Essential Email Marketing Skills

As digital marketing and online shopping become more common, learning how to optimize email marketing campaigns is an important skill to maximize business success. In fact, 2024 retail e-commerce sales rose above $4.1 trillion globally, meaning drawing customers to your online business through email campaigns could have a big impact [1]. To decide how to approach this type of marketing, explore essential email marketing skills and ways you can start building this expertise. 

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a type of digital marketing that uses email campaigns to welcome customers, send information, celebrate milestones, and promote products. As an email marketer, you design and manage different types of email campaigns, ranging from product announcements and promotions to customer feedback and re-engagement. 

This job involves a mix of creative and technical skills, including finding ways to increase email sign-ups and employ marketing strategies to understand consumer preferences and engagement patterns. 

Technical skills for email marketing

As an email marketer, you use several technical skills to create engaging emails that drive users to take action. Learning how to create these emails and use best practices can help your campaigns stand out.

Email personalization

Tailoring email campaigns to individual preferences and behaviors can create a more relevant and valuable experience for your customer base. You can employ small changes to make this happen without having to rewrite each email to your customer. For example, you might:

• Address customers by their name in the subject line

• Include recommendations based on behavior patterns or previous purchases

• Offer location-based deals

• Make recommendations based on customer preferences

• Celebrate customer milestones with the brand

You can find this type of information through several avenues, including behavioral tracking. Behavioral tracking allows you to see how your subscribers interact with the website and what they are most interested in. Another avenue is directly asking customers about their preferences when they sign up for emails. Doing this gives customers an opportunity to indicate which segments of your business they want to learn more about.

Customer segmentation

Another skill that can help you as an email marketer is learning how to segment your customers. You can segment based on demographic characteristics, location, shopping time, purchasing behavior, or other defining characteristics. 

For example, you might segment based on gender or age. If you have products geared toward a specific gender or group of people, sending recommendations in alignment with potential needs can help you optimize your campaigns. You can do this for any characteristic that makes sense for your brand, even lifestyle factors. If you offer a line of baby products, you might target people of childbearing age or customers who have recently purchased pregnancy-related products. 

Automation

As an email marketer, learning how to automate aspects of your marketing campaigns allows you to send emails to large audiences. However, in order to personalize messages, it’s important to use automation rules to trigger certain messages or tailored information. You might have an automated welcome email and follow-up emails for new customers or personalized emails for current customers that provide product updates or exclusive deals. 

Writing skills

Because you’re communicating through emails, being able to write engaging content that resonates with your audience is an important skill. Typically, email marketing will have a conversational tone, and you’ll want to reflect the brand voice. For example, some brands might use humor, while others might take a more professional approach. 

When writing engaging content for your customers, you want to make sure that it’s mobile-friendly, has a clear goal, and adheres to the brand. You will typically want to keep it brief, but also include attention-grabbing information, a call to action (CTA), and perhaps even visual pieces to support the text.

Analytics and optimization

Running a successful email marketing strategy relies on knowing the performance of your current strategies and then making improvements. By being proficient in analytics, you can understand what is working in your campaign and what you might need to change. You can track things like the percentage of recipients who open your emails, how many users click the links in the email, how many people take action as a result of your email, and how many subscribers you gain or lose. This helps you understand the return on investment of your campaign and marketing efforts.

Workplace skills for email marketing

While technical skills are an important part of creating successful email marketing campaigns, interpersonal skills play an important role in ensuring your campaigns resonate with your audience and meet your business goals.

Attention to detail

Small mistakes in your emails, such as typos or broken links, can negatively impact your brand and take away from the user experience. By paying attention to the little things, you can create a tone of professionalism that leaves a positive impression on your audience. This includes spelling and grammar, as well as inclusive language.

Strategic thinking

Once you have access to the analytics from your campaign, knowing how to make strategic decisions is important to decide your next steps. Strategic thinking helps you refine your strategy based on campaign metrics and improve your results over time. It helps you design campaigns that align with the needs of your customers, gain insights into market trends, acquire new customers, and deliver more impactful messages. Overall, you use strategic thinking to understand the bigger picture of your marketing goals and how each email or campaign fits into this larger goal.

Communication and storytelling

As a marketer of any sort, you want to relate to your customers’ needs and tell a story about how your product specifically can help them meet those needs. Through these stories, you can evoke emotions in your audience that compel them to take action, such as buying a product or subscribing to your brand. Strong storytelling helps keep your readers engaged and humanizes your brand, which can create a sense of loyalty in your customers. 

How to become an email marketer

To become an email marketer, you’ll need to build relevant skills through a combination of education and experience. Ways you can begin this journey include:

• Earn a relevant degree: While a degree isn’t required to become an email marketer, earning a bachelor’s degree in communications, public relations, or marketing can help you build relevant skills and stand out to employers.

• Complete an internship: Completing an internship can help you gain real-world experience with writing, marketing, data analysis, and creating email campaigns. This also helps to build your network, which can help you find a full-time position.

• Enter an entry-level position: Beginning as an entry-level email marketing coordinator allows you to gain experience because you will most likely be working on email campaigns, assisting with scheduling, testing, and evaluating the performance of the campaign.

• Take online courses: Online courses, such as those offered on Coursera, can help you learn at your own pace and tailor your education to your interests within email marketing.

Learn more about email marketing on Coursera

Technical and human skills such as email personalization, customer segmentation, strategic thinking, and storytelling can help you become a successful email marketer and launch sustainable campaigns to meet your business goals. On Coursera, you can discover foundational skills in digital marketing, e-commerce, email marketing, and marketing analytics with the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate.