Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing. It allows brands to engage their audience, build a community, and increase sales. Email marketing specialists are responsible for overseeing the success of the company’s email marketing efforts.
In this post, you'll learn how to become an email marketing marketer without prior experience.
What Does An Email Marketer Do?
An email marketing specialist is responsible for planning, developing, and implementing a company’s email marketing strategy. This involves creating and managing email campaigns, analyzing performance, and constantly performing tests for better results.
Some of the day-to-day duties and responsibilities of email marketing managers include:
- Developing lead generation strategies
- Creating opt-in forms and landing pages
- Designing email templates
- A/B testing different variables of email campaigns
- Evaluating important email marketing KPIs
- Compiling and presenting reports
- Setting up automation and workflows
- Creating email list segments
- Finding areas of improvement
- Communicating with other decision-makers (social media managers, merchandisers, etc.)
How To Become An Email Marketing Specialist
Follow these steps to become an email marketing expert.
- Understand how email marketing works
- Build your email marketing skills
- Learn how digital sales funnels work
- Choose your email marketing tools
- Master the A/B testing process
- Build your copywriting skills
- Study email marketing case studies
1. Understand how email marketing works
The first step to becoming an email marketing specialist is to gain a complete understanding of how email marketing works.
In simple terms, email marketing is a digital marketing method where you communicate with your audience through email messages.
It is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing and was around well before pay-per-click ad services and social media platforms.
While these more recent forms of marketing allow businesses to reach their audience at scale, email marketing still has advantages not found in other types of marketing.
Some of the biggest benefits to using email marketing include:
- You own your audience - Unlike other marketing channels, you can control your list of email subscribers. As such, you can market to them as much as you like and how you like.
- High ROI - Email marketing has a higher ROI than other digital marketing channels.
- Easy to automate - Today’s email marketing software makes it easy to configure your email marketing campaigns to trigger when people take certain actions automatically.
- Improved relationships with customers - Email provides a direct channel to your audience. You can communicate with your subscribers more personally, building a stronger connection.
Here is a quick summary of how the email marketing process works.
You create an email marketing strategy
Like any other marketing channel, email requires planning your strategy. You need to know how email fits into your overall marketing strategy and what goals you want to achieve with your campaigns.
Establishing clear objectives for your email campaigns will help you know what tools to use and the best approach to take.
You get subscribers onto your email list
Your email list is a critical part of email marketing. If you want your marketing efforts to be successful, you need a list with plenty of active subscribers.
Building an email list involves getting sign-up forms in front of your target audience. You place the forms on your website as a popup or part of a dedicated landing page.
Opt-in forms often give users something in exchange for free. These free gifts (known as lead magnets) help incentivize people to join an email newsletter.
Popular things you can give away for a subscription include ebooks, checklists, discounts, and webinars.
You configure email automation
Modern email marketing software allows you to automate a wide variety of tasks. Once a subscriber is on your list you can have automated campaigns send them a sequence of messages.
Some of the most common email automation tasks include:
- Welcome emails
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Post-purchase win-back series
- Loyalty rewards
- Requesting customer feedback
You monitor performance
Email marketing specialists must continually monitor the success of their campaigns to find improvement areas.
By diving into the analytics within your email marketing solution, you can see which messages are driving the best results and which members on your list are the most responsive.
You clean and segment email lists
Over time, people may lose interest in your business or forget they signed up for your list. Making an effort to remove inactive subscribers can make your email list cleaner and easier to manage.
Your analytics will better reflect the effectiveness of your campaigns as the performance data is not diluted with inactive subscribers. A healthy list can also lower costs, given that many email marketing services base their pricing on subscriber count.
2. Build your email marketing skills
Some of the important skills email marketers must develop include:
- List building and management - Email marketers should know how to use different tactics to get their target audience to subscribe to an email list. As the email list grows, you need the ability to create relevant audience segments.
- Engagement - Email communications must be engaging while also presenting the business's unique value. Email marketers must create messages and campaigns that get opens and clicks.
- Deliverability - There are a variety of factors that can affect email deliverability. Email marketers need to know how to configure their messages to have the greatest chance of landing in their subscribers’ inboxes.
- Automation - Email marketers must know how to set up different email automation tasks. This includes creating autoresponder campaigns and assigning tags or custom fields to subscribers who take certain actions.
An effective way to quickly develop the skills needed as an email marketer is to take an email marketing course.
Courses pack everything you need to learn a subject into a single resource. This saves you the trouble of compiling multiple resources and wondering how to order the topics you study.
It is designed for complete beginners and teaches you:
- How to grow an email list quickly
- How to create an email list
- How to set up email automation
- How to improve your email engagement
- The best email marketing tool available
3. Learn how digital sales funnels work
help businesses engage with prospects throughout the buying process before they are ready to become customers.
Digital marketing funnels are typically divided into four stages:
Awareness - In this initial stage, a person becomes aware of your business for the first time. They could first learn about your company through social media, paid ads, organic search, another website, and more.
Discovery - During this stage, a person will start engaging with your business more by consuming your content and learning more about what you offer.
Consideration - In this stage, the prospect will spend even more time on your website. They may even follow you on social media or subscribe to your email newsletter.
Conversion - This is the stage where you convince the customer to complete a purchase. The amount of time it takes to complete the conversion stage will depend on the type of product or service you are selling.
Each stage of the funnel uses different types of content to target that particular audience segment. The further down the funnel you go, the more narrow the targeting.
When planning content for the digital marketing funnel, it is helpful to view the funnel in the following segments:
Top of the Funnel (TOFU) - Top-of-funnel content introduces prospects to your business during the awareness stage. Common types of TOFU content include paid ads, landing pages, visual media, and videos.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) - This type of content targets the discovery and consideration stages of the funnel where people are starting to pick up their engagement with your business.
Content during this stage should look to provide value while solving the audience’s pain points. Examples of MOFU content include case studies, long-form guides and blog posts, and product/service comparisons.
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) - This type of content targets visitors in the conversion stage as they are deciding whether to purchase from your business.
Common examples of BOFU content that can help lead to sales include discounts, free trials and demos, and dedicated sales pages.
For example, if someone visits one of your product category pages, you can configure your email marketing software to automatically send a follow-up message showing items from that category.
4. Choose your email marketing tools
As an email marketing expert, you need to know how to use a wide variety of email marketing software.
This includes email automation software, list-building platforms, A/B testing tools, and landing page builders.
For email marketing software, we recommend Mailchimp for creating campaigns and setting up email automation.
Here are some of Mailchimp’s key features:
- Comes with plenty of pre-built templates
- Easy integrations with platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and WooCommerce
- Affordable compared to other email marketing solutions
- Easy-to-use interface
- Pre-built workflows and automation
- In-depth reports and analytics
Mailchimp offers four tiers for plans: free, Essentials, Standard, and Premium.
The higher the tier, the more features that are available. Pricing is based on the number of contacts on your email list. Each type of plan has a limit to the total number of subscribers you can have on your list.
If you want access to all the essential marketing features, you’ll have to sign up for the Standard plan.
The standard plan costs $99 per month if you have 10,000 subscribers. If you have 30,000 subscribers, it costs $249 per month.
OptinMonster
The right lead generation tool can help improve your opt-in rate, leading to a larger email list
We recommend OptinMonster for capturing leads for your list.
With OptinMonster you can:
- Easily integrate your favorite email marketing software
- Create various types of sign-up forms
- Set your opt-in forms to only trigger in certain situations
- Build forms quickly with a visual editor
- Conduct A/B tests on different elements of your forms to see which performs best
The strength of OptinMonster lies in its ability to easily create attractive opt-in forms with detailed rules for targeting and triggering.
Some of the different form types you can create include:
- Slide-in
- Lightbox popup
- Sidebar widget
- Fullscreen welcome mat
- Inline
- Mobile optimized popups
You can set your forms to be “exit-intent”. This ensures that they only show when a visitor is about to leave the page. You also have the option to only have your forms show on certain pages.
5. Master the A/B testing process
A/B testing is the process of comparing multiple versions of a webpage, email, or other variables to see which one performs better.
Common things to A/B test in email marketing include:
- Subject lines
- Call to action copy
- Landing page design
- Email send times
- Sign up forms
- Images
- Email length
When you start an A/B test, you should establish goals for what you are trying to achieve with the experiment.
Knowing what you want to optimize will make it clear which elements are most important to test.
For example, if you wanted to increase email open rates, you could test different subject lines.
- You would send one subject line to half of your subscribers and the other to the other half.
- You then track the performance for each message to see which has the higher open rate.
Popular email marketing solutions make it easy to perform A/B tests on your campaigns. For example with Mailchimp, you just choose a variable such as body text or subject line and what percentage of your subscribers are sent each version of the content.
As the different versions are sent to your subscribers, you simply view the campaign reports to see which is performing better.
If you’re testing different areas of marketing simultaneously (like your email messages and landing pages) you are probably using several different testing tools.
In this case, you need to know how to use a centralized tool like a spreadsheet to monitor the results of the different tests in a single place.
6. Build your copywriting skills
To become a great email marketing specialist, you must build your copywriting skills.
The goal of copywriting is to write in a manner that encourages readers to take a specific action. In email marketing, it can lead directly to more opens, clicks, and conversions.
Here are some of the copywriting techniques you’ll need to master:
Punchy subject lines - Subject lines function as a headline to an article. They are meant to grab readers' attention and convince them to open the email. Email marketing specialists must master the ability to write engaging copy within a short space.
Personalization - Personalization is a big part of email copy. Part of the reason it is so common is that modern email marketing software makes it easy to personalize your email messages. Knowing how to use personalization in email copy can help email marketers build relationships with subscribers and increase conversions.
Making copy actionable - All email messages will include some call to action that you want the reader to complete. It could be to click a button to go to a blog post or to encourage someone to take advantage of a discount. Persuading people to take action requires a certain type of language. Email marketers should know how to use powerful words that are better at eliciting an emotional response. You should also have the ability to write effectively using the active voice.
Storytelling - Stories are a natural part of human communication. As an email marketing specialist, you should know how to use storytelling to generate interest and build a stronger connection with your audience.
7. Study email marketing case studies
A great way to learn how email marketing knowledge can lead to real-world results is to study email marketing case studies.
Case studies give you a direct insight into a company's approach so that you can compare their tactics to the results they achieved.
Email marketing case studies often show how companies that first introduce email marketing campaigns can experience a substantial increase in revenue.
Case studies can also show how a company used A/B testing to optimize parts of its email marketing.
How Much Do Email Marketing Specialists Make?
The average annual salary for an email marketing specialist is around $59K. More experienced email marketers may gain up to $92K per year. The salary differs by location, company type, and experience.
