We already send a newsletter. Why would we pay someone to do it?

Because sending is the easy half. The half that decides whether it earns anything is list hygiene, segmentation and inbox placement, and almost nobody does that part on their own. A large share of the accounts we take on turn out not to have a content problem at all. They have a deliverability problem, and the newsletter has been quietly landing in a promotions tab or a spam folder for months.

Our list is old and we have never cleaned it. Can you just send to all of it?

No, and this is the single fastest way to damage a domain. A list that has sat untouched for years is full of addresses that no longer exist and people who have forgotten who you are. Mailing all of it at once produces a bounce rate and a complaint rate that tells Gmail you are a spammer. We split it by recency, mail the recent part, and win back the rest slowly and in small batches.

What open rate should we expect?

We would rather you did not judge us on it. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads images for a large share of recipients, which registers as an open whether or not anyone read the email. The number still moves and it is still worth watching for sudden drops, but every decision we make is based on clicks, revenue and unsubscribes.

Do you write the emails or do we?

We write them. You supply the raw material once a month — the new stock, the real number, the customer question, the thing that went wrong and was fixed. Emails built on that material outperform emails built on nothing, and no amount of copywriting substitutes for having something to say.

Can you move us from Mailchimp to Klaviyo while we are at it?

Yes, but it is a separate project with its own fee. A migration means rebuilding segments, forms, templates and automations, re-authenticating the sending domain and warming it back up. Folding it into a monthly retainer is how it gets done badly, so we price it on its own and schedule it around a quiet month.

How long before this pays for itself?

For an e-commerce list with existing customers on it, usually the first properly segmented campaign. For a list being built from zero, the honest answer is months, because you cannot mail people you do not have yet. We will tell you which of those two you are before you sign.

Content, Social & Communications

Email marketing and newsletters

The one channel nobody can switch off for you — run properly, which means the deliverability work first and the clever subject lines second.

From: $300–$2,500/mo
Typical time: ongoing
Usually bought by: E-commerce, SaaS

What this actually solves

Two very different owners land on this page. The first has an audience somewhere else — an Instagram following, a Google ranking, a paid ads account that works — and has been through one algorithm change or one cost spike and understood the exposure. Email is the only place where the list is genuinely theirs. Nobody can suspend it, reprice it or deprioritise it overnight.

The second has a list already and cannot understand why it produces nothing. They send. People do not seem to receive. Sales do not move. Almost every time, the problem is not the writing. It is that the sending domain was never authenticated, or the list has never been cleaned, or every email goes to every subscriber regardless of whether they bought last week or have never bought at all.

That second case is worth being blunt about, because it is where the money is quietly leaking. Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly published in DNS. Plenty of small businesses are sending without all three and have no idea. Their emails are technically being delivered and functionally being ignored.

What we do, and in what order

Deliverability first. There is no point writing better subject lines for an inbox you are not reaching.

Audit the sending setup and the list. SPF, DKIM and DMARC checked in DNS through MXToolbox, a seed send scored through Mail-Tester, the sender name and reply address reviewed, and the bounce and complaint history pulled out of the ESP. Then the list is split by recency — who has opened or clicked in the last six months, who has done nothing for twelve. Three to five days, at the start.
Clean the list and fix the plumbing that fills it. Long-dormant addresses moved to suppression rather than deleted, double opt-in switched on so bots and mistyped addresses stop entering, and the actual acquisition points built or repaired — a lead magnet that solves one small real problem, a signup form, a popup with sane timing, and an opt-in at checkout. Three to five days, overlapping with the audit.
Build the month's calendar and the segments it will send to. What goes out, on which dates, to which slice of the list, and what each send is meant to achieve. Segmentation is the difference between a cheap email service and one that earns — buyers versus non-buyers, recent versus lapsed, one product category versus another. One to two days at the start of each month.
Produce and send. Per campaign — six subject lines under fifty characters narrowed to one, a preheader written deliberately, body copy built on something real you gave us, the design, an inbox test across Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail, then the send. A/B tests only on one variable at a time, and only when the segment is large enough for the result to mean anything. Half a day to a day per campaign.
Report on what happened. Revenue attributed through UTMs in GA4, click rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate, list growth and net list health. Including the bad numbers, because a report that only contains good ones is not a report. Half a day at month end.

Tools, so it is not a black box. MailerLite or Beehiiv for straightforward newsletter work, Klaviyo where there is a store attached, ActiveCampaign for B2B, MXToolbox and Mail-Tester for deliverability, GA4 for revenue attribution, and Canva when a campaign needs images.

What moves the price

The range is $300–$2,500/mo and the arrangement is ongoing, because a list is a standing asset rather than a project with an end date. Three things decide where in that range you sit.

Volume and cadence. Two sends a month to a modest list sits at the bottom of the range. Two campaigns a week with several segments each, plus ongoing list work, sits at the top.

Whether there is a store behind it. Klaviyo work costs more than MailerLite work for the same number of emails, because product feeds, purchase data and segment logic all have to be wired and maintained, not just written.

Whether design is included. Plain-text style emails are fast and often outperform designed ones. If every campaign needs a designed template with product blocks and lifestyle imagery, that is a different amount of work per send and it is priced as one.

One thing that is deliberately not folded in — repairing a domain that is already damaged. If the complaint history has already pushed you into spam folders, the recovery work is its own project, because it takes weeks of controlled sending and it would otherwise eat the entire first month of a retainer.

What usually goes wrong

The whole legacy list gets mailed on day one. The owner points at years of addresses collected since the business opened, and the obvious move looks like sending to all of them. What follows is a bounce rate in double figures and a spam complaint rate above the threshold that matters. Gmail's ceiling is 0.3 percent — three complaints per thousand emails. Cross it and inbox placement degrades for everything you send afterwards, including to the people who genuinely wanted to hear from you, and it takes weeks of careful sending to climb back.

The preheader is left empty. It is a single field and skipping it is the most common avoidable mistake in the whole discipline. Left blank, the inbox fills that preview line with whatever text appears first in the email — usually "View in browser" or an unsubscribe link. You get two lines of attention in a crowded inbox and one of them has been handed to boilerplate.

Decisions get made on the open rate. It is the number every client asks about and it is the least trustworthy one on the report. Privacy protections pre-load images without a human ever seeing the message, so opens are inflated by an amount that varies by audience and cannot be separated out. Choosing which subject line "won" on that basis means optimising toward a measurement artefact. Clicks, revenue per recipient and unsubscribes are the numbers that survive contact with reality.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

We already send a newsletter. Why would we pay someone to do it?: Because sending is the easy half. The half that decides whether it earns anything is list hygiene, segmentation and inbox placement, and almost nobody does that part on their own. A large share of the accounts we take on turn out not to have a content problem at all. They have a deliverability problem, and the newsletter has been quietly landing in a promotions tab or a spam folder for months.
Our list is old and we have never cleaned it. Can you just send to all of it?: No, and this is the single fastest way to damage a domain. A list that has sat untouched for years is full of addresses that no longer exist and people who have forgotten who you are. Mailing all of it at once produces a bounce rate and a complaint rate that tells Gmail you are a spammer. We split it by recency, mail the recent part, and win back the rest slowly and in small batches.
What open rate should we expect?: We would rather you did not judge us on it. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads images for a large share of recipients, which registers as an open whether or not anyone read the email. The number still moves and it is still worth watching for sudden drops, but every decision we make is based on clicks, revenue and unsubscribes.
Do you write the emails or do we?: We write them. You supply the raw material once a month — the new stock, the real number, the customer question, the thing that went wrong and was fixed. Emails built on that material outperform emails built on nothing, and no amount of copywriting substitutes for having something to say.
Can you move us from Mailchimp to Klaviyo while we are at it?: Yes, but it is a separate project with its own fee. A migration means rebuilding segments, forms, templates and automations, re-authenticating the sending domain and warming it back up. Folding it into a monthly retainer is how it gets done badly, so we price it on its own and schedule it around a quiet month.
How long before this pays for itself?: For an e-commerce list with existing customers on it, usually the first properly segmented campaign. For a list being built from zero, the honest answer is months, because you cannot mail people you do not have yet. We will tell you which of those two you are before you sign.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Email marketing & newsletters All Content, Social & Communications services