Day in the life of
Email Deliverability Specialist – John C. Simmons
My typical day as a Deliverability Expert involves reviewing and analyzing email programs. To make it simpler, I make sure that our clients get their emails delivered. But unlike personal emails, we send commercial emails and that makes it a little more challenging. Our team has to make sure that our clients’ emails were not sent to the spam folder or blocked by the inbox provider.
What’s important in my job as an email deliverability expert is to help those doing cold outreach or sending emails to their subscribers. The success of their email marketing campaign will depend on various metrics: open rates (numbers of subscribers who opened the email we sent) both desktop and mobile, click-through rates (number of readers who clicked on links on the email), bounce rate (number of those who didn’t receive the email), engagement rate, etc.
So, the job is more than just keeping emails from being spammed. You’ve got to be able to know some trends for open rates of email by industry, the time when to best send your email, or whether you need to segment your email list.
Screenshot of our software
At our company, we use our very own email deliverability tool. Although when we do AB testing (determines which campaign works better), we use different email platforms. Gmail, Outlook, AOL, and Yahoo! are some of them.
I also spend time reading emails, keeping a list of all projects our team is working on, and building an email list for our clients.
Pros
About the pros and cons of being in this field, I like that my job is like a rare breed. The job itself is fun. You don’t just send an email or an ad, you’re building a relationship with a person. Strategy, tone, and design can make or break your emails. Of course, I won’t deny it. There’s a money factor too. The pay level may not be as high as software engineers (not really sure about this), but it gives you motivation to also give your best each day as your efforts are rewarded.
Now that we transitioned to remote work, another pro is to work at a time that you’re most comfortable with.
Cons
The downside, for me, is that mastering email deliverability requires lifelong learning. Email marketing is changing and you have to adapt to those changes for the benefit of your campaigns. For example, now we have to consider designing mobile-friendly emails or use images to make some of our messages easy to understand to certain subscribers. If SEOs have to observe changing algorithms, email marketers consider the changing factors on what it takes to get into their target audiences’ inboxes – be that sending frequency, the better time to send emails, etc. This applies to our team as well.
It can be a con because sometimes it feels uneasy knowing that the knowledge you’ve already mastered in the past suddenly becomes irrelevant or least important. But of course, it can be a good thing since it leads to both personal and professional growth. You know, no monotony at work.
Advice to students interested in this career path
For those who wish to get into this career path, my humble advice is to surround yourself with smart and inspirational people. Once you’re on the job, you don’t really have to be the smartest gal or guy. You’ll work as a team.
As for education, the typical requirement is at least an undergraduate degree in the field of marketing, communications, business, web design, graphic design, or related fields. The preferred skillset would be strategic thinking, conceptual skills, content writing, and creative thinking. But you know, beyond knowing sales strategies, it would be best if they are motivated to deeply understand their target audience for lead generation and how to nurture those contacts.
