As the job market heats up, marketers looking to go to the next level in their career should constantly look to upgrade their skills and talent stack. While most digital marketers are well-versed with most aspects of digital marketing like paid ads, social media and SEO, it’s usually email marketing that’s not given serious thought and most email marketing folks just “wing it”. However, email marketing much like PPC or SEO is a specialized skill, but one that can be easily learned and honed depending on one’s interest. Not only is it an important marketing function to have to do better as an all-round digital marketer, but also important if you’re looking to work at a top email marketing agency or as a retention marketing specialist at an ecommerce company.
Here’s Top 5 skills you need to be Good at Email Marketing
1. Copywriting
Emails are mostly about communicating about a product, an offer or an idea to the right audience in the right way. Great copywriting skills are a must to make sure that the emails are able to speak to their audience and create an impact. Right from creating great email subjectlines to the body text to creating an overall campaign, a large part of great emails is an art of storytelling and yet being concise. The best emails are ones that can say a lot without too much text. People who enjoy writing and are experienced bloggers, writers or authors tend to do well in the creative side of email marketing.
2. Being a Team Player
An email marketing manager needs to work with the rest of the marketing team to be able to create integrated campaigns. While the director of marketing or the more experienced marketing manager lays out the basics like the target audience, the budget and the overall marketing strategy, the designer creates the email, technical specialists set it up etc. Being able to work well with a team is a huge asset to being a great email professional.
3. Basic or Email-Specific Coding Skills
While email is largely not a technical function, a lot of larger enterprises need one to create emails in HTML as opposed to a drag and drop template like the one in Klaviyo. Learn a few ESPs (SFMC, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Pardot, etc.), using their HTML editor versus WYSIWYG. You will find, overtime, that all ESPs have similarities and you will be able to hop from platform to platform with minimal ramp up time.
Having the ability to code, trouble-shoot and work in various platforms will put you in a niche that is in demand.
Right now learning to code for email is important because there are so many email clients, devices and browsers that render code differently. What works in one client could break in another. However with emerging AI, it looks like coding could soon be a thing of the past.
4. Project Management Skills
Like most marketing functions, email marketing too calls for strong project management skills. Perhaps even more than the others. A mid to large sized company is likely to have large and complex email marketing campaigns spanning various geographies, products, campaigns and audiences. Add complexities like working with different team members, audience segmentation, AB testing and more, and you need to have project management skills of a McKinsey consultant to be able to manage it all and ensure that all the campaigns are being sent, sent correctly and on time. Besides sending emails, you also need to dive into analytics and reports and then bake those findings into your next campaign. Working with project management tools like Asana, Monday, Airtable and more is one of the ways to manage an email marketing function well and without getting bogged down by the multiple moving pieces.
5. Strong Marketing Knowledge
Last but not the least, every email marketer needs to be well-versed with basic marketing principles too. In fact, if you’ve done social media, search engine or other kinds of marketing, email pretty much follows the same principles, just in a different format. As a marketer, you need to have a good understanding of your audience, your product market fit, product value, what touchpoints to use, how much to say, and the ability to communicate it well and craft a great email marketing campaign. Knowing CTAs, landing pages, ideal discount strategy etc will be an additional boost in getting the best results from email.
