- Why should I consider hiring a team to do my email marketing?
- What should I look for when hiring people for my team?
- What are the core roles and responsibilities of an email marketing team?
Email Marketer, email specialist, email manager, email marketing strategist. Aren’t all these job titles for people who send out marketing emails? Actually, these people make sure that email is an integral part of your marketing, that it drives sales to your business, and that whatever you send out is part of a bigger strategy.
It’s important to have people who make sure all these things get done because email marketing can be incredibly hardworking and effective.
How much more effective can email marketing be compared to other types of campaigns? Research from Campaign monitor shows that emails get you 6X more click-through than tweets. Because email marketing is so effective, you should invest in it by hiring the right team.
Before you start calling marketing headhunters, set clear goals for what you want to achieve.
Your email marketing efforts should support the main business objectives. This will help set up messaging that is consistent and is right for your target audience.
There are 3 types of email marketing goals:
- Acquisition – build your subscriber list and send emails that encourage action.
- Retention – keep existing customers interested and engaged.
- Awareness – get your brand in front of as many people as possible.
The type of people you hire will depend on your email marketing goals:
- If your goal is an acquisition, look for candidates who are nimble and are skilled at writing copy that drives subscriptions and sales.
- If your goal is retention, look for candidates who are comfortable segmenting customers, setting metrics, doing analysis, and who know how to craft emails to meet specific needs.
- If your goal is awareness, look for storytellers who can write engaging copy that ties into your brand voice, catches people’s attention, and makes headlines.
A team doesn’t have to mean hiring a whole platoon. You could bring in a writer, or a designer, or a strategist, or all 3. You could even manage the email marketing yourself (yes, there can be an “i” in the team.)
Successful email marketers are great communicators and curious researchers. Having a writer on board is helpful. But if you don’t have one, make sure the marketer who is assigned to the role is a good editor.
When reviewing candidates, have them show previous campaigns they’ve worked on and ask them about their thinking behind the process. Also, have them present ideas on how to improve your marketing.
You might want to ask the candidates to run a test campaign. When reviewing these tests, pay close attention to their ability to write engaging subject lines, maintain brand voice, and use effective calls to action (CTA).
Once hired and onboarded, the first task of your shiny, new email marketing team is to develop a shiny, new email marketing strategy.
Creating a strategy is a bit like wearing bifocal glasses: It’s being able to look at short-term goals, long-term goals, and considering how your email marketing activity ties into your brand’s overall revenue goals.
When developing a strategy, the team should think about how to manage different email lists, how to approach campaigns with different goals, and how to balance those along with triggered messages and transactional emails.
To do this role effectively, your team needs to analyze the strategy, look at what’s working, and what needs to be improved. Then they need to communicate these learning and suggest changes based on the data they gathered.
Keep in mind that no matter how much you plan or who you hire, they might not get everything correct 100% of the time. Give them the freedom to adjust, experiment, and make changes that can improve the strategy.
In addition to thinking about the bigger picture strategy, your email marketing team needs to know how to handle day-to-day operations.
Your team should create a content calendar with weekly emails, release dates, product launches, and special events. Review the calendar with them once a week to see if they’re on the right track, and adjust if changes are needed.
Test emails before they send them out to actual customers. Services like Litmus let you see how your emails look on different devices so you can preview them before hitting send.
Also, to make sure your emails are going to customers and not to spam folders, your team should be up to date on how spam filters work.
Start by looking for people within your organization who might be a good fit. If you don’t have in-house resources, start looking for potential hires.
References: Google Webmasters, Think With Google, Google Primer
