How to become an email marketer?

The first thing that many people associate with the phrase email marketing is spam. In fact, everything is much more complicated and you need to take into account the fact that email marketing is communication with certain people through their email with their prior consent, and spam without the latter.

The second misconception is that email marketing is just sending email. But in fact, these concepts need to be separated: mailing is only a small part of what email marketing implies, which is an integral full-fledged strategy.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing can safely be called one of the channels of working with clients, which brings the greatest return. The challenge he faces is to build long-term relationships with subscribers, which allows you to establish feedback with customers, as well as significantly increase sales through repeat purchases.

Distinctive features of email marketing

There are several important distinguishing features of email marketing:

1. Allows you to build an effective dialogue between the company and its consumers;
2. Opens up the opportunity to create a unique database of potential and actual customers;
3. Support for an advertising channel will cost a relatively small amount;
4. With it, you can get targeted actions from subscribers: sale, upsell, call, subscribe, go to the site and others.

In addition to all of the above, it is impossible not to note another feature of email marketing – automation.

What explains the high success rate of email marketing?

Mailing in email marketing is carried out exclusively to those users who themselves provided their email address. Each of them is already ready to become your consumer, make a purchase from you, or they are simply interested in the topic that is discussed in the letters.

Pros and cons of email marketing

Requirements for an Email Marketing Specialist

What do you need to know and what to be able to do in order to try your hand as a representative of this profession? Let’s start with skills.

One of the quite logical requirements in this case would be a good command of the language and at least a superficial knowledge of html. It would seem, why? If writing texts is the work of a copywriter, then html is the work of a layout designer. To achieve great success in your business, most likely you will have to control and make changes to the work of both a copywriter and a layout designer, so you must certainly have knowledge in these areas.

In addition, you will need:

1. Ability to get along with people, including the sales department. In fact, the marketer and the sales department have one goal – to increase sales. The final result directly depends on how well the connections are established in this case.
2. Flexibility. This profession will require from you not only the ability to build a strategy and steadily follow it, but also the ability to abandon it if the result of the work does not live up to expectations.
3. Special approach to work. If you are used to doing everything, as they say, “at the last minute”, then this specialty is unlikely to suit you. In marketing, it is important to develop strategies and tactics that are much more likely to bring good results than any spontaneous decisions.
4. Knowledge of mathematics and analytics. There is an opinion among the people that a margetologist is an excellent option for “humanitarians”. But in fact, everything is not so – work in the field of email marketing initially implies good abilities to process a huge amount of data, statistics, etc., without which it is simply impossible to build a strategy.
5. Portfolio – this is if you have already tried yourself as such a specialist. What does it usually include? First of all, it is worth demonstrating the results – sales and leads (number of potential customers, requests). Mailing statistics are also of great importance. Just a good mailing, the results of which are doubtful, is unlikely to interest the employer.

There are 4 key email marketing performance metrics

1. Open Rate – % of emails that were opened by consumers;
2. Click Rate – % of emails for which the target action was performed;
3. Click Rate / Open Rate – % of the effectiveness of the advertising message;
4. Bounce Rate – % of emails that are not delivered due to spam filters or other technical reasons.

Each topic has a certain average mailing success rate. Before showing your portfolio to an employer, compare your performance against market data.

How and where can I get email marketing training?

Whatever you say, there are enough options in this case. Each of them has its own advantages.

1. At thematic conferences. It is here that you have a great opportunity to learn about the latest trends in this area, which will certainly come in handy in future work.
2. Seminars from agencies or services for distribution. Similar events are regularly held by every major agency. Its true goal is to attract new customers, therefore, the information that you will be offered there, for the most part, comes down to advertising. But very often there you can learn something useful for self-development of a specialist in this field.
3. Email marketing as part of marketing education. The course certainly includes a section on email marketing.
4. Special seminars and workshops organized by companies specializing in this.
5. Courses. For example, a separate email marketing course is offered by Webpromoexperts.

What can you learn from special email marketing seminars?

Undoubtedly, each training program is unique – differences can be both in terminology and in the amount of information offered. But, by and large, at the initial stage, the basics are offered, then the databases and fundamental methods of this marketing industry, as well as finding potential customers and retaining existing ones.

At the same time, some aspects that are covered in the Email Marketing course are of interest only to a small audience of listeners, and some are relevant to a wide range of listeners, for example, how to write a letter that will promote sales.

What to read?

Dan Kennedy. Sales letter. How to write a sales letter to attract the maximum number of customers.