Blog post By Paula Chiocchi on 2016-08-17
When it comes to email marketing, the pros know that success comes from gathering clicks and conversions, and nurturing leads into sales. But how can email marketers turn their successes into their own promotion, and land a higher position or get a raise?
Here are seven suggestions:
- Make your manager look good: No matter which career path you choose, making your manager look good should always be a top priority. The biggest way you can achieve that goal as an email marketer is to deliver leads and (hopefully) revenue into your organization. But don’t stop there: it’s essential to know what other objectives your manager might have, and how your results impact overall performance. Once this is understood, do everything you can to support your organization and bring solutions to problems – instead of being one of them.
- Measure your results: Make sure you know your organization’s key marketing metrics and how you can impact them. If the key metric is, say, revenue, know how your efforts support revenue generation, and be able to clearly communicate this when provided the opportunity. Luckily, email marketers are quite skilled in data, metrics and analytics, so providing tangible, measurable results should come easier to you than others. Proclaim your successes, and back them up with data.
- Don’t be a geek: While being skilled at data is an advantage, don’t provide so much detail that you lose (or confuse) the attention of high-level thinking C-suite executives. If you do, you may be considered too geeky or technical to be a part of their strategic conversations going forward. Start your briefings with high-level results, and provide short, easy to understand metrics to back them up. (If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can keep the detailed data in the appendix of your presentation, in case it’s needed.)
- Educate, don’t intimidate: Don’t assume your colleagues and managers understand the details of email marketing like you do. This is your area of expertise, and they likely came up the ranks via a different path. Provide a bit of background for edification purposes, and avoid acronyms that you think will impress (e.g. CTR). Explain what your metrics mean, why they’re important, and how they contribute to higher-level objectives.
- Partner with sales: According to HubSpot, organizations with good alignment between sales and marketing achieve 20% annual revenue growth on average. Don’t collect your leads and simply throw them over the proverbial wall to sales. Instead, set up regular meetings with the sales team to learn what leads are delivering the best results, and what you can do to help them be more successful – and make more money (that will get their attention). In addition to helping them achieve more, you will learn about deals that close thanks to your activities, tying your efforts – and you personally – to the incremental revenue.
- Always be learning: Always strive to get better at your role, and invest your time in training, articles, blogs and learning the latest technologies and trends. By attending training or industry events – or even speaking at them – you will learn more marketing tactics and successes that you can use in your role or in other aspects of your marketing duties or department. Be a marketing authority and a contributor with fresh, new ways of overcoming challenges and achieving success.
- Volunteer for other assignments: While succeeding at your email marketing job is key, you will not be seen as a “one-trick pony” if you take on additional assignments and responsibility. Perhaps your company is launching a user group event, creating a new website, or even planning to hold a company picnic. Volunteering will expose you to different people within or outside or your organization, give you an opportunity to show off your creativity, leadership and people skills, be viewed in a different light and potentially be part of another successful initiative. Obviously, you don’t want your primary duties to slip, so make sure the effort gets a green light from your manager, and coordinate your plans with the overall marketing team so that they understand how they might be impacted.
Ready to move your career up a notch? Take these tips and run with them and you may find more success in your future. If the end result isn’t a job promotion, at the very least you will put yourself on a stronger path for earning the recognition you deserve in your organization.
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