Email marketing. Often overlooked by businesses on a daily basis, overshadowed by fancier marketing strategies, email marketing is the grand-daddy of online marketing campaigns.
Here’s what we think about email marketing.
Yes, they’re sometimes annoying.
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Yes, you probably skim through majority of them in seconds.
However, there’s a reason why we still receive marketing emails to this day.
Because it works.
Just because you don’t buy from that email, doesn’t mean others aren’t.
It only takes the email to strike a chord with a small fraction of the mailing list to bring in sales for the business. Best of all, email marketing allows you to target your own list DIRECTLY. You don’t need to go through Facebook or Instagram and compete with hundreds of other pages for attention. The moment your reader clicks into your email, you have their attention. The level of attention they give you is up to you. The email crafting genius. In this article, we’re going to explore the 9 skills you must have to land yourself an email marketing job or even better, implement your skills in the future business of yours.
Table of Contents
1. Strategic Vision
It’s no secret that email marketing is hard. Just ask anyone who’s created a career out of it. It may seem easy on the outside. People on the outside thing email marketing will just think your role consists of putting together newsletters all day long. But it’s so much more than that. You need to be able to strategise your email marketing campaigns tailored to your audience.
2. Email Automation
Email automation is to create an automated system of emails that every new subscriber will run through. You will need to be able to create more sophisticated funnels to run your email list through. What happens if the reader clicks through to a specific product or service offering but they don’t buy? Can you track that action and run them through a dedicated email sequence to sell that specific product or service?
Learn how to set these up with the right tools to so your campaign is off to a good start.
3. Copywriting
Copywriting is the skill of writing words that sell. From long flowing sentences to choppy
words
like
this,
the way you write will affect how the reader feels and ultimately their decision to buy from you or not.
Learn how to implement different copywriting frameworks into your emails. The most popular framework commonly used is the AIDA strategy. Attention - Interest - Desire Action. Use this simple framework to strategies how you structure and write your emails.
On top of that, always keep in mind that you're writing to have a conversation with your audience (a one way conversation, that is). You're not writing an essay for your teacher to read. We can all speak casually when we talk in person, but the moment we put our fingers to the keyword, our inner professor talk comes out. I guess it's just the way we were taught in school right?
When you write in marketing, you don't need the big words. You don't need to write long sentences. More so, know your audience and learn how to write like how they talk.
4. Best Practices
Not exactly a skill, but you need to know the rules for email marketing. From not going for a hard sell on the first email to knowing the GDPR rules, these are the best practices you should know for email marketing.
Everything you do has nuances. From playing soccer to writing emails, try subscribe to other email marketers out there to learn the practice. And learn it fast. Join Facebook groups or listen to podcasts like Marketing School to learn about the latest news in marketing.
That way, you will be able to create a strategy that works best.
5. Analytics
Data is king. You’ve probably heard this phrase here and there. I cannot stress how important data is in email marketing, especially if you’re hired into a company that already has an email list. Without numbers to track, you will never be able to improve. It’s your job to make sure you’re tracking your click-through-rate (cool people call it CTR) on each email and the % of sales.
Once you track these numbers, you can start experimenting if different styles of email designs will generate a higher CTR or perhaps to you introduce the product later down the funnel, would it sell better?
Everything can be tested, you just need to measure it first.
6. User Experience
As someone in-charge of email marketing, you need to be away of how your readers sell the email. From the subject line to their first impression. Does it stand out from the 50 other emails they will receive each day in their inbox?
Once they click in, is your email written in a way that will capture the attention of the reader to go through everything and click through to your website?
Once they’re on your website, does the messaging flow through? Trust me, this mistake is very common, I’ve made it many times myself. You spend so much effort in the previous steps just to bring them to your site, but if the messaging isn’t right or your website doesn’t convert, then don’t leave that to someone else to fix. Take action and change it.
Why?
Let me fill you in on an industry secret. Working in marketing is a double-edged sword. Can’t hit your numbers or can’t make sales? You’re the first one out the door. We marketers get hired for one reason only. To bring the business owners a surplus in sales. I’ll tell you one thing, it’s a rough life if you can’t hit your numbers. From sleepless nights to dreadful performance meetings. But on the other side, if you are able to bring the numbers up, you are a ROCKSTAR. The boss will treat you like a sales magician, and you can walk around the office with Big D*ck Energy. Your ideas are treated as the gospel and EVERYONE asks you for your advice.
That’s enough rambling...so make sure not only are you bringing in the traffic from your email and your traffic converts!
7. Basic HTML
Knowing how to code is a life blessing. When you work in digital marketing, you need to learn the very basic of HTML. From how to add a link into adding a button in, these are important skills to have.
Here's the few things you should know how to code up in HTML.
- adding a link
- add the right headers in
- adding a button
These days, most sophisticated email senders will have the interface created so you don'y need to code anything up yourself, but if you end up working with a company with a dinosaur email sender, then these skills will come in handy.
8. Design
If you know how to design, you have a big step up from other marketers. You can actually design your own email templates, and won’t need to work with a designer and go back and forth with them to get what you want. All this will only slow you down from executing your strategy.
Learning how to use Photoshop is a big big plus if you have the time, but if you don't have the time to learn it, then use something more simple like Canva. With built in templates of all kinds, half the creative work is done and all you need to do is to customize it.
9. Outreach
Outreach? What is this? Email marketing isn’t ONLY about emailing your database. What if you’re just starting out and have no database? Can you still do email marketing? The answer is yes. Learn how to use email crawling software such as Hunter or Skrapp, and use these tools to build up an email list so you can email out.
Emailing a cold audience that’s not in your database is a bit different. The email needs to look more personalised.
Rather than using Mailchimp, you need to use a handy tool like Lemlist to send out your messages so it will look like your writing the email in person. This means compulsory email rules like having the 'unsubscribe' button can be hidden, so the outreach email looks real.
Conclusion
So to wrap it up, email marketing is an awesome marketing career to get into. It's one of the more everlasting channels of marketing, and doesn't involve continuously pumping money to large social media corporations. If you're good at negotiating, convince your boss to pump money into your wallet instead or you can start looking for a new job!
Here you can find thousands of email marketing career opportunities.
Now what if you've never ran an email campaign in your life but still want to go for that loaded salary email marketing job?
Yes, it's ok to do push the boundaries of the truth in interviews.
Just download Mailchimp and have a play around yourself before you sit in the job interview, so when they ask you if you've got experience, you can say YES!