It’s quite all right to be a lifelong email marketer, since demand is certainly high. Many, however, want to leverage their skills to advance down a different path.

If you’re an all-knowing specialist/generalist in email marketing, here are ideas on where you can take your career next:

If you’re strong in analytics:
Because data is the core of any good email program, many email marketers are inherently strong in using, interpreting and reporting on data.  Analytics work is in high demand, especially with the uptick in the amount of data brands have to manage and make sense of. Machine learning will only make jobs in this area more in demand.

Jobs to search for: Marketing analyst (or even analysts in other functional areas like finance), data scientist, data modeler and various management levels relating to those roles.

If you’re highly technical:
Email marketers often have to code, manage/move data, and build out complex solutions that require a lot of technical expertise. It’s fairly easy to translate those skills into technology jobs that are in email or entirely different functional areas of business.

Jobs to search for: Database administrator (DBA), email developer, web developer, software engineer, solution consultant/architect, business analyst, content architect and various management levels relating to those roles.

If you’re highly creative:
Every email requires some level of creative thought process and production. Content in both images and words is a large factor in driving an email’s success. Take the portfolio of emails you’ve created and use that to springboard into a creative-focused role.

Jobs to search for: Email designer, Web designer, creative director, Web copywriter and various management levels relating to those roles.

If you love operational processes:
To get an email campaign out the door requires rigorous management of process and people. It also requires an understanding and implementation of privacy regulations and deliverability best practices.

Jobs to search for: Deliverability consultant, privacy officer, marketing operations manager, marketing project manager and various management levels relating to those roles.

If big-picture thinking is your strength:
Strategic thinking plays a big role in how effective an email program can be. It takes an understanding of the marketplace, consumers and a company’s abilities to deliver a good experience.

It’s easy to translate this into a more strategic business role within email and other areas of business.

Jobs to search for: Email strategy consultant, digital strategist, marketing strategist, business consultant, retention marketing manager, relationship marketing manager, brand manager and various management levels relating to those roles — all the way up to chief marketing officer or chief strategy officer.

If you can’t bear to lose “email” in your title, but want to progress:
If you’re an email specialist and you simply love thinking with both sides of your brain and managing all aspects of email marketing from start to finish, you should consider building people management skills and running a team.  You can also make a case to take on other channels as part of your area of responsibility, such as SMS and push notifications, since they align well with email.

Jobs to search for: Email marketing manager and email marketing director.

Some of the aforementioned categories may overlap a bit.  The point is, there are a lot of career options for email marketers.

There are 10 email marketing manager skills which are needed to succeed.

1. Deliverability

If your email doesn’t get delivered, it doesn’t get opened. If it doesn’t get opened… well, you know the rest.

Making sure your emails get to their final destination is the first essential step in email marketing.

There are many variables that affect deliverability of your emails, including ISPs, MTAs, throttling, bounces, bulking, spam issues, and the quality of your content.

Here are a few easy rules that will help you achieve 99.5%+ deliverability:

Avoid SPAM complaints

• Don’t spam
• Use double opt-in
• Set expectations upfront, so subscribers know how often they’re going to hear from you

Avoid hard bounces

• Use double opt-in
• If you don’t use double opt-in, verify validity of collected email addresses in some other way:
  • If you’re collecting emails in exchange for a freebie, send that freebie to their inbox vs. putting it on a thank-you page.
  • If you’re collecting emails in a giveaway, send your first email to participants from a different account, so the wave of unsubscribes and bounces doesn’t affect sender reputation of your main account.

Purge your list

Every 6 months or so, delete all your inactive subscribers. If they haven’t opened any of your last 20-50 campaigns, they probably won’t open the next 100. Such subscribers and you don’t need each other, so let them go.

Know how the Gmail Promotions tab works

The Gmail Promotions tab adds a new layer to email deliverability. If your email is delivered but ends up in the Promotions folder, the subscriber might only get to it much later, if ever.

The problem is that Gmail got pretty good at distinguishing personal emails from everything else, so whether you need to stress over the Promotions tab is debatable. However, it’s still good to know what can cause your emails to land there: bulky images, fancy styling, excessive links, different reply-to address and email header markup.

2. List building

Growing an email list is the most-talked about topic in email marketing today. Good marketers should have a grip of different subscriber acquisition mechanisms available to them, such as:

• Content marketing (i.e. blogging coupled with content upgrades)
• Guest blogging
• Lead magnets (steal a few ideas from the bonus at the end of this post)
• Webinars
• Giveaways
• Opt-in tools like popups, slide-in forms, and top of the page ribbons
• Social media (see section below)

3. Social media integration

Social media is not only good for building your brand image and gaining exposure; it can also help you add subscribers to your email list.

The good news is that almost any social media channel can be leveraged to grow your email list.

Here are a few ideas:

• Twitter lead generation cards
• Call-to-actions + sidebar apps on your Facebook page
• Inviting your Instagram followers through storytelling
• Email-gated content upgrades on Periscope
• Giving sneak previews of (exciting) emails in Snapchat stories
• Driving traffic to the opt-in freebies in your blog through Pinterest
• Collecting leads on Slideshare

4. Subscriber engagement

Everybody wants a big list, but few realize that it’s not a panacea for your business.

Even small lists can work magic if they are healthy and engaged. This is because engaged subscribers open more, click more, and buy more.

And once you learn how to engage your email subscribers you can apply that to a list of any size to optimize its effectiveness.

The top rule of email list nurturing is “give more than you ask for”.

Especially in the first 2-4 weeks after someone subscribes to your list, make sure you surpass all expectations of being helpful and over deliver on a regular basis.

Once you establish trust with your new subscribers, continue your communication keeping in mind why people join and stay on email lists: they love the feeling of being on the “inside” of a private club.

Cultivate that feeling by:

• making them the first to hear new announcements;
• sending them exclusive content that’s not available on your blog;
• offering special deals to your subscribers.

Here are a few more tips on keeping your subscribers engaged:

• Segment your list and send more relevant info to segments
• Don’t lose your voice in automated emails
• Find the right “send” frequency: be on their radar without being annoying
• Make your emails feel like a continuous conversation (vs. a series of one-off emails)

5. Open rate

If you’ve ever sent an email campaign to a list of people, you might have engaged in the “open rate watching” behavior that looks at least somewhat like this:

Just 2 minutes after hitting “go” on my email campaign, I start refreshing my browser to watch the open rate stats roll in…

I know I’m not alone. We’ve all been there, right?

Email open rate is not just the subject line (although it’s important). It depends on a whole host of reasons, including:

• “From” name
• Preview text
• Send time
• Your list quality
• Your content

The more people open an email, the more people click, the more people buy, so make sure you always optimize your emails for a higher open rate.

6. Click rate

Most marketing emails get sent to trigger some action, whether you want people to buy, share, or engage with your stuff.

Any action in an email is measured by the click on your CTA (call to action). That’s why click rate (along with the conversion rate) is the ultimate metric in email marketing.

The “big secret” of achieving a high click rate is making a truly valuable offer. If your end product is not good, no tactics will save you.

However, if your fundamental offer IS good, then there are a few tips for optimizing your click rate:

Make your CTA crystal clear

Readers must immediately recognize the call to action even if they simply skim through the email. The easiest way to make your CTA stand out is to use buttons.

PRO-tip: use HTML-based buttons for best results. They’ll get displayed even if subscriber’s email client blocks images.

Use one CTA per email

Choice can be demotivating. The fewer options your subscribers have, the more they are likely to act. Using just one call to action eliminates the paradox of choice.

There are lots of resources to back this. Whirlpool got a 42% click-through-rate increase by dropping the number of CTAs in its emails from 4 to 1. HelpScout increased click-through rate by 17% by keeping the number of CTAs in its emails to one.

Evoke powerful emotions in your copy  

Marketing is based on psychological principles, and the most effective campaigns take advantage of such powerful emotions as:

• Scarcity
• Curiosity
• Social proof
• Authority

7. Analytics and data

Any email marketing manager has to feel comfortable in the analytics dashboard of their ESP (email service provider).

Email marketing stats like open and click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, list growth and conversion rate can give powerful insights at what’s working (and what’s not) in your email marketing strategy.

Looking at the numbers and seeing trends, and with that, opportunities for experiments (A/B tests) is a skill that distinguishes a successful email marketing manager from someone with stagnant results.

The first step to a more thoughtful email marketing strategy is determining what exactly you want to achieve — your number one goal. Based on that goal, decide what your primary and secondary metrics should be and track them meticulously.

8. Automation

Email marketing automation is another topic that’s at the top of any digital marketing discussion these days.

And for good reason. Automated emails are timely, personalized and hyper-relevant to the reader. As a result, they drive open and click rates and positively affect subscriber engagement. The bottom line of all that — more revenue for your business.

Most ESPs these days have automation features, but you can also get sophisticated software to create advanced workflows. No matter what tools you’re using, you should be able to set up simple email workflows that get triggered in a number of different ways:

• when a subscriber gets added to a list,
• clicks a link in an email,
• views a page on your blog,
• clicks on one of your ads,
• becomes a qualified lead,
• downloads one of your content upgrades (freebies),
• any combination of these and more.

9. Segmentation

Segmentation is a powerful mechanism that lets you subdivide your list based on a certain set of characteristics. You can then send highly targeted emails to subscriber groups within your list.

According to eMarketer,

• 39% of email marketers that practice list segmentation see better open rates;
• 28% see lower opt-out and unsubscribe rates;
• 24% see better email deliverability and greater revenue.

There are a number of ways you can segment your list simply based on campaign activity. Look at the following groups and see how you can serve them differently:

• subscribers who open most of your emails but don’t click
• subscribers who click but don’t convert (send them a new campaign with more reasons to purchase your product)
• subscribers who didn’t open the last email (if it was an important email, re-send it with a new subject line after a few days)
• subscribers who have consistently replied to your emails (they are your biggest fans, so treat them accordingly)

Skillful email marketers should also be able to segment based on past purchases, interest level, demographics, and much more.

I have included 7 smart ideas for list segmentation in the bonus at the end of this post.

10. Attribution

Attribution is one of the most advanced topics in digital marketing.

A good email marketing manager wants to know the exact payoff of each tactic they use. When you know how your marketing efforts covert, you are better informed to develop further strategy and allocate budget.

Although email marketing is highly trackable, email attribution is not a straight line. For many companies, a linear A-to-B-to-C email interaction is increasingly rare.

Today, consumer behavior looks more like this:

Someone hears an ad in a podcast and then googles the company. They are not ready to buy yet, but they sign up for the newsletter. At some point in the future they receive an email from the company and forward it to a colleague who is interested in the product. The colleague is then walking down the street and sees the product in a window. She remembers the email and goes into the shop to purchase.

It’s hard to attribute this conversion to any particular event, and the truth is that this will only get messier in the future. However, email marketers need to keep attribution in mind to continue making the right decisions when they analyze reports and develop strategies.

Want to become a better email marketer?

Woof, we’ve covered a lot here. Don’t get discouraged if you’re not an ace on all 10 of these topics — you can always improve.

To help you with that, I prepared a special bonus. It includes a few key resources for taking your email marketing skills to the next level:

1. A list of 15 lead magnet ideas to help you grow your email list faster;
2. 7 smart ways you can segment your list to keep it healthy and engaged;
3. A video tutorial on how to delete inactive subscribers from your email list (to keep your open rates high).

Nine Email Marketing Tips

Email marketing is one of your most powerful marketing tools, if done correctly.  It’s a very personal touch point to reach current and potential customers/clients and has been shown to have one of the best ROI among various marketing channels, even social media.

1) Think about prime send times

Depending upon your unique subscriber list, content, and company, you’ll have a prime send time that varies from everyone else’s. According to an email report by Experian Marketing Services, most emails performed best when sent between 8:00 p.m. and midnight. This block of emails boasted a 22% open rate and a higher-than-normal clickthrough and sales rate.

These results may be on account of inbox crowding: if you send your email While this is a great baseline to start from, it’s important to remember that each company’s prime send time will vary, so it’s important to look into your analytics to find your best sending time.

2) Give something away

People love free stuff and it’s just as true in email marketing as it is anywhere else. Recently, Bluewire Media ran a test on their 6,300 email subscribers. They were wondering which types of content earned the highest click and conversion rates. What they found was, overwhelmingly, that emails giving away templates and tools were opened at a much higher rate.

To get more engagement from your customers and produce higher levels of conversions for your company, offer to give something away every now and again. Whether it’s a template or an eBook, freebies keep your users interested and help you produce great email marketing results throughout the new year.

3) Optimize for mobile

We can’t say enough about this. Mobile is a huge deal right now and if your email marketing content isn’t optimized for mobile platforms, you’re missing out. Mobile traffic makes up 47% of the average email open rate. That said, it’s hugely important to make sure that everything you send out via email looks and performs great on a mobile phone.

This means converting your content to one column templates, increasing font size to make it more readable on a small screen, ensuring that buttons are at least 44 pixels x 44 pixels, and making CTA buttons obvious (above the fold) and easy to click (by placing them in the middle of the screen).

4) Make use of weekends

Earlier we talked a bit about your prime send times but what about your prime send days? According to the aforementioned Experian study, emails sent on Saturday and Sunday outperformed emails sent on weekdays. That said, consider whether sending your marketing emails on the weekends is something that will work for your clients and company.

5) Keep your whole list active

Say you have a list of 1,500 email subscribers. Great! The problem is that only a portion of that list is likely to be active. In fact, some studies have found that most lists have an inactivity rate of 63%. That said, in order to make the most of your email list, you’ll have to figure out a way to engage the entire list rather than just a portion. One of the most effective ways to do this is through what marketers call a “Re-engagement campaign.”

Re-engagement campaigns look a little different for every marketer, but essentially they involve testing different subject lines to find out which ones earn the highest open and click rates from the highest portion of your list. Keep in mind, though, that any re-engagement campaign you run should offer value, as well. Once that inactive 63% of your list clicks an email, they’re going to want to see something good.

6) Write to one person

Nobody wants to be just one person in a crowd of subscribers, so help your readers feel unique by writing every email as if you were writing to them and them alone. This approach makes your emails more personal and provides a higher level of value for every reader.

7) Be respectful

Remember how we said earlier that 144 billion emails are sent every day? Most consumers feel like all of them wind up in their personal inboxes. For this reason, it’s hugely important to be respectful of your readers’ time. To put this another way: don’t spam anyone. Spam is one of the quickest ways to get yourself booted from the inbox and companies that don’t send spam are generally more well-regarded by their customers.

That said, only write an email when you have something valuable to say and be careful to get to the point as quickly as possible. This will keep you in your customers’ good graces and allow you to maintain your inbox privileges.

8) Remind your readers that they’re not alone

Why do people sign up for email lists? To get great content, information, and offers. But what’s one of the easiest things marketers can do to ensure that their readers are anxiously awaiting the next email?

The answer is simple: remind readers that you’re on their side. This takes a variety of different forms, including polling readers for content ideas, offering surveys, letting readers know you sympathize with their struggles, and then offering them actionable solutions to deal with them. This tip should pervade your content and, when done correctly, can take your emails from “blah” to “wow!”

9) Reward readers

So you’ve got a faithful list of readers. How do you keep them that way? You give them a reward! By rewarding your readers for faithfully opening your emails, you inspire them to continue doing so in the future. Rewards can be anything from access to a super-secret sale to insider info, industry tips, or inspirational content that’s not shared anywhere else.

10) Make use of power words

When you get 20 emails an hour, nothing much stands out. Until, that is, you see a subject line that includes emotive, exciting power words. Incorporating sensory phrases into your email marketing can go a long way toward improving your open rate and ensuring that your emails are well-received by readers.

11) Keep headlines simple

If your readers have to puzzle over the meaning of your email headline, they’re going to hit “Delete” in no time. Trust us on this one – when it comes to email marketing, the simple path is almost always the right one. Emails shouldn’t be brain twisters – they should simply provide valuable information in a quickly digestible package. Enough said.

12) Automate it

One of the easiest ways to make email marketing easier for you is to automate it. Services like MailChimp and Constant Contact both offer automated email marketing with simple drag-and-drop template layouts. Utilizing an automated service like this can help ensure that your emails get out when they need to as well as giving you a place to monitor your analytics.

13) Make the most of your CTAs

If you’re going to include CTAs in your email, they need to be clear, concise, and compelling. You should be telling your readers exactly what you want them to do and reminding them what they’ll get if they do. CTAs aren’t platforms for guesswork and when you lay it out clearly for your subscribers, you’re likely to produce better results.

14) Keep body copy short

You’re writing an email, not a novel. Long, bulky, text-dense emails are going to lose your readers’ interest in a hurry, so you’re best off keeping your body copy short and concise. The next time you edit your email, challenge yourself to cut your body copy in half before you send the email out. This will distil your points to the most important ones and ensure that your readers are getting only the information they need.

15) Be natural

Now more than ever, consumers want to interact with authentic marketers and companies. To help this come through in your email marketing, avoid using strict formulas, be conversational in your tone, and ensure that you’re interacting with your readers like you would interact with real people. This will help make your emails something readers look forward to.

Conclusion

When done right, email marketing can be more effective than other types of marketing, including social media marketing. To get it right, though, you’ll need to keep these 15 tips in mind. Doing these things ensures that you’re sending valuable, exciting, actionable emails that your readers will love to engage with.