Email Marketer: Inside the Minds of Successful Campaign Creators
An email marketer is a person who creates an email marketing strategy, executes it, studies performance for refinement, and optimizes ROI (return on investment).
But there’s MUCH more depth to an email marketer than a simple definition.
An email marketer is a relationship architect, responsible for creating trust and engagement with each email they send. They also need to be good at storytelling — how else will they grab the attention of their audience? And they also need to be proficient at understanding data, to decipher the needs and wants of subscribers.
Does that sound like a fun job? For some, it most definitely is!
Let’s further explore what kind of people hide behind the world of email marketing.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful digital marketing strategy that involves sending targeted messages to a group of subscribers through the email channel. It’s a great medium to achieve results without breaking the bank; another plus is that you can connect directly with your customers.
Email marketing is permission-based; this means subscribers willingly opt in to receive emails from a brand, indicating an interest in its products or services. This gives the recipient complete control; they can adjust the type and frequency of communication they receive or unsubscribe at any time.
Email marketing also offers marketers a higher degree of measurability and accountability than other marketing channels. Senders can track various engagement metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their email campaigns.
These metrics offer you excellent insight into the mindset of your customer:
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Open rate | Percentage of recipients who open the email. |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | Number of unique clicks divided by the total number of sent emails. |
| Conversion rate | Percentage of recipients who complete a desired action (aka a conversion). |
| Unsubscribes | Percentage of recipients who opted out of future emails. |
This data-driven approach allows continuous optimization, meaning you can fine-tune it to achieve higher conversion rates.
Email marketing isn’t just sending email blasts, though — it is a versatile tool that can support various marketing objectives, including lead generation, customer acquisition, retention, and re-engagement.
Whether it’s welcoming new subscribers, nurturing leads through a sales funnel, or reactivating dormant customers, email campaigns can be highly effective during different stages of the customer journey through your marketing/sales funnel.
What Does an Email Marketer Do?
An email marketer, or email marketing specialist, is a professional responsible for planning, executing, and analyzing email marketing campaigns for companies, their clients, or even themselves.
Typical duties of an email marketing strategist include:
- Formulate effective email marketing strategies aligned with overall marketing objectives.
- Design and create email campaigns including content, visuals, and layouts.
- Grow and manage email subscriber lists through various methods such as opt-in forms, lead magnets, and list segmentation.
- Segment email lists based on various criteria such as demographics, purchase history, and engagement levels.
- In the absence of a copywriter, a marketer writes persuasive email copy that can resonate with the target audience.
- Create visually appealing and responsive email templates that are optimized for different devices and email clients.
- Conduct split tests on subject lines, email content, visuals, and other elements to optimize campaign metrics.
- Monitor key email metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates to identify areas for improvement.
- Implement best practices to improve email deliverability.
- A marketer may need to integrate campaign data with customer relationship management (CRM) systems or marketing automation platforms to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and track data better.
- Staying abreast of emerging trends and industry developments is a critical part of being an email marketing specialist.
- Ensure compliance with relevant regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act or GDPR to maintain legal compliance.
- Work closely with other teams such as content marketing, design, sales, and customer support.
An email marketer also has to generate reports on email marketing performance and present findings to stakeholders. Brainstorming and suggesting recommendations for optimization and future strategies is also part of the job profile.
How Much Money Can an Email Marketer Make in 2024?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for this, as there are factors affecting an email marketing specialist’s salary in 2024.
The main factors are:
- Experience,
- Location,
- Industry,
- Company size,
- Skills/Certification.
For a rough estimate, we referred to sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, and Payscale.
According to Glassdoor, full-time email marketing specialists in the US can earn between $50K and $81K per Year.
This changes according to years of experience:
| Years of experience | Salary | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Entry-level (0-2 years) | ~$50,000 per year | Glassdoor |
| Mid-level (3-5 years) | ~$61,000per year | Coursera |
| Senior level (5+ years) | ~75,0000 per year | Coursera |
There are also freelance email marketing specialists who work remotely from all over the world; they typically work with clients on a contractual basis. Compared to hiring full-time employees, freelancers offer flexibility and potentially lower overall costs (no benefits, payroll taxes).
Freelancer charges vary according to these factors:
- Location,
- Years of experience,
- Platform,
- Project objectives.
Freelance email marketing specialists work through freelance platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer. They also list their services on job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, and SimplyHired.
Freelancer rates vary wildly, so it would be tough to offer a range. Typically, you can expect a marketer with 0-2 years of experience to charge around $25 to $50 per hour. Comparatively, seasoned professionals with over 5 years of experience could command $75 to $125 or even more.
It’s more common that these professionals charge by the project and not hourly rates.
How to Become an Email Marketer
Whether you’re drawn to the power of storytelling or the analytical side of campaign optimization, the world of email marketing offers an exciting and engaging career path.
There are different ways to kickstart your email marketing journey:
- Get a relevant degree: While a specific degree isn’t always mandatory to become an email marketing specialist, certain educational paths can give you a strong foundation and make you a more competitive candidate. This includes degrees in marketing, communications, advertising, business, or even English, as strong writing skills are always welcome.
- Without a degree: Many individuals successfully enter the field without a traditional degree. One way to do this is by focusing on acquiring relevant skills through online courses, boot camps, or certifications. You could also start as a newbie and demonstrate strong copywriting, design, and analytical skills. A third method is by building a profile through freelance work, volunteering, or personal projects.
- Internship: Internships allow you to apply your knowledge and skills in real life. You’ll work on actual email marketing campaigns, gaining valuable hands-on experience.
- Pivot from writing or design: Effective email marketing relies heavily on compelling copywriting; your skills in crafting engaging content can translate to creating impactful email campaigns. Similarly, your understanding of visual design principles would be considered a strength in email marketing.
- Learn to code: If you learn languages such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, and practice enough, you can build a rich portfolio of email templates to demonstrate your ability to create attractive emails.
Ultimately, it comes down to passion. If email marketing resonates with you, you can work towards becoming a champion email marketing specialist!
Challenges Faced By Email Marketers
If you aim to take up this career, you should be familiar with common obstacles email marketers face regularly.
For email marketers, staying motivated, delivering successful campaigns, and adapting to changing trends is crucial for long-term success. There are challenges you have to face in this job profile, but developing a strong foundation can help you surpass most of them.
The top issues email marketing professionals must tackle are:
| Challenge | What it means |
|---|---|
| Deliverability issues | Emails filtered as spam or not reaching recipients’ inboxes. |
| Low email open rates | Difficulty in persuading recipients to open emails, impacting overall reach. |
| Decreasing engagement rates | Decline in the level of interaction and response from email recipients. |
| Integration with other marketing tools | Coordinating email efforts with other digital marketing strategies seamlessly. |
| Data privacy and compliance | Adhering to regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act. |
| Maintaining subscriber lists | Ensuring list hygiene, growth, and managing unsubscribes and bounces. |
| Content personalization | Crafting personalized content that resonates with recipients. |
| Increased competition | Standing out in a crowded inbox and competing with other marketing channels. |
| Design issues | Ensuring emails are visually appealing and display correctly across devices. |
| Email marketing trends | Keeping updated on emerging trends and changes in the field. |
Let’s learn more about the top 5 issues you will face as an email marketing professional.
Deliverability
Email deliverability will be a significant challenge as a email marketing specialist, hindering your ability to reach intended inboxes and maximize campaign impact. This is due to spam filters; mailbox providers use sophisticated filters to protect users from unwanted emails. These filters can sometimes mistakenly flag legitimate emails as spam, resulting in low deliverability rates.
Another challenge is blacklists. If your sender reputation is poor due to high bounce rates, spam complaints, or other issues, your IP address or domain name might be blacklisted.
Building a Subscriber Base
Building or growing an email list can be a herculean task — after all, you have to convince individuals to share their email addresses, which requires clear value propositions and building trust.
It’s critical to attract the right leads, too, as sending irrelevant content to uninterested individuals will lead to low engagement and unsubscribes.
Maintenance is as important as growing a subscriber base, as email lists naturally decay due to address changes, unsubscribes, and inactive users.
Engagement Rates
Low open rates is a challenge you will face all the time in the email marketing industry. As recipients receive numerous emails daily, they may ignore your messages, leading to poor open rates. This can further impact deliverability as email providers prioritize engagement metrics and deliver emails with higher open rates to the inbox.
A similar issue is that, over time, a small group of subscribers become inactive and no longer engage with your emails. Sending emails to inactive subscribers can lead to lower engagement rates.
Personalization
Personalization has become a cornerstone of successful email marketing. But it comes with its own set of issues.
With stricter data privacy regulations, you will need explicit consent to acquire and use subscriber data for email personalization. Tackling these regulations can be a task; it also doesn’t help that consumers are increasingly concerned about data privacy and may be hesitant to share the personal information you require for deep personalization.
That said, we recommend you strike a balance between personalization and respecting user privacy.
Up-to-date user data is yet another barrier you will face as an email marketing specialist, as inconsistent data can lead to ineffective personalized messages, potentially damaging user trust. Even with the advanced technology available in digital marketing today, it is still difficult to scrape and compile data from CRM systems, website analytics, and email marketing platforms.
Staying Up to Date with Email Marketing Trends
As an email marketing specialist, you need to keep an eye out for the latest email marketing trends — new technologies, functionalities, and marketing automation tools emerge rapidly, which requires ongoing learning to stay competitive. It can be difficult to filter truly valuable content, with a constant influx of articles, blogs, and webinars covering trends.
With the multiple responsibilities that come with this role, finding time to research trends, learn new skills, and implement them can be challenging.
How to Master Email Marketing
Mastering email marketing is an ongoing journey fueled by continuous learning, skillful execution, and a passion for connecting with your audience.
Here are our best suggestions to be the best email marketer you can be:
- Deepen your knowledge: Take online courses or pursue certifications specific to email marketing. Platforms like HubSpot Academy, Udemy, and eMarketing Institute offer comprehensive resources.
- Master the fundamentals: Hone your ability to write clear, concise, and engaging email copy. On the design front, learn basic principles to create visually appealing and user-friendly emails.
- Develop a customer-centric mindset: Craft email campaigns that offer value and address their pain points.
- Think creatively: Develop engaging subject lines, captivating visuals, and compelling content to capture your audience’s attention and drive action.
- Practice constantly: Experiment with different email marketing tactics and analyze the results. This allows you to refine your approach and continuously improve.
- Network with other marketers: Connect with individuals in the field to learn from their experiences and gain insights.
- Seek feedback: Share your work with colleagues, mentors, or online communities for constructive feedback. This helps you identify areas for improvement and learn from others’ perspectives.
As long as you stay curious and embrace continuous learning, your email marketing career will be a fulfilling one!
The Inbox Formula: An Email Marketer’s Playbook
Do you know the difference between a good email marketer and a great one? Experience.
This experience can take years of experiments, painful failures, and hundreds of hours before you start to see your emails land in the inbox consistently.
Our founder, Travis Ketchum, feels that email marketers can skip the hard lessons and learn all about email best practices which ensure better inbox placement. This is why he wrote the Inbox Formula and shares it FOR FREE with any email marketing specialist looking to level up their email marketing game.
The Inbox Formula provides a comprehensive overview of email marketing fundamentals, covering areas like IP and domain management, list strategies, and industry insights. The book shares practical tips gleaned from real-world experiences and offers actionable steps that will change the way you look at your campaigns and ensure you approach email marketing strategically.
If this sounds amazing, unlock the secrets to high inboxing rates by downloading The Inbox Formula today!
What Does the Future Look Like for Email Marketers?
Armchair experts on social media often claim that email marketing is dead.
This couldn’t be further from the truth; the future of email marketing is brimming with potential and exciting possibilities for email marketing specialists.
Here’s what the future of email marketing will be like:
- With advancements in AI and machine learning, email marketers will be able to access deeper audience insights, leading to hyper-personalized email experiences tailored to individual preferences and behaviors.
- The use of interactive content is spiking. Expect an increase in elements like polls, quizzes, and dynamic content within emails, leading to higher engagement.
- In the future, we will also see better interoperability between different marketing channels. Email will be integrated with social media and messaging platforms, creating a seamless and consistent customer experience.
- The tools that help email marketers with tasks like list segmentation, content creation, and campaign scheduling are also rapidly evolving. This frees up time for strategic initiatives.
- As analytics and reporting get better, we will see more real-time data on dashboards. This means superior insights and more precise optimization of email campaigns.
- With significant changes to privacy and security measures by mailbox providers, we will see fewer cases of spam in the future. Email marketers will be able to achieve better results simply by following regulations and implementing best practices.
- There is a lot more attention to accessibility features today, as compared to a decade ago. This direction ensures emails are accessible to individuals with disabilities, which means marketers can cater to a broader audience.
By embracing future trends and staying adaptable, email marketers can continue to play a vital role in effective digital marketing strategies.
Campaign Refinery Makes Life Easier for Email Marketers
Campaign Refinery is a boutique email services platform that believes email deliverability comes before everything else.
The platform has all the tools and services a seasoned email veteran would love and an amateur email marketer would find intuitive.
- Powerful automation tools? Check.
- Vetting system for new customers to prevent onboarding spammers? Check.
- Mandatory security protocol implementation for all clients? Check.
- Automated list-cleaner that protects your sender reputation? Check.
- Constant monitoring to ensure all members follow policies? Check.
- Campaign Library filled with a wide range of templates? Check.
- Features developed based on what customers vote for? Check.
- Simple yet powerful analytics dashboard? Check!
Campaign Refinery is where email marketers discover what peak email performance looks like. If you want elite results, apply to be a Campaign Refinery customer today.
