How to Become a Freelance Email Marketer
As a freelance email marketer, your expertise is in high demand.
In fact, 81% of small and midsize businesses rely on email for customer acquisition. And these companies are searching for email marketing freelancers to help guide their strategy and drive revenue through email newsletters, marketing emails, product emails, and more.
Simply put, if you want to be a freelance email marketer, now is a great time to take the leap and use your email marketing skills to support a variety of clients and bring in the
Below, let’s go over what it takes to be a freelance email marketer, the different services you can offer, and how to price your work.
How to Become a Freelance Email Marketer
If you’re interested in becoming a freelance email marketer, your first step is to determine your skill level. Do you already have a background in email marketing? Or do you just like to dabble with emails on the side? Determine how much knowledge you currently have to figure out whether or not you need to seek out more experience and proficiency in the area.
What skills do you need?
Email marketers need to know about email strategy and all of the tactics that go into it including segmentation, A/B testing, automation, and analysis. On a high level, email marketers should also be comfortable (or at least familiar) with content marketing, graphic design, and general marketing strategy. You should also be familiar with common email marketing platforms and tools so you can be prepared for whatever your client currently uses. Some common email marketing platforms include:
If you have a career background in email marketing already, then you’re primed to become a freelance email marketer. All you need to do is figure out what types of clients you want to work with, the specific services you want to offer, and how to charge for email marketing on a freelance basis (more on that below).
How to learn email marketing
Maybe you don’t have a background as a full-time email marketer but you’ve dabbled in email strategy and are interested in learning more. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways you can sharpen your skills or learn more about the industry.
Taking a course is a great place to start. HubSpot, for instance, offers a free Email Marketing Certification Course that teaches the fundamentals of building an email marketing strategy. Getting a certification like this can help legitimize your freelance business — especially if you’re just getting started and don’t have a ton of past projects in your portfolio yet.
Here are a few other (free and paid) email marketing courses to check out:
3 Services to Offer for Freelance Email Marketing
As you’re thinking about which email marketing services to offer your clients and what to charge, it helps to break down every task that goes into developing and managing email campaigns.
There’s a lot that goes into email marketing, from auditing to setting up campaigns to creating reports. Rather than simply charging X amount of money for monthly email marketing here are a few other overlooked services you can include in monthly email marketing management.
1. Audit and set up
Before starting monthly email marketing work, you can kick off the project with an audit of the client's existing email content, platform usage, and performance across platforms to identify challenges and opportunities.
Next, you’ll create processes that will set up the weekly campaign flow for success. Depending on the email campaign frequency that you and the client agree to, you can also set up a framework for the email marketing campaigns. This includes list segmentation and tracking options. You can also implement email automation systems based on unique tag identifiers of audiences.
2. Weekly email marketing work
With frameworks and processes already in place, you’ll likely spend most of your time each week setting up new campaigns to send out.
Factor in how much time you’ll spend on email marketing work for each client every week or month when trying to figure out your scope and pricing. The time you spend on your monthly email marketing work depends on the scope you have outlined for each client. If you
You may also want to include meetings in your scope so you can discuss high-level strategy, upcoming content, performance reports, insights, and recommendations with your client.
3. Monthly reporting
A monthly email marketing management retainer should also include monthly reporting. You’ll walk the client through the overall performance, changes to key metrics, and A/B testing results.
Your reporting should also include the project’s qualitative and quantitative results. Determine specific qualitative measurements with the client and gather them during each project phase.
Finally, at the end of each month, you’ll create a report on the monthly campaign performance that the client can reference. Present reports on the previous month’s online campaign performance, including learnings and guidance for the next month.
How Much to Charge for Email Marketing Freelance
Once you have a better understanding of which services you want to provide in your monthly email marketing scope, the next step is to figure out how much you want to charge.
Knowing how much to charge for email marketing is always a challenge for freelancers. Your price should factor in how many emails your client needs, the amount of time and resources you’ll spend each week, and the value your email marketing expertise will bring your client. Once you have all of those factors considered, gut-check your pricing with other freelancers’ rates with our Email Marketing Scope of Work Template. The template not only provides a breakdown of services, but also includes pricing recommendations based on what freelancers just like you charge.
There are also a couple of common ways that freelancers like you tend to structure their pricing. Let’s go over the different ways to structure and charge for freelance email marketing.
Email marketing management retainer
Email marketing is a great service to offer as a freelance retainer. A retainer contract guarantees a set amount of work for a set rate on a monthly basis. Since email marketing is something that companies do on a pretty regular basis (e.g., sending a weekly newsletter or setting up product emails), it would make sense to work with clients on a retainer basis so that you can offer your email expertise as needed.
Your email marketing management scope of work could include a certain number of email campaigns that you’ll create and manage each month. Or, you could structure your retainer as a certain number of hours spent on email marketing management each week or month.
Email marketing project
If you don’t want to go the retainer route, consider offering freelance email marketing on a project basis. This could mean that you offer a flat project rate per email campaign or agree to provide a certain number of emails per month, each with a flat rate.
For example, if your client only wants your help with their weekly newsletter, then you could charge a flat rate for four email newsletters per month. You could also add on services such as a monthly meeting or report if needed.
Freelance email marketing is a great service to offer if you’re a digital marketer or email marketer and want to work independently. Follow these steps to set up your freelance business for success.
Ready to start your freelance email marketing career? Kickstart your next email marketing project today using our customizable email marketing management scope of work template.