Email marketing is a promotional strategy that sends tailored email messages to subscribers with the intent of accomplishing a specific company goal. Businesses use email marketing to promote products, generate sales, send company announcements, and connect with customers. Email marketing is a creative, technical, and strategic endeavor. The creative side involves writing and designing each email in alignment with brand standards and goals. Each email requires specific code to properly display and function across devices and email platforms on the technical end. Email marketing specialists also analyze the results of each campaign. These metrics are used to make strategic decisions regarding the direction of the campaign or overall email marketing strategy.

Email marketers use several tools to obtain new subscribers, develop email templates, send campaigns, and analyze specific key performance indicators. A few of the top email marketing tools include Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Omnisend, and Hubspot. Within each platform, marketers have access to an assortment of tools designed to help optimize email marketing campaigns. These tools include drag-and-drop email templates, custom coding features, campaign reports, and subscriber profiles. Each tool helps marketers make creative and strategic decisions about the overall campaign. Many email tools integrate with critical business tools such as customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, and inbound marketing software for a full-fledged approach to online marketing.

Good email marketers possess a myriad of technical, creative, and analytical skills. Email marketers must be able to make strategic, creative, and technical decisions to improve overall campaign performance. Technical skills include coding with HTML, CSS, and other programming languages and an in-depth understanding of the most common email marketing tools. Email marketers must also use their creativity to write compelling message copy and design an intriguing layout. Good email marketers have a compelling ability to turn data points into actionable next steps or changes. Possessing a combination of these three skill sets is the key to a high-performing email marketer.