Is Email Marketing a Good Career Option in 2023? A Beginner’s Guide
If you are wondering how to become an email marketer, chances are you already know how efficient email is as a marketing medium. According to a 2021 Litmus report, at least 37% of brands worldwide increased their email marketing budget in 2020, while another Market Maximize report projects a 9.47% compound annual growth rate in the email marketing domain in the ongoing decade. All these stats highlight not just the dominance of emails but also their shining prospects as a separate marketing discipline.
Email Marketer Skills
What is the right set of skills that are central to how to become an email marketer? To be successful in this field, you need to develop a balanced combination of technical and soft skills:
Technical Skills
- CSS, HTML, and Ampscript expertise
- Expertise in Microsoft Suite
- Efficient email automation with the help of Email Eervice Provider (ESP) softwares
- Design expertise
- Design software knowledge
- Proficiency in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google Analytics
- Familiarity with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), database management, and data analysis tools
Soft Skills
- Writing and editing skills
- Interest in different consumer personas
- Empathy
- Strong intuition
- Nose for news and a strong awareness of consumer needs
The Role of an Email Marketer
For some insight into how to become an email marketer, you should have an idea about the responsibilities that the job entails:
- Design unique and memorable email campaigns
- Identify customer segments and formulate campaigns according to their needs
- Ensure that templates behave and look similar across devices
- Proofread emails to clarify the Call-to-Action (CTA) and produce concise email copy
- Stay updated on the latest consumer trends
- Keep tabs on promotional campaigns, bulk email blasts, and weekly or monthly newsletters
- Prioritize company events and corresponding communications
- Create and saturate email lists with potential conversions
- Analyze campaigns and suggest more efficient strategies to boost return on investment
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How to Become an Email Marketing Expert
Step 1: Build Your Copywriting Skills
Copywriting teaches you how to express the best ideas in the shortest possible way. Crisp, concise copy and short messages are the thumb rule of email marketing to direct users toward specific CTAs.
Step 2: Master the A/B Testing Process
The A/B testing process is incredibly important when it comes to learning how to become an email marketer. It is an effective way to track how users respond to different variants of the same message. A/B testing involves sampling of response differences and prescribing strategy changes based on the results from two unique sets.
Step 3: Choose Your Email Marketing Tools
A strong technical understanding of marketing tools will help you successfully pull off email campaigns. Professionals swap through a variety of softwares in a given day, such as ESPs, email deliverability tools, and email testing/tracking tools.
Step 4: Build Your Email Marketing Skills
To write email copy that engages, appeals, and solves user problems requires an intuitive perception of the audience. Learning how to become an email marketer requires a succinct understanding of keywords, subject lines, accurate sales pitch language, and hyper-personalization strategies.
Step 5: Learn How Digital Sales Funnels Work
Sales funnels visually represent the consumer journey from product awareness to their final action of buying. Email marketers pull new customers, generate referrals, and monitor every step of the email engagement process so that they perfectly align with the digital sales funnel.
Step 6: Learn How Email Marketing Works
An effective email campaign has three essential steps:
- List building: Learn different ways to entice people to subscribe to your email lists. It includes free downloadable assets, regular product updates, or free content on subjects related to your domain.
- Designing customized content: Personalization is the backbone of email marketing success; it is crucial to update user customization strategies and push your CTA accordingly.
- Analytics and segmentation: Splitting your email lists into more targeted groups is called list segmentation. Recruiters actively seek out professionals with market segmentation expertise.
Step 7: Take an Online Executive and Certification Program
Certification programs provide you with hands-on technical learning of all the email marketing processes alongside consistent ideation on latest industry challenges.
Step 8: Enroll in Bootcamps
Email marketing bootcamp courses are tailor-made for working professionals to enhance their careers in typical part-time modules. They are short and affordable, and give you a certified launchpad to boost your marketing career.
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Types of Email Marketer Careers
Email marketing specialists develop an accurate sense of what sells and what users ignore by working with just regular email. This intuition is transferable to the following portfolios:
1. Digital Marketer
When you are an expert at knowing what appeals to your customer base, you can stimulate multiple online channels to expand user engagement and build the brand voice. Digital marketers juggle between strategy, planning, and creativity to generate a wide range of social interactions and content that reinforce the company/brand-user dynamics.
2. CRM Manager
Companies thrive on relationships. The crucial function of retaining and nurturing client relationships is called customer relationship management or CRM. Email marketers, through their course of work, master lead generation, optimize information, and handle intricate customer data—all of which are central aspects of the CRM portfolio.
3. Social Media Marketer
Training in email marketing also prepares you for a range of communication tools applicable in social media marketing. This is an equally engaging portfolio that leverages the power of social media to draw user engagement and establish brand authenticity.
The Training Required to Become an Email Marketer
A thorough and specialized email marketing training program—like the ones mentioned below—will enable you to unleash your full potential and enhance your marketing skills.
1. Overview of Email Marketing
- The importance of email marketing in the age of instant communication
- Best practices of email marketing
- The importance of personalization and disadvantages of bulk email
- How to write remarkable email copies
2. Primary Elements of Email Marketing
- How to become an email marketer specialist with ESPs
- Permissions and regulatory email compliances
- Newsletter design
- Email marketing goals and corresponding strategies
3. Fundamentals of Email Lists
- Significance of email lists in marketing
- Maintaining and growing email lists
- Defining the user base from company lists
- List segmentation
4. Measuring Campaign Success
- Understanding spam filters, A/B testing, open and click-through rates
- Curtailing the unsubscribe rates
- Smart Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for email marketing
- Analyzing results and formulating strategies accordingly
Educational Requirement for Email Marketers
The best part about digital marketing is that there’s no prerequisite degree necessary to achieve success. Anyone with a working knowledge of real-life marketing can excel at digital and email marketing.
However, if you are looking for jobs in the marketing sector, recruiters demand a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing or an equivalent field such as media studies or advertising. For working professionals, short online marketing courses that are replete with industrial insights and practical training could be more helpful instead.
ALSO READ: What is Marketing Automation and How it Helps Businesses Grow
Is Email Marketing a Good Career?
A 2022 Hubspot blog projects that email marketing revenue will reach $11 billion by the end of 2023. Moreover, when one out of two media planners leverages emails as a dominant marketing form, it only reinforces the strength of this traditional digital medium. With these stats in mind, it is easy to conclude that email marketing is a very lucrative career and will remain so in the coming years.
Transparency and easy accessibility make emails one of the most effective marketing tools despite major technological shifts in digital communication. Explore the digital marketing courses of Emeritus that teach you all about the best email marketing practices, the latest industry trends, and personalization strategies.
By Bishwadeep Mitra
Write to us at content@emeritus.org