Even as we move further into 2020, email marketing remains one of the pivotal communication channels between businesses and their stakeholders across the globe. According to Medium, 46% of small businesses actively use email marketing, with 47% believing that it is the most effective lead nurturing tactic to employ today.
Additionally, Business 2 Community reported that 67% of email marketing specialists use this strategy to increase brand engagement, with 80% of businesses firmly believing that email marketing increases customer retention. That being said, an email marketing strategy is only as efficient as the email marketing specialist in charge of producing and delivering the content to would-be customers and clients.
Whether you aim to become an email marketing specialist yourself or are looking for the best skills to look for in future job candidates, this is the list for you. Let’s take a look at the top skills every email marketing specialist should possess in order to use email marketing software correctly and ensure that his or her business performs optimally in 2020 and beyond.
Professional Communication Etiquette
While an email marketing platform will indeed enhance the email marketing specialist’s ability to deliver quality content to the customer base, it is the content itself that will matter the most at the end of the day.
With that in mind, an email marketing specialist should be able to communicate in a professional, succinct, and informative manner through their writing in order to scale the business and grow its revenue over time.
By introducing an email marketing specialist with well-rounded soft skills and a vocabulary which matches the industry’s standards to your team, your emails will enjoy far better reception and engagement than ever before.
Email List Management
Producing quality content and delivering it to outdated mailing lists will result in the campaign’s inevitable failure – one which could be avoided with proper planning.
Growing and maintaining active and relevant email lists should be one of the top priorities when it comes to the skills of a good email marketing specialist.
Checking for inactive emails, grouping recipients based on their engagement and preferences, as well as delivering content in a seamless and intuitive way is a must-have skill for any email marketing specialist worth hiring for your company.
Problem-Solving Initiative
Even the best thought-out marketing campaigns tend to hit bottlenecks which can cause problems with content delivery and affect its overall success.
An email marketing specialist should, therefore, be able to think on their feet, assess the situation, and look for a solution without panicking or being confused about what to do next.
While it is a soft skill at its core, being solution-oriented can be of great value both for the email marketing specialist and their coworkers who will consider this mentality a great morale boost.
Goal-Driven Mindset
At the core of every email campaign lies a set of goals and KPIs – outcomes that the email marketing specialist set out to achieve before delivering emails to their audience base.
Specialists that consider the company and campaign goals “sacred” can be highly effective at using email marketing software optimally in order to achieve those numbers in the shortest amount of time possible.
With dedicated writing tools, a goal-oriented mindset can translate to high-performing email campaigns with great engagement and revenue generation.
Analytical Thinking
No email marketing activity should ever be taken without proper data analysis and calculation of possible outcomes.
Doing so will always result in a poor audience reception, wasted resources, and create no tangible data to analyze post-engagement.
A good email marketing specialist will take past marketing performance, audience expectations, and content engagement into consideration before creating or delivering any form of an email to the mailing list.
- Content Formatting
While the main job description of an email marketing specialist lies in their ability to utilize the email marketing software provided by the business, content formatting remains a pivotal element of their skillset just the same.
Content which is created with the intent to engage and convert email recipients should be formatted, checked for proofreading errors, and shaped so that it flows well and is easy to read once it hits the target inbox.
Poorly formatted content, even if it contains quality information and a good value proposition, will most likely fail to intrigue the recipient enough for them to check your links out and convert into a lead – make sure to avoid that at all costs.
Ability to Automate Processes
Every email marketing campaign consists of small steps which amount to a larger whole and result in successful content delivery to the business’ target audience.
However, automating as many of these activities to allow for better focus on those that matter the most (such as content writing) is highly recommended.
As such, email marketing automation is one of the top skills every email marketing specialist should have in their arsenal to allow for streamlined and easier-to-manage marketing campaigns to take place going forward.
Audience Segmentation
Different demographics will naturally gravitate toward different content types and expect various approaches to writing and calls to action.
This makes it essential for the email marketing specialist to know how to segment email lists based on different filters such as age, gender, engagement preferences, internet use habits, etc.
In doing so, they will be able to more effectively encourage interaction and conversion with the audience given their efficiency at pairing audience segments with various content types and approaches.
Social Media Integration
While social media marketing is a topic worth discussing in and of itself, email marketing specialists should still possess the ability to seamlessly integrate social media links into the content they deliver to the mailing list.
Doing so will allow the recipients to quickly check out your social media pages, subscribe to your feeds, and stay in touch with the latest posts and information regarding your business.
Combined with writing platforms, an email marketing specialist is able to write unique and appealing calls to action which can be integrated into the email’s body and further improve social media links engagement contained within.
- Follow-Up Engagement
Lastly, once the emails are successfully sent out, it will be up to the email marketing specialist to stay vigilant and respond to any queries and responses from the audience directed at the sender’s email.
Failing to possess such a skill will result in poor brand reputation and lower response rate since the recipients won’t receive a follow-up from the email addresses they were just contacted by.
This makes it important for the specialist to have social skills and be communicative enough to be able to talk to individual customers and direct them to different departments or colleagues within the company.
In Conclusion
Regardless of the industry, you operate in or the scale at which you conduct business, hiring an email marketing specialist with the above-mentioned skills is highly recommended.
A specialist with a well-rounded combination of soft skills and the ability to use email marketing software effectively will undoubtedly have a positive impact on your business’ bottom line in the foreseeable future.
