The short version: A career in email marketing means spending most of your week on segmentation, flow logic, deliverability, and testing rather than writing clever subject lines, and it pays anywhere from £24,000 for a junior exec to £75,000-plus for a head of lifecycle or retention marketing. The people who move up fastest aren’t the best writers in the room, they’re the ones who understand data and can prove a sequence made money.
What the job is, day to day
When people picture email marketing they picture someone typing witty subject lines with a cup of tea, feeling pleased with themselves. That’s maybe an hour of the week, if you’re lucky.
Most of the actual job is this: pulling open and click data from the last campaign, checking why a flow’s revenue dropped 15% last month, rebuilding a segment because half of it unsubscribed, arguing with a designer about whether a button needs to be bigger, and sitting in a meeting explaining why “just email everyone” is how you get flagged as spam. I’ve run campaigns for clients with lists from 3,000 subscribers to over 200,000, and the bigger the list gets, the less time you spend writing and the more time you spend on the plumbing behind it, sender reputation, list hygiene, suppression rules, timing.
If you enjoy writing but hate spreadsheets, this job will surprise you. If you enjoy solving a puzzle where the answer is a number on a dashboard, you’ll love it.
The different shapes this career takes
Email marketing isn’t one job, it’s about five, wearing the same name tag.
- Email marketing executive (junior): Builds campaigns from templates, schedules sends, pulls basic reports, usually under a manager who sets strategy.
- Email marketing specialist or CRM executive: Owns automations (welcome series, abandoned cart, win-back), does A/B testing, works inside a platform like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, HubSpot, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud daily.
- Lifecycle or retention marketing manager: Owns the whole customer journey by email, plans quarterly strategy, sets KPIs, often manages one or two juniors.
- Head of CRM or head of retention: Sits closer to the board, ties email revenue to overall company revenue, decides tooling and budget, works with data teams.
- Freelance or agency email marketer: Runs email for three to eight clients at once, gets paid per project or retainer, has the most freedom and the least job security.
I’ve sat on both sides of this. I’ve been the person building the strategy for a big brand and the freelancer juggling four clients with four different tools and four different login screens open at once. Both are real careers. Neither is easier than the other, they’re just hard in different ways. If you want a full breakdown of the money at each of these stages, I wrote a separate piece on how much an email marketer can expect to earn that goes level by level.
A real week, from a real client
A few years back I worked with a homeware ecommerce client based near Manchester with a list of around 40,000 subscribers and one email going out a week, a straight product blast, same format every time. Open rate sat around 22%. Nothing wrong with that number, it’s fine, it’s just leaving money on the table.
We rebuilt one thing: the welcome sequence. Not a rebrand, not new photography, just the automation that fires when someone joins the list. It went from a single “thanks for subscribing, here’s 10% off” email to a five-email sequence over nine days, each one doing one job, welcome and discount, best sellers, founder story, social proof, last chance on the discount.
Within the first month that one sequence pulled in £8,400 in attributed revenue that hadn’t existed before, and open rates on that flow specifically hit 41%, almost double the old blast average. Nobody wrote a masterpiece. We just gave the sequence structure and stopped asking a single email to do the job of five.
That’s the job in miniature. Not inspiration, structure.
The skills that get you hired
Job specs for “email marketing manager” list things like “excellent copywriting skills” near the top, and it’s a bit of a red herring. What they’re really testing for, once you get to interview, is:
- Can you build a segment based on behaviour, not just demographics (someone who opened three emails but never clicked, someone who bought once but not in 90 days)?
- Do you understand why deliverability drops, and can you name at least two causes (poor sender reputation, spam trigger words, a sudden spike in send volume)?
- Can you read a report and explain what it means to someone who doesn’t work in marketing?
- Have you run an A/B test to a conclusion and changed something because of the result?
- Do you know one email platform, not five badly?
Writing matters, but it’s the smallest of these five. If you’re coming from a writing background and thinking about this route, it’s worth reading what counts as content writing work today because email overlaps with content writing far less than people assume; it sits much closer to data and marketing operations than to editorial.
Pay, level by level
Numbers vary by industry and location, but here’s a realistic UK range as of 2026:
- Junior email marketing executive: £24,000 to £30,000
- Email marketing specialist / CRM executive: £30,000 to £42,000
- Lifecycle or retention manager: £42,000 to £58,000
- Head of CRM / retention: £60,000 to £85,000, more at larger ecommerce or SaaS companies
- Freelance day rate: £250 to £600 depending on experience and whether you’re doing strategy or just execution
Agencies tend to pay slightly less on salary but give broader experience faster, because you’re touching five different accounts a year instead of one. In-house pays more once you’re senior but you learn one business inside out and that’s it.
The uncomfortable bit nobody puts in the brochure
Here’s the thing most career guides skip past. The entry-level rung of this job, the “write and schedule the newsletter” job, is shrinking. AI tools now draft a competent welcome sequence or product email in under a minute, and plenty of small businesses have already stopped paying a junior to do that first draft. What’s still paid for, and paid well for, is the judgement layer on top, deciding what to test, reading why a flow underperformed, knowing which segment to protect and which to sunset, spotting when a “high open rate” is a deliverability problem in disguise because the email landed in spam folders that auto-open tracking pixels.
That’s not a reason to avoid this career. It’s a reason to skip past the “just write nice emails” version of the job and go straight for the strategy and data side, because that’s the part that isn’t getting automated away, it’s the part doing the automating.
The other thing people gloss over: this job involves a lot of being told no. Legal will block a subject line, a client will hate the send time you picked, deliverability drops for reasons out of your control (an ISP changes its filtering rules overnight, and your open rate halves with no warning). If you need every day to go smoothly, this isn’t the career. If you can shrug, check the logs, and fix it by Thursday, you’ll do fine.
How to break in
Five steps that work, because I’ve watched people use them:
- Step 1: Pick one platform (Klaviyo is the easiest to get free training on) and build three fake automations for a made-up business, welcome series, abandoned cart, and a win-back sequence.
- Step 2: Learn to read the four numbers that matter, open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and revenue per email sent. Not just what they are, what a good and bad number looks like in your industry.
- Step 3: Offer to audit one small business’s email for free, a friend’s shop, a local service business, and give them three specific fixes with reasons. Real feedback beats a certificate.
- Step 4: Get comfortable with basic reporting tools outside the email platform itself. Understanding how tracking data flows through analytics is a genuine edge; if you want the technical detail on how that data connects, I’ve written about how Google Analytics passes data through its API, which is more useful for this job than most people expect.
- Step 5: Apply for the junior CRM or email specialist role, not the “content writer who also does email” role. Titles matter, they signal what a company will ask you to do all day.
If writing is your stronger muscle and you’re weighing this against a purely copy-led route, it’s worth comparing against what a copywriting career or side hustle involves day to day, because the two paths look similar from the outside and feel completely different once you’re in them. And if freelancing appeals more than a job title, the freedom and the pain points are close to what I’ve described for people building a freelance writing and editing career from home, minus the writing, plus a lot more spreadsheets.
I covered the follow-on problem in How To Look For A Temp To Hire Job.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be a good writer to work in email marketing?
It helps, but it’s not the main skill. Most of the job is segmentation, testing, and reading data, and a lot of the actual email copy today gets drafted with AI tools and then edited, not written from a blank page.
How long does it take to get a first job in email marketing?
Most people I’ve seen break in did it within three to six months, usually by building a small portfolio of practice automations and getting one real audit under their belt, then applying for junior CRM or email specialist roles rather than general marketing roles.
Is email marketing a dying career because of AI?
The junior task of drafting a single email is shrinking, but the strategy, segmentation, and deliverability side is growing, because someone still needs to decide what to test and interpret why it worked. Roles focused purely on writing are the ones at risk, not the discipline itself.
What’s the best platform to learn first if I want to get into email marketing?
Klaviyo is the most requested skill in ecommerce job listings right now, and Mailchimp remains the easiest to practise on for free. Learn one before touching a second, employers care more about depth than a list of logos on your CV.
