Service
Email copywriting retainer
An email copywriting retainer is $1,500 a month for 3 to 5 emails a week, written and built in Klaviyo, with a two month minimum. That is roughly 12 to 20 campaigns a month.
Written and built, not written and handed over. The emails go into your account, laid out, tested and scheduled, so nothing sits in a document waiting for somebody to find time.
01
How is this different from the Klaviyo setup?
The setup builds the emails that send themselves. The retainer writes the ones you send on purpose.
A Klaviyo setup is a one time job. It builds the flows that trigger off behaviour, meaning welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post purchase and win back. Once those are live they run without anyone touching them.
Campaigns are the other half. Those are the emails you decide to send, such as a launch, a sale, a restock, a story about how something is made. They do not trigger off anything. Somebody has to write them every week, and that is what a retainer is.
Most brands need both, and the setup comes first. Sending weekly campaigns to a list with no welcome flow behind it means paying to acquire subscribers who never hear from you until Tuesday.
02
What is included every month?
3 to 5 emails a week
Roughly 12 to 20 campaigns a month, written from scratch rather than adapted from a template pack.
Built in your account
Laid out, linked, tagged and scheduled in Klaviyo. Not delivered as a document for somebody else to build.
A/B testing
Subject lines tested against each other so the sending gets better over the months rather than staying where it started.
Segmented sends
Campaigns sent to the part of the list they are actually for, as opposed to everyone every time.
UTM tagging
Every link tagged so your analytics can tell you which email produced the sale.
A monthly look at what happened
What earned, what did not, and what changes next month because of it.
03
What does it cost?
Ongoing
$1,500 a month
Email copywriting retainer. 3 to 5 emails a week, written and built. Two month minimum.
Setup
$800 to $1,200
Klaviyo setup: account, lists and segments, UTM tracking, and the five core flows.
Bundle
$2,800
Starter funnel: a landing page, Klaviyo setup with UTM tracking, and a five email sequence.
The whole rate card is on the pricing page, with nothing behind a form.
04
Who actually writes them?
I do. That is the part of this I would not hand off.
Configuring an email platform is the easy half of the job and plenty of people will do it. What decides whether a campaign earns anything is whether it sounds like a brand a person wants to hear from, as opposed to another message that opens with a discount because nobody could think of a reason to write.
Sending five a week is what makes that hard. Anyone can write one good email. The work is finding twenty things worth saying a month without repeating yourself, and that is what you are paying for.
05
What do you need from me each week?
Less than you would think once it is running. A short message usually covers it.
01
What is coming up
Launches, restocks, sales, anything with a date on it. The further ahead you can say, the better the sequence around it.
02
What is out of stock
The fastest way to waste a good campaign is to send people to a product they cannot buy.
03
One person who approves
Approvals are what slow a retainer down, not the writing. Three people reviewing in sequence turns a Tuesday send into a Friday one.
04
Anything you want said
A story about a product, a supplier, a mistake you fixed. The details you think are boring are usually the ones that earn.
06
Who is this for?
Small and mid sized ecommerce brands, mostly on Shopify, with traffic and orders and no real email programme behind them.
The usual shape is a list that has been collected for a year or two and emailed occasionally, when somebody remembered. There is real money sitting in that list and it is not being asked for.
It is not for brands sending at enterprise volume with an in house lifecycle team, and it is not for a store with no traffic yet. If nobody is arriving, email is not the thing to fix first, and I would rather say that than take the retainer.
07
What happens if we stop?
You keep everything. The account was always yours, and so is every email in it.
The two month minimum exists because one month of sending is a sample size rather than an answer. After that it is month to month with no annual lock.
If the emails are working you will not need a contract to keep you, and if they are not, a contract should not be what does.