Email Marketing Team Roles, Collaboration, and Salaries

Are you putting together an email marketing team? Or looking to improve your email team workflows? Maybe your interested to see how email marketing teams collaborate in other companies to produce emails? Find out all of the answers to these questions, and more!

Email marketing is not dead. With more and more privacy issues surfacing on social media platforms, email marketing is increasing in popularity.

For businesses, email marketing is great for promoting products or services, developing customer relations, and reaching out to potential new customers.

According to one study, 59% of marketers feel that email is the most effective channel they have to generate income, and research shows that email is more successful than social media for customer acquisition.

But a successful email marketing campaign requires a team of professionals with specialized roles to get the best results. This is creating a demand for various email marketing specialists to fill these roles enabling companies to build an effective email marketing team.

Email Marketing Team Roles & Specialists

Not every email marketing team requires the same specialists. In small businesses, a team member may take on more than one role. However, in general, a good email marketing team will be made up of the following roles:

• Email Marketing Strategist
• Project Manager
• Email Designer
• Copywriter
• Email Marketing Developer
• Data Engineer

Email Marketing Strategist

The strategist is the person who comes up with the overall email marketing plan. They are the ones who manage campaigns and ensure that specific goals are being framed well and taken into account.

A strategist must understand how to research target audiences as well as recognize where the opportunities to generate revenue are.

Basically they must determine the best way to implement email marketing to reach the marketing goals of a business.

Without a good strategy, an email marketing campaign will not be successful.

Email Marketing Project Manager

The main duty of the project manager is to oversee all the other roles of the email marketing team members.

They are responsible for gathering the required assets for email campaigns as well as allocating resources.

Project managers set timelines for different tasks and ensure that they are completed on time. Additional duties include communicating across different departments on the status of a project and any problems that may come up.

They are also in charge of managing tools such as email automation platforms, project management, and communication tools such as Sharepoint, Slack, and Trello.

Email Marketing Designer

The designer is responsible for the look and feel of the email. They are the ones that deal with visual content such as images, videos, GIFs, and graphics and understand how these and other factors such as white space, color, and contrast affect conversions.

Email marketing designers must understand how emails are viewed on different devices as well as the design constraints created by different email clients.

This requires working closely with both the strategist as well as the developer to ensure a design that will be responsive across both desktop and mobile devices as well as the many different email inboxes.

They must identify and understand the core objectives of a campaign and oversee consistency in the company brand and messaging.

Email marketing tools a designer uses may include graphic design tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator as well as various email template builders and editors.

Email Marketing Copywriter

High-quality content that converts is the responsibility of the email marketing copywriter.

The best email marketing strategies and email designs are essentially useless without good quality, compelling content.

The goal of the copywriter is to first get people to open a marketing email. And once opened, to motivate them to take action.

People read emails differently than they do pages of a website and a good copywriter understands this. We can’t talk about email copy without email design. That’s why designers and copywriters must work together to ensure they complement each other.

Check out our series of resources all about email copywrtiting best practices.

Email Marketing Developer

The Node.js developer is the person who technically codes the email that the designer has come up with.

They are responsible for building the email HTML and inline CSS.

Email clients render emails differently. Unlike web development, there are no rendering standards across email clients which makes the developer’s job more difficult.

Developers are the email marketing team members responsible for handling the technical aspects of email automation, deliverability, ensuring spam filters aren’t preventing emails from reaching inboxes, and working with designers to make emails appear as they should across all devices and email clients.

They should be familiar with various email marketing software such as Rejoiner and be responsible for A/B testing and the associated tools to see which version of an email works best with your audience.

Email Marketing Data Engineer

A data engineer ensures that the correct data is included in the correct email.

Companies often use segmentation in email campaigns. And having a data engineer on your team will help prevent failed segmentations.

The data engineer will also examine and analyze performance data to help improve future campaigns. This way, the email marketing team can determine when personalization works best, the best time and days of the week for sending emails, the types of subject lines with the best performance, and other factors that will improve the results of an email marketing campaign.

Companies can fill this position in-house, use freelancers, or contract out the entire email marketing campaign.

Your business may want to consider a company like Mobilunity to fill the roles in your email marketing team. They can provide a team of experienced and proven professionals to ensure your email marketing campaigns succeed, allowing you to reap the full benefits of email marketing.

Collaborating on an Email Marketing Campaign

Conducting an email campaign is a collaborative effort between every member of the team. Developing an email campaign consists of the following basic steps:

Developing an email marketing strategy

The strategist is tasked with developing the overall marketing plan. They will determine the goal of the campaign, its intended target market, and how the campaign’s success will be measured.

Establish an email design

The designer and strategist will work together to establish an email template design.

This could be as simple as selecting a template from a free collection online, designing a new master template, or creating an email layout for one-time use.

The designer will determine what type of visual elements should be included such as images or GIFs and how they will be presented subject to the strategist’s approval.

Write email copy and design images

After the email template design has been established, the copywriter, working with the strategist and data engineer identifies the core message they want to communicate. Their goal is to come up with the most compelling copy that most likely to convert readers.

They have to determine which calls-to-actions get the most clicks, and where personalization and other opportunities can be taken advantage of.

The designer will create specific visual elements to be included, working with the copywriter to determine what images best support the message. The developer will also be involved in this phase to determine feasibility and weigh in on other technical aspects.

Coding the email

During this step, the developer will convert the design and content into code. They need to determine what custom code if any is required as well as testing and optimizing for all devices and email clients.

Some teams skip this process entirely by using a drag and drop email builder which allows them to design emails and generates HTML code automatically.

Chamaileon for example offers exactly that. Our email builder is flexible and has many design features, allowing marketers to create any email layout they have in mind. Anyone can create HTML emails using Chamaileon, no coding knowledge required.

Integrate CRM

The data engineer and developer work together in this step to integrate the CRM or another database.

The goal here is to identify and implement segmentation opportunities, validate data integrity and personalization, and integrate the CRM with the email platform.

Test and validate

This will involve all email marketing team members to review the final copy and design. They need to make sure that correct A/B tests are being used, test variables, and otherwise make sure everything is good to go.

Overseeing and coordinating all the above is the project manager.

They keep everybody focused, keep track of deadlines, and ensure team members are communicating to facilitate the completion of the project. Thus following the deadlines is the best time tracking for business growth and investment in the future. Project managers are aware of every step in the process and make use of collaboration tools like time tracker with screenshots to keep the work flowing smoothly at every step. Here’s a quick wrap up of the email production workflow.

Email Marketing Team Salaries 

The salaries for specialists working in email marketing can vary quite a bit depending on:

• Where the job is located
• The email marketing position
• The person’s experience

And many other factors.

The following are median salaries in the United States for the different roles on an email marketing team for 2018 and for 2020.

Again, salaries vary widely depending on location and other factors and the salaries in the United States do fall within the higher range.

Wrapping Up

Although it isn’t cheap putting together an email marketing team salary, having a team of email marketing specialists to develop and manage your campaigns will definitely produce long term benefits.

Increase sales and build up your company by assembling a team of email marketing specialists to get the most out of your campaigns.

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