How to become an email marketer: 10 skills and 4 steps

How to become an email marketer: 10 skills and 4 steps

Here’s a stat that will blow your mind: 347 billion emails are sent each day. And companies need savvy marketers to send them, which means email marketing is still highly in demand — and will be for many years to come. In fact, it’s still considered to be one of the most effective marketing channels.

So if you’re thinking about a career in email marketing, let us be the first to say: Great idea.

Here’s what you need to know to make it happen. 

What does an email marketer do?

Email marketers create and execute digital communications for a product, brand, or service. In addition to email marketing campaigns, they can be responsible for creating a variety of emails sent throughout the customer journey. This may include educational nurture emails to help prospects turn into paying customers, promotional emails to reengage inactive customers, or customer experience emails like welcome sequences, and much more.

The specific responsibilities of an individual email marketer may vary by their role on the team. More junior email marketers might be responsible for email sends and list management, whereas more senior marketers tend to be responsible for email marketing strategy. 

Email often works closely with other digital marketing teams, including content marketing, organic search, affiliate marketing, social media, and paid advertising. This ensures a cohesive marketing strategy across all digital channels, which can increase the efficacy and cost-efficiency of your marketing and maintain a consistent brand experience. 

The typical career path of an email marketer

If you want to pursue a career in email and you’re wondering about the potential for career advancement, here’s what a typical career path might look like.

1. Intern: Many professionals start with an internship. Your internship role may be directly related to email or more generalized across various marketing channels, supporting the wider department. If you’re in school or looking for an entry-level marketing job, a paid internship is a great way to start your career. (P.S. If you have some previous experience, you may be able to transition into email marketing at a different level.)

2. Specialist: Individual contributor roles on an email team may have titles like Email Marketing Specialist or Email Marketing Coordinator. These roles are typically responsible for creating and managing email campaigns, writing and designing emails, managing contact lists, analyzing performance metrics, and basic A/B testing. 

3. Manager: Manager-level roles are typically responsible for more complex workflows like drip campaigns, conversion tactics for cart abandonment, driving customer engagement, and advanced A/B testing. Email managers may also have direct reports.

4. Director: A director takes on more responsibility for setting the broad marketing strategy, often working closely with other teams in marketing, customer service, and sales to ensure that marketing initiatives are supporting the organization’s key lead, revenue, and customer retention goals.

5. Executive leadership: If you keep climbing the corporate ladder, you just may find yourself in charge. A department head in marketing might have a title like Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Vice President of Marketing, or Vice President of Email. Executive marketing leaders spend much of their time setting the organization’s go-to-market strategy and aligning with stakeholders in other departments to advocate for marketing initiatives.

10 skills you need to be a successful email marketer

Learn them in the classroom. Learn them on your own. Learn them on the job. However you want to slice it, these are the skills you need to thrive in an email marketing career. 

1. Email content creation and copywriting

You can’t create a stellar email without some rock-solid email copy and content. Get to know each element of an email message—the subject line, call to action (CTA), images, headers, and body copy—and what makes each successful. Looking for a way to get better? Write, test, and iterate. Try different subject lines, nurture campaigns, and CTAs to learn what works and doesn’t. The more you test, the more you learn about both best practices and your audience.

2. Creative design skills

You must understand visual design principles like layout, typography, color schemes, and visual hierarchy to ensure your emails are attractive and functional. You’ll want to have strong knowledge of responsive design for mobile compatibility and you should be familiar with accessibility standards, ensuring your emails are readable for readers with disabilities (and ADA-compliant).

3. HTML/CSS for email design

HTML and CSS are the coding languages you’ll most likely need to know in your email career. Both can help you create and customize email templates that are visually appealing and function across different email clients. Knowing your way around the code, rather than just relying on AI to do the job for you, ensures you have clean, responsive code that’s compatible with different devices. 

4. Expertise with email marketing software

You need to know how to use email marketing tools like Twilio Sendgrid to create, manage, and optimize email campaigns. Practice building email templates, setting up automation workflows, segmenting audiences, and analyzing performance metrics within the software so you can get comfortable working with some of the most common features. You’ll also need to know your way around A/B testing, dynamic content, and integration with CRMs for more sophisticated campaigns. 

5. Email deliverability knowledge

Knowing how to maximize email deliverability is essential for ensuring your messages reach the recipient’s inbox instead of their spam folder. Email marketing specialists need to understand the factors that affect deliverability, like sender reputation, email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, SMARC), and maintaining a clean email list. If you want to launch your career in email marketing, study up on best practices for managing bounce rates, avoiding spammy email content, and complying with regulations (like GDPR and CAN-SPAM).

6. Audience segmentation and personalization

Audience segmentation is the practice of splitting an email list into different groups based on a set of criteria like demographics, behavior, or engagement and tailoring content to each group. Knowing how to effectively segment audiences is crucial for creating relevant and targeted campaigns and sending the right message at the right time.

7. Marketing automation

Using marketing automation will help you reach maximum efficiency as your email marketing program grows. Marketing automation helps you streamline — and, yes, automate  — repetitive tasks like adding new users to email workflows, segmenting audiences based on milestones, and comparing performance data. Implementing a few automations can save you several hours each week, freeing you up to focus on strategy work.

8. Data analysis and reporting

Data analysis and reporting is the ability to interpret marketing metrics, identify trends, and translate them into actionable insights to improve campaign performance. In your email marketing career, you’ll need to analyze metrics like open rates, clickthrough rates, conversion rates, and ROI to evaluate the success of campaigns. You’ll need to know how to use tools like Google Analytics, Excel, or platform-specific dashboards to track performance and spot opportunities for optimization. 

9. Marketing strategy

A digital marketing strategy outlines how a business or organization will use tools and tactics in digital channels to achieve its objectives, build brand awareness, and connect with its target audience — this is the roadmap that will largely determine how you’ll achieve the goals you set. Understanding marketing strategy is important for any marketer, but it’s especially important for email marketing specialists who aspire to grow into roles with more responsibility, where they’ll be more directly responsible for setting and executing strategy. 

10. Project management

Every aspect of email marketing comes with a lot of moving parts. Email marketing specialists need to stay on top of dozens of different deliverables and deadlines while communicating with various stakeholders. This means that project management is key for keeping initiatives on track, maintaining an organized email calendar, collaborating with team members, and communicating with different departments. 

4 steps to become an email marketer

You’re clear on the skills you need but how do you actually get an email marketing job? If you’re a student, new professional, or someone looking to make a career pivot, here’s how to break into email marketing. 

1. Complete an in-depth course or certification

Education lays the foundation for success in email marketing. While a degree in a marketing-related field at a college or university will certainly help you launch your career, you definitely don’t need a traditional degree to become an in-demand marketer. A credible email marketing certification can provide you with the knowledge you need to begin as an email marketing coordinator or specialist, and it will let you do so without racking up a bunch of debt. 

2. Create a resume and email marketing portfolio

Create a resume that highlights your wins and demonstrates your proficiency with the key skills we covered above. Make sure to call them out so the hiring manager can see you have what it takes to thrive in an email marketing role. And don’t forget your portfolio — most hiring managers will want to see samples of your previous work, so keep copies of everything you do (including performance metrics!) and make sure it can be easily shared with potential employers.

3. Pursue an email marketing role

Getting reps is the fastest and most reliable way to become an email marketing expert. You can find and submit for positions on job boards. It’s also a good idea to reach out to people in your network to see if they can connect you with a role — in the age of AI cover letters and resumes, many companies are drowning in applications. Personal, human relationships can help you cut through the bot noise and land the job. 

4. Keep honing your marketing skills

Digital marketing is a fast-paced industry that will continue to evolve as new tools, trends, and social channels come into favor. If you’re not growing your skillset, you’re falling behind. So find ways to continue to develop more advanced email marketing skills. If your ambitions are set on management or executive leadership, develop your marketing strategy, stakeholder alignment, and people management skills — these will be crucial for advancement.

6 tips for creating your first email marketing campaign

Creating a mock campaign to include in your email marketing portfolio? Working in your first email role and need help launching your first campaign? No sweat. These tips will help you create your email campaign from start to finish. 

1. List your goals

Before creating your campaign, you need to get clear on what you’re trying to accomplish. List your key objectives and make sure they’re achievable, measurable, and meaningful for the business. 

2. Select (and understand!) your target audience

Every successful email campaign is designed for a specific target audience. Generic messaging falls flat — when you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. So don’t make that mistake. Start with a well-researched audience profile or persona that represents your ideal customer so you can better tailor your email messages to the recipients. 

3. Choose an email marketing tool

When you use email marketing software designed to support you, it’s a lot easier to create a winning campaign. Look for an email tool that offers list segmentation, email automation, polished templates, and deliverability support. Twilio SendGrid offers all this and more so you can send high-performing campaigns at scale. 

4. Organize your email lists

Email segmentation is a must for delivering relevant and compelling emails. Use segmentation to match your audience profiles to corresponding email lists so recipients only receive the messages that matter to them. This can help you increase conversion, which will in turn boost your sender reputation score. 

5. Create the emails

Even the most effective email marketing strategy won’t deliver if the emails aren’t packed with quality. Spend time refining your template design, imagery, subject lines, body copy, and CTAs — a little extra time can be the difference between a campaign that converts and one that just sits there unopened and unread. If you want some inspiration for creating standout emails, you’ll find it in 21 Types of Emails Explained (With Examples). 

6. Track and assess performance

Once you’ve created the emails and started sending, it’s time to measure your success. Pay attention to key performance indicators (KPIs) like open rate and clickthrough rate in addition to your stated campaign goals. Try to discern next steps based on what the data tells you — for example, a high open rate with a low clickthrough rate indicates that your subject line was a success but your body copy or CTA weren’t compelling enough to keep recipients engaged. This tells you that you need to rework your body copy or CTA for better conversion.

Kickstart your career in email marketing with SendGrid

SendGrid can help you achieve outstanding results at every stage of your email marketing career. With pre-built, customizable templates, our campaign tools help you create polished, professional emails in minutes. For more experienced email marketers, our Email API allows you to deliver exceptional email marketing at scale. Whatever level you’re at, we’ll meet you there and take you even farther in your career. Try SendGrid for free today.