What does an average subscriber cost you?

If you factor in the sales I make from my landing pages, I make more than it costs me to get subscribers. Eliminate the sales and it would cost me $0.30 to $0.40 cents per subscriber.

If you're not using paid traffic (which is - clearly - a whole different ball-game) the costs of those other things are just too small to measure meaningfully against the income generated from sending emails to subscribers.

My own meaningful costs are all in terms of my own time, effort, energy, skills and so on. And how you monetize those is pretty subjective, according to your perception of the value of your time (mine changes all the time, as my income grows, but even that isn't a realistic way to measure it, because of the proportion of my current income that always comes from work I did in the past).

It would depend entirely on their quality and targeting, and how ready they are to buy something I'm promoting.

To take an extreme example, if they were just about ready to buy a $97 ClickBank product that earns me $66 affiliate commission, they'd probably be worth paying about $80 per lead for, given the long-term future income developed from the list (i.e. several of them will buy more than one thing). In reality, I'm never going to be attract subscribers all of whom are effectively "ready" to buy that. But even if only 10% of them were, they'd still be worth at least $8 per lead, I suppose?

I can't envisage where I'd ever be able to buy them from, though (and if they were actually for sale anywhere, of course that product's vendor would be buying them all, rather than paying affiliates 75% commissions!). And fortunately one can "convert other, lesser traffic into them". But that's what affiliate marketing is, really, in a sense? Converting into regular customers people who subscribe without necessarily having any specific intention of buying.

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I don't measure things like hosting, domain name, etc., on a per subscriber level. Those are simply fixed costs, part of being in business.

If I convert my time using my old hourly consulting rate, subscribers on a new list run $3-$4, which I expect to make back many times. As the list matures, that figure goes down significantly (in other words, if I invest $500 worth of time to get the first 500 subscribers, the cost is $1/sub, but when that same list hits 5,000 with no further investment, we're down to $0.10/sub). I picked those last numbers out of thin air because I'm still on my first cuppa and the arithmetic was easy.

It depends on what I think the lifetime value of a subscriber is going to be. As a rule of thumb, I try to stay around the amount I stand to make on the first sale, with the estimated conversion rate factored in.

Again, using easy arithmetic at the expense of perfect accuracy...

If I believe I can get 10% conversion, and each conversion makes me $100, then I'm willing to pay up to $1,000 per 100 subscribers, or $10 each. As numbers accumulate, that number gets adjusted. My "marketing" costs are covered, and the profits start accumulating with the second sale.

About 1.60 but I make about 3.00 on the initial affiliate offer so I'm making money while I build the list.

You are thinking in terms of costs, rather than profits. If you are not currently earning off your subscribers and only seeing how much each cost you, then you need to learn to monetize better. Each subscriber on your list should be generating money and if not, they are wasting space.

Hello, at present an average subscriber is costing me about .45 in solo ad advertising.

I expect this expense to be recouped in the sales I make, in which case a subscriber would cost me nothing.

This is what you should aim for but, you need to test different offers to which ones convert well and test your sources of traffic to see what converts well.

Hope that helps

Hi,


In my opinion, concentrate on variable costs (i.e. paid traffic, if any) that helps to build your list instead of fixed costs (hosting, autoresponsder) that is minimal to the business.

The average cost per subscriber for me is 50cents in solo ad. Trial and error on the source of solo ad to see which converts well is important too.

Cheers,
Jic