I’m in a unique position where I help train new copywriters, I’m friends with a lot of established copywriters, and I own a business.
So I want to break down for you what the economics of writing email copy look like in 2024 (for both freelancers and established business owners writing their own copy).
A few things to keep in mind before I begin:
- A lot of copywriters include email as part of an overall "package" they sell to businesses. So they write ads, advertorials, sales pages, and emails. This is how I used to operate.
-
While the emails I write to this email list are usually longer storytelling emails that take a bit of time to craft, the truth is that the biggest money-making emails for most businesses are just simple "xx% off today only" emails – which take maybe 5-10 minutes to write when you know the formulas (which I teach in Email CopyHour).
So depending on the business, you may get less per email – but the emails are stupidly easy to write (and they add up since these businesses usually need daily emails).
- The best money comes when you’re a business owner writing to your own list, which we’ll get to in a moment.
With that said, there are four tiers of email copywriters.
Tier 1: Entry Level – Writing For Small Business Or Getting Paid To Learn
When you’re starting out, you realistically aren’t going to be writing for bigger businesses. It’s going to be mostly smaller businesses with smaller budgets looking to hire copywriters for less.
This is a good thing because you need to start somewhere.
I have two students right now who write for pretty big business but fall into the camp of getting paid to learn – they’re good, but still developing their chops.
"Fresh but hungry" I like to say.
They make $50 per email that’s sent out by the client.
Again, this is get-your-foot-in-the-door type work, getting paid to learn.
Tier 2: Entry-To-Mid Level – Writing For Medium Sized Businesses
My good buddy and occasional business partner Ian Stanley trains writers like this to sell packages of 20-30 emails per month for $2k-$2.5k.
That’s about $100 per email.
These are often very simple emails that follow basic formulas – like the "xx% off today only" emails I mentioned above. I teach 50 of these formulas in Email CopyHour.
Once you’ve had some practice, you can crank these kinds of emails out in 10-20 minutes – so the ROI for your time is massive.
And TONS of companies are hungry for these emails because they just work, so you can rack up a lot of dough this way AFTER you get your foot in the door.
I know several copywriters living a quiet & relatively simple six figures lifestyle following this model.
Tier 3: Experienced – Value Based Emails
Once you’ve got some results to show and have your email chops down, I highly recommend you move to value-based pricing.
I’m using the term liberally but what that means is charging based on what the email is going to produce revenue-wise.
A close friend of mine specialized in writing "conversational" emails (just like this one you’re reading now) and charged $500-$750 per email, which his clients never second guessed because they pulled in multiples of that.
He’s not a "big name" person at all – just a dude who could show off a portfolio of really good emails and clients were hungry for his help.
Ian Stanley (mentioned above) charges $1.5k/email for what he’ll be the first to admit are pretty simple formulaic emails that take him 10 minutes or so to write.
With enough deliberate practice, I’ve seen a few people get to this level in their first year or two. (But I don’t know you personally so I can’t make that promise to you.)
Either way, this is where you’re ideally working toward when you start taking email seriously.
Tier 4: Business Owner
This is the "final boss" level.
You already know that your income potential is maximized by running your own business.
But to give you an idea of it – CopyHour is a relatively small business I’m a "lifestyle business" type of guy.
I make about $1k-$2k profit per email I send.
That’s averaged out over all the promotions I do – so it includes the weeks of "conversational" emails that don’t actually directly sell anything and days when I send 2 or more emails.
I know other small one person business owners with lists around 20,000-30,000 people that send daily emails and are doing $3k-$5k profit on average per email.
And there are lots more doing even more than that.
The point here is that email copy can pay off right from the beginning… and with some luck the money can very quickly ratchet up.
Yes, you’ll have to get your reps in with relatively cheap $50/email work in the beginning.
I’m not going to act like you can skip that part of the process.
But if you put in the work to get good, and you can prove you have a history of getting results for a wide variety of businesses, you can move your way up the ranks faster than most other careers of any kind.
And you can build a very good lifestyle for yourself – especially since email is actually the easiest form of copy to write (in my opinion) once you’ve put your reps in and know the formulas.
And nearly every business needs email copy written for them.
I help you put in those reps – and learn those formulas – in Email CopyHour.
Email CopyHour is a 7 week course designed to "embed" in your head the most common, proven, profitable email formulas as rapidly as possible… so when you sit down to write, you naturally produce the top 1% of email copy (with the sales to prove it).
The way it works is simple:
- Every day for 7 weeks you’ll receive an email from me with a short lesson and a piece of curated, proven email copy that demonstrates that lesson
- You’ll spend 20-30 minutes handwriting that piece of email copy to hard-wire the lesson into your brain
- And I’ll give you a short assignment to give you some practice writing with that lesson yourself
This is the same general system as my flagship CopyHour course but focused specifically on email copy.
Spend roughly 1 hour a day and, after 7 weeks, writing world class email copy will feel natural and easy.
This course is designed to be worth a minimum of six figures to you over your lifetime – and likely more. It’s built to teach you exactly the skills you need to be in the top 1% of email copywriters, from scratch.
Which is why it’s a steal at only $297 (or 3 payments of $99).
If you’re a freelancer or business owner and don’t get back 100x-10,000x on this investment over your lifetime, then I’ll be very surprised.
Cheers!
- Derek