What is Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost (SAC)?
Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost is an email marketing metric that reveals the average amount of money it costs a company to gain one subscriber. This is not to be confused with Customer Acquisition Cost. The price of advertising and the quality of those advertisements often determine how effective a given campaign is at converting people into subscribers.
Email subscriber acquisition cost can be calculated simply by dividing the paid ad costs (plus any additional marketing costs spent) on acquiring a new email subscriber by the number of new subscribers acquired.
As an example, if a company spent $1000 on ads (and other marketing costs) in a month and acquired 400 new email subscribers, then their cost would be $2.50 per email subscriber.
Here’s the formula (and is most accurate when used on only one advertising campaign or source at a time):
E-SAC = (Paid Ads + Additional Costs)/Number of Subscribers Gained
For example…
$2.50/Subscriber = $1,000/400
Why is Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost Important?
Email Subscriber acquisition cost is one of the fundamental metrics for any successful email marketing campaign or strategy. If you don’t know how much it costs (on average) to acquire a new subscriber, then you can’t possibly try to get the best ROI on your efforts — you won’t know how much more you can spend trying to turn them into a paying customer and you won’t know whether your email marketing is profitable or not.
Without knowing your subscriber acquisition cost, you also can’t try to save money by improving your email marketing strategy (and decreasing how much it costs you to acquire a new subscriber).
How to Track Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost
Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost can be calculated using this formula (and is most accurate when used on only one advertising campaign at a time):
E-SAC = (Paid Ads + Additional Costs)/Number of Subscribers Gained
For example…
$2.50/Subscriber = $1,000/400
In addition to the formula up above, here’s our full article on the topic: Email Subscriber Acquisition Cost: How To Determine The Cost Of Your Average Subscriber