The last decade has seen a whirlwind of changes in marketing. The developments in the field of social media, artificial intelligence, conversational commerce, and adtech have changed the way marketing is done.

Despite all these shifts, email marketing continues to remain fundamental in modern marketing. McKinley Marketing Partners’ attested to this fact in their 2018 Marketing Hiring Trends Report. The survey revealed that email marketing is among the top four most sought after skills in marketing.

Since email marketing is one of the most effective channels to drive traffic and conversions, let’s look at the role, necessary skills, and the job description of an email marketing manager.

The Role of an Email Marketing ManagerAn email marketing manager works with the marketing/marketing communication team and manages end-to-end email marketing strategies. As organizations begin to adopt the omnichannel approach, the manager is also responsible for the overarching impact of email on other marketing functions.

Many organizations tend to gravitate more towards marketing automation software than standalone email marketing platforms due to their versatility. It helps email marketers get hands-on experience with both types of applications.

With thousands of emails vying for a user’s attention, email marketers are expected to work on the following aspects of email marketing:

1. Effectively promote company offerings through email
2. Ensure that email marketing works in coherence with other marketing channels
3. Cultivate relationships with subscribers through highly personalized email campaigns
4. Establish and measure key metrics to understand the success of email marketing
5. Optimize funnel performance using email marketing

Learn More: What is Email Automation? Definition, Benchmarks, Marketing Best Practices with Examples

Essential Skills Required to be a Successful Email Marketing ManagerAlthough the role of an email marketer requires a narrow focus, the person needs to be an expert, a T-shaped marketer. As email marketing is a combination of a little bit of design, coding, and a whole lot of writing, the email marketing manager should be adept in all three areas.

Along with these, here are five essential skills an email marketing manager should possess:

1. Technical Skills

An email marketer must know how to work with various email marketing applications. Automation drives a significant part of email marketing; therefore, the person should know how to set up different types of workflows and campaigns (drip, trigger-based, etc.) to automate the job.

Similarly, having some experience with design tools such as Adobe Creative Suite or Canva, along with knowledge of HTML/CSS, will immensely beneficial.

2. Improving Deliverability

Some of the aspects that influence email deliverability are the IP address, sender domain, spam issues, bounce rate, email content, and recipient behavior.

The email marketing manager needs to ensure that their domain doesn’t get blacklisted, and emails don’t land in the spam folder. The marketer should, therefore, focus on reducing spam complaints and hard bounces. The chances of spam complaints can be reduced by keeping the email content and HTML formatting clean, providing the unsubscribe option, and performing a spam check before you hit the send button.

Learn More: What is Lead Management? Definition, Process, Best Practices with Examples

3. Understanding Segmentation and Personalization

Personalization is how you boost email engagement. The success of hyper-personalization lies in audience segmentation. The email marketer should understand audience characteristics and what motivates them. Using this data, the marketer can create segments and campaigns that address audience needs and pain points.

Personalization goes beyond “Hi”, and delivers the subscriber what they want at the right stage of their purchase journey.

Knowing how to create effective audience segments to drive personalized campaigns will allow the email marketing manager to drive email marketing success.

4. Knowledge of Compliances

Although following ethical email practices will not land you in hot water, it’s imperative to know the country or region-specific regulatory compliances pertaining to email marketing. The most well-known email compliances are the CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR.

The manager should be aware of the general provisions, rights of users under these acts, and fines/penalties of these regulations.

5. Analytical Mindset

Ans email marketer should 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.

Measuring the ROI requires you to have the right attribution criteria in place. The buyer journey is a complex phenomenon, and the right purchase trigger can be identified using attribution. If needed, the email marketer can help the marketing team build a custom attribution model to track the ROI to the highest accuracy.

Learn More: 5 B2B Email Marketing Best Practices You Can’t Afford to MissOpens a new window

Email Marketing Manager: Job DescriptionHere’s an example of what the job description for the position of an email marketing manager looks like. Organizations may tweak it depending on their requirements:

An experienced Email Marketing Manager who knows how to soar the email open and click-through rates. To head email marketing efforts and work with key stakeholders in the marketing department. If writing compelling emails excites you and driving conversions through email campaigns is your true north, give us a holler/get in touch!

Responsibilities: What You’ll Do

1. Devise and manage the entire email marketing strategy that is in-line with business goals
2. Build and grow email subscriber lists organically
3. Manage end-to-end email campaigns:

• Design email templates
• Craft irresistible subject lines
• Write convincing body copies and call-to-actions (CTAs) to drive conversions
• Experiment and Run A/B or multivariate tests to optimize campaign performance

1. Create audience segments based on demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and other criteria and run highly personalized email campaigns
2. Run lead nurturing activities, i.e., guide the audience through the funnel by sending downloadable guides, free trials, etc. based on the stage of the buyer’s journey
3. Ensure email campaigns adhere to industry standards and do not violate regulatory compliances
4. Track key campaign metrics and report their impact on sales conversions

Requirements: What Companies Are Looking for

1. Bachelor of the Arts (BA), the Bachelor of Science (B.S.), or equivalent degree
2. Knowledge of lead generation, lead nurturing, drip campaigns, design tools, content management systems (CMS), and Google analytics
3. Hands-on experience with Constant Contact/Mailchimp (or other email marketing or marketing automation tool)
4. Debugging skills to identify deliverability issues and correct them
5. Impeccable copywriting and communication skills
6. HTML/CSS knowledge preferred
7. Strong analytical skills to infer meaning from campaign metrics

Learn More: Marketing Automation Manager: Role, Skill Set, and Job Description

How Should You Get Started?The email marketing manager‘s salary ranges from $46,000–$97,000. It can also go up depending on the location, industry, and work experience.

If you’re just getting started with email marketing, there are plenty of courses and micro-courses by email marketing application vendors and massive open online course (MOOC) platforms. We recommend HubSpot’s free email marketing certification course to begin your learning journey.