Should I Hire a Pro Copywriter for My Email Marketing?

Subscriber Rick asks “Should I write my own emails or hire a pro copywriter to do it for me?”

He explains:

You might not know who I am, but I’m a big fan of your writing.

Your emails that you send out every day are nice and seems like your always there in my inbox everyday.

I’m going to be launching a new product, i’m looking to hire a copywriter to write about 10 – 15 emails for the launch.

On average how much should each of this emails cost me?

I have the content written for each of the emails, so most of the work is revision work.

The person i’m looking to hire is looking for around $400USD per email is that the going rate?

$400 is not unheard of, but it’s definitely on the high side.

(As a benchmark, my rate last time I took freelance work was $300 per email, although I’d charge more than that now.)

Even though it’s scary to stare down the barrel of a $6,000 copywriting invoice, the dollar amount isn’t really what matters.

The real question is:

Can a “hired gun” copywriter make you enough money to offset the cost of bringing in a pro?

The way that you answer that is with some back-of-the-envelope math, looking at your list size and the average value of a sale.

(Hang in there with me—I won’t go too deep into the weeds with the numbers.)

The goal here is to figure out how much the copywriter would have to increase your sales in order to break even.

In Rick’s case he has a fairly small list of around 2,500 subscribers.

And his product sells for around $250.

Given that, I’d estimate that Rick will probably make between 25 and 75 sales from this launch, and earn somewhere between $6,000 and $19,000.

So is it worth it to shell out $6K for a top-drawer copywriter?

In this case the math ain’t pretty:

An expensive copywriter would eat up half or more of the money Rick earns from this launch.

And the pro would have to hit a grand-slam homerun to make the investment pay off.

I don’t like those odds.

The real limiting factor here is Rick’s list size.

If he had 10K subscribers it would be a different story, because every little improvement that the pro copywriter made to Rick’s emails would be magnified by a factor of 4.

My guideline for this is:

If you have a small list (say under 5,000) and you’re launching a product that sells for less than a few hundred dollars, you’re probably better off writing your own emails to start.

When you know your product sells and you’re ready to scale up—that’s the time to bring in a hired gun.

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