How to Become an Email Copywriter (Even If You Have No Experience)

February 11, 2021
by Marianne Manzanillo 
Marianne writes emails for a living. She's a former corporate slave who found her freedom through freelancing. She's a homebody but loves travelling and playing with her nephews.

I’ve been a freelance email copywriter since 2017. 

And unlike others who went through serious training to do it, I started from zero.

No experience. No formal training.

So if you’re wondering if you can start your freelancing journey as an email copywriter right away…

Or you’re planning to niche down and want to focus on writing emails for your clients…

You’re in for a treat.

Because I’m going to give a quickstart guide to become an email copywriter.

Step #1 Understand what email copywriting is.

Simply put, email copywriting is persuasive writing. It’s one of the most lucrative skills in freelancing. And it’s probably the single best starting point for new copywriters.

As an email copywriter, you're paid to write “email copy” – words designed to prompt action.

And learning the basics of persuasive writing is your first step to becoming a copywriter. 

There are tons of resources available to help you accomplish this. Just a warning though. Don’t try to read them all. (Or you’ll get overwhelmed)

You can pretty much start with Robert Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion.

Alright?

So let’s move on to the next step.

Step #2 Get mentors.

Sure, you can read tons of resources and hoard all the copywriting courses out there. But if you want to 10x your writing fast, get a mentor.

You don’t need to master everything from scratch which can make the journey very stressful. Getting someone to teach you can save you years of time, money, and energy.

Not to mention that a mentor fast-tracks you towards success much more rapidly than you would alone.

But in the event that you can’t find someone to do this for you, you can opt in to the newsletter of the best email copywriters (e.g. John Pagulayan and Allan Ngo), learn from their tips, study how they write and apply what you’ve learned on your own copy.

Step #3 Land your first client.

Steph Curry didn’t become a great basketball player by reading books about the sport. He has to shoot that ball every single day.

Same goes in email copywriting.

There’s really only so much you can learn from reading about copywriting. 90% of learning to write copy comes from actually writing copy.

And while it’s certainly essential to consume some of the fantastic materials out there on copywriting, you need to get your hands dirty.

Get those clients, and write more copy.

And it doesn’t matter whether or not you get paid (or how much you get paid).

You need practice. Real practice.

So there you go. I hope you find this guide helpful.

If you want to learn more about email marketing, you can check out VA Bootcamp’s 5 Email Marketing Lessons for Beginners (free) and Email Marketing Mechanics (paid).

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by Marianne Manzanillo 
Marianne writes emails for a living. She's a former corporate slave who found her freedom through freelancing. She's a homebody but loves travelling and playing with her nephews.

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