If you're using Mailchimp to handle a list of 10 million users you're definitely doing it wrong. You need a tool that charges by number of emails sent instead of size of list.

These days I'd suggest buying an in-house email tool and use an SMTP server (SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, Mailgun). Pricing will obviously be more expensive but it increases much more slowly than with Facebook. To send 10 million emails on SendGrid would cost around $5K. Depending on the terms, that kind of budget would cover somewhere between 50 and 50000 users with Facebook or AdWords.

Ha! Yeah, well we're not quite at the 10 million mark, and not sure who would pay that amount.

We actually use Sendgrid for transactional emails and should probably revisit for marketing. They didn't have the list manangement features when last we looked and there's a little integration dev that'll need to be done, but you've prompted me to take another look at it. May be worthwhile now. Thanks.

But, even with those guys going from 100 emails to only 4 million (highest quoted on the site), the price goes up a couple of orders of magnitude from $9.95 to over $1600. That's hardly "barely growing costs" and for a bootstrapped startup, the difference may be prohibitive. Hopefully, you've got some revenue or funding by the time you hit that subscriber base. But, don't want to gloss over the fact that you will pay significantly more as your list grows substantially, even if it's less than with other channels.

OK I guess I phrased it badly. At a list size of 10 million, email will probably cost around $10K per month to service. With SEM you'll be lucky if it costs less than $250K per month.

So for every SEM placement, you can send 25 newsletters. So you need SEM to convert 25x better than email to get value from it. That might be possible, depending on the quality of your list, but my experience is that all companies eventually use email marketing because it's so much cheaper with big lists.

I would question how you even got a list size of 10 million, or what you're hoping to get from direct marketing, if $10K per month is prohibitive.

Points well-taken. Thanks for sharing.