Email insight: the value of an email

Imagine every email you send as an email marketer costing 5 bucks. Sending out to the nice round number of 100,000 people would cost half a million. All of a sudden, you would make every single e-mail and every single address count. Why else would you spend that kind of cash to send out your next email newsletter?
Of course current email costs are low compared to many other marketing channels, and return on investment is comparatively high. But instead of thinking that you send as much as you can (which I do support, up to a point), think about making every single email count like it would be the last one you send out at your current job, or one costing 5 bucks like the previous example.
Because one should not forget that to get an interesting amount of revenue from email, there should be a considerable investment at first. This doesn’t mean having the biggest list out there. Having a 100,000 people on your list sounds nice, but what if only a 100 people do something in response? In that case the 99,900 other contacts on that list are quite useless…
Finding out how to provide value to all your list members is crucial: it will take you some time and investment of resources, but will pay back. A lot actually: currently email is the ROI champ with a 43 to 1 ratio (read here). For every dollar invested you get 43 back. Unbeatable methinks: other channels are slipping or still have to prove themselves (like social media).
When you make an email more valuable (e.g. relevant content, timely fashion, etc) to the subscriber they will respond better to it, and more shall respond!
To recap: next email campaign will cost you $500,000. Spend it wisely.
edit 13:42 CET:
Jordie van Rijn has reacted to this post in lightning fashion: his responding blog post can be found here: http://www.emailmonday.com/the-value-of-email-marketing-messages