Self-Improvement Guide for Excellent Email Marketers

Published: 2016-05-20

The success of email marketing campaigns is closely related to the personal knowledge and skills of email marketers. Throughout the planning and execution of email marketing campaigns, email marketers need to master some basic and necessary skills that sometimes even affect the overall marketing situation. So how should email marketers conduct self-improvement to truly be competent in their work with ease? The following is an excerpt from the 2015 work plan of a front-line professional marketer from a world-leading intelligent marketing service provider. In the new year, upgrade marketing techniques and get new skills√.

1. Subscribe to a large number of brand email newsletters
As a practitioner in the email marketing industry, subscribing to a large number of external emails from various brands, different industry fields, and competitor products and services is a daily work necessity. Understanding external email dynamics is a good way for us to understand industry development trends, peek into competitor strategies, broaden our horizons, and inspire inspiration.

2. Use tags or create documents to record
When you receive a good email, use special tags or create dedicated documents to classify and archive them for reference when conducting email marketing later. Step by step, you will accumulate many good ideas and gradually establish your own resource library.

3. Practice copywriting diligently
The control of words, the arrangement of sentence patterns, the layout of paragraphs, and even the insight into product characteristics and human nature, and the free switching of different types of email copy. Creating an excellent email copy with both internal and external qualities is very difficult for many email marketers from liberal arts backgrounds, let alone pseudo-literary people like the author. So do you know the author's secret to practice? Proficiency comes from diligence, nothing else. Strengthen learning, but you must not lose in posture. When writing copy, first treat yourself as a writer or reporter editor.

4. Be an aesthetic connoisseur
Making emails is like making a magazine. Exquisite packaging and pleasantness can often bring unexpected results. In the daily work of email marketers, when judging the beauty of emails, they should be like designers, performers, and connoisseurs. Even if they cannot create beauty, they should have excellent aesthetic vision.

5. Use the useful inverted pyramid method
The inverted pyramid method is a good way to ensure that emails do not distract users. If you find that you need to carry too much information and appeal points in an email, by using the inverted pyramid method, sorting these interest-related points from least to most important can well help you make reasonable choices and distinctions in design, copy, content and other aspects, so as to avoid excessive information distracting users and help users reasonably focus their attention on the purpose of email marketing.

6. Study the philosophy of buttons
In emails, buttons are another important element comparable to main email elements such as copy and design style. The reason why they are important is that they are the key link of conversion. In the past, we focused on optimizing copy content and design style, but now, we need more than that. We also need to deeply understand all aspects of buttons and study them as an element that connects various elements and has independent effects. What kind of buttons do what kind of users like? Does the shape of the button relate to user clicks? How to place the button position? A series of questions like these need you to study with a philosophical perspective. Remember, the hub link of conversion is worth your extra effort!

7. Professional skills that must be mastered
A/B testing, lifecycle emails, behavior-triggered emails, personalized emails, automated marketing, email data management, SMS email APP multi-channel integration... Email marketers need to master and flexibly apply these cutting-edge technologies and professional skills in the industry field.

8. Learn to do user surveys
Regularly conduct various user survey activities to collect various feedback from users. Email marketers should establish a set of survey content systems suitable for themselves based on user characteristics, and use this to obtain opportunities to deeply understand users and needs.

9. Attach importance to new user cultivation and guidance
Cultivating new users is the source of customer conversion. Whether it is sending a polite and solemn welcome email or nurturing emails for users within the new user period, let's treat these users like our own children, with patience and care. This is an excellent opportunity for users to understand your brand from scratch. Email marketers need to pay attention to their needs like parents and meet the various curiosity and desires of these "children".

10. Active feedback and proactive action
The rise of young consumer groups has made consumer groups show new characteristics. Compared with the past, they are more proactive in obtaining consumption information and consumption. At the same time, consumers also hope that brand merchants can respond more actively, and become more tolerant and accepting of merchants' timely proactive promotion and actions, which can be seen from the recent WeChat Moments advertising promotion. Therefore, learning how to take proactive action is a new skill that email marketers in the new era must possess. For example, actively sending unsubscribe channel emails to inactive users, actively seeking user feedback and forwarding sharing in emails. These practices well meet the characteristics of the younger generation of users.

11. Personalized communication from person to person
Forget B2B and B2C. In email marketing, it is more important to remember H2H (human-to-human). Whether it is writing email content like a friend one-on-one, or sending personalized emails in the name of the CEO, let every user of yours feel one-on-one interpersonal communication.

12. Win users' friendship with patience
The significant effect of email marketing takes time. This is a process of long-term interaction between you and users. First, you get users to add an address list and gain their trust. Then, you establish a complete email marketing system including new user marketing plans, lifecycle emails, automated intelligent emails, etc. Then, you gradually improve and optimize each link. Finally, you easily establish long-term friendly relationships with users and obtain long-term and sustainable considerable email marketing benefits. This really takes a long time. Only with patience and persistence, never giving up, can you become a leader.