Email Marketing Specialist: Key Skills and Responsibilities
Email marketing has consistently ranked as one of the most effective areas of online marketing. It is not surprising that specialists in this field are still in high demand. In this article, we’ll explore what an email marketing specialist does, their key skills and responsibilities, the tools they use, and how to become one.
Who is an Email Marketing Specialist
An email marketing specialist is a type of digital marketer specializing in developing and managing email campaigns. This specialist not only creates the text and design of emails but also deals with strategic planning, data collection and analysis, testing, and optimization of campaigns.
Email marketers manage the full range of online marketing activities conducted through email. Their primary task is to strengthen the connections between a business and its target audience through online communication channels. To succeed, they must effectively encourage action, build trust, and foster long-term connections.
The tasks and responsibilities of email marketing experts vary depending on the type, size, and nature of the company they work for. In small companies, the email marketing specialist job description often includes technical and design duties: coding, creating graphics, automating mailings, and more. In large enterprises, they are mainly engaged in planning, management, and analytics.
In general, the profession requires a combination of a number of practical skills with a solid theoretical background. We suggest that you familiarize yourself with the priority competencies for such a specialist.
Core Skills and Competencies
An email marketer’s key skills are essential for implementing successful marketing strategies. They ensure effective interaction with the audience, increase conversion, and strengthen the brand. Moreover, they contribute to professional growth and successful execution of tasks in the field of email marketing.
Priority skills:
- Copywriting. The ability to write commercial texts is one of the key skills that every email marketer should have. Most of this specialist's work process is devoted to preparing capacious, informative headings and texts for emails. The effectiveness of the content they create largely determines their career growth and prospects. Copywriting skills need to be constantly improved.
- Design. Email marketing specialists are often responsible not only for the text but also for the graphic component of newsletters. In many companies, they perform the duties of a designer: they develop a layout and images, combining them with text. To perform these duties, at least a basic understanding of design principles is necessary. In addition, to create interesting and attractive content, you need to be able to work with specialized programs.
- Analytics. Conducting research and analytics are important email marketing skills. Professionals working in this field must be able to collect and analyze data, identify key ideas, and make the right marketing decisions based on the information received. Furthermore, they need to have a good understanding of campaign key performance indicators (KPIs). It is important not only to know what deliverability, opens, click-through rates (CTR) are but also to be able to achieve their increase. Working with analytical programs is no longer a plus but a necessity.
- Coding. In many cases, email marketing specialists will benefit from basic programming skills, even in the most basic languages: HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. These skills will be in demand when developing email layouts, managing contact lists, and automating mailings.
- Creative thinking. The profession of an email marketer involves creativity. To develop in this direction, it is very important to have creative thinking. Work on planning and creating campaigns is directly related to the constant search for original ideas. It will be quite difficult for a person without creative skills to prove themselves in this position.
Key Responsibilities
An email marketer is responsible for a range of tasks aimed at strengthening a company's position in the market and promoting its products to the target audience via email. It sounds a bit vague and not entirely clear, doesn't it? Let's get more specific: what does an email marketing specialist do?
Main responsibilities:
- Preparing emails. One of the main tasks of an email marketer is to develop marketing newsletters to achieve current business goals. They create welcome emails, newsletters, feedback letters, lead generation, drip campaigns, and more.
- Contact base management. An email marketing specialist organizes lists of addresses for sending emails. They must segment the audience according to specified criteria, filter inactive/irrelevant addresses, and set up lead scoring metrics.
- Campaign planning. An email marketer looks for original ideas for new newsletters and thinks about ways to improve the effectiveness of current campaigns.
- Testing. Regular A/B testing is an important element of an email marketing strategy. As part of its implementation, a specialist creates several versions of letters or their individual components (headlines, CTA) and compares their indicators. In this way, they can determine and choose the most effective one.
- Automation. Implementing tools to automate mailings helps prepare and send letters more easily and quickly. They also increase the effectiveness of interaction with the audience.
- Analytics. An email marketing specialist is required to monitor the performance of mailings. Based on this data, they evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns and make decisions regarding measures to optimize them.
Tools and Platforms for Email Marketing
Effective work of an email marketer is impossible without using modern email marketing tools that help automate processes and optimize mailings. Let's consider key platforms that significantly simplify the creation, analysis, and management of campaigns.
Email marketing platforms. Specialized services provide a wide range of tools for creating and sending mass emails, planning, automating, and tracking campaign results. They allow you to flexibly manage your contact base, prepare and launch email chains, and perform a number of other tasks relevant to an email marketer. The most popular among them are Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Omnisend, and Snov.io.
CRM. Using the functionality of CRM systems, email marketers get the opportunity to successfully engage in lead generation and effectively manage the email address base. The most popular CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) have advanced tools for audience segmentation and research, lead scoring, and campaign results analytics.
Automation tools. With the help of services of this type, specialists free themselves from daily routine, entrusting repetitive actions to software algorithms. One example is our no-code application connector ApiX-Drive. It offers numerous pre-installed integrations of various systems that allow you to automate the transfer of data between them and other operations.
Schedulers. These platforms are a must-have component of any email campaign management software suite. They allow email marketers to plan their campaigns more thoroughly and accurately. In addition to the organizer, popular schedulers (Asana, Trello, Upbase, CoSchedule) provide a number of features for project management and collaboration.
Testers. Email campaign testing platforms (Mailtrap, Litmus, Mailosaur) allow you to quickly and effectively conduct A/B testing of several mailing options. With their help, you can check how letters are displayed in different browsers and email clients. Many services have powerful analytical tools that allow you to evaluate the quality of letters by a number of criteria and recommendations for their improvement.
How to Become an Email Marketing Specialist
To build a successful email marketing career, you will need to invest time and money in training in this specialty. The best way is to take specialized courses in email marketing. However, for some, general courses in digital marketing may be enough, which provide the opportunity to acquire basic skills in design, layout, analytics, and HTML/CSS.
Our recommendations:
- Learn to write better. Mastering copywriting is one of the keys to a successful career as an email marketer. Mastering this skill will greatly benefit your professional development.
- Track new trends. Email marketing is evolving dynamically, so it’s important to stay on top of all the latest updates. Subscribe to blogs from leading email platforms and follow digital marketing experts on LinkedIn.
- Create a portfolio. Select the best of your work and add it to your portfolio. By presenting it to a potential employer, you will be able to demonstrate the real results of applying your knowledge and skills.
- Get your first experience. To successfully find employment, it is advisable to have at least minimal practical experience in your chosen specialty. Think about how you can gain it. Look for orders on freelance exchanges, do an internship, or launch a personal mailing list.
Email marketing specialist salary is an important aspect that most jobseekers focus on. It is worth noting that salary indicators in this field vary significantly. They are influenced by the experience, qualifications, and skills of the specialist, as well as the location and field of activity of the employer company. According to the Comparably portal, email marketer salaries in the US in 2024 range from $29,000 to $120,000 per year, with an average median of $65,000.
Highlights
Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for businesses to interact with their audience and promote brands and products. Since it is constantly evolving and improving, email marketing specialists must quickly master current trends and technologies. This is the only way to remain in demand in the labor market. In 2024, the most significant trends in this area are considered to be advanced personalization, interactive content, mobile optimization, in-depth segmentation, and behavioral triggers.
Time is the most valuable resource for business today. Almost half of it is wasted on routine tasks. Your employees are constantly forced to perform monotonous tasks that are difficult to classify as important and specialized. You can leave everything as it is by hiring additional employees, or you can automate most of the business processes using the ApiX-Drive online connector to get rid of unnecessary time and money expenses once and for all. The choice is yours!