What Hiring an Email Copywriter Actually Costs

By Frederik Baun, conversion copywriter and founder of Words Sounds Visuals

I've quoted and delivered email copywriting services across the full range below, from single-email freelance jobs to full-sequence AI-assisted production, since 2018.

What an Email Copywriter Costs

Here’s the range I see most often, broken out by route.

The $75 to $300 per email range for mid-market freelancers is the number most people anchor on. Then they get surprised when a sequence costs more than they expected.

Five emails at that rate land between $375 and $1,500, before revisions.

In-house sits at the other end. ZipRecruiter’s 2026 data puts the typical range at $58,000 to $86,500 a year, with the top 10 percent of earners past $121,500.

That number only makes sense once you have enough email volume to keep one person busy full time.

Price the whole job before you price the email. A single welcome email looks cheap next to a $2,000 agency retainer.

Until you count that the retainer covers the welcome sequence, the abandoned cart flow, and the monthly newsletter, and the single email covers exactly one email.

Should You Hire a Freelancer, an Agency, or Bring Email In-House

I’ve worked from all three sides of this decision, so here’s how I’d sort a business into one of them.

A freelancer fits a business with one project right now, or a steady but modest volume of email work that doesn’t justify a full-time seat.

You get one writer who learns your voice over several projects. You pay per piece or per sequence.

An agency fits a business that needs several channels running at once and wants one point of contact for all of them.

You pay for that coordination on top of the writing, which is why the retainer costs more than the sum of the individual emails would.

An in-house hire fits a business generating enough email volume (several campaigns a month, ongoing testing, a growing list) that a dedicated seat pays for itself.

Below that volume, you’re paying a full salary to write two emails a week.

Most businesses I talk to overestimate which bracket they’re in.

A founder sending one newsletter a month doesn’t need a full-time copywriter.

A business running five active sequences with weekly sends is usually underpaying a freelancer for work that deserves agency-level attention.

What a Good Email Copywriter Does

Writing the sentences is the part everyone hires for, and it’s the smallest part of the job.

A copywriter worth the money also plans the send sequence:

• What goes out first
• What waits
• How many days sit between each email

Take welcome sequences. I build a five-email map for most welcome sequences, because the order matters as much as the words inside any single email.

I write subject lines for every email in the sequence too, since an unopened email never gets read regardless of how good the sentences are.

When a sequence underperforms, I check deliverability before touching a single line of copy.

Low opens across an entire sequence usually point at the inbox rather than the writing.

Hire someone who only offers sentences, and you’ll get sentences.

Hire someone who thinks in sequences, subject lines, and send timing, and you’ll get emails that reach an inbox and get opened once they’re there.

What to Ask Before You Hire Anyone

Run through these before you sign anything.

1. Ask for a sequence. A portfolio full of clever one-liners tells you someone can write a punchy sentence. It doesn’t tell you they can carry a reader across five emails without losing them.
2. Ask for an example close to your business. A B2B SaaS sequence and a coaching launch sequence solve different problems. Someone who’s only written one type will default to it whether it fits your business or not.
3. Ask how they handle subject lines. A single subject line per email, written once and shipped, is a guess. Several options tested or reasoned through per email is a process.
4. Ask what they check first when a sequence underperforms. Deliverability, then the promise between emails, then the offer itself, in that order, is the answer I’d want to hear. Someone who jumps straight to “let’s rewrite it” hasn’t diagnosed anything yet.
5. Ask about revisions up front. Get the number in writing before you start, since this is where freelance relationships go sideways more than any other line item.

What the AI Alternative Changes and What It Doesn’t

I write with AI-assisted production for most of my email clients now, so I’ll be straight about what that changes and what it doesn’t.

What changes is turnaround. A sequence that used to take me two days now takes a few hours.

The drafting layer moves faster once I’ve fed it the audience research, the offer, and my own voice profile.

What doesn’t change is everything before the drafting starts. I still read the client’s past sends and talk to them about who buys.

Then I run every draft through an editor pass by hand before it ships.

Skip that research step and you get the same generic copy a $35 gig-site freelancer would, just faster.

That dividing line sits between research-backed writing and templated writing, more than between a person and a machine.

Writing from a blank prompt with no research behind it produces copy that reads like every other business that used the same prompt.

AI-assisted production with a real research and editing layer behind it is closer to hiring a fast, well-briefed writer than to using a generator.

If you’re comparing quotes, ask an AI-assisted writer the same five questions from the section above. The honest ones will point to the specific research and editing behind each sequence.

Skipping both steps is easy to spot. The copy reads generic, the kind that could sit on any business’s site without a rewrite.

How to Decide

Match the route to your volume. One sequence or occasional emails point at a freelancer.

Several channels running at once point at an agency, and enough weekly volume to fill a job points at an in-house hire.

If you want the speed of AI-assisted production without losing the research and the editing that make a sequence convert, that’s the gap I built my own process to fill.

If you’d rather hand me the whole thing instead of vetting five freelancers, here’s how I run email copywriting for clients, and you can apply to work with me directly.