With around 90.3% of Americans using email and 100 million new email accounts created yearly, email marketing is a gold mine. From boosting brand awareness to creating a seamless customer journey to direct email sales with an incredible ROI of up to 4,200%, email marketing can make a difference for any business, whether online or offline.

Email marketing looks more than promising in 2022, but how do you harness its full potential? What knowledge and skills should you possess to join the cohort of marketing experts? Where do you start?

Read on as we address each of these questions.

What Does an Email Marketer Do?

Email marketers create and segment email lists, design and write email content, and analyze the results of their campaigns with the goal of driving sales through improving the relationship with current customers and converting as many new leads as possible. Depending on the specific focus, an email marketer might be called a newsletter marketer, a lifecycle marketer, or a retention marketer, but their role is more or less the same.

What’s the Path of an Email Marketer?

Every story is unique – most renowned email marketers would tell you they never thought of ending up where they are – but there’s still a traditional approach to becoming an email marketer:

1. Get a degree in a related field. A degree in marketing, advertising, business, or communications will prepare you best for a career as an email marketer. Supplementing a degree with a background in automation, software programs, and programming languages like HTML and CSS will strengthen your knowledge of email marketing.
2. Enroll in a certificate program. The internet is abundant with free and paid email marketing courses, so you can choose the ones that suit your focus or the most fundamental ones that may interest a potential future employer.
3. Get some writing experience. Compelling writing skills are paramount for email marketers so it would be beneficial to polish your writing and get published by authoritative publishers.
4. Never stop learning. Innovations like interactive emails show that email marketing embraces new tech and approaches. Expand your knowledge, attend conferences like those offered on MailCon.com, and experiment with your campaigns to stay on the crest of the wave.

Email marketing is a craft rather than a science, with room for those creative and willing to learn, analyze, and adapt. You don’t necessarily have to have a related degree or certificate to enter the field, but acquiring knowledge and preparation is a good place to start.

Types of Emails to Master

Almost half of customers want to receive emails from their favorite brands, but you cannot hit everyone with the same message. To be effective, you have to customize your voice, tone, and content for every group of recipients or every stage of the sales cycle.

To cover the whole range of leads and customers, you have to learn to write:

• Welcome emails – introduction of your products.
• Newsletter emails – significant updates about your company.
• Announcement emails – upcoming sales, important changes to the assortment, etc.
• Promotional emails – sales, discounts, etc., preferable with some added value.
• Milestone emails – celebrating achievement with your customers.
• Survey emails – asking for feedback in exchange for some value.

From awareness to discovery to consideration to conversion to retention, your chain of emails should address the current need and wants of a particular customer, regardless if they are at the top, middle, or bottom of the sales funnel.

Tools to Master

Automation is king in email marketing. Not only do automated emails drive 320% more revenue, but they also save tons of resources that would otherwise be spent on the salaries of those doing the job manually.

Here is just a sample of what email marketing software can do:

• Create sign-up forms, email templates, etc.
• Automatically send emails to different categories of recipients
• Conduct A/B tests for different email elements: subject lines, CTAs, send times, etc.
• Build workflows
• Conduct performance-based analytics
• Predict the success of future campaigns

Email marketing software is available online in free and paid versions. Software from a reliable provider – HubSpot, Sendinblue, MailChimp, etc. – will allow you to gather, segment, and interpret customer data into a series of campaigns aimed at different segments of leads and customers.

Three Pillars of Successful Email Marketing

Email marketing isn’t simple by any means, but it can be broken down into three components: segmentation, customization, and automation — all with the intent to deliver relevant emails to every recipient.

• Segmentation. Collecting and interpreting behavioral and demographic data into tailor-made messages is crucial for success in today’s ultra-competitive digital marketplace. Segmented campaigns reap 760% more revenue.
• Customization. A hard sell within a generic email rarely works. On the contrary, customization allows hitting the ‘vulnerabilities’ of every recipient to entice them to take actionable steps.
• Automation. Dealing with an increasing volume of customers is feasible if you can instantly send any number of emails to target recipients at a chosen time. Email automation software facilitates this and much more.

Final Thoughts

Without a doubt, email marketing is as powerful as ever and can take your business to the next level. It’s affordable, can boast an incredibly high ROI, and improves key marketing metrics across the board.

Learn email marketing now to elevate your business and build a successful career.