The short answer
Most UK businesses spend between £1,500 and £6,000 a month on managed email marketing. Freelancers sit below that range, specialist agencies with strategy, design, build and reporting sit inside it, and enterprise lifecycle programmes with CRM integration sit above it.
What each tier gets you
Freelancer — £500 to £1,500 per month. Usually one person building and sending campaigns from your existing strategy. Good for simple newsletters, risky if you need deliverability, data or design work too.
Specialist agency — £1,500 to £6,000 per month. Strategy, segmentation, copy, design, build, testing and reporting, with cover when someone is on holiday. This is where most growing ecommerce and B2B brands land.
In-house hire — £35,000 to £55,000 salary plus tooling. Around £4,000 a month all-in once you add employer costs, software and management time. Makes sense once email is a core channel and you have someone senior to direct them.
What actually moves the price
- Send volume and list size — mostly affects platform cost rather than agency fees.
- Number of automated flows — build is front-loaded, maintenance is cheap.
- Design requirements — bespoke templates per campaign cost more than a modular system.
- Integrations — connecting a CRM, subscription tool or bespoke database is usually a one-off project fee.
- Reporting depth — board-level attribution reporting takes real analyst time.
Platform costs to budget separately
Klaviyo, HubSpot, Mailchimp and Braze all price on contacts or sends. For a 50,000-contact list expect roughly £250 to £900 a month depending on platform and features. HubSpot Marketing Hub sits at the top of that range once you add the hub tiers.
Setup fees
Most agencies charge a one-off onboarding fee covering audit, strategy, template build and flow setup — typically £2,000 to £8,000. Be cautious of anyone who skips this: it usually means they are reusing a generic template set.
Questions to ask before signing
- Who actually writes and builds the emails — and can I meet them?
- What is included in the monthly fee versus billed separately?
- What is the notice period, and does the IP in templates and flows transfer to me?
- How do you report revenue, and which attribution window do you use?
- What happens to deliverability if we scale volume 3x?
Is it worth it?
Email is judged on incremental revenue, not cost. A £3,000 monthly programme that adds £30,000 in attributable revenue is cheap; the same programme adding £4,000 is not. Agree the target before the contract, not at the first quarterly review.
See our full email marketing pricing breakdown, or compare the in-house versus outsourced maths.