Last month I placed an Email Marketer into a DTC supplement company. The founder’s exact words on our first call were, “I need someone with direct response experience, Klaviyo expertise, and supplement industry background.”

I asked him how long he’d been looking.

4 months.

I asked how many candidates he’d interviewed.

Two.

I asked why only two out of four months of searching.

“Nobody meets the requirements.”

Of course nobody meets the requirements. He built a job description that eliminates 95% of the talent pool before a single person applies. Then he built a 7-step hiring process that takes five weeks to complete. Then, after all that, he asks the winning candidate, “Can you start Monday?”

This is a guide about hiring an Email Marketer. But the reason you’re reading it isn’t because you don’t know what an Email Marketer does.

It’s because your hiring process is broken. Your expectations are misaligned. And you don’t even know what questions to ask in the interview — because you barely understand the role yourself.

That’s not an insult. That’s a diagnosis.

And it’s the reason most ecommerce brands either hire the wrong person, overpay an agency for shared attention, or just leave money on the table for years.

This article is split into three sections:

Section 1: For Ecommerce Brands Looking to Hire Email Marketers

If you’re a DTC or ecommerce brand looking to hire Email Marketers, start here.

Section 2: For Email Marketing Agency Owners

If you run a Klaviyo agency and you’re trying to staff your pod, click here to jump to the agency section.

Section 3: For B2B and SaaS Companies

If you’re not in ecommerce, click here.

The first section will still be useful for agency owners. The agency section addresses problems that are specific — and epidemic — to how email marketing agencies hire and manage people.

TLDR

• Understand the difference between email marketers, retention specialists, and all the other titles that come up when hiring an email marketer
• Cut down your hiring process if you want to attract the best talent
• The questions you should actually ask when you need to hire an email marketer
• How to design a good trial task
• What’s reasonable to expect from an email marketer in terms of graphic design, copywriting, visual taste, and more
• Why Ecom email agencies have such a hard time attracting good DTC talent

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Hire Email Marketers, Retention Specialists, Lifecycle Managers, Klaviyo Specialists, etc…Where To STart

Before you write a job description, before you post on LinkedIn, before you message a recruiter — you need to understand what you’re looking for. Because the job market has turned this into a mess of overlapping titles that all sound different but often describe the same person.

Email Marketer

This is the broadest title. It covers everything from someone writing subject lines and scheduling campaign sends to someone designing full customer journey flows across multiple segments. When most ecommerce brands say “Email Marketer,” they mean someone who owns the channel end-to-end: strategy, copy, design direction, flows, campaigns, and reporting.

Retention Specialist

Same job. Different framing. “Retention” signals that the company has already acquired a customer base and now needs someone to keep those customers coming back. The work is identical — email flows, segmentation, win-back campaigns, post-purchase sequences. The title just tells you the company thinks about email as a retention function rather than a marketing function.

Lifecycle Marketing Manager

Also the same job — but now it includes SMS, push notifications, and sometimes loyalty programs. If you see “lifecycle,” the company is saying they want one person to own every touchpoint after acquisition. Email is the biggest piece, but it’s not the only one.

Klaviyo Specialist

This is where people get confused. A “Klaviyo Specialist” can mean anything from a strategic Email Marketer who happens to use Klaviyo to a specialized Ecommerce Virtual Assistant who knows how to build flows in the drag-and-drop editor. The title alone doesn’t tell you anything. More on this in a minute.

Here’s the deal:

If you’re hiring and you don’t know which of these titles fits your needs — that confusion is going to show up in your job description, in your interviews, and in the performance of whoever you hire. You’ll attract the wrong candidates because you described the wrong job.

For the rest of this article, I’ll use “Email Marketer” as the catch-all. But understand that what we’re really talking about is the person who owns your email revenue. Strategy. Execution. Results.

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Why Klaviyo Matters (and Why It Doesn’t) When You Hire Email Marketers

Every ecommerce brand owner I talk to says the same thing:

“They MUST know Klaviyo.”

And I’ll be honest — I understand why.

Klaviyo is deeply integrated with Shopify’s admin and backend in a way that no other email platform matches. It pulls purchase history, browsing behavior, predicted customer lifetime value, churn risk scores — all natively from your Shopify data. The segment builder is built around purchase behavior. The flow triggers are built around shopping events. The revenue attribution ties directly back to your store.

When a brand says, “Must know Klaviyo,” what they actually mean is:

“Must understand how to build segments and flows based on purchase behavior data.”

And that’s a legitimate requirement.

An Email Marketer who doesn’t understand how to segment by purchase frequency, or build a flow triggered by a browse-abandon event, or read Klaviyo’s revenue attribution dashboard — that person is going to struggle in an ecommerce environment.

But here’s what most people miss:

The strategic thinking transfers across platforms.

An Email Marketer who has spent two years building retention flows in Omnisend or ActiveCampaign or Drip understands the logic. They know what a win-back flow is. They know how to segment by recency, frequency, and monetary value. They understand the difference between a campaign and an automation.

Klaviyo’s interface?

They can learn it in a week.

The segment builder has a learning curve, sure. But it’s a tool. It’s not a skill.

You are shrinking your candidate pool over a tool someone can learn in seven days while ignoring whether they can actually think about your customer journey.

I’ve watched brands sit on an open role for four months because they couldn’t find someone with “Klaviyo experience” — while an Email Marketer with four years in Omnisend and a 40% repeat purchase rate at their last company was sitting right there.

That said — I’m not telling you Klaviyo doesn’t matter. It does.

The Shopify-Klaviyo integration is the deepest in the market. The purchase data layer, the predictive analytics, the revenue attribution — that ecosystem is why 90% of serious DTC brands are on Klaviyo and not Mailchimp.

What I’m telling you is:

Screen for the thinking first. The tool second.

And if you don’t know how to screen for the thinking — keep reading.

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Your Hiring Process Is the Problem

I see this pattern constantly:

A DTC brand doing $2M-$5M in revenue. Email is 4-6% of their total revenue. They know it should be 20-30%. They post a job description on LinkedIn and Indeed.

The job description asks for:

• 3+ years of DTC email marketing experience
• Klaviyo expertise (required)
• Industry-specific experience (supplements, beauty, CPG, whatever they sell)
• Direct response copywriting skills
• Graphic design skills or “strong design sensibility”
• SMS experience
• Knowledge of A/B testing and analytics
• Segmentation expertise
• Experience managing a creative team

That’s nine requirements. For one role. At a salary that’s competitive…but not extraordinary.

Now here’s the thing:

The talent pool for ecommerce Email Marketers is already small. It’s a specialized role. The people who are good at it know they’re good at it, and they have options.

When you stack nine requirements on top of each other, the pool shrinks from small to microscopic. And then you layer on “must have supplement experience” or “must have beauty industry background” and you’ve reduced it to a handful of people — most of whom are already employed and not looking.

But it gets worse.

After building this impossible job description, most brands then build a 5-to-7-step hiring process:

1. Application and resume screening
2. Brief phone screen with HR or a recruiter
3. 15-minute Loom introduction from the candidate
4. First interview with the hiring manager
5. Take-home trial task
6. Second interview to review the trial task
7. Final interview with the founder

Five to seven weeks. For a role where the best candidates have three to five other conversations happening simultaneously.

And here’s the irony that kills me:

These same companies describe themselves as “fast-paced, dynamic environments where you need to move quickly and keep up.”

Your environment is fast-paced. Your hiring process is designed for the DMV.

The best Email Marketers — the ones who actually thrive in fast-paced environments — are the exact people who won’t sit through a 7-step process. They’ll take the offer from the brand that moved fast and made a decision in two weeks.

So the company that prides itself on speed is using a hiring process designed for bureaucrats. And the talent that would actually succeed in their environment self-selects out before they ever get a live interview.

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The Inverse Picky Rule

There’s a principle we have learned from placing thousands of candidates into businesses:

The harder a role is to fill, the lighter your hiring process needs to be.

Read that again.

It’s counterintuitive.

Most people think, “Well, this is a specialized role, so we need to be extra thorough.” And they add more steps, more trial tasks, more interviews.

But the talent market doesn’t care about your process. It cares about supply and demand.

If you’re hiring a general Admin Assistant, you’ll get 300 applications in 48 hours. You can afford a rigorous process because the supply is massive. Screen, filter, test — knock yourself out.

If you’re hiring a senior Email Marketer with DTC food & bev experience, Klaviyo, SMS, and retention expertise? You might get 15 qualified applicants. Maybe 5 are actually good. And 4 of those 5 are talking to other companies right now.

This is where the brands that hire well separate from the brands that post the same job every six months.

The brands that hire well:

• Cut their requirements to the 3-4 things that actually matter
• Run a two-step process: one real interview and one async task
• Make a decision within two weeks
• Have a compelling offer ready — not just salary, but the opportunity itself

The brands that struggle:

• Stack 9+ requirements and wonder why nobody applies
• Build multi-week hiring gauntlets
• Take three weeks to schedule a second interview
• Lose the candidate to someone who moved faster

And then they go online and write, “There’s no good talent out there.”

There is. Your process filtered them out.

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How to Actually Interview and Hire Email Marketers (The 12 Questions That Matter)

Most hiring managers can’t interview and hire Email Marketers properly because they don’t understand the role deeply enough to know what to ask.

They default to, “Tell me about your experience with Klaviyo” and “What’s your approach to email marketing?” — and the candidate gives a polished answer that doesn’t reveal anything.

Here are the questions that actually separate the strategic thinkers from the button pushers:

1. “Look at this Klaviyo dashboard screenshot. What’s the first thing you’d change and why?”

This is the most important question on this list.

Give them a real screenshot — your flow performance, your campaign metrics, your revenue attribution. Not on a live call with a timer — because you’d never expect someone to only take 1 minute to analyze this if money was actually on the line.

Send it ahead of time or give them five minutes to study it. A good Email Marketer will immediately identify what’s underperforming and articulate why.

2. “Walk me through how you’d build a post-purchase flow for a customer who just bought your product for the first time.”

This tests whether they understand customer journey.

You want to hear about timing, content, and the strategic goal of each email — not “I’d set up a trigger in Klaviyo.”

3. “Our repeat purchase rate is X%. What would you do to improve it?”

Forces them to think about retention strategy, not just campaign sends.

If they immediately jump to “send more emails” or “add a discount code,” that’s a red flag. You want to hear about segmentation, timing, content, and customer behavior analysis.

4. “What’s the difference between a flow and a campaign? When would you use each?”

Basic, but you’d be surprised how many candidates blur the line.

You want someone who can articulate that flows are behavior-triggered automations and campaigns are one-time sends — and more importantly, when each is appropriate.

5. “How do you segment a list of 50,000 subscribers who haven’t purchased in 90 days?”

Tests their segmentation thinking.

You want to hear them ask clarifying questions: What products did they browse? What was their last purchase? Were they acquired through paid or organic? A good Email Marketer doesn’t treat all lapsed customers the same.

6. “Tell me about a time an email or flow you built didn’t perform. What did you learn?”

Everyone has wins on their resume.

This tells you whether they can own their failures — and whether they’re honest about them.

7. “If I gave you our Klaviyo account right now, what would you look at first?”

Tests their diagnostic instinct.

You want to hear about deliverability health, flow performance, list quality, and unsubscribe rates before they mention campaigns or creative. The person who goes straight to “I’d look at your designs” isn’t thinking strategically.

8. “How do you think about email design for our type of product?”

This is the taste test.

If you sell luxury skincare and they describe bright, cluttered templates with 47 product images — they don’t have taste. If they can articulate why your brand needs a specific visual approach and reference examples — they do.

9. “What metrics do you report on weekly vs. monthly?”

Tells you whether they understand what’s a leading indicator vs. a lagging indicator.

Click rate is daily noise. Revenue per recipient is monthly signal. If they can’t separate the two, they’re going to drown you in dashboards that don’t mean anything.

10. “Have you managed a designer or given creative feedback before? Give me an example.”

Email Marketers don’t need to be designers. But they need taste.

They need to look at a draft and say, “This doesn’t fit the brand” and explain why. If they’ve never given creative feedback, they’ve only done half the job. Don’t hesitate to show some of your own designs and ask them to rate them.

11. “What’s your experience with SMS? How does it integrate with your email strategy?”

Not a dealbreaker if they haven’t done SMS.

But if they have, you want to hear how they think about the two channels working together — not just “I also sent texts.”

12. “What email platform did you use before? How long would it take you to get comfortable in Klaviyo if you haven’t used it?”

This is where you test self-awareness.

Anyone who says “I’d be fully ramped in a day” is either lying or doesn’t understand the depth of the platform. Anyone who says “Probably a week or two to learn the interface, but I already understand the logic” is telling you the truth.

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The Trial Task That Actually Works When Hiring Email Marketers

Stop putting candidates through live, on-the-spot data analysis.

I see this constantly. A brand gives the candidate access to their Klaviyo account during a video call and says, “What would you do to improve this?”

Think about what you’re asking.

You wouldn’t hand someone a million-dollar ad account and say, “Diagnose it in 3 minutes with two people watching.”

You’d say, “Take the week. Study the data. Come back with a plan.”

Here’s a trial task that actually tests strategic thinking without wasting five weeks of everyone’s time:

Send the candidate a screenshot of your Klaviyo dashboard. Flow performance overview. Campaign history. Revenue attribution. Subscriber growth. Whatever you’ve got.

Give them 24 hours.

Ask for two things:

1. The top 5 things they’d change and why — in a 5-10 minute Loom recording
2. One specific flow they’d build or restructure, with a rough outline of the emails in the sequence

That’s it.

A button-pusher will look at the screenshot and not know what they’re looking at. They’ll give vague answers about “optimizing subject lines” and “A/B testing.”

A strategic Email Marketer will identify specific problems — a flow with a 2% conversion rate that should be 5%, a welcome series that drops off after email two, a win-back flow that doesn’t exist, a campaign cadence that’s inconsistent. They’ll tell you what to fix, roughly how, and what the expected impact is.

This takes the candidate an hour. It takes you 10 minutes to review. And it tells you more than five interviews ever could.

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Certifications Are the College Degree of Email Marketing

Klaviyo has a certification program. HubSpot has a certification program. Mailchimp has one. ActiveCampaign has one.

They all prove the same thing:

The candidate sat through the course.

Not that they can do the job. Not that they can think strategically about your customer journey. Not that they can look at your data and identify what’s broken.

A Klaviyo certification means they passed a test about Klaviyo’s features. It doesn’t mean they’ve ever built a flow that generated revenue. It doesn’t mean they understand why your abandoned cart sequence converts at 3% instead of 8%.

It’s the same logic as a college degree. Completing the coursework proves you can complete coursework. It doesn’t prove you can do the work.

I’m not saying certifications are worthless. If two candidates are otherwise identical and one has the certification, sure — it’s a tiebreaker. But if you’re filtering resumes by “Klaviyo Certified” and throwing out people who don’t have it, you’re eliminating potentially excellent Email Marketers because they didn’t sit through an online course.

Screen for results. Not credentials.

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What a Good Email Marketer Actually Costs

Here’s where I’m going to save you from the most expensive mistake in this entire process.

The going rate for a talented ecommerce Email Marketer with direct response experience, Klaviyo fluency, and real results is $3,500 to $5,000 per month.

Now think about what you’re paying an email marketing agency.

Most Klaviyo agencies charge $3,000 to $5,000 per month for their services. Some charge more. And for that money, you’re getting shared attention. Your account manager is handling 8-12 other brands simultaneously. Your campaigns are going through a pod of people who don’t know your brand as deeply as someone working inside it every day.

For the same money — the exact same monthly spend — you could have a dedicated person. Someone who works inside your business. Learns your brand voice. Studies your customer data. Shows up in your Slack every morning and owns the channel.

That’s the math.

Now, here’s what I’m not going to do:

I’m not going to tell you an agency is always wrong. Some agencies are excellent (we staff for them as well). Some brands actually need the agency model because they’re at a stage where a full-time hire doesn’t make sense — maybe they’re under $1M in revenue and email is a side channel.

But if your brand is doing seven figures and email is still under 10% of your revenue, you are leaving six figures on the table every single year. And the question isn’t whether you can afford a dedicated Email Marketer.

It’s whether you can afford not to have one.

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The “Taste” Requirement

Everything in Ecommerce is visual.

Colors. Photography. Typography. Layout. Videos. The way a product shot sits against a background color. The way a CTA button contrasts with the email body.

An Email Marketer for an ecommerce brand doesn’t need to be a designer. They don’t need to know Figma. They don’t need to build templates from scratch.

But you need to hire Email Marketers with…taste.

They need to look at a draft email and know instantly whether it fits the brand. They need to be able to tell a designer, “This doesn’t feel right for our audience — the palette isn’t feminine enough for a beauty brand” or “This looks like a discount mattress ad, not a premium supplement company.”

That’s not design. It’s judgment. It’s aesthetic sensibility. And it’s non-negotiable for ecommerce.

The exception — and it’s a real one — is longform direct response. A supplement brand selling a weight loss product through a long-copy email with nothing but text, bullets, and a buy button? That can crush. The copy carries it. The design doesn’t matter because there is no design.

But for the vast majority of DTC brands, email is a visual medium. And the person running it needs to have eyes.

Here’s how you test for taste in an interview:

Show them three email designs. Ask which one they’d send to your list and why. If they can’t articulate why one works and the others don’t — if they just say “I like this one better” without explaining the reasoning — they don’t have taste. They have preferences. Those are different things.

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What the First 90 Days Should Look Like When You Hire Email Marketers

If you’re expecting revenue impact in week two, you’re going to fire a good person for no reason.

Here’s a realistic timeline:

Days 1-30: Learn.

The Email Marketer should be studying your brand, your customer data, your existing flows, your competitors’ emails, and your product catalog. They should be auditing what exists and building a plan. They might send a few campaigns, but the focus is on understanding — not output.

If they came from a different email platform, this is also when they’re getting comfortable in Klaviyo. Let them.

Days 31-60: Build.

New flows go live. The welcome series gets rebuilt. The post-purchase sequence gets restructured. Campaign cadence gets established. They’re sending regularly and starting to see early data on what resonates.

Days 61-90: Optimize.

Now you can start evaluating. What’s the email revenue trend line? What’s the flow conversion rate? What’s the campaign engagement? Is the list growing or shrinking?

If you hired well, month three is when the numbers start moving. If you hired poorly, month three is when it becomes clear.

Giving someone 90 days is not patience. It’s math. Any shorter and you’re measuring noise, not signal.

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If You Run an Email Marketing Agency, Read This

Everything above still applies to you. But you have problems that brand-side hiring managers don’t have.

And I’ve seen enough of them from the inside — from placing people directly into your agencies — to know exactly where the breakdowns happen.

Let’s get into it.

The Pod Problem

Someone — I don’t know who, probably a YouTube guru — taught every email marketing agency to structure their teams into “pods.”

A pod looks like this:

• Account Manager
• Graphic Designer
• Copywriter
• Klaviyo Tech / Flow Builder

The Account Manager runs the accounts. They’re supposed to review the copy, give design feedback, check the flows, manage the client relationship, and make sure deliverables go out on time.

In theory, this is a clean structure. In practice, it means you’re asking one person to do four jobs.

The Account Manager needs to understand email strategy well enough to catch bad copy. They need enough design sensibility to give feedback in Figma. They need enough Klaviyo knowledge to check flow logic. And they need enough client management skills to handle 8-12 brands without dropping balls.

And most agencies are trying to pay this person per-account.

So the more brands they juggle, the more the agency makes — but the Account Manager’s workload scales linearly while their pay scales marginally.

Here’s the thing:

The best Account Managers know this math. And they leave. They go in-house at a brand where they manage one account, make the same money, and their workload drops by 80%.

Which is why you can’t find them. Which is why you’re reading this article.

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“Must Have Agency Experience”

Every agency says this. And I understand why.

Agency work IS different from in-house. The pace is faster. The context-switching is brutal. The client communication adds a layer that doesn’t exist in-house. An Email Marketer who’s only ever worked on one brand at a time might struggle to manage twelve.

But here’s the irony:

The reason you “need agency experience” is because agency environments are so chaotic that only people who’ve survived one before can handle it.

That’s often a management problem.

If your onboarding was better, if your SOPs were documented, if your Account Managers weren’t drowning in accounts — you wouldn’t need someone who’s already been through the war. You’d need someone who’s smart, strategic, and willing to learn.

You’d train them. And they’d be fine.

Instead, agencies stack “must have agency experience” on top of “must know Klaviyo” on top of “must have DTC experience” on top of “must have managed 10+ accounts” — and then wonder why nobody applies.

You’ve built an impossible job description for a position that pays per-account and offers zero stability.

And then you blame the talent market.

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The Onboarding Disaster

Here’s a story. And I’ve seen it across dozens of Ecom email agencies.

An agency hires an Email Strategist. The hire is strong. Good experience. Good interview. Starts working.

Day 1:

No logins. No access to the accounts they were hired to manage. Have to practically beg to get it. No SOPs. No brand guides. No documentation of what’s been done on each account or what the strategy is.

Week 2:

They’re expected to be up to speed on multiple accounts never seen before. The client expectations don’t match the onboarding timeline.

Week 3:

The agency has already cycled through 3 other Email Strategists in the past few months. Both were let go quickly. She doesn’t know this yet.

Week 4:

The termination letter comes in.

Deleted off everything. Same day.

The strategist says what any reasonable person would say:

“This is not a talent or mismatch issue. This is a management issue. If I had known they had this happen in the past few months, I never would have accepted the role.”

This is not a one-time event. This is a pattern at email marketing agencies. I’ve seen it repeatedly. The agency doesn’t invest in onboarding because they’re trying to keep costs low. The hire gets thrown into accounts with no context. Performance doesn’t meet expectations that were never properly set. The hire is terminated. The cycle starts over.

And every time, the agency blames the talent.

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The Budget Contradiction

Agency owners — I’m going to say this with respect, but I need to say it clearly:

You cannot pay per-account, offer minimal base salary, demand “agency experience” and “Klaviyo expertise” and “DTC background,” run a 5-step hiring process, and then wonder why your hires don’t work out.

The math doesn’t work.

A good Email Marketer costs $3,500 to $5,000 per month. That’s the market. Whether they’re in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the Philippines — the talented ones know their value.

If you’re trying to pay $300 per account and give them 8 accounts, you’re at $2,400 a month for someone managing $200,000+ in combined email revenue across your client base. And you want them to also manage client relationships, review copy, give design feedback, and be available in US hours, and probably on call at night as well.

That person exists. But they won’t stay. Because the brand that’s paying them $5,000 to manage one account with one-tenth of the stress is going to poach them inside of six months.

You either invest in the hire or you budget for constant turnover. There is no third option.

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The Speed Contradiction

This is the one that really gets me.

Email marketing agencies pride themselves on being “fast-paced, dynamic environments.” You brag about it in your job descriptions. “We move fast.” “We’re high-energy.” “You need to keep up.”

And then you run a hiring process that looks like this:

1. Application
2. Resume review
3. Recruiter phone screen
4. Request a Loom introduction
5. 15-minute video interview
6. Take-home trial task
7. Review interview with the founder

Seven steps. Over a month.

And then — after putting a candidate through a five-week gauntlet — you say, “Great, can you start tomorrow?”

The candidate who actually thrives in your fast-paced environment is the person who took the offer from the agency that moved in two weeks. They’re already onboarding somewhere else while you’re scheduling step six.

Your hiring process is the opposite of your culture. And the mismatch is costing you every good candidate you touch.

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What Agency Owners Should Actually Do

I’ll keep this simple because the advice is simple:

Cut your requirements to four things. Strategic email marketing experience. DTC or ecommerce background. Strong communication skills. Good taste. Everything else is learnable or trainable.

Run a two-step process. One real interview using the questions above. One async trial task — the screenshot method. Decision within two weeks.

Pay the market rate. $3,500-$5,000 for someone good. If your per-account pricing can’t support that, your pricing model is the problem — not the talent market.

Invest in onboarding. The first 30 days should be documentation, training, and supervised account management. Not “here are 10 accounts, figure it out.”

Stop blaming the talent. If you’ve churned through three Email Strategists in six months, the common denominator is…you.

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What About B2B and SaaS?

If you’re not in ecommerce, you’re in a different world.

B2B email marketing is about lead nurturing, not retention. The tools are different — HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Pardot — and the strategy is different. You’re warming leads over weeks and months, not driving repeat purchases.

Most B2B companies and SaaS founders don’t hire a dedicated Email Marketer as their first marketing hire. They hire a T-shaped marketer — someone who can do email along with content, SEO, and maybe paid acquisition. Email is one tool in their kit, not their entire job.

If you ARE at the stage where email is big enough to warrant a dedicated hire — usually when your list is over 10,000 subscribers and you’re sending regularly — most of the advice in Section 1 still applies. Screen for strategic thinking. Don’t over-index on tool experience. Run a lean hiring process.

The main difference is that B2B email marketing is less visual and more copy-dependent. The “taste” requirement fades. The ability to write clearly and persuasively becomes the primary skill.

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How It Works

We’ve placed Email Marketers into DTC brands, email marketing agencies, and B2B companies across 35 countries. Over 1,100 placements total.

Here’s what happens:

You tell us what you need. Not a job description — a conversation. We ask the right questions (the same questions in this article) to figure out what you actually need, not what you think you need.

We search our existing database first. We’ve done enough email marketing placements that we have a deep bench of pre-vetted Email Marketers who’ve already been screened for strategic thinking, platform fluency, and design taste.

You interview our shortlist. We send you 5-7 candidates. You interview them. We help you structure the interview if you want it.

They start. Full-time, dedicated to your business. Onboarding support from our team. One-year replacement guarantee.

The entire process takes days, not months.

If you’re tired of your hiring process producing the wrong people — or no people at all — book a call.

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FAQ

How much does a good ecommerce Email Marketer cost?

$3,500 to $5,000 per month for someone with real DTC experience and strategic thinking ability. That’s the market regardless of where they’re located.

Should my Email Marketer also handle SMS?

Most ecommerce brands bundle email and SMS under one person. They’re both retention channels and the strategy overlaps. But SMS is the side dish, not the main course. Hire for email expertise first and make sure they’re comfortable with SMS as part of the role.

Is Klaviyo experience a hard requirement?

It depends.

If you’re on Shopify and Klaviyo, you want someone who understands the purchase data integration — but they don’t need to have used Klaviyo specifically. The strategic thinking transfers across platforms. The interface is learnable in a week. Don’t eliminate great candidates because they used Omnisend at their last company.

What revenue level should my brand be at before hiring a dedicated Email Marketer?

If you’re doing less than $1M per year, you probably don’t need a dedicated hire yet.

A general VA or freelancer can handle basic campaigns and flows. Once you’re at $1M+ and email is underperforming relative to your revenue, a dedicated Email Marketer will pay for themselves within 90 days.

Agency vs. dedicated hire — which is better?

Depends on your stage.

Under $1M, an agency or freelancer might make sense because you don’t have enough volume to justify a full-time person. Over $1M, the math shifts. A dedicated hire costs the same as an agency retainer but gives you undivided attention, deeper brand knowledge, and someone who’s in your Slack every day instead of managing 10 other accounts.

What if I need someone to set up flows but not run ongoing campaigns?

That’s a project, not a hire.

Find a Klaviyo specialist or agency for a one-time setup engagement. Once the flows are built and running, then evaluate whether you need a person to manage ongoing campaigns, optimization, and strategy.

Do Klaviyo or HubSpot certifications matter?

Not much.

Certifications prove the candidate completed a course. They don’t prove they can build a flow that generates revenue or diagnose why your welcome series converts at 2% instead of 8%. Screen for results, not credentials.