: 16 December 2020

6 tips for hiring an email marketing expert for your company

For years the imminent death of email marketing has been announced by digital experts worldwide.

Some say that no one bothers anymore to look at the dozens of promotional emails that hit our inboxes, others say that consumer attention has been diverted to newer technologies (social networks, blogs and so on).

However, according to data from Campaign Monitor, email marketing today is still the king of Digital Marketing, with an ROI of 4400% and a return of €44 for every €1 invested. For this reason, companies keep on hiring email marketing talent as part of their global digital strategy.

But beware, hiring someone who can make sure your newsletters don't end up in your recipients' spam box or trash folder is no easy task.

In this post, we propose some guidelines to follow so that your company may hire someone who knows how to turn email marketing into a profitable source of income.

Make sure they understand Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is the perfect combination between digital content and personalized communication.

A candidate who has worked on Inbound projects understands the power of email marketing when it comes to driving qualified traffic to a web page, blog, or landing page. Inbound marketers understand the importance of segmenting recipients based on the type of content they have been consulting on your page. But above all, they understand that email marketing is a long-term tactic, and therefore don't remove from their database those recipients who have not turned into customers after receiving the first promotional email.

They know CRM and marketing automation

Nowadays email marketing can hardly be separated from CRM. Sure you can still work with tools such as MailChimp and the likes to send out your campaigns, but those basic tools don't offer the same level of marketing automation as modern CRMs such as SalesForce, MS Dynamics and SugarCRM do.

Look for candidates who have already worked with advanced CRM solutions, ideally the CRM platform your company is already using, as this will save you precious time that would otherwise need to be invested in training when onboarding freshly hired email marketing talent.

They love analyzing data

An important part of the job of an email marketing manager is to analyze email openings, CTRs and overall conversion data. This on one hand allows them to present meaningful reports to top management, and on the other hand to further optimise and segment existing email marketing databases.

Make sure the candidates you are hiring have a very good level of Excel, that they know how to work with pivot tables and that they have a good command of data presentation tools such as Tableau.

Someone with knowledge of Google Analytics will also be a good investment for your email marketing efforts, since GA is a powerful tool to analyze email campaign performance as part of your global digital strategy.

They have basic webdesign knowledge

Although in many companies the design and layout of email campaigns is not carried out directly by the email marketing manager, it is always good that they have knowledge of HTML and CSS, since in this way they can solve small technical glitches before the final delivery (for example an image not loading due to the use of relative paths instead of absolute paths).

An email marketing manager with knowledge of photoshop or InDesign will also be able to solve simple image resolution problems without having to rely on the help of a professional web designer.

Last but not least, responsive web design is becoming the new norm when designing emails. Someone who understand responsive concepts such as bootstrap coding is more likely to drive your web team in the right direction when designing emails.

They have strong attention to detail

Attention to detail is an essential soft skill when scheduling email marketing campaigns. Just imagine the reputational damage that can be caused by typographical errors in the title of a promotional email, misspellings in the body of the message, or inaccurate expiration dates for a promotion.

A good way to test a candidate's ability to pay attention to detail is to do a short quick-read test during the job interview, in which we include typographical or spelling errors, and check if our candidate is able to spot them.

They know email marketing best practices

Email Marketing is an ever changing world, in which major players such as Gmail or Outlook constantly update their anti-spam algorithms.

Therefore, it is key to ensure that our candidate has good knowledge of the best practices in today's Emailing world. Ask them if they know what are the criteria to take into account when choosing the words that will appear in the title of an email and how to optimize the HTML code so that the emails we send out don't go to Spam.

Also, they should be able to know anti-spam tactics such as sending out a limited amount of emails per hour so as to avoid triggering known mail clients' red flags.

To sum it all up, a good email marketing profile requires both hard skills for the more technical part of the mailing campaigns, as well as soft skills to guarantee an attractive writing style, catchy headlines and error-proof content.

And of course, it doesn't hurt if our candidates show a touch of humor during the interviews ... after all, the recipients of our emails are every day people and we all like to brighten our day with a smile from time to time!