For several years, digital marketing has been the number one method businesses worldwide use to engage with their customers. Over the past couple of years, the COVID-19 pandemic has only strengthened email, and digital marketing communication as brands were limited with in-person marketing and customer service tactics and strategies that they could use.
At this point, whether you are looking to run your own business or want to work in the marketing department of another company, it’s safe to say that solid email marketing skills are in high demand. Email marketing is an aspect of digital marketing that offers the highest return on investment. Despite the rise of alternative digital channels for marketing, such as social media, email still brings the highest returns across the board. However, it takes specific skills to get the most from email marketing.
What are Email Marketing Skills?
An email marketing professional is ultimately well-versed in everything to do with email and all the brand’s details. They possess a set of skills that allow them to create campaigns that nurture subscribers through the different steps in the customer journey, including retentions, sales, and more. They are not only skilled at creating effective emails that catch the attention of the recipient and generate results, but they are also skilled at cleaning email lists, editing templates to fit in with a brand, and automating email sending. A good email marketing professional has a set of skills in several different aspects of marketing, sales, design, development, customer service, and more.
Skills Needed for Email Marketing Successfully
A successful email marketer has a wide and varied set of skills that they can use when creating individual emails and email marketing campaigns and getting better results for a business. Their skills allow them to make the most of email marketing as the digital marketing channel with the highest ROI; and ensure that they are engaging with customers, nurturing leads, and ultimately helping the brand grow. Some skills that you need if you want to get better email marketing in 2022 include:
1 – Develop Automation Skills
Email marketing is about much more than simply sending out newsletters, promotions, and customer offers. A good email marketing professional should be skilled at using automation software to automate the lead nurturing process. They understand just how important it is to save time and effort and achieve a higher ROI from the campaigns they run. To be successful today, a good email marketer needs to have a solid understanding of automation in email marketing, including how to segment contacts, effectively personalise emails, collect and synchronise data between systems, and build various workflows and sequences for following up.
2 – Get Good at Strategic Thinking
A good email marketer is not just somebody who can make a marketing email look and sound appealing. They are an excellent strategic thinker with a solid understanding of the basic email marketing frameworks and how it can be used to add value to the business as a whole. A good email marketing professional should understand the strategies used to bring results for the company. They should be skilled in sales strategies, lead generation strategies, and strategies used for nurturing contacts. They have a solid understanding of the different stages of the subscriber lifecycle and how to engage with subscribers throughout each phase.
3 – Practice Email Copywriting
A way with words is crucial for every successful email marketer. If you want to get into email marketing, then email copywriting is perhaps one of the most important skills you should put time and effort into. Every day, recipients get hundreds of emails in their inboxes, all trying to get their attention – and good writing skills can make all the difference between an email getting ignored or an email being opened, engaged with, and leading to a sale. One of the most important skills for email marketers today is to understand how to write catchy subject lines that catch the reader’s attention and ultimately increase email open rates.
4 – Improve Your List Management
A good email marketer is not only skilled at the creation, design, and writing of emails, but they also need to spend time developing some advanced skills when it comes to list and contact management. Segmenting lists based on data is a crucial skill for all email marketers to have in order to ensure that they put the right information in front of the right people. Understanding how lists are segmented and what each segment is based on, with the goal of engaging the right customers with valuable and appealing content, goes a long way in getting a higher ROI from any email marketing efforts.
5 – Develop Better Visual Design Skills
Another skill that is worth developing for email marketers is visual email design. With an increasing number of people now reading their emails using a smartphone, it’s important for email marketers to understand the importance of responsive email design and how to ensure that an email reads well and looks great on any device. While many marketing email design tools available today provide templates, email marketers should have at least a basic understanding of design principles and what visual elements can be included to add to the appeal of the design and support the copywriting and calls to action.
6 – Understand Testing and Analytics
Today, one of the most important skills that an email marketing professional can have is understanding the most important email marketing metrics and how these are measured in order to determine the efficiency of an email campaign. Email marketers need to be clued up on the best tactics to increase open rates and revenue and track these throughout a campaign to determine what can be done differently next time to improve the email performance.
What Email Marketer Skills Look Good on a Resume?
If you are looking to get into a career in email marketing, then several skills will look good on your resume and help you get further in the digital marketing field. Some skills that you may wish to develop further in order to improve your performance as an email marketer or to help you land an email marketing career include:
Web Design Skills
While there are now several marketing email building tools that do not require knowing HTML or CSS, having web design skills can help you get further in the world of email marketing, as this will allow you to customise emails and move away from the basic templates, leading to more unique results that stand out. Many marketing emails today are like mini websites, so email marketers need to know programming languages like CSS and HTML to create appealing messages.
Copywriting Skills
As mentioned earlier, good copywriting skills are essential for any email marketing professional. Copywriting skills will undoubtedly stand out if you want to enter a career in email marketing, as brands tend to look for professionals who can craft interesting and engaging messaging to support a campaign. A good email marketer is an effective storyteller and knows how to use language that persuades people to take action.
Technical Marketing Skills for Email Marketing
Along with skills that will help you put together a more effective and appealing marketing email, there are various technical skills that are highly sought-after in email marketing professionals. Since email marketing is about much more than making an email look good or writing the right words, it’s worth spending some time improving your skills in:
Automation Tools
A solid understanding of how to automate workflows or trigger email campaigns is key to working as a successful email marketer today. Whether looking for a new career or starting email marketing for your own business, it is worth getting to know some of the most popular automation tools and software programs.
Data and Analytics
A thorough understanding of the data is critical when it comes to being successful in email marketing, so it is no surprise that brands look for marketers with solid data and analytics skills. The constant refinement and iteration in email marketing are one of the main reasons its ROI is so high. A good email marketer should possess technical skills when it comes to tracking and measuring the performance of their campaign.
Email marketing is about much more than simply putting a message together and sending it to customers. To be successful with email marketing, there are several different skills involved.
