4 skills you need to become a great at email & sms marketing

If you're working in the Commerce or in marketing in general, absolutely you know that retention is becoming more and more important as all of the ad platforms are making it harder and harder to advertise and when it comes to retention, email marketing and SMS marketing are the most important channels because they're the highest revenue generating channels for any business, especially e-commerce.

To be a successful email marketing strategist, there are a lot of different things, a lot of moving pieces that you have to excel at at the same time. This is a role that I hire in my agency quite frequently, also if you're an e-commerce brand and you want to do email and SMS in-house, this is the type of person that you absolutely need. It's best if your email strategy is separate from all the other roles, like your social media and so on. So if you are a marketer and you want to niche down and only work with e-commerce brands and really make this your career, this article is also great for you.

1. Creative strategist

Of course, is that you have to be a very creative strategist meaning you need to understand how email and SMS also work as a channel. What converts in this channel? How? What are people doing when they receive emails? Meaning like, where in the customer journey the person is, what's going through their head, what hesitations they have, all of those have different things and based on that create a strategy, whether that's for email and SMS flows or for campaigns. So the poin, number one like the actual strategy part.

2. That they need to be great at is also seeing and understanding good email design

They won't be designing the emails themselves, but they need to look at the email and see whether the design is great for multiple different reasons? The easiest one is whether the design is on brand or not on brand, I think more people can do that. But somebody who is not a designer can look at an email and see whether it is conveying the information that it needs to convey, not only textually but also visually. Then, is it going to convert well on desktop and mobile? If you can master all of this, it will increase your possibilities magnify increased sales.

3. Is they also need to understand great copy?

Again, they're not the copywriter that's going to write the email, but they need to be able to read and edit and review copy. We have an article about copywriting tips and techniques for emails marketing overall, I think it's really great and really helpful.

It's not easy to find people who are not copywriters but can see immediately whether the copy is great. Again, is it on brand or not on brand, and is it evoking emotions? Is it making the reader feel something? Is it focusing on the benefits versus features? Is it conversational? So all of those things.

4. Understanding data

The fourth part to a great strategist is working with data and understanding data and knowing how to use data to learn about the effectiveness of the campaigns and flows that they've run and the pop-ups, and then understanding how to take it forward which experiments to design in your flows and your campaigns and your pop-ups, and how to structure all of that and inform the strategy moving forward.

So those are all the things that are required to excel as an email strategist and of course, you need to understand how SMS marketing works because nowadays email and SMS need to work very seamlessly together. It's also great if you understand other marketing channels, at least big picture how they work bcause all marketing channels work together in Omni Channel marketing which is kind of a buzzword these days. 

Conclusion

Is about knowing that for a customer, for a shopper, like they don't care whether they're receiving an email or if they're on the website or if they're on social media. Each interaction with their brand needs to be coherent and seamless, and all of it needs to work together, and of course email is a very important part of that.

Strategy for an email flow is more demonstrative than doing strategy for a campaign because you have to think through a lot of kind of moving pieces, and if you're an applicant, something that I recommend is that you take a random brand, either a brand that you like or a brand that you're applying for, or if it's an agency, a brand that you know that they work with, and come up with your strategy for that brand's welcome flow or post-purchase flow or abandoned checkout flow, and then present the emails that you would include, the time delays, and kind of the main point or the concept for each email.