In short, no.

There are some exceptions, but generally speaking, writers did not go to design school. It’s unlikely you want them designing your emails.

Plain text? Sure, most of us can:

  • add bullets
  • create bolded headlines
  • italicize for emphasis
  • and create an email that POPS…without the need for beautiful backgrounds.

But full HTML emails with code and graphics are tough. You have tables. You have CSS. You have images that need serving and hosting.

Not to mention making sure it’s just right on mobile, tablets, and desktops. That’s a lot of skillsets we didn’t learn in “copywriting school”.

Now for the exceptions. Here’s when you should expect your email creator to design as well:

  1. You’re hiring an agency that specializes in complete email creation
  2. You’re hiring a very expensive contractor that has confirmed they can do all of this for you (and hopefully has a portfolio to back it up)
  3. You’re OK with a “good enough” email from your copywriter and realize it will take many extra hours for them to do the additional work of designing, coding, and testing the emails.
  4. You have pre-existing templates that are easy to do and just need the text copy+pasta’d in

That’s it in a nutshell.

Please do not expect your writer to design a full HTML email from scratch. If you do need all of this, remember it’s likely to cost more.