Hire Email Marketing Director — email as a revenue engine

Full-time $120k–$170k. Fractional directors suit companies with real lists that do not yet justify a full-time senior email leader.

Usually one to three email specialists/designers, plus ESP and agency relationships. They own the program end to end regardless of team size.

Audit, deliverability fixed, core flows live or rebuilt, campaign calendar running. Email revenue typically lifts within the quarter as flows start working.

Revenue attributed to email (flows vs campaigns), list growth rate, deliverability metrics, and engagement trends. Reported against the revenue target, monthly.

The email director owns the email channel deeply. The head of CRM owns the customer database and lifecycle across channels. If email is the priority, hire the director; if the database is, hire the head.

An agency usually runs your campaigns to a brief and bills by output; the strategy, deliverability and platform decisions stay unowned. When you hire an email marketing director, even fractionally, you get someone accountable for the whole channel as a revenue line, who sets direction, owns the sender reputation, and manages any agency or specialists underneath them. I am happy to keep a good agency doing production while I own strategy, infrastructure and the numbers.

I work daily in Klaviyo, Iterable, Braze, Customer.io, HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, with transactional mail kept separate in Postmark or SendGrid. If you are on the wrong tool for your model I will say so plainly and run the migration, including domain warming and consent porting, so reputation and revenue survive the move. The platform matters far less than how it is configured, so I never recommend a switch just for the sake of it.

Yes, deliverability repair is the most common reason people hire an email marketing director in the first place. I audit SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment, check blocklists, read Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS, clean the list, and fix the complaint and bounce patterns dragging you down. Most senders see placement improve within a few weeks once authentication is correct and unengaged contacts are suppressed, though a badly damaged domain can take longer to rehabilitate.

Flow fixes tend to show first, often within the initial month, because triggered emails run on existing high-intent traffic. Deliverability repair and list hygiene usually lift campaign performance within four to eight weeks. If we are warming a new domain or recovering reputation, I pace volume deliberately and the curve is slower but far more durable. I would rather build something that compounds for a year than spike one month and burn the list.

Either, depending on what you have. I often sit above an in-house specialist or a production agency, setting strategy, standards and the testing roadmap while they execute, which is usually the most cost-effective shape. Where there is no team yet, I build and hire one. The goal when you hire an email marketing director is clear ownership and raised standards, not necessarily more headcount.

Both. Ecommerce flows like abandonment and winback are the obvious case, but I spend as much time on B2B lifecycle: lead scoring, nurture tracks tied to sales stages, onboarding and expansion sequences, and alignment between marketing automation and the CRM. The deliverability and measurement discipline is identical; what changes is the segmentation logic and how tightly email has to hand off to a sales team.