10 Email Marketing Skills to Become an Expert

What makes an email marketer successful? You need a diverse skill set to shine bright in this digital marketing field. From writing creative copy to ensuring deliverability and compliance, there are lots of boxes to check daily.

Learn the top email marketing skills you should master to deliver impactful campaigns and meet your KPIs. This article can help:

• People looking for an email marketing role or transitioning to a new position.
• Marketing specialists who want to uplevel their skills.
• Hiring managers seeking the best candidate for their digital marketing roles.

You’ll also find email marketing courses and books to expand your knowledge in your own time.

What Does an Email Marketing Specialist Do?

Here’s a brief job description of what this role usually entails. The responsibilities may vary based on a business’ needs:

• Conceptualize, plan, and execute end-to-end email marketing campaigns
• Use various marketing tools, including an email marketing service, CRM, and Google Analytics
• Collaborate with other departments to set strategic email marketing goals
• Create compelling email content appealing to your target audience
• Build automated flows and segment your audience to deliver personalized content
• Apply regular list building and cleaning to ensure high deliverability
• Monitor data analytics and report on performance monthly
• Follow protection and authentication protocols and compliance policies

A marketing or communications educational background is usually among the requirements. However, previous experience in marketing–and especially email content creation and copywriting–are key.

Top Email Marketing Skills

What differentiates a good email marketing specialist from a great one? Step into an email marketer’s shoes and discover their daily challenges and the skills they need to tackle them:

1. Campaign management

Every email serves a conversion goal. To meet it, email specialists need to ensure that the target audience will grasp, and most importantly, get on board with it. Once they figure it out, they search for the right idea that will lay all eyes on the campaign and bring it together.

For most, campaign management starts with updating their email marketing calendar and project management tool. When smaller parts, such as design assets, audience segments, and copy, come together, work is transferred to dedicated marketing software.

Most email marketing services let users manage all tasks in one place. This tool can become a marketer’s best friend, especially when it comes with intuitive and user-friendly capabilities. For more complex tasks, such as setting drip campaigns, more nuanced steps are needed, but with the right platform, you can automate repetitive flows and save time.

Looking for an affordable email marketing solution trusted by beginners and pros? Sign up for a Moosend account and get one month for free to experiment with user-friendly features and deliver campaigns that leave a lasting impression.

Try Moosend

2. Copywriting skills

One of the most important skills an email marketing specialist should excel in is email copywriting. And it needs to be compelling from head to toe to bring conversions.

Starting with the subject line and its counterpart, the preview text, they should craft copy that will stand out in chaotic mailboxes. To boost open rates, they need to follow certain email subject line practices or use an intuitive subject line tester to do the work.

As for the email body, they need to stick to their tone of voice and be empathetic, offering value and solutions to real pain points the audience faces. Plus, they should follow certain tactics that convert, such as creating a sense of urgency.

Overall, consumers trust brands catering to their personal needs and feel off when receiving uninspired campaigns with little to no value. Finally, since typos always find their way in, they should have attention to detail, too.

Here’s a tutorial to learn more:

3. Email design fundamentals

To make a great impression on subscribers, you need beautiful email design with clear navigation. Most email marketing software and newsletter builders offer premade HTML email templates for different purposes, easy to customize based on a brand’s needs.

Hence, you don’t need graphic design expertise to craft a converting campaign. Yet, it’s important to understand the anatomy of an email and know how to use an email builder to create it in a reasonable time. Knowledge of HTML and CSS coding languages is considered a plus, especially when there is no developer available in the team.

Finally, email marketers who don’t work closely with designers should know how to create simple visuals or videos on platforms like Canva. They should also be familiar with stock photo websites for faster results.

4. Marketing automation

One of the greatest assets of email marketing is its automation capabilities. Email marketers use dedicated tools to set up automation workflows triggered at critical moments throughout a prospect’s or customer’s journey. Welcome and abandoned cart emails belong in that category.

To nail automation, email marketers need to know their buyer personas in-depth and have a clear understanding of lifecycle marketing. Once they spot certain customer behavioral patterns, they capitalize on them to meet KPIs, delivering tailored content to leads and prospects to move them down the funnel.

Even though setting up automation workflows can be challenging for beginners, most software makes this process easier by offering premade tools. So, once marketers grasp the if/then conditional logic, it becomes doable.

5. Email personalization

While automation is perfect for targeting subscribers with timely messages, there are more effective email marketing tactics to personalize content. Email segmentation is one of the most popular. Email marketing specialists spot audience segments based on characteristics like demographics and location and create sub-lists to send them unique and relevant content.

They also use custom fields and dynamic content to personalize parts of their emails. For example, they add the recipient’s name in the subject line to grab their attention or make product recommendations based on previous purchases and behaviors.

Overall, a successful email marketing strategy relies on personalization, especially for eCommerce businesses. Creating an ICP profile and mapping the average customer journey are crucial to deliver email content that will warm up customer relationships and boost email performance.

6. List building and hygiene

Apart from email segmentation, email marketing specialists have two more important responsibilities regarding email lists: email list building and cleaning. First off, they search for ways to boost lead generation using online forms, lead magnets, and landing pages.

But as an email list grows, email deliverability–the ability of an email to land in the recipients’ mailboxes– may start to decline. High bounce rates and spam complaints can harm the sender’s reputation over time, that’s why email marketers need to remove inactive or incorrect email addresses regularly from their lists.

Popular list cleaning practices marketers follow include:

• Using an email list cleaning service
• Adding an unsubscribe button at the email footer and allowing users to set their preferences
• Applying a double opt-in subscription process
• Sending re-engagement campaigns

7. Data analysis and optimization

No digital marketing strategy can flourish without a data-driven approach. An email marketer spends plenty of time in data analytics tools to understand what patterns work for their audience and what needs improvement.

Some of the most important metrics they keep an eye on include:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• Bounce rates
• Spam complaints

Most email marketing tools offer analytics capabilities to help you keep a good track of the data. Marketers usually combine that with information from Google Analytics and CRM solutions to understand customers in-depth and use appropriate tactics based on their preferences.

Also, email marketers often resort to A/B Testing to discover which email version performs best for their audience to boost campaign performance.

8. Protection and privacy compliance

Email marketing specialists should also be aware of the technical back-end processes that maintain the security of email communications. To achieve that, they need to adhere to certain protocols, such as:

SPF (Security Policy Framework): It signals to the email server that the email is sent from an authorized IP address.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): An Internet technical protocol for email transmission over the network.

DKIM (Domainkeys Identified Email): A digital signature that confirms the sender’s identity and verifies the email authenticity.

DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance): Policies for emails that fail SPF and DKIM protocols to stop potential phishing or spoofing attempts.

Good email marketers need to comply with the privacy regulations of the recipient’s regions, too, such as GDPR and CCPA.

9. Time management and multi-tasking

Email marketers need soft skills to thrive, too. Consider how much they have on their plate daily. From brainstorming new campaign ideas to writing converting email copy and maintaining list hygiene, they need to be agile and flexible to respond to different responsibilities within their deadlines.

This role requires thoughtful and creative planning and the ability to multi-task without reducing the quality. Updating their email marketing calendars and project management tools well in advance is key to managing their time more effectively.

10. Effective collaboration

Email marketers often cooperate with different departments, such as content marketing and design teams to deliver great campaigns to the audience. It’s important to sync in time to get on the same page. They need clear communication skills to avoid back and forths to deliver each project on time.

Plus, they need to align with the goals they set and provide teammates with clear guidelines to deliver great output.

Best Email Marketing Courses & Books

If you want to sharpen your email marketing skills methodically, here are some courses to choose from based on your level and needs:

• HubSpot Academy email marketing course: Best for small business owners and marketers who want to expand their knowledge.
• Skillshare email marketing course: Suitable for all levels and backgrounds but without certification.
• Udemy email marketing and copywriting course: Best for copywriters and creative professionals who want to boost their email marketing expertise.

If you like to learn the old-school way, check out these email marketing books:

• Email Marketing That Doesn’t Suck by Bobby Klinck
• How To Write Emails That Sell by Matt Bacak
• The New Email Revolution by Robert W. Bly

Time to Turn into an Email Marketing Pro

How do you feel after reading this post? Is email marketing a decent choice for you? Hopefully, you have a better understanding of the email marketing skills a professional should obtain in this area and how to start gaining them.

As you probably noticed, this tactic relies heavily on the marketing platforms professionals use. Thankfully, email marketing services like Moosend make campaign management easier than it may first sound. So, if you’re looking for an email marketing solution to elevate your email marketing efforts, sign up for an account today, and put theory into practice.