Email Marketing as a Career
Description of the Job
An email marketing specialist is a digital marketer that focuses on building email lists, creating emails, and nurturing leads through written communications. These professionals work with email automation software, sending out email blasts, newsletters, and more, all with the goal of increasing brand awareness and establishing a brand’s place in the competitive market.
Fast Facts
- Number of hours per week40-45 hours
- Average starting pay$57k Nationally, $64k in the Bay Area
- Amount of travel requiredGenerally no travel
Roles & Responsibilities
- Creating and monitoring a wide variety of email marketing campaigns
- Ensuring design and layouts of emails are optimized, user and mobile-friendly
- Securing email databases for future campaigns
- Creating digital ads
- Tracking and analyzing campaign results
- Aiding additional digital marketing efforts
Skills Needed
- Analytical Mindset: keep an eye on campaign metrics and ROI of email activities. Knowing what drove a change in audience behavior and campaign performance will allow them to replicate them in the rest of the campaigns.
- Technical and Creative Skills: experience with design tools such as Adobe Creative Suite or Canva, along with knowledge of HTML/CSS is beneficial
- Creativity and Problem-Solving: Creativity and thinking outside the box to find new ways of doing things is one of the trademarks of a successful marketing professional.
- Attention to Detail: Accuracy is essential - both to ensure your company's image is maintained, and so that your customers are getting the right information.
- Data Analysis & Analytics: Marketing is nothing without measurement: you need to be able to calculate the success and ROI of your marketing efforts.
Steps to Enter The Field
- A bachelor's degree is recommended for email marketing, but isn’t always required. Some common majors for this career include marketing, business administration, sales and marketing, business communications, and telecommunications
- Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service. It is a great platform to start creating emails for practice, and there is a free version
- If you are part of a club or organization, you can use Mailchimp to send emails to your list to gain exposure into email marketing easily
- Internships in social media or marketing can be helpful to gain exposure in the field, which can translate to an email marketing role
Landscape of the Field & Companies in the Field
- Most, if not all, large companies have email marketer(s) within their marketing department
- Smaller companies likely still do email marketing, but they may not have a specific role that’s just for email marketing because of their small size. The role may be a marketing specialist that includes some email marketing
- Top companies that specialize in email marketing include: MailChimp, Oracle, Constant Contact
External Resources to Learn More & Develop Skills
- Marketing Communities: A list of the best marketing communities to join to meet others in the field.
- Email Marketing Resources: Contains a comprehensive list of resources, including blogs, articles, experts to follow, tools to invest in, and more
- Complete Mailchimp Email Marketing Course: Udemy offers a digital course where you can learn how to use Mailchimp, grow an email subscriber list and build high quality email marketing campaigns
- It costs about $20 (Udemy frequently changes the prices of its courses, but it will be around $20)
- Free Email Marketing Tools: Includes a list of 11 free email marketing tools to save time and money
Related Careers
- Market Research Analyst, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC), Digital Marketing Analyst, Content Writing, Graphic Design, Social Media Marketing Manager, Product Marketing Manager
Informational Interviews
Elizabeth Urbina
Company Name: Mutual of Omaha
Title: Email Marketing Specialist
Years of Experience: 2
Biography
Elizabeth Urbina is an Email Marketing Specialist at Mutual of Omaha. She graduated from Creighton University in 2019 with degrees in Marketing and Business Intelligence and Analytics. She was a Digital Marketing Coordinator for almost two years at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska before joining Mutual of Omaha in December 2020.