How To Become An Email Marketer In 2023

It’s hard to ignore the impact of email marketing.

Most of us receive daily emails from brands and businesses promoting different offers.

If they do their job well enough, they will ultimately lead you to find out more about a product or service.

Behind every successful marketing email is a creative email marketing specialist.

An email marketer usually works as part of a wider marketing team, working towards shared objectives to promote a brand, product, or service.

It’s a challenging and creative role, and if you have the right skill set, it could be a great match for you.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the world of email marketing and outline how to become an email marketer.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing tool that involves sending promotional emails to a targeted audience.

It’s an effective way of reaching customers directly to promote a brand’s products or services.

Email marketing provides a simple, low-cost method of engaging with customers, building customer loyalty, and boosting sales.

Direct emails can be used to reach a large audience and for a variety of purposes, including promoting new products, announcing special offers, or sharing valuable information.

How does email marketing differ from other channels?

Email marketing is just one of several forms of digital marketing that can be used to reach audiences.

Other methods include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and social media.

Each of these platforms has its own strengths and weaknesses:

Email marketing

Used to share key announcements with a targeted audience via email.

Pros:

• Allow detailed targeting: Emails can be tailored to different audience segments to help drive higher engagement rates.
• Affordable: Email marketing can be very cost-effective, potentially delivering a high ROI for brands.
• Easy to measure success: The analytics available for email marketing make it easy for marketers to assess their performance.

Cons:

• Need to be balanced: Too many emails can be seen as spam, leading to customers unsubscribing.
• Customers need to opt-in to subscribe: Building up a distribution list can be difficult, especially for new businesses.
• Limited design possibilities: Emails need to be simple to ensure they can be opened by users and to avoid spam filters.

SEO

A strategy to tailor a website’s content to improve its rankings in search engine results such as Google and Bing.

Pros:

• Boost website traffic: SEO can help increase visibility for improved website traffic.
• Helps establish credibility: Higher search engine rankings help build trust.
• Cost-effective: SEO can be an affordable way to drive traffic, ensuring a better ROI.

Cons:

• SEO is a long process: It can take time for the results of SEO to pay off, so can be ineffective as a short-term strategy.
• Requires specific expertise: SEO is complex and requires someone with the skills and experience to see results.
• SEO is constantly evolving: Changing search engine algorithms means SEO needs to be an ongoing strategy to remain effective.

PPC

PPC is a type of digital advertising where the advertiser is charged a fee every time someone clicks on their ad.

Pros:

• Allows detailed targeting: PPC ads allow detailed targeting based on different demographics.
• Controlled budgets: Advertisers control the budget, making PPC ads easy to fit in with existing marketing budgets.
• Measurable: PPC ads produce measurable data to help assess performance and measure ROI.

Cons:

• Competitive: The space for PPC ads is competitive, meaning it can be difficult for your target audience to see your ads.
• High-cost: Bidding on certain keywords can come at a high cost, especially if you have a lot of competitors.
• Easy to ignore by customers: Customers may feel fatigued by the volume of ads that they see, potentially reducing their impact.

Social media

Brands and businesses use social media to connect with their audiences and can use both organic and paid-for strategies to achieve objectives.

Pros:

• Access to a wide audience: With billions of social media users worldwide, there’s a potential to reach a wide audience.
• Build meaningful connections: Effective social media marketing can build brand loyalty and ensure meaningful engagement with customers.
• Allow detailed targeting: Social media advertising allows detailed targeting based on different demographics.

Cons:

• Algorithm challenges: Social media algorithms are constantly changing, making it difficult to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends.
• Competitive: It’s not always easy to stand out on social media, with posts disappearing from users’ feeds quickly.
• Require consistency: Social media marketing should be an ongoing strategy to ensure continued success and ROI.

Used alone or alongside other digital marketing practices, email marketing has the potential to generate a lot of success for businesses.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

Email marketing can form a solid part of any brand’s marketing strategy.

With the potential to deliver excellent ROI for little investment, brands with an effective approach to email marketing should expect to see great results.

Some of the main benefits of email marketing include:

• Increase sales by promoting products and surveys to an interested audience.
• Communicate with customers who have chosen to opt-in to hear from you.
• Personalize your communications to help increase your engagement.
• Generate traffic to your website.
• Cost-effective marketing.
• Capitalize on different events and seasons, including Christmas, Black Friday, Mother’s/Father’s Day, etc.

With the number of global email users expected to reach 4.6 billion in 2025, email marketing demonstrates huge potential for brands. 44% of users check their email for a deal from a company they know, compared with just 4% of Facebook users.

With open rates of almost 23% for marketing emails, this is a significantly higher engagement rate than the 1-6% average of social media engagement rates for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

What’s great about email marketing is that it can be used by businesses of all sizes.

The right communications at the right time have the potential to reach many subscribers to generate high ROI for your business.

How to become an email marketer

One of the most effective routes to becoming an email marketing specialist is to undertake a marketing or communications bachelor’s degree.

While this isn’t an essential qualification, having a marketing or related degree can help you learn some of the skills and methodology behind successful email marketing.

The key skills you will need to become an email marketing specialist include:

• Copywriting
• Communication skills
• Data analysis
• Digital media
• Graphic and/or content design
• Marketing strategy

Some businesses may want to employ someone solely to work as an email marketer, but many businesses will want multi-skilled digital marketers who can work on a range of campaign types, bringing their expertise and experience to deliver results.

You can take advantage of the many digital marketing courses that will help you learn essential digital marketing skills.

These will help introduce you to many email marketing practices and tools to help you develop the knowledge that will make you a desirable candidate for email marketing roles.

Useful tips for becoming an email marketing specialist

Some of our best tips for becoming an email marketing specialist are:

Research what the role entails

Before embarking on any career path, you need to know what it entails.

You should read all about the roles and responsibilities, average salary, and the types of companies and organizations that hire email marketing specialists.

It’s worth checking out some examples of successful email campaigns to help you see the types of things you could be working on, as well as give you some inspiration for the future:

Get some relevant Digital marketing qualifications

A marketing qualification can help you learn some of the skills needed to become an email marketing specialist.

Marketing qualifications are attractive to employees, and you may not need a bachelor’s degree in marketing if you’ve completed some other relevant training and qualifications.

Develop digital marketing skills

Spend time developing core digital marketing skills such as copywriting, graphic design, and data analysis to evaluate campaign performance.

Many of these digital marketer skills are transferable across different areas of digital marketing, giving you some flexibility to move between roles.

Get some experience

Experience is key to being hired as an email marketing specialist.

You may need to secure an internship or start a graduate program to help you gain experience in a junior role.

From there you can learn the ropes and add to your skills and experience to help you move up the ladder.

You could also try volunteering or working on an independent email marketing project to help you gain some experience and develop a portfolio to share with potential hiring managers.

What are the best tools for email marketers?

Fortunately, there are many incredible tools to help you become a successful email marketer, including:

Mailchimp

One of the most well-known email marketing platforms, Mailchimp is used by a number of businesses to produce email marketing campaigns, design attractive email templates and gain valuable insights to help improve performance and increase ROI.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform that can execute high-performing email campaigns alongside other essential tools such as CRM (customer relationship management), customer support, and more, ensuring a cohesive, customer-focused marketing experience.

ActiveCampaign

An online platform specializing in marketing automation.

Helps to narrow down targeting and carries out many functions on your behalf to save time and resources and make lighter work of your email marketing efforts.

Drip

Drip is an easy-to-use marketing platform that makes designing attractive and engaging resources simple and effective.

Email Subject Line Generator

Optimo’s own email subject line generator is a handy tool for marketers looking for inspiration for an engaging, attention-grabbing subject line ready to appeal to your customers.

Proofreading

Nobody wants to receive an email full of typos or spelling mistakes.

Use a free AI proofreading tool to make sure your marketing emails are 100% correct before you hit the send button.

Market Research

Understanding your target audience is an essential element of a successful email marketing campaign.

Optimo’s AI market research tool helps give you some valuable insights into your target demographics including age, interest, shopping habits, and more, while also giving some ideas on the best methods to reach your target audience.

This can help inform your email campaigns to help you gain the best results.

Things you didn’t know about email marketing

• For every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses receive $36 in return. This is the highest average ROI of all marketing channels.
• More than 85% of smartphone users use their devices to open emails. The majority of people will delete an email that displays poorly on a smartphone in under three seconds, making a mobile-friendly content design strategy a must for email marketing specialists.
• According to HubSpot, “The most effective email subject lines engage curiosity, include promotional offers, and are personalized to each recipient’s interests.”
• An increase in the cost of ads on platforms such as Facebook is driving brands towards greater use of owned channels for marketing purposes, and experiencing ‘more effective results than ever.’
• In recent years, 70% of brands have increased their email marketing workload, without increasing their budgets. Just 37% of brands are increasing their email budget, while only 1.3% are making cuts.

Keeping up with the latest email marketing trends can help you become a more effective email marketing specialist.

Advances in technology and automation are constantly changing the email marketing landscape, but global events such as the recent pandemic have also contributed to shifts in practices.

Following email marketing influencers on social media can also give you some of the latest news and insights to help you become a better marketer.

Becoming an email marketer – your next steps

Email marketing can provide a significant ROI for businesses, making it an exciting area of marketing to specialize in.

If you’re interested in becoming an email marketer, you should explore training and qualifications that will help you gain the email marketing skills and knowledge you need to become a digital marketing expert.

Using tools like Optimo can help you take your email marketing campaigns to the next level.

We have developed a range of smart AI tools that can help you draft email subject lines, proofread your work and even help generate creative copy.

Try out Optimo for free to see how it can boost your marketing efforts, and keep an eye on our website for new and exciting AI tools as they’re launched.