A well-defined marketing organisation structure is essential for successful email marketing structure defines roles, responsibilities and performance expectations. If roles and responsibilities are allocated on an ad hoc bases, says the campaign to campaign, critical tasks such as list updating, list expansion, response management will suffer.

Email marketing is relatively new and hasn’t been slotted firmly into the marketing function. There’s still plenty of exploration and experimenting with the media. Being a low-cost, ubiquitous media that is accessible to all employees, its potential is blurred (as against exclusive access to the marketing department with conventional media such as Print, TV, Outdoor). Maybe it’s about time that Email Marketing moved into mainstream Marketing, and got the budgets and organisation commitment it deserves.

Organising Email Marketing

Understanding the roles and activities in Email Marketing will help us build the Email Marketing organisation. Let’s take a look at the activities and roles:

• Email Marketing
• Develop Email marketing objectives
• Develop Campaign Metrics
• Develop content for each campaign
• Budget for the year as well as individual campaign and quarterly budgets
• Formulate the Annual Email Marketing Plan
• Email Marketing – Micro
• Contact Lists

Develop a contact list

Sanitise the list: Whet the list and eliminate duplicates, weed out badly formed email ids, scrutinise for competition email ids, other contacts who you don’t want in your list.

Segment lists by demographic, psychographic, consumption patterns, targeted products/services or any number of other parameters. Purpose of segmentation is to customise Email Marketing campaigns by segment.

Continuous list building: new contacts can come in from your sales teams, newsletter subscriptions on the website, new customer additions etc.

Keep the list updated

• Remove bounced, spam blocked and bad email ids at the end of each campaign.
• Honour unsubscribe requests and delete their email ids from the Email marketing database.

Develop the campaign

• Specify campaign objectives and analysis framework
• Conceptualise design and messaging
• Manage campaign development and testing

Execute, Manage & Analyse

• Manage campaign execution
• Manage responses
• Update contact list (remove bounces, spam blocked, unsubscribe requests)
• Analyse open rates, bounce rates, click-through rates and any other metrics set up in the campaign objectives

Building the organisation structure

Marketing Manager Role- Email Marketing

Email marketing may not justify a separate Marketing Manager in most organisations irrespective of size. But someone needs to play the role of the Marketing Manager for Email Marketing. The manager will be responsible for the Email Marketing function and will be the final decision maker for email marketing.

His core responsibility will be to set up annual marketing objectives for email marketing, budget funds, allocate and manage funds across campaigns through the year.

Marketing Manager

Should typically report to the Marketing Head of the organisation (Or Group Product Head in larger organisations). Should be responsible and accountable for all Email Marketing of the organisation. Specifically, he/she would play an active role in:

• Setting up the objectives for the year (in line with the overall marketing objectives of the organisation.
• Drawing up budgets, getting sanctions and managing them through the year.
• Build and maintain strategic relationships with external stakeholders such as Email Application service providers, email marketing services providers, list providers, ISP’s etc.
• Will also manage all relationships within the organisation and anchor all Email Marketing initiatives.
• Will contribute to campaign conceptualisation and design.
• Will manage: campaign design, execution, response management, evaluation and list management.

Database Executive

This role will be responsible for all contact databases of the organisation. They will constantly look for resources to add contacts to the database. Will be the anchor for all contact updates received from sales, support and other customer interactions. At the end of each campaign, they will be responsible for updating the contact database with unsubscribe requests, bounces and spam blocks.

At campaign end, the same executive can also perform the analysis of open rates, bounce rates, click through rates etc. The same executive should also be responsible for executing the campaign mailing. They will coordinate with the marketing manager and sales in the course of their jobs.

Direct Sales Executive

The Sales Executive can be attached to the Email Marketing department or could be reporting into sales with a dotted line reporting the Email Marketing Manager. Sales Executive will be responsible and accountable for converting all leads generated from the Email Marketing campaign. A substantial part of the sale process would be on Email, and any Sales Executive in this role should have excellent written communication skills and sound email etiquette.

Copywriting and Design roles

Email Marketing does not call for dedicated creative resources. If the organisation has an in-house creative department, email marketing could be allocated to appropriate creative resources. If design and copywriting are outsourced, the Marketing Manager needs to manage the approvals and change requests.

Outsourcing your Email Marketing

If you do not have access to competent resources in-house, you can outsource your Email Marketing services. You could assign roles piecemeal (design to one provider and execution to another) or get everything under one umbrella. There are benefits and pitfalls in either approach. Analyse your providers, map them to the tasks you need to be done, look for continuity and expertise and freeze on your outsourcing strategy.