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The 10 different hats email marketers wear

No, we’re not all the same.

Getting into email marketing occurs almost by accident. There aren’t any organized degree programs that teach you all that you need to know about email marketing. Most practitioners I know, including myself, started getting into it because there was a need, and grew from there.

We tend to be natural problem-solvers, internally motivated, innately curious individuals that don’t like getting bored. The practice of email marketing attracts our personality type specifically because there are so many different hats to wear!

The thing is, most of us do not want to wear allllll of these hats. There are two or three that we would claim as our strengths; even our passions. We’re proficient in most of the rest, but on the passion scale, closer to ‘meh’. There may even be one or two that we would tell someone ‘that’s not my thing’. A true email program needs all of these hats to be successful, which is why most organizations should think about creating an email team with a combination of skill sets.

AKA the “journey building” hat

This hat is all about knowing how a specific marketing platform works (either email platform or marketing automation platform) and then devising different methods to make stuff happen.

Want to create multiple lead nurture campaigns, and need to ensure that a lead is only in one campaign at a time? Or maybe create a custom, multi-channel and multi-touch product replenishment campaign based on last purchase date?

The email marketer that proudly wears the automation hat knows the nuance of the platform they’re using (you’d solve those problems differently in different platforms) and also knows where to find or even how to create the data points used to make decisions.

AKA the “development” hat

Coding, or development, of emails and email templates really can be quite challenging. And, no, you cannot expect someone who develops web pages to also develop emails. They are two distinct beasts and have different best practices. Email marketers have to consider not only browser and device, but also email client and versions. What looks good in Outlook 2013 may look terrible in the 2016 version.

Coding enables the email to look good (which is why this hat goes hand in hand with “creative” hat but more on that below). It also requires more non-traditional “marketing” skills such as basic HTML and CSS.

Unfortunately, this hat tends to be under-appreciated. Not everyone can or wants to learn this skill, and it takes ongoing learning to keep up with seemingly ever-changing requirements. It can’t “just” get done in a matter of minutes.

AKA the “words” hat

Subject lines are pretty important to a successful email marketing campaign. They need to be compelling, but also intriguing enough so that subscribers click to open the email and see the full message.

We all know that a successful marketing campaign gets the right message, to the right person, at the right time. This hat takes ownership on nailing the messaging part — ensuring that the email quickly, coherently, and compellingly delivers the point and drives the subscriber to take some further action (click here, buy now, read more, etc.).

AKA the “pretty” hat

Part of email marketing is making pretty emails that fit the brand’s tone and voice. It’s about considering if the call-to-action button is prominent enough without being too pushy. The creative hat considers whether those social icons look right in the current placement.

Every one in an organization can have an opinion on the creative of an email. But a good email marketer, with the creative hat as a strength, knows what will look good in an email across browsers, clients, and devices; generally what will look AND work the best.

Most email marketers wearing the ‘creative’ hat also wear the ‘coding’ one.

AKA the “make it get there” hat

It’s not enough to click “send” on a marketing email. There is work to be done to ensure that you end up in the inbox (and yes, the Google promotions tab is fine too) rather than in spam.

The deliverability hat works to set up an authenticated sender domain, and needs to understand the importance of DKIM, DMARC, SPF. Here’s the area where email marketers think through possible scenarios on what would look spammy or phishy to a recipient, and tailors the email accordingly (for example, no email marketer would ever send a commercial / batch email that asked the recipient to “click here” to reset their password. Instead we’d ask them to go to the site to reset on their own).

AKA the “what do we do with these people” hat

This hat thinks critically about how to handle subscribers in relation to their subscription status. This hat knows that a person who just signed up for email promotions today is much different than the customer who bought something in 2015 and hasn’t purchased anything since.

How are you going to handle new subscribers? What should you be sending to contacts that haven’t interacted with your emails in awhile? These are questions that lifecycle management thinks. This persons understands there are 4 different stages to a subscriber’s life with your email program.

This hat plays well with the “automation” and “segmentation” hats.

AKA the “what goes in” hat

An email program is really only as good as the information that goes into it. You can’t create meaningful audience segments (more on that below) if you are not capturing meaningful data about your subscribers AND ensuring that information gets back into the email platform in some way.

For example, it’s best practice to online retailers to do an “abandoned browse” campaign to known web visitors that may look at a specific product a couple of times. However, if your web analytics aren’t tied back into the email platform somehow, your email marketer can’t run this campaign.

The platform management hat knows what information is out there, how to get it (or who can get it), and then works to ensure it is available in the email platform.

AKA the “how’d we do” hat

Performance of an email campaign can be defined different ways — could be revenue generated, visits to site, webinar registrations, etc. The reporting hat can look at simple email metrics — opens, click throughs, unsubscribe rates — as well as more complex metrics — app engagement, website traffic patterns — and create a story around that data.

Here’s where an email marketing person can uncover hidden insights such as the top newsletter articles clicked all had a number in the headline or that the majority of purchases from email came from specific audience segments or that a certain audience segment responded to that special offer.

AKA the “audience definition” hat

When you are doing email marketing really well, not only are you creating super compelling content and design, but you are defining your target audience for that email in a detailed way.

You may want to consider demographic or firmographic information about your leads and contacts when defining your audience for your email campaign. You can also think about interest / intent data (what pages did a subscriber visit on your site? what products or product categories did they browse?) and past purchase behavior.

It’s usually not enough to think in terms of single variables (all leads in Texas); instead think in terms of multi-variable (all leads in Texas working in the manufacturing industry with a title of Director level or above).

It’s a specific art form to create compelling, meaningful audience segments within an email platform that also takes a strong understanding of what gets into that platform from where. This hat plays well with the platform management hat.

AKA the “why are we doing this” hat

In our hectic realities, it can be easy to fall into “just get it done” mentality without stopping to critically examine “why”. What purpose or goal does this email or campaign support?

This hat looks at what is going on in the email program and determines what needs to start happening, what needs to stop happening, and can provide the roadmap on how to get there.

This hat needs to work well with all the other hats, is typically worn by practitioners who have been doing email marketing for several years, and who may be managing a dedicated email team.

What combination of hats do you wear?

Recruiters: The job market for email professionals right now is good. For us. There’s lots of openings out there, and few things will make an email practitioner run faster than seeing a job description that asks for all of these hats. Work with your client companies to get them to be more specific in what they are really looking for and / or maybe they’d be willing to bring in some agency or outside help to cover one or more areas.

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