How to Make Money Writing Emails – Path To Six Figures – Path To Six Figures

You may have heard that you can make thousands of dollars sending emails, but what’s the difference between an email copywriter that makes a few thousand dollars per month and an email copywriter that makes well over $50,000 per month from writing emails?

Your email copywriting skill is undoubtedly a significant variable that impacts your earning potential, though it’s only one of many variables that affect how much money you’ll make as an email copywriter.

In fact, the email marketing opportunity you pursue may impact your earning potential even more than your email writing skills.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to various ways you can monetize your email writing skills and discuss the pros and cons of each one. That way, even if you’re a beginner copywriter, you’ll be able to maximize your earning potential (and even earn more than many seasoned copywriters) by choosing the most profitable opportunity to apply your writing skills.

How Much Money Can You Make As An Email Writer?

Statistics from Salary.com show that the average copywriter makes about $100,000 per year.

However, there are also email copywriters like Justin Goff, that have made over $2 million dollars in a single year.

So why does Justin Goff make so much more than the average email writer?

The short answer is that Justin Goff chose to apply his email copy skills to a much more profitable opportunity than in-house copywriting.

Instead of accepting a comfortable salary as an in-house writer, he partnered with another entrepreneur selling a greens powder and only earns a percentage of the sales he generates from his emails.

He generated multiple millions of dollars in sales for the company through his emails, and as a result, collected about $2.2 million in profits.

However, if the offer flopped and he didn’t make any sales, he wouldn’t have made any money.

Therefore, we’ll introduce you to the pros and cons of each type of email marketing opportunity and the earning potential of each one so that you select the best opportunity for your situation.

Types of Email Writing Monetization Strategies

Here are the most profitable methods to make money online as an email writer.

Get a Full-Time Job As An Email Writer

Most larger companies hire in-house email copywriters to send engagement emails, write autoresponders, and promote the latest products or sales.

The main benefit of a full-time job is that it provides income stability (you know exactly how much money you’ll make each month), though the downside is that there’s a relatively low ceiling to the earning potential.

As we mentioned in the introduction, you probably won’t make much more than about $100,000 per year as an in-house copywriter.

Example

B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and even personal brands hire email copywriters to write various types of emails, from nurture sequences and autoresponders to sales emails and newsletters. A quick Google or LinkedIn search will reveal plenty of email marketing jobs.

Pros:

• Stable income with the benefits of a full-time job.
• Learn how to become a great writer on someone else’s dime.

Cons:

• Limited earning potential
• Limited freedom (unlike a freelancer)
• Limited experimentation opportunities
• Many in-house email writers are “jack-of-all-trades,” making it difficult to become a highly paid specialist.

Write Emails For Clients

Many companies hire freelance email copywriters to write specific email campaigns for their products or services. If you’re starting your career as an email writer, this is probably the best way to make money immediately, and you can choose to keep it as a side hustle or scale it into a full-time income.

Some clients pay recurring monthly retainers (say, $4,000 per month to write eight emails monthly for six consecutive months) or a one-time fee for a specific project (say, $20,000 for an email autoresponder).

There are also several different types of emails that a client may pay you to create, including:

• Lead generation emails
• Autoresponder emails (nurture, onboarding, abandoned cart sequences, etc.)
• Weekly email newsletters
• General news/announcement and content promotion emails

In terms of earning potential, the amount you can charge clients depends on how much money your emails make for the client.

While your skill as a freelance writer is one variable that influences the ROI you can produce, other variables (that aren’t really in your control) include:

• The offer’s relevancy to the email list audience
• The email list’s engagement and loyalty
• The profit margin of the offer

In addition, you’ll make more money sending lead generation emails than writing weekly email newsletters simply because the ROI for a lead generation email is much higher than a traditional engagement newsletter.

For this reason, it’s important to carefully consider the types of clients you work with and the email writing niche you decide to specialize in.

Example

Companies like Vshred, Credit Secrets, and MiamiMD are all brands that invest heavily in email marketing and pay their copywriters well into the five figures for quality email marketing campaigns.

Pros:

• Immediate cash flow with the freedom benefits of freelance writing
• Moderate earning potential

Cons:

• You have to find and close clients.
• Less stability than a full-time job
• Client management can be challenging

Offer Premium Content/Subscriptions

Newsletters are becoming increasingly popular, and many people are happy to pay for content from their favorite writers. While some brands/influencers pay ghostwriters to write the emails, the most profitable long-term monetization strategy is to build your own newsletter.

However, if you’re just starting your career and don’t have an email list, you can offer to ghostwrite a newsletter for an influencer to earn while you learn and simultaneously start building your newsletter as a side hustle.

Once you’ve built a newsletter, offer some of the content for free and then a subset of exclusive premium content for paid subscribers.

For example, you might offer a weekly newsletter with tips and tricks from the week and then a premium subscription with exclusive deep dives, data, or other premium resources.

Example

Category Pirates is an excellent example of a newsletter that monetizes by offering premium content.