How to Hire the Email Marketing Strategist That Converts

Social media platforms have fad periods of time but none remain as relevant and useful as email marketing to reach customers directly. Surprisingly, though, businesses are unable to utilize email effectively. They tend to view email marketing simply as a tool for sending regular newsletters and announcements to customers. What they are missing is a higher level of optimization for their email campaigns. Bridging the gap between sending emails and selling products and services by finding the right Email Marketing Strategist.

The difference between sending emails and selling products online often can be attributed to the expertise behind the email campaigns. To bridge this gap to create highly converting email marketing campaigns, businesses. This person must have the required knowledge of data, of human psychology as well as of design in order to create the optimal email marketing strategy for any company.

Email Marketing Strategist

Business owners may believe that creating email marketing is simply another form of copywriting and can be treated similarly to creating content on a website. Typically, many business owners send out weekly newsletters or sporadic emails containing information about a product launch.

By relying on basic communication with customers, a business is leaving a large amount of revenue on the table. In order to achieve high-converting email marketing campaigns, the way in which you are using email for communication with customers needs to be looked at in a different light and treated as a form of precise orchestration utilizing data to achieve desired results.

Beyond the Basics: Email marketing strategy goes beyond simple content creation and must be applied in conjunction with the rest of your online marketing. The Email Marketing Strategist will apply technical optimization to ensure that all emails are fully responsive on all devices, are optimized for fast load times and apply search-friendly practices to email content.

This means that not only will email content be optimized for the best possible engagement but also that email content will be structured and contain links to the highest value pages on your website in order to maximize the benefit of email marketing for overall digital visibility.

The Value of Expertise: While an Email Marketing Specialist can develop emails to encourage engagement, an Email Marketing Strategist takes that a step further by turning that engagement into actual growth for your business.

By using data and studying user behavior, an Email Marketing Strategist will work intently to create email marketing campaigns that have high ROI, such as lead nurturing, reducing customer churn, and direct sales. The Email Marketing Strategist will also work to optimize for deliverability and open rates, so that the emails that are sent will actually reach the inbox and prompt the recipient to take action.

Information for your Audience: Your email marketing will function best as a filter to pick and choose from your subscribers if you are able to segment and personalize. When a subscriber receives content about things in which they are interested and are at the correct stage in the buyer’s journey, that will be information for your audience to find what they are looking for and turn into customers.

Identifying Your Specific Business Needs 

Define what your success will look like for your new business. By hiring someone to help your business grow without clearly outlining the objectives that you want the new hire to reach you are only sending them off into the unknown without a compass to guide them. Eventually you will find someone to help your business to grow but that individual will most likely have objectives vastly different from your own, potentially stymieing their ability to be of value.

Define Your Goals: You’re focusing on filling the top of your sales funnel with high quality leads OR attempting to nurture your existing customers in order to retain them? Right now your main goal is to drive huge amounts of revenue with super aggressive and highly motivational promotional campaigns in order to reach your goals?. There are conversion specialists that run high-intent sales sequences with aggressive A/B testing, and retention specialists that can build out loyalty loops and engagement via email newsletters. 

Current State Audit: This audit reviews your current email marketing efforts, such as your open rates and click-through rates, to establish a benchmark for where you are currently. While your open rates may be greater than anticipated, your click-through rates may remain stuck.

A review of your current email marketing templates, subject lines, and your email paths (technical email) could reveal items that, with a bit of fine-tuning, could result in greater results from your current system. You may find that you don’t need to invest in a heavy-lifting email marketing strategist who will create a system from scratch but rather someone who can make your best emails even better.

Budgeting for Talent: Next you should consider the size and complexity of your business in determining the amount of expertise required and match this with a corresponding price tag. A small start-up will no doubt need someone who is flexible to handle correspondence, as well as automation of certain areas, while large, mature organizations with lots of advanced segmentation sets could benefit from a Senior Email Marketing Strategist to architect multi-email campaigns across different channels.

Establish a true budget for hiring, and clearly define roles and responsibilities to ensure you don’t pay for infrastructure and skills that you don’t need, as well as not undershoot the mark for bringing in a counterpart who can handle tasks of a coordinator.

Essential Skills and Competencies to Look For 

When hiring for an email marketing strategist role, most companies focus on the surface-level qualities of the candidate. In reality, finding the right partner is far more complicated and requires hiring for a multitude of hybrid qualities that showcase a candidate’s unique capabilities. Prioritizing key core competencies of potential candidates will help you to find the right person who can take your company’s email marketing efforts to new heights.

Your ideal email marketing strategist is going to need to have a very strong base of knowledge of email automation tools like Klaviyo, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign. They will need to be able to set up complex automations as well as be able to work within the interface to add new data, segmentation, etc. They will also test subject lines via A/B testing and be familiar with ways to increase deliverability.

Content Mastery: Many email marketing strategists are able to craft effective emails but can’t write within a brand’s specific voice and style. Their copy should maintain the brand’s unique perspective and continually incorporate new information as results are gathered from past email campaigns. In regards to crafting an effective email, writing within a specific style is not enough. 

He or she must gain insight into how readers are experiencing or perceiving an email that has been sent and continually make improvements so that future communications are effective. His or her emails should additionally possess a sense of flow, in which the reader experiences a gradual increase in interest throughout the communication with the end result being a strong call to action that continues to prompt the recipient to complete the desired action(s).

Strategic Planning: While there are plenty of email marketing strategists available who are able to develop strategic email marketing campaigns, there are few that truly understand the SEO-content connection. Finding a strategist who will develop a content roadmap for your business and utilize your email marketing efforts to reinforce your efforts to build digital authority on your site is a challenging task.

In order to find someone who will be a good strategist for your business, look for someone who can work within a silo and create a content strategy and email marketing plan that work to reinforce your business’s efforts to build SEO. A good email marketing partner will be able to repurpose high performing website content in order to send it in email campaigns. In this way, your email marketing efforts will reinforce your efforts to build digital authority on your site.

Readability Optimization Tactics: Every email should be written in a way that enables people to quickly scan and get the main points. Optimizing email content using headings, subheadings and even bulleted lists to create easily readable content are key skills that we look for.

Being able to write easily readable email content, every email strategist that we work with is also an expert in using strategic anchor text within email content. The action-oriented links within email content drive click-through rates and hiring an email strategist who treats every email as a mini-landing page is a strategic decision that ensures all email communication is not only optimized for readability but also for conversion.

Where to Find Top-Tier Email Talent 

So why use freelance marketplaces with high volumes of general-purpose freelancers? They don’t have the depth and quality of a community for finding exceptional email marketing strategists to boost your email marketing ROI for the long-term. Instead, try to find Niche Job Boards and communities of high-level digital marketing specialists as well as Growth Marketers, E-commerce Specialists and Email Automation Specialists. Also look for jobs within renowned marketing associations.

Niche Job Boards: This type of online resource does an excellent job weeding out freelance dirtbags who can’t do quality work to support your bottom line. Niche online job listings tend to pool highly qualified individuals because they only include jobs advertising from Growth Marketers, eCommerce Marketing Agencies, highly-experienced Email Automation experts, etc. Most Marketing related freelance platforms are also in association with major marketing communities.

They “certify” freelance applicants thereby limiting a company’s risk, which as a rule are only cost-effective if you hire a qualified employee who knows the ins and outs of automation of the emails for your online ventures.

Professional Networks - LinkedIn. As one of the largest job platforms in the world, LinkedIn can be a fantastic resource to find high-level strategists. The problem is that most business owners use it poorly. Don’t simply post up a job listing on LinkedIn - search for people on the platform who already have experience with your email automation tools. Look at their profiles and see if they have any case studies or work that have been done in the past with email marketing. Also, get involved in the industry-specific groups on the platform (or Slack communities) - there is nothing better than getting a referral from a trusted peer to sift through a pile of resume

Agencies vs. Freelancers: A look at the types of partnerships you can sign up for. There are agencies, composed of copywriters, designers and data analysts that can deliver email campaigns for you on a done-for-you basis. There are pluses and minuses to this, including the high cost of employing a team of experts versus the low overheads of hiring a single, freelance, specialist. 

If you run a small team, a freelance strategist is likely to be a great addition to your team, integrating fully into your current structure. Agencies are ideal for large businesses that want to be able to scale up email marketing on a high volume basis, employing a variety of different campaigns across different channels. Weighing up the merits of your required workflow against your budget is key in determining the best partnership for you and your business.

The Interview Process: Strategies for Success 

You can test a candidate’s ability in this regard through a structured and rigorous interview process to gauge their real world application of email strategy.

Portfolio Deep-Dive: While the outside of the emails that a digital marketer for email such as yourself includes may look pretty enough to hang on the wall of a creative office, it is when you get past the design of an email that you start to learn how effective it really is. Every email that goes out has a very logical and clear application of a marketers strategy that can be put into place, in order to elicit a positive reaction by the person reading the email. 

Look through the various past email campaigns of your interviewee and pick the various individual emails, in a particular campaign, and then have the candidate describe the very strategic campaign they had developed for a particular set of emails. You have to get into the very detailed description, especially regarding how a marketer structures an email hierarchy. 

Does the subject line create enough interest so as to be opened by the reader? Is the body of the email then created in a fashion to allow for very easy reading, so that the body of the email is very easy to read in order to assist the reader in ascertaining the needed information in the email. In turn, also take a look at the metrics in regards to the e-mail, past campaigns such as the open rate of emails that were sent, click-through rate (of links in emails), as well as the various overall and, even more importantly, the conversion of a campaign. 

Behavioral Questions: The ability to perform quality control checks prior to the distribution of a campaign is invisible marketing. Ask a candidate how he/she conducts the review process for his/her campaigns. Look for a well-organized, systematic and structured set of processes the candidate goes through prior to distributing his/her campaigns.

Does he/she test whether emails will display correctly on all mobile phones? Does he/she test links to ensure that no 404 errors are distributed in the mail? A quality email marketing strategist would set up a feedback loop with his/her customers in order to rework distributions of future emails in order to enhance customer experience. He/She should outline processes and have an ability to work within a team to refine distributions of email campaigns prior to launch.

Technical Testing: While your email marketer must support your broader digital efforts, if your email marketing strategy is going to contribute to your wider online goals then your email marketing specialist needs to have a good understanding of SEO and the relationship it has to high quality content. Just because the Email Marketing Specialist is not the SEO Specialist, does not mean they do not need to have an understanding of linking strategy and of the importance of clear anchor text for Search Engines. 

Find out if the candidate has experience of using UTM parameters and also of completing page titles to ensure that when an email is read by a customer and they then click through to your website as a result, they are arriving at a page that has been optimized for search, in order to maximize the potential for conversion. Candidates that see email marketing in the context of overall website growth and understand how emails can aid in URL indexing and thereby increase site authority, are more likely to be considered for a job than those who view it as simply a task.

Integrating the Strategist into Your Workflow 

Onboarding and Alignment: As before, get your new email marketing strategist up to speed and immersed in your brand’s, products’, and service’s ecosystem quickly. It’s not enough for them to learn about your various products and then send out emails about them. They must also get a handle on your brand’s voice and tone and really internalize your content’s long-term strategy. This means giving them your brand style guide and other assets like customer personas, and archives of your best and worst emails. Their first email should read as though it were written by you.

Regular Reviews: As before, it’s not enough for your email marketing strategist to leave your company after the onboarding process with knowledge of how to execute certain tasks, etc. Your email marketing strategist needs to be able to collaborate regularly with your team to develop your content. Set up regular reviews of your email marketing performance to continue aligning email marketing with your overall strategy (weekly or bi-weekly is typical).

These reviews need to go beyond simply reviewing raw numbers in your email reports. Use these reviews to understand why email marketing performed the way it did (even in success and failure), understand nuances in your audience, and work together to evolve your long-term content strategy and continue aligning with your company’s goals.

Tools & Data: Provide access to your email service provider (ESP), CRM and other relevant analytics platforms. This will allow your email marketing strategist to make data-driven decisions to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing. By having access to real-time data, they will be able to track trends, troubleshoot issues affecting deliverability and ensure the success of future campaigns in terms of ROI.

Actionable Tips for Immediate Email Success 

Here’s how to make your email campaign a success right away. To begin with, pay attention to the principle of readability and precision while implementing the idea of Structure for Success to your email campaign. Using short paragraphs and simple sentences, that are able to represent complex thought, allows readers to easily read the material on any type of device. Adding Visual Clarity to your emails using descriptive headings and subheadings increases the emails’ scannability and makes readers immediately aware of main points of the email. 

Last but not least, Targeting should be mastered in order to add targeted keyword phrases that are related to subscribers’ intent in the material. In order for email to attract quality leads that are likely to generate revenue, it’s very important that the material represents topics that are of great interest to subscribers and relate to their needs. Thus, by introducing three simple elements – structure, clarity and precise targeting – email marketing can reach great heights in order to generate desired results in subscribers.

FAQ: Hiring an Email Marketing Strategist

• What is the difference between an email writer and an email strategist?

While email writers are concerned with writing high quality email copy, email strategists are concerned with the big picture; that being the setup of email automation, email segmentation, and email performance tracking and reporting as part of the larger conversion optimization system.

• How much money am i required to pay?

Professional email strategists charge depending on their experience, where senior strategists could be billed out on a professional level for monthly retainers or on an hourly basis.

• Which duration does it take to see ROI?

Immediate fixes within the email systems can give quick wins. However, a good email strategy is only beginning to give you a compounding ROI after 3 to 6 months.

Call to Action

High-converting email marketing does not equal large volumes of sendings. Rather, it is determined by the expertise behind the corresponding email marketing strategy. By means of expert support, simple newsletters can quickly become campaigns that are specifically tailored to the corresponding target group and generate substantial success.

So whether you are starting out from scratch or merely adding Email Marketing to your existing campaign arsenal, the best investment you can make for your company’s future is to engage an Email Marketing Strategist who can unlock email potential for you and assist you to implement effectively in order to gain maximum results in the shortest time possible.

Find someone that matches your goals and tech stack.