Email Never Dies! How to Land Email Marketing Jobs in 2024
by Chandler Craig
Email is, if nothing else, resilient. It remains one of the 21st century’s most cost-effective and efficient marketing channels. Even with AI beginning to wipe out swathes of careers, email marketing jobs continue to be posted with regularity. This post discusses the skills and knowledge required to land a great job as an email marketer.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of customer engagement. It is a way to reach potential and current customers through large-scale email communications. It encompasses a variety of tactics. Some common ones are newsletters, product updates, onboarding support, discount codes, cart reminders, and product recommendations. The purpose of these emails is to drive product adoption and sales through consistent engagement and re-engagement with customers.
Essential Knowledge for Landing Email Marketing Jobs
In theory, any company can benefit from email marketing and, therefore, would need people to manage email marketing campaigns. However, campaigns differ across sectors, and specializing in a specific sector is essential for landing an email marketing job (Note: these positions are often listed as “lifecycle marketing” positions. It’s just a different name for the same thing, but knowing the term will help your job hunt). Let’s first look at some of the general knowledge you’ll need no matter what sector you specialize in, and then we’ll look at sector-specific knowledge requirements.
General Knowledge
When you start at any email marketing job, you’re going to have to follow a common series of steps to make use of email marketing software.
1️⃣ Collect data about the audiences you’ll be emailing
- Form and survey builders like Typeform and SurveyMonkey allow for landing page and in-app data collection. Companies with a software product or an online platform/app collect usage data from customers using their product.
2️⃣ Identify where your employer stores their user data
- CDPs (customer data platforms) like Segment and Rudderstack help unify and manage customer data from various sources. Your company may, for example, have customer data from your app, in Salesforce, and in Google Sheets. CDPs provide easy integrations to move all that data to the same place. Companies store their applications’ user data in databases Postgres, MongoDB, and Firebase. Many companies without engineering resources exclusively use Excel to store this information. It is, after all, the original low-code database.
3️⃣ Design email templates that appeal to your audience
- Design software like Canva and Figma are commonly used to design templates. Illustrator and Photoshop are also used for this purpose. Use HTML, CSS, and MJML to translate designs into syntax that email providers can render. Note: you can also use an exported design image (jpeg, png, etc.) from your design software as the entire body of your email to get around using markup and CSS. However, email providers like Gmail and Outlook don’t like it and will likely flag your emails as spam.
4️⃣ Transfer data & designs into marketing automation software to segment your audience, schedule emails, & personalize email templates
- Marketing automation software like Dittofeed, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, and Braze is used to draft and store dynamic email templates, segment customers based on their behavior and attributes, automate when and how emails are delivered, and analyze email performance.
- Note: there is also software that is channel-specific. The email marketing platform MailChimp is the most widely used email-specific marketing software.
5️⃣ Send the emails!
- ESPs (email service providers) like Amazon SES, SendGrid, and Resend assist with email deliverability, scalability, and monitoring. Marketing automation platforms integrate with these systems to trigger email sends. Mail warming services like Mailwarm also help increase the deliverability of newly created email domains. Note: it’s strongly suggested that email marketers send emails from domains that aren’t their company’s official domain. For example, if your company’s official/primary domain is doordash.com, don’t send bulk emails from any email address ending in “@doordash.com” because it could negatively impact the deliverability of all emails sent from that domain (e.g., you email your boss requesting time off, and it lands in their spam folder). Instead, buy a similar domain like doordash.io and send bulk emails from there after you’ve “warmed up” the domain with a mail warming tool.
6️⃣ Analyze email campaign performance data & use it to adjust your campaign strategy
- Marketing automation software usually includes basic analytics tools for open, click, delivery, and spam rates. Software designed specifically for analytics and A/B testing include Mixpanel, Amplitude, and PostHog. Many marketing automation platforms have integrations with analytics software because they’re more fully featured.
Sector-specific Knowledge
B2C Consumer Brands & E-commerce
Companies that sell products to individual consumers as opposed to businesses must send a high volume of messages at a regular cadence. This is because their business model necessitates hundreds of thousands of engaged customers to be profitable, whereas B2B companies only need thousands. B2B companies have fewer customers and a much higher LTV per customer. They can often afford to communicate with their customers via human customer success or sales representatives. When the LTV of each customer is lower, as is typically the case with B2C customers, more automation becomes necessary. Email marketing automation is particularly important for B2C companies, and they employ the largest amount of email marketers.
Crafting consumer-centric email marketing campaigns is more time-intensive than it is for any other sector. Consumer brands have more customer data to process, more customer segments to target with their messaging, and a higher bar for template designs, which must be eye-catching and align with their brand identity and audience.
Getting an email marketing job at a B2C company– either at a consumer brand or e-commerce platform– requires you to be excellent at solving deliverability issues, which are more likely to arise due to the sheer amount of emails you’ll be sending. It’s easy to anger the Gmail gods and end up in spam folder hell.
Knowing how to visually and verbally brand emails is crucial not only because they need to align with the brand for consistency but also because marketing emails serve a dual purpose: they generate brand awareness in addition to delivering a useful message (like a discount code or holiday sale alert). Consumer companies often expect email marketers to put on their designer and copywriter hats because no one else has the capacity. Design software like Canva and Figma help with quickly generating email template ideas. Good document collaboration tools like Notion will help you work with your team to develop email copy that communicates a strong, coherent brand identity for consumers, making selling to them easier.
Lastly, many consumer companies use Shopify as their underlying e-commerce infrastructure. Shopify has email marketing tools built into its platform, so it’s good to know how those work. They also help companies collect and store customer data. So, even if you don’t use their email marketing tools directly, you must know how to integrate Shopify data with other email marketing software.
Examples of consumer brands and e-commerce companies that hire email marketers include:
Fabletics, Amazon, GOAT Group, Disney, TikTok, Buck Mason
B2B SaaS
B2B SaaS companies are subscription software companies with businesses as customers. You’ll need different skills to be a successful B2B SaaS email marketer, although many skills overlap with those required by B2C companies.
Business customers respond best to straightforward, informative messaging. They prefer plain text emails to flashy, highly designed ones. You’ll need to know how to make the email copy feel helpful and human. The primary purpose of B2B SaaS email marketing is to increase usage and retention.
A common use case for increasing usage is the onboarding email which helps ensure new users start actively using the product by guiding them to the first features they should be using and providing information about how to use those features. Onboarding emails also have downstream positive effects on retention. A user who knows how to use the software they’ve purchased and who has benefited from it is much less likely to churn.
Common use cases for increasing retention include product updates, documentation updates, newsletters, and explainer videos. Anything that makes the software feel more approachable and helps the user understand the full value proposition of the software. Being a great technical writer is essential for B2B SaaS email marketers. Knowing how to convey complex information in simple, digestible language is more valuable than knowing how to craft a flashy brand identity (although both are helpful) because it leads to increased usage and retention.
Regarding data collection, the primary difference between B2B SaaS companies and other kinds of companies is that you’ll want to collect user- and organization-level data from your customers to efficiently segment them for email automation. You’ll presumably have more available data on usage patterns over time because the subscription model means companies use your product every month– at least they’re paying to anyway. This allows you to create more in-depth automation and template personalization.
A working knowledge of SQL and JSON can be a great bonus skill set for many B2B companies who may need you to educate yourself on how their customer data is structured and how it can be transmitted via API to 3rd party marketing software.
Examples of B2B SaaS companies that hire email marketers:
Gusto, Ahrefs, ClickUp, Asana, Zoom, Square
Political Campaigns and Non-profits
Political campaigns and non-profits primarily use email marketing to raise money for candidates and social causes.
Being a great storyteller and compelling copywriter is critical here, perhaps even more so than in the consumer brand sector. You’ll need to convince the people on your mailing list that your organization’s cause is worth fighting for, which can be harder than convincing them they need a new pair of shoes. Branding and design also come into play more than in B2B SaaS, but not as much as it does for B2C companies. You are marketing ideals as opposed to products. Your email template designs should convey those ideals but not be too eccentric.
Unlike the previously discussed sectors, the non-profit and political campaign sectors don’t have detailed data about each person they email beyond general demographic data at most. Thus, they won’t require the same level of targeting and email personalization that brands and software companies require. They simply don’t have the data to perform fine-tuned segmentation and email personalization.
Another thing to consider before looking for work with these kinds of organizations is that you will perform a lot of manual data entry since many people in their target demographics still communicate via snail mail and fax. Make sure you’re comfortable with Excel, CSV, and Google Sheets because those are what you’ll be using to store data and load it into your automation software.
Examples of political campaigns & non-profits that hire email marketers:
All political campaigns hire email marketers from the local to the federal level. Regarding non-profits, Habitat for Humanity, Doctors Without Borders, and The Ocean Cleanup are well-known organizations that hire email marketers.
Bonus considerations
SMBs (Small and Midsize Businesses)
SMBs operate email marketing much like consumer brands but with fewer resources. They’re usually not tech savvy but may have helpful customer info they can extract from their POS software, website, and/or delivery and auction apps they sell through.
They often won’t have the budget to hire a full-time marketer, and you’ll have to be a jack of all trades: design, branding/brand awareness, web development, form building, software integration, and possibly even photo production. However, they can provide a steady paycheck if you contract to work with enough of them. Plus, many of them are easy to contact! Just walk into a store and ask to speak with the owner or manager.
Marketing Agencies
Agencies work with many different clients, which can be a great way to figure out what sector you like working with most. They usually pay well but have longer hours than B2B SaaS and B2C companies.
How to Find Email Marketing Jobs
Once you’ve settled on what sector you prefer and what skillset you’re most suited for, it’s time to search for openings. Create a list of the top companies you’d like to work for, then contact hiring managers directly to let them know you’re searching for a lifecycle or email marketing role. Research if their companies currently have openings. If so, reference the job listings directly and ask if they’d be willing to take a look at your resume. If there are no job listings online, ask if there are upcoming openings.
LinkedIn for Outreach
LinkedIn is the best place to contact hiring managers. Either send them an invitation to connect in order to message them or pay for LinkedIn Sales Navigator (highly recommended), which will allow you to message hiring managers without the need to connect with them first.
Luckily, LinkedIn’s search functionality allows for searching people by their titles. Hiring managers for email marketing jobs usually have titles like marketing manager, marketing director, head of growth, VP of marketing, and CMO. Only reach out to VPs and CMOs if the company is small. Otherwise, you’re unlikely to get a response.
Other Outreach Methods
There are, of course, other ways of finding and applying to jobs, like recruitment agencies and sites like Indeed, where you can apply through an online form, but these often have a much lower success rate than contacting hiring managers directly. Sites like Apollo can help you find email addresses for hiring managers. However, emailing hiring managers can come across as invasive, and email outreach success rates are also lower than LinkedIn messaging as a result. Remember to thoroughly research the companies you want to work for and the managers you want to work under before contacting managers directly.
And that’s a wrap. Now get out there and land your dream email marketing job!