Skills You Need for Email Marketing

By NIIT Editorial 

Published on 26/10/2020

 6 minutes

Email marketing remains an important contributor to digital marketing campaigns. Done right, it is one of the most effective ways to maintain close contact with your customers and maximize the lifetime value of this relationship with deals and discounts landing exactly in the inbox of your brand loyalists. Being such a high-priority exercise for revenue generation, aspiring email marketers need to focus on skills that allow them to master their art. In this article, we’ll share those top-of-the-line skills that make recruiters hire email marketers in a jiffy. In other words, we’ll answer the question, what skills do you need for email marketing? and how to squeeze the maximum benefits of email marketing from your efforts.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the process of connecting with leads or customers for purposes of promotions, acquisition, sales, or knowledge sharing. It enables business owners to extend a communications line to their customers and allows people to stay informed of the best business deals a brand has to offer. It offers the following advantages:

• Economically feasible.
• You can study customer behaviour and streamline the campaign to offer varying deals as per customer choices.
• An average working professional checks his/her email 15 times a day. So the probability of getting user attention is quite high.  

Having explained what is email marketing, let us discuss the skills required for the same.

Skills required to be an Email Marketer

You need a homogenous mix of managerial as well as a creative aptitude to be good at growing business through emails.

STRATEGY

Unlike other marketing, platforms email is much bifurcated and scattered due to the vast variety of customer demographics that complicate it. Imagine a database of thousands of people, some leads, while others converted buyers and the rest just part of your cold emailing outbursts. Surely you can’t expect to send single-minded email correspondence to all and expect anything out. Instead, you need to peel the superficial layers and find what ticks each group of readers. Segregation based on age, location, content preferences, purchase history, and so much more needs to be in place before the first email lot exits your outbox. Marketers must roll up their sleeves and polish their strategy creation acumen to build a foundation for email marketing skills.

Read More: How to be a Top-Notch Email Marketer

DELIVERABILITY

What use would be all the strategic expertise if you can’t get the email to land in someone’s inbox in the first place? Yes, there could be many reasons for an email bounce rate. Factors contributing to this could be any of the following:

• You might be spamming too many people due to which you have been blacklisted.
• If landing the email is not a problem, having the customer not open it might be at which point your content quality, or the subject line, in particular, might be called into question.
• While spamming, as per convention, regards to non-registered customers that you want to woo in, there could be a different problem with registered users. It’s called email throttling. It refers to the frequency of emails sent to a single user, which when exceeds a threshold, the ISP might block you.
• Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is software that is used to send bulk emails. If you’re having trouble emailing customers you might want to look into your MTA

One of the benefits of email marketing is it puts you right in front of the user, but for that, you must initiate the right practices.

SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION

Sending fab emails is not the only KRA of an email marketer. They are also responsible for growing the list step by step leading to more purchase orders. Relying single-handedly on your routine newsletters will not suffice although that formulates one of the key pillars of an email campaign. As a result, it would be a big bonus if marketers know how to convince people to sign-up for newsletters through social media. You could upload a sign-up form on your social handles leading people with an inlet to your routine updates. This could be done through story-telling that establishes expectations for the future and it brings us to our next point.

COPYWRITING

Email marketing jobs require professionals to be excellent at expression. The first thing, which is also the make or break deal for an email, people notice in their inbox is the subject line. You must give them want they want to read or something outstandingly creative that catches their eye. After that comes the email body, which should adhere to a storytelling flow. Marketers must be smart to drive home the point of their email as creatively as possible. Based on this, we can surmise that email marketing requires the communication skills of the highest order.

This is where copywriting comes into play. The content, tone, fervour, and CTAs should be adjusted to the liking and stage of the customer journey. Carve out the best templates, with regular upgrades/experimentations in design, to keep the audience looped in.

ENGAGEMENT

Customers must be incentivized to enlist with you. Of course, this can’t be the case each time you mail them, but an occasional reward, such as a discount coupon or a cashback, for being a long-standing fan can be arranged. Having gained the rights to the inbox-real estate of an individual, you must pay the informal royalty, i.e. freebies. You can take inspiration from the following types of giveaways:

• Birthday specials
• Exclusive pay-per-view content
• Notifications about product upcoming sale/product launch/events etc.
• Festive discounts/Weekend offers

These are the proverbial carrots that you dangle in front of and bait the rabbit with. Their ultimate aim is to urge the user to make the next purchase.

CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS

You must be able to group-in and or untangle numbers to precisely point what’s working for you and where the scope of improvement remains. There should be utmost clarity on commonly used matrices for measurement such as:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Subscription rates
• Block/Spam reports
• Email referral rate

Get your act together so you can analyse the data and communicate with other stakeholders the requirements for making email marketing more effective. That could vary from acquiring more resources be it in the form of content creators or bandwidth allocation from the network provider.

CREATIVE OUTLOOK

Email marketers are not expected to have Photoshop skills yet, they should at least have an impression that is competitive with others in their field. The more creative you are the better your chances of getting hired when applying for email marketing jobs. Customers expect a certain level of aesthetics in their emails, otherwise, you’re just one of those that they would happily gloss over. Experiment with the style and flow of content along with the design until you find the secret ingredient that encourages interaction.

HOW TO BECOME AN EMAIL MARKETER?

The Post Graduate Programme in Digital Marketing and Branding at NIIT is a comprehensive, 400-hour intense course apt for aspiring digital marketers. This career programme covers modules that include but are not limited to:

• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Planning & Promotions
• SEO, SMO, Mobile Marketing
• E-commerce optimization
• Online Reputation Management
• Market Research
• Facebook and Google Certification Prep.

With 3 assured interviews, students have their first job as a digital marketer ahead of themselves, as they gain a course completion certificate. Learn remotely from anywhere, and across any device with this NIIT Digital initiative.