Email marketing has pretty much always been a major digital marketing medium since email has been around for decades now. But have you ever taken a moment to appreciate how awesome it really is?
Nobody can deny the tremendous value of guerilla marketing in the real world. Printing out a ton of flyers and delivering them door-to-door in targeted areas is very much a viable strategy for any physical business.
Advertisements that are shown based on cookies and other information are still broad enough to miss the mark. Just because I watched two YouTube videos about dropshipping doesn’t mean I’m a business owner.
While targeted campaigns on social media are pretty accurate, they are still far from perfect in this regard. That’s why email marketing is still an awesome tool.
By allowing people to sign up for newsletters by themselves and giving them the option to unsubscribe, this mode of communication tends to be way more effective as a form of direct marketing.
All that is great, but how much can you really expect to make with this line of work if you choose to specialize in it? Let’s take a look.
Is Email Copywriting Profitable?
Email Copywriting is a specialization within the field of digital marketing. It is the art of crafting distribution networks through the email medium in order to achieve certain results.
The results could be conversions, sales, lead generation, gathering funds, entertainment, or education. An email marketer’s mode of employment might also range from employment to freelance.
Coming to the point now, Yes! Email marketing can indeed be considered quite a profitable line of work to be engaged in.
People can earn proportionately more than they invest in it with minimal time and experience.
Why Email Copywriting Can Be Profitable
I could just tell you that this is profitable and expect you to believe me. But instead of that, I will explain my reasoning behind these claims and show you some hard evidence behind them.
I invite you to consider the following and decide for yourself.
1. Zero-to-No Investment:
Getting started as an email copywriter requires little to no monetary investment. You just need a working desktop PC, a good mastery of language, and an internet connection.
Compare that to a YouTuber who needs a camera, lighting, editing software, a stock footage subscription, etc. There are even newsletter services that you can use for free to set up your email list.
2. Less Experience Required:
The skills required to be successful at this job can be learned quite quickly. You don’t need to work for a decade or spend a lot of time learning new skills through a course.
This is especially true if the person has some copywriting experience.
3. Low Competition:
A quick search on an online hiring platform for “copywriter” showed almost 10,000 people offering their services in this niche. Changing it to “email copywriting” narrowed it down to just 1,500.
Lower competition means that you don’t have to engage in a race to the lowest price, and it gives you a better chance to land good clients. It also makes it more likely for the clients to hire someone.
4. Good-Quality Feedback:
The feedback mechanisms for the performance of email marketing tend to be pretty straightforward. Users can unsubscribe at any time, and you will get more replies to effective emails.
This feedback allows you to optimize your process and learn what works best. In the long term, this allows you to build a better sales funnel and make more money for your clients and, in turn, for yourself.
5. Higher Earning Per Word:
It’s clear that, on average, email copywriting will pay you more per word at any specific experience level than other forms of digital marketing.
You get to create higher-quality copy and charge more for it. This leads to spending less time writing and more time increasing your earnings through other clients.
How Profitable Is Email Copywriting?
It might not be easy by any means, you still have to work hard to get returns, but I hope that you can see the earning potential of this line of work. Still not convinced? Let me hit you with some real-world data, then.
An average hiring platform like Fiverr pays email copywriters an average of $37/hour in the US. The opening pay is $10/hour, and the maximum is $70/hour (on Fiverr as a beginner).
Experienced email copywriters earn around $80-150/hour after three years of experience. What’s more, leading email copywriters in the world charge big brands upwards of $250-300/hour for managing their email marketing!
If you do the math, that’s about $100,000-300,000 for an average copywriter with just a few years of experience. Clients only care about results, and if you have a knack for it, you can earn six figures earlier than that.
But wait, I’m not done yet! Let me give you two more real-life examples that you can look up yourself to show you the scope of email marketing. After all, clients are ready to invest this much for good reasons.
1. The Hustle
The Hustle began in 2014 as an email list to promote an event called Hustle Con, where entrepreneurs and startups can share business insights to excel together.
Today, it’s an email-only newsletter that provides microdoses of news that young professionals could use to excel in their careers. At the end of the day, it’s just a newsletter in the business niche.
Yet, The Hustle was started by just three people and sold for $17.2 million to HubSpot in 2021. Not half bad, if you ask me.
2. Morning Brew
Morning Brew is a free newsletter that was also started in 2014 by Alex Lieberman when he was in college. It was called “Market Corner” at first and was just a PDF of the latest business news sent through email.
It covers everything in business, from Wall St. to Silicon Valley, in a way that’s simple to understand without dumbing things down. In 2016, Mr. Lieberman left Morgan Stanley to focus on this full-time.
In 2020, Mr. Alex sold Morning Brew to Business Insider for a jaw-dropping $70 million. The company is said to be worth over $75 million today.
Believe it or not, that’s just the tip of the iceberg! The fact is that email marketing gives people a unique way to build relationships with their customers. This is especially true of newsletters.
Since people can decide to signup or unsubscribe at any time, there is a real sense of authentic one-on-one connection. If done correctly, whoever is on a newsletter, actually wants to be there.
These big deals have made headlines, and major companies have taken notice.
I’ve seen many individuals, from entrepreneurs and authors to YouTubers, who’ve built their own free newsletters to earn thousands of dollars every month.
Some of them use it as a sales funnel for their own products, while others utilize affiliate marketing, brand deals, or partnerships.
It’s important for you to understand this landscape when thinking about how profitable email copywriting can be for you.
Let me give you some tips I’ve picked up from these successful people on how to earn more in this line of work.
Best Ways To Earn More As An Email Copywriter
Earning six figures as an email copywriter might require some hard work, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. You don’t need a master’s degree or a diploma course to understand how it all works.
Instead, just take a look at this list of tried and tested ways that you can follow to excel at this awesome job and start to land some big clients:
1. Get a Job Before You Freelance
It’s hard to land a job on online platforms as a freelancer when you are just getting started. Even if you do, it’s tough to get paid fairly. The best email marketers suggest learning at other people’s expense.
Nobody can teach you better than those who are already engaging with the craft. If you can’t find any opportunities in newsletters and email copywriting companies as a beginner, look for something adjacent.
Take a copywriting job or work in customer service. Anyplace where you can get paid to write emails and interact with customers through email should help you break into this professionally.
2. Learn The Basics
Whether it’s on the job, free videos on YouTube, or an affordable online course, it always helps to learn the basics and get to know the industry’s standard practices.
Email marketing courses tend to be short and quite affordable, I mean, I’m giving you so much of what they will teach you right here for free.
I learned all this from podcasts, interviews, and YouTube channels of the top email marketers, by the way. Which means I also learned it all for free.
3. Build Your Portfolio
The first two steps can get you started and bring you into the fold. They will get you over the initial learning curve, but the real work starts here.
Now that you have learned the rules like a pro, it’s time to break them like an artist.
This means getting your hands dirty and collecting real experience that you can show. There isn’t any replacement for that, as this is where you build your skills.
4. Utilize Frameworks
We are all human, and we all get stuck sometimes.
Whenever you face difficulty, you can always refer to some great frameworks like AIDA (Attention Interest Desire Action) or the one below by Mr.Money on YouTube.
These will help you a lot whenever you get stuck since you will always have some useful information to work with. Just find the answer to these questions for your client, and you will have your copy.
5. Understand The System
Try to learn everything from A to Z. This includes how exactly to set up a newsletter, who are some of the major service providers and industry leaders, and how to determine which framework works best in which case.
Instead of just limiting yourself to the actual writing and drafting of email copy, specialize and master email marketing as a whole.
Nothing will teach you this better than starting your own newsletter. Once you have, you can actually set up the whole channel for clients and charge them really big money to help them earn more.
As you get into it, you will learn more about digital marketing, sales, and the conversion process as a whole. This is how you really become an expert.
6. Market Yourself Better
It’s not enough to have experience and an impressive portfolio. You will find a lot of people that are worse than you in terms of skills and knowledge earn way more than you do simply because they decided they were worth it.
Marketing yourself properly has a lot to do with technical work and investment, like having a great online presence, but more than that, it’s about a state of mind.
You need to believe you are worth the money. This will happen automatically over time, but just make sure you aren’t short-selling yourself.
7. Find The Best Clients
There are three major types of clients you can find as an email copywriter:
- Big Budget Brands: These include your big companies, 8-figure publishers, and Internet Gurus. If you can start your career by learning here at lower positions, nothing else like it.
- Diamonds in The Rough: SaaS and brick & mortar companies that are yet to take their email seriously are in this category. These give you some great opportunities once you are an expert.
- The Sweet Spot: The bulk of your best opportunities will lie in this category. Think 6 figure e-commerce stores, coaches, courses, and medium-sized companies.
By understanding these three types of clients, you can get ahead of at least 50% of email marketers by focusing on the people that need your services the most.
8. Know Your Audience
Just like the last point, you should also know that there are three general types of audiences that you will encounter, and targeting them individually will give you the best results.
- The first are people who are only looking for free content and never intend to make a purchase. Give these people reasons to stick around, and they might change their minds.
- Then you will find people with a lot of time, energy, and initiative, who are only there to learn so that they can do things themselves. Building goodwill with this audience will give you compounding results.
- Finally, the third type is your red-hot leads. They are actively searching for solutions that you or your clients can sell to them.
You can either have a separate newsletter for the first type and have a way for them to move up the funnel, or you can make content that appeals to specific or even multiple groups.
Curating content like the two success stories featured in this article would be a great example of email copy that appeals to all three types of audiences.
Conclusion
There might be more to email copywriting, but the things mentioned in this article should be more than enough to prove its potential and get you started. I hope this article was useful and that you found what you were looking for.
Thank you for reading, and I wish you all the best in all your undertakings!
Anirudh Gitai
Writer from the heart – whether it is affiliate marketing or fiction – and a proud member of Shivansh’s team! Big fan of combat sports, reading non-fiction, and watching the best of everything from anime and movies to TV and video games.
