22+ Email Marketing Skills for a Successful Email Campaign

Email marketing doesn’t need an introduction regarding its significance in marketing strategy for business.

It is the best performing marketing channel with higher ROI and retention rate, so much more than social media and even other popular marketing methods.

Email marketing is also a complex concept of marketing. It has many layers and a set of other conceptual marketing that goes into it.

Depending upon what your objectives are, the required skillset changes in email marketing.

For example, if you look forward to building long-term relationships with your prospects and customers, you need to learn more about content marketing, personalization, and other core skills.

That is not exactly the same as when your focus is selling; then, you focus more on creating a funnel system through email.

Altogether, there are multiple skills and concepts that an email marketer needs to learn to be successful.

Also, it correlates to other forms of marketing, such as social media marketing, branding, and more.

Here are all the skillsets and more explanations on how to use them together to become a successful email marketer.

Contents

Things An Expert Marketer Really Good At

Expert marketers aren’t just good email marketers, but they bring more than that into their strategies and approach.

It is other components or types of marketing that play a huge role in the success of an email campaign.

More importantly, there are aspects of marketing that usually do not account for email marketing, but it changes the course entirely.

Few of those highlighted email marketing skills or aspects they know best :

Retention marketing
Lifecycle marketing
Deliverability consulting
Newsletter marketing
Campaign marketing
Social Media
Branding

Email marketing is more versed in all of these different tangents and more nuanced skill sets that might not be the key components of email marketing but what elevates them.

Why Should Email Marketers Also Know About Branding And Social Media Marketing?

Email marketing works best when you combine it with your social media marketing strategies and vice-versa.

And for an email marketer, it is essential to know how your emails are tied up with your social media profiles.

Especially if you want to utilize social media to boost your email list, you need to use social media for branding, exposure, and building relationship only to lead them toward your email list.

Why Should You Use Social Media To Boost Your Branding?

Well, let’s just say if you do social media marketing well and create a brand with a consistent brand image, email marketing will become way easier.

In fact, you can leverage your social media exposure to boost your email subscribers list, but more on that later.

First, you need to learn how using social media gives you leverage to be a better email marketer than your competitors.

Here’s the range of benefits and features that social media marketing brings to the table that complements email marketing.

Social Media Is Easy To Use

When compared to other marketing channels, social media is easier to use. Unlike traditional advertising or direct mail campaigns, you don’t need any special equipment to market on social media. All you need is a computer and an internet connection.

Social Media Can Be Used For Lead Generation And Customer Acquisition

You can use social media to generate leads and acquire new clients.

When you share valuable content on social media, you will attract potential buyers who may become interested in your products or services.

Social Media Allows You To Interact With Customers And Prospects

You can easily communicate with your customers and prospects via social media.

This allows you to address issues and concerns that they may have regarding your product or service.

Social Media Helps You Generate Brand Awareness

If you want to improve brand awareness, then you must make sure that you keep up with the latest trends in social media.

By doing so, you will be able to gain the attention of your target audiences.

Social Media Provides An Opportunity To Connect With Your Audience

If you want to connect with your existing customers, then you should try using social media. You can send them messages, ask questions, and even give away freebies.

Social Media Increases The Engagement Of Your Target Audiences

Your target audiences will spend more time reading your posts and interacting with your pages. As a result, you will receive more clicks, likes, and shares.

Social Media Makes Marketing More Cost-Effective

Compared to old-school methods like TV ads, flyers, and billboards, social media is cheaper. Plus, it doesn’t require much manpower to manage.

Social Media Gives You A Chance To Promote New Products Or Services

You can promote your new products or services by sharing relevant updates on your company page. If you do this regularly, you will increase sales and boost profits.

Social Media Improves SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial in improving your online presence.

However, there’s no point in having a strong digital footprint if people cannot find you. Fortunately, social media helps you achieve better search rankings.

Social Media Boosts Your Reputation

Social media users tend to trust reviews from friends and family members.

Therefore, you should always post positive reviews about your business on different platforms. Doing this will help you build credibility among your audience.

Social Media Is Good For Business Growth

Social media has helped many businesses grow over the years. It provides a platform for companies to reach out to their current and prospective customers.

Social Media Creates Loyalty Among Users

When you provide exceptional customer service, you will develop a loyal following. These followers are likely to refer others to your business.

Social Media Helps Build Trust

When people see that you respond quickly to comments and complaints, they will feel comfortable buying from you. They will also trust you since you seem reliable.

Social Media Offers Better Customer Service

By responding to user queries within 24 hours, you show that you care about your clients. This builds trust and encourages repeat purchases.

Social Media Lets You Monitor Feedback

If you don’t monitor feedback, then you might miss important issues. That could lead to negative publicity. On the other hand, monitoring feedback lets you know what works and what doesn’t.

Social Media Enhances Sales Through Referrals

People who share your content usually end up becoming your brand ambassadors. When they recommend your product to their friends, you will get more leads.

Social Media Allows You To Generate Leads

People use social media to research products before making a purchase decision. By posting useful information on your Facebook page, you will generate more leads.

Social Media Provides Great Opportunities To Market Your Brand

You can market your brand through paid advertisements. But social media allows you to run free campaigns without spending money.

Social Media Makes Customers Feel Special

Customers love to be treated with respect. Make sure that you reply to all messages within 24 hours. Also, thank them whenever possible.

Social Media Gives You A Competitive Edge

Since competitors are already active on social media, you need to join the conversation. This way, you can learn new ways to promote your company.

Social Media Improves Employee Engagement

Employees enjoy being part of an engaged team. If they like what they do, they are more likely to work harder.

Social Media Boosts Reputation Management

Reputation management is one of the best things you can do for your business. However, it takes time and effort. Luckily, social media helps you manage your reputation in no time at all.

Email Marketing Skills That Can 10x Your Campaign Success

Creating Strategically Designed Triggered Campaigns

This is more of a specific skill set that expert email marketing has and comes into play when they automate email marketing campaigns.

There are automated email campaigns that work on the triggers, a certain action or event which acts as a trigger for initiating a particular action from your side as well.

For example, if a customer just bought a product from your website, this is a trigger after which you can automate a series of emails.

Now, if you know how to strategically use triggers to pipeline your prospects or customers to nurture them further or develop a long-term relationship with them, it changes everything.

Having the ability to set a triggered campaign saves tons of time, energy, and effort in creating emails and sending all of them one by one.

More than that, the skill is not just about automating a series of emails but creating compelling copies of emails that sync with each other in a series, gradually taking the customer for better engagement.

Some commonly known triggered campaigns are :

Welcome Series: When a customer buys the product, or someone subscribes, there are a series of welcome emails sent to engage with them.

Transactional Emails: These emails are triggered by the purchase made on your website, more like receipts and billing, etc.

Time-sensitIve Campaigns: These campaigns are triggered by an inactive cart for more than half an hour, sending them to email to remind them of their purchase and persuade them to buy.

Notification emails: Any change that happened in the customer account or any other changes related to the customer will be sent to their email.

Personal event emails: These emails are automatically sent to anyone or everyone in your subscriber list/customer list who has birthdays, anniversaries, etc. You can send multiple format emails.

Personalization

Personalization is an essential component of email marketing and a primary contributor to the success of email campaigns.

Every email marketer or marketer for that matter, must have the skills and understanding of these different aspects :

How to personalize your email marketing campaign?
What does personalization mean in marketing?
How personalization psychologically impacts the prospective customer or subscribers?
Why does personalization work?
On what basis will you personalize?
How to personalize a copy of your email?

And so much more.

All these aspects are crucial for an email marketer to understand so they do not just use personalization strategies without really knowing it.

Rather they have the ability to use personalization strategically and more profoundly and in detail in every aspect of their marketing, starting from their email subject line to product pitching.

Personalization is all about knowing the audience, which is already an essential skill for a marketer, as mentioned earlier.

You also need to know how a prospect sees your email.

Mobile Optimization

What you need to realize as an email marketer is that 54% of the emails sent are opened on mobile devices.

So this means that email marketers need to focus highly on how their emails look on mobile devices as important as they think they will work on desktops, if not more.

For that, email campaigns need to be mobile-optimized for a better reading experience.

It is a crucial skill for email marketers where they need to learn about how to optimize the design and copy of the email.

There are design elements and visual aspects of the email which need to be customized to fit on mobile devices, and that too on all of them.

The first response to a bad-formatted email that appears on mobile devices a user is just getting annoyed and closing it off.

Mobile optimization has become more important for email marketers than ever as mobile users are the only growing who are reading their emails on their phones.

The future ahead also lies in mobile devices and the increasing dependency on them. So, that demands email marketers who are skilled in mobile optimization.

Automating Lead Nurturing, Lifecycle & Drip Emails

Email marketing is not just about sending automated newsletters and sending promotional emails.

It is about building a long-term relationship with your audience. You must nurture your leads to sustain them with you over their customer journey.

What essential skill about email marketing that you need to focus on is the strategical automation of emails to achieve an objective, which can be any of these :

Making customers purchase
Generating leads
Nurturing leads
Building customer relationship
Upselling
Post-purchase communication

The core concept behind automation to nurture leads goes back to your understanding of knowing the audience.

Automation helps you create scheduled workflows that send out strategically sequence-based designed and optimized emails towards achieving a specific objective.

These campaigns also have triggers that start, change, or end the campaign accordingly.

Email marketers need to have a deep understanding of email automation, such as how to :

Personalizing emails to make them more effective
Segmenting your emails into automated campaigns for better targeting
Collecting data and syncing it between different systems
Managing the campaign
Building automated workflows, follow-up sequences & triggers

Email Deliverability

Email Deliverability is the percentage of emails that are delivered to their intended recipients. It can be a very important metric for email marketers, indicating how well they can reach their audience.

There are many reasons why an email might be marked as undeliverable, including spam filters, blacklisting, and poor deliverability settings.

If you’re using Gmail (or another Google-owned service), then you should check your “Spam” folder regularly to ensure that your messages are getting through. If you still receive messages in the Spam folder, then you probably have some issues with your deliverability.

If you’re sending emails via MailChimp, then you should check your IP address against their blacklists. If you’re receiving bounces, then you may need to adjust your MX records.

You can also test your deliverability by creating a free account at Return Path.

Simply enter your domain name and click “Send Test Message.” Return Path will send you an email message that contains links to various services, like web analytics tools, which can help you identify where your messages are going wrong.

You can also try testing your deliverability by adding a DKIM record to your DNS settings. To add a DKIM record, simply visit dkim. Tools and follow the instructions.

Avoiding SPAM Complaints

Spam is a type of email that contains advertisements. Some people complain about receiving too many spam emails.

To prevent spam complaints, you can use a spam filter. A spam filter is software that checks all incoming emails and deletes any messages that contain certain words.

These words include “spam,” “junk mail,” “promotional material,” “advertising,” “marketing,” and “scams.” Spam filters usually delete junk emails without reading them.

They just check whether the subject line includes certain keywords. To improve your deliverability rates, you can change how your emails look.

For example, if you’re sending newsletters or promotional emails, you can remove images from the body of the email. This will reduce the chance of your emails being flagged as SPAM.

You can also create a plain text version of your email. Plain text emails don’t display pictures or videos, so they’re easier to read.

To increase your chances of delivering emails, you can use a professional email marketing provider.

Many companies offer this kind of service, but you should always double-check what they charge before signing up.

You can also use a third-party tool to verify your deliverability. There are several online tools available, such as ReturnPath and MxToolbox.

The best time to send emails is between 9 am and 5 pm on weekdays. The reason behind this is that most people are working during these hours.

Creating Interactive Content

Interactive content has been an email marketing trend that continues to grow every year, and so it will be in upcoming 2022 and beyond.

It is high time for marketers to incorporate interactive content in their emails, but to do that, they must first acquire the skill.

Interactive content comes along in all sorts and types, such as GIFs, reviews, forms, polls, surveys, quizzes, and questionnaires.

Then, there are other creative alternatives and styles a content marketer or email marketer could come up with to engage with the recipients.

It is about learning to create engagement within the emails without taking them away through any given link.

One of the effective interactive content is actually interacting with the recipients on a personal level and helping them.

According to recent studies, interactive content generates 2 x many conversions than any other email type.

Creating interactive content is an essential skill and expertise in itself that comes from really knowing your audience and finding creative ways to interact with them.

Strategic Thinking

Any good email marketer has a strategic understanding of their basic framework and how email marketing works for the business.

They must be able to think to create email marketing strategies for maximum conversions strategically.

Email marketing was never about just sending emails which amateurs often confuse it with. If not, many just think media marketing is all about automating and scheduling emails.

But it is way more than that. You have to understand how your audience perceives emails, what they need, and when they want to read your email.

Every aspect of email marketing needs strategic planning and the ability to adapt. So you need to look at the successful email marketing campaign and case studies and how they did it.

There are also multiple levels to work on, such as :

Reaching out to the target audience through various channels.
Getting email addresses of the target audience
Growing and managing an email contact list
Learning about lead generation strategies
Sales strategies
Nurturing your email leads and contacts

In general, email marketers must have to learn inbound marketing strategies.

Email List Management & Segmentation

One of the core challenges for email marketers is to create an effective and highly relevant email list that converts.

The work just does not end there when it comes to managing the list and even further segmenting it for more personalization and better targeting.

So, here are a few of the core skills related to an email list that you need to learn :

Accessibility

Accessibility is also a crucial skill that is about adapting to advanced technology to find unique ways to make people interact online.

It is about reaching people who come from all different areas, segments, backgrounds, and so more.

For email marketers, it is essential to learn how to scale the accessibility of their brands through email marketing channels.

After all, if you don’t know how to reach out to more and more target audiences through email marketing campaigns, your email list will be very limited, and so will your sales as well.

Other audiences do not or cannot access the technology, and who are also your potential customers, so how can you reach them as well?

There are some strategies through which you are increasing the accessibility of your emails to some degree, such as :

Select a contrasting text and background color to make it easier to read, especially for people who are sensitive to light or luminosity.
Make sure your emails are adaptable to the device’s dark mode without disrupting the email reading experience for the recipients.
Always use proper formatting of the text or email body to make it easy to consume. Use heading elements like <h1> and <h2> to maintain the hierarchy.
Maintain an easy-to-scan logical reading order which is from left to right and top to bottom, making it a single-column layout. It must be easy to read on all devices.
More than 50% of emails are read on mobile phones. So it becomes crucial to optimize your emails for a mobile reading experience.