Cape Town email marketing retainers typically run R2,500–R25,000/month, and the gap between the bottom and top of that range is almost never just "more emails."
What the lower end typically includes
A handful of campaigns a month, basic template design, and maybe one or two automated flows. Functional, and a genuine improvement over no email marketing at all, but usually missing the segmentation and deliverability groundwork that makes the difference between decent and excellent performance.
What the upper end should include
- All four core lifecycle flows, not just welcome and abandoned cart
- Segmentation built around actual purchase behaviour
- Revenue-per-flow reporting, not just open and click rates
- Ongoing list hygiene and deliverability monitoring, not a one-time setup
The metric that actually matters
Open rate became close to meaningless after Apple started pre-fetching images at the operating-system level, silently inflating opens regardless of whether a human read anything. Revenue attributed per flow and per segment is the number that tells you whether the retainer is paying for itself, and it's a fair question to ask any agency to report on directly.
Comparing quotes properly
Two agencies quoting R8,000/month and R18,000/month for "email marketing" are often selling genuinely different scopes of work. Before comparing the number, compare exactly which flows, how much strategic segmentation work, and what reporting is included, since the headline price rarely tells you that on its own.