Did email choose you? Or did you choose email?
Nearly 8 of every 10 email marketers who responded to a 2020 Only Influencers career survey said email chose them. Nearly 45% of email pros were already in marketing and either branched out into email or had email tacked on to their job responsibilities somewhere along the line.
With email, it’s relatively easy to get a foothold in the industry using the skills you learned elsewhere, especially if you worked in direct marketing, customer relationship marketing, or retail sales.
If you want to improve your skills to become a better marketer, achieve an ambitious set of goals for the year, or get promoted, your journey to skill improvement will largely be self-guided, through vendor training and certified programs like Salesforce Trailhead and Marketo (part of Adobe Experience Cloud) or online learning sites such as Udemy or Coursera.
Many email marketers find it’s hard to move up from a specialist position to a team lead or manager, or from a manager to a director, or beyond:
- The daily grind of planning and executing campaigns, reporting, and researching doesn’t give them any time to learn new skills, such as data management or analysis, or even to explore advanced features of their email or e-commerce platforms.
- The company doesn’t encourage or support skill-building, either through on-site training, mentorship, or resource libraries. Or they don’t pay for training or give employees time off.
- Marketers don’t know where to look for training or educational support or what they need to learn to qualify for promotions. For example, many email jobs now require extensive data skills. Short of going back to college for data science, where can you pick up that skill and experience?
If you’re ready to break free of your cubicle and move up to an office with a view, or at least a door you can close, these five skills will help pave your way to promotion.
1. Strategic planning
At many companies, you can sum up the email strategy in three words: “Send another email.” We could write an entire blog post on why this is so wrong-headed. Suffice to say your email program needs a well-planned strategy to guide all of your decision-making, from how to make more money from email to avoid wasting time and budget on tactics and plans that don’t work.
Further, your email strategy must align with your brand’s objectives and strategy. You’ll be seen as a valuable resource if you can show how your email program helps your company achieve its goals over and above just hitting your annual revenue goal for email!
How to start? The easiest way to start is by taking a few extra minutes before you start with campaign planning to outline the goals and align campaign objectives with the brand’s objectives. Small details matter and having the objectives in front of you will help guide campaign planning and help with presenting the results at the end.
Suppose your company’s growth strategy focuses on heavy customer acquisition. As an email marketer, you know that customers from one acquisition channel might be far more valuable than those from another. Showing how your email strategy works to attract the most valuable new customers can help you stand out as a strong team player.
2. In-depth competitive analysis
As a marketer, you’re expected to be your company’s expert on the competition. But what would your email director or CMO say if you could show them you know exactly what, when, and how your biggest competitors are emailing their customers – which, very likely, could include your own customers, too?
Whether you have your eye on a promotion, a career switch, a pay raise or a bigger email budget, you’ll come across as a stronger team member if you can report on your competitors and use what you learned in your research and analysis to create more effective email campaigns.
Compiling this research into general reports or PowerPoints might be a regular weekly part of your job. You also can offer that research to support your recommendations for improving your strategy against your biggest competitor.
But what if your team leader calls on you in a meeting, pings you on Slack or drops by your desk and asks, “What’s Brand X doing with email now and what are you doing to get ahead of them?”
Imagine how impressed they’ll be if you can pull up a month’s worth of your competitor’s email practices and use that data to quickly identify trends in campaign sending patterns and promotional rates.
This image reveals fluctuations in sending patterns and promotion by day and by week, showing which days the brand sent an email, how many unique campaigns it sent per day, how many of those emails included a promotion like a reduced price, and how it compares year over year.
As a bonus, you can view these insights and others on each brand’s Overview page to support your strategic and tactical recommendations to kick your email program into high gear.
3. Measuring progress against goals with KPIs and attribution
People say you can make money from email even if you do it badly, but you make more when you do it well. Key performance indicators will reveal whether your campaign hit its goal and whether your program is improving or falling behind. Use this data to create or adjust your strategy to correct problems and build on strengths.
Using KPIs: The KPIs you choose to measure success and reveal trends must map to your email objectives and strategies. An engagement metric like the open or click rate can also measure awareness but they’re an unreliable substitute for measuring revenue goals.
These are the most valuable KPIs for an e-commerce email marketing program:
Revenue per email: This is the gold standard for measuring success. It measures how well your campaign makes money. To calculate, divide total campaign revenue by number of emails delivered. Track it campaign by campaign or at meaningful intervals, like weekly, monthly, quarterly, or year over year, to learn which kinds of emails generate the highest RPE and whether revenue is going up or down.
Revenue per subscriber: This figure reveals the average value of each subscriber and measures your email program’s general profitability. Calculate it by dividing the total annual revenue from each by the average number of subscribers. Use it to estimate acquisition costs and set marketing budgets.
Average order value: This revenue metric is another canary-in-the-coal-mine measurement that you can use to compare the effectiveness of different kinds of campaigns and track whether the number is going up. Calculate it by dividing total sales revenue from email by the number of sales the campaign generates.
Click rate: This behavior metric measures the percentage of customers who click on links in your email. You can measure it as unique clicks (one click per subscriber) or total clicks (all the clicks on all links). It measures subscriber engagement accurately, but be careful about using it as a success metric if the campaign goal is to make money. High clicks don’t always translate into high revenue.
Conversion rate: A conversion is an action your email campaign promotes. It could be a purchase but it could also measure downloads, account renewals, event registrations – whatever tracks with your campaign goal.
Open rate: We’re including the open rate only because if we don’t, people might wonder why this popular metric isn’t listed. The open rate measures the percentage of email recipients who opened the email. However, the open has always been unreliable because it’s easily overcounted or undercounted. It’s valuable as a diagnostic metric – whether it’s rising or falling over time.
Diagnostic metrics: These include unsubscribe and bounce rate along with the open rate. None of these directly measure campaign success. When tracked over time, they can tell you if subscribers are disengaging or if you have deliverability problems.
Using attribution models: Your attribution model will help you see how your email program contributes to the company’s bottom line compared with other digital channels like search, social media, or apps as well as offline channels such as print or broadcast advertising.
“Last click” is the most popular attribution model in part because Google Analytics uses it. But it has a big flaw: It can be misleading if you use more than one marketing channel. Last-click often fails to count email’s contribution to a conversion, and that can end up funneling the budget away to other channels that get a disproportionately larger share of the credit.
Knowing which attribution model to use or how to work around last-click if that’s all you have to work with is a valuable job skill and makes you a greater expert on email performance.
4. Using work time efficiently
This is a major pain point for email marketers at all levels. When your to-do list is endless, you have less time to research and optimize your email program or learn new skills so you can become a better email marketer.
Streamlining your daily workload can give you more time to think about your email plan: how to improve it, analyze your competition, learn how to use your email platform more effectively, and look far ahead to prepare for change.
These tips can help you find a few extra minutes in every work day:
- Reuse old campaigns, including everything from campaign copy, images, and calls to action
- Use dynamic content and real-time data to swap in personalized content instead of creating multiple versions of a single campaign.
- Get inspiration fast from sources like MailCharts’ curated lists of email examples, organized by holiday, lifecycle, journeys, and creative content, and share with your team.
Streamline the email research, production and approval timelines to launch campaigns faster. MailCharts’ new team functions take the back-and-forth hassle out of group collaboration, making it easier to research, discover and plan campaigns.
5. Become the recognized email expert
If you want to advance your email career, you have to show that you are the smartest person in the room. Here are three quick ways to do it:
- Suggest new ways to use email to save money and improve efficiency throughout the company.
- Back up your recommendations and insights with data. (Note: You can share MailCharts’ data, reports, and email examples quickly with your team; just click the blue “Share” button you’ll find in the top right corner on most pages.)
- Document everything. If you lead a project to add or revamp a new email program, like an abandoned-cart journey, write down every step. List testing procedures and results. Add metric tracking reports and campaign results and your insights into the problems and achievements they measure.
Got an opportunity? Go for it!
We hope this piece helps you prepare for your next career move. If you aren’t a MailCharts user yet, create a free account today and discover how you can become a better email marketer in just a few minutes a day.
