In today’s digital landscape, staying at the top of someone’s inbox is equivalent to staying top of mind. But there’s a delicate balance between sending thoughtful, effective messages out and simply spamming everyone on your list. Retail and consumer-based organizations especially rely on this form of marketing to attract customers and bring in business.

It’s essential that businesses find a candidate who understands this concept and can put together an effective strategy. This email marketing professional should have an arsenal of skills that can help to achieve the overall goals of the organization.

Here are just a few of the skills you should look out for while seeking an email marketing professional to add to your team.

Automation

Depending on the frequency of your email marketing campaign, it could be incredibly helpful to automate some of the work required. If your candidate knows how to use one of the many tools that can be utilized for this purpose, they could compose the emails ahead of time and schedule them to be sent on a specific date and time. This allows them more time for other functions of their job, which could be just as vital.

Segmentation and Targeting

There is a lot of content out there, so yours needs to be relevant in order to have a chance of making an impact. Therefore, a good email marketing candidate should understand how to both segment and target your audience properly. Without these skills, you could risk wasting both time and resources.

Campaign Testing

There are a lot of factors at play in an email marketing campaign. You have to fine-tune every detail – from the heading and subject line, to the formatting and timing. When making all of these decisions, it’s important to have experience with A/B testing. Your ideal professional should be able to conduct this testing, then make suggestions based on the results in order to increase engagement.

Analysis and Reporting

Similarly, all data is important in email marketing. It’s key that your candidate is able to look at the data collected from past campaigns and adjust their strategy accordingly. This practice can increase open and click-through rates over time, and thus have a positive effect on ROI. Ask a candidate for clear examples of when they’ve done this, and you’ll get a good measure of how effective they can be.

Tools

Using the right tools can help anyone to do their job more effectively. It’s important that your candidate has knowledge of and experience with tools like MailChimp, Exact Target, or Marketo. Google Analytics is another tool that they can use for campaign testing and the like, so experience with that platform is definitely a plus.

Content

It’s important that every message your company sends out has a purpose. If your content is not relevant or is poorly composed, it can do more harm than good. So writing samples or examples of past emails can be extremely helpful when screening an email marketing candidate.

If you’d like help finding an email marketing professional for your business, or for any other staffing needs, reach out to an expert consultant at Michael Page today. Or, you can take a look at our job postings. If you choose to apply, we will be in touch with any relevant opportunities.