12/2025

Essential Email Marketing Skills for 2026 Onwards

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If you work in email, full-time, part-time, or “that thing you do on a Friday if you have time”, there’s a very good chance you didn’t choose email.

You inherited it (didn't we all!). You joined a business, and someone said:
“We already do email. Here’s how we do it: we pull a list, build a campaign, send it to the segment, and repeat.”

So you stayed inside those guardrails. Not because you’re not capable of more, but because no one told you email could be anything else.

This is one of the biggest patterns I see when I train marketers day in, day out: It’s not that you don’t have skills.

It’s that you were never shown what’s possible, what’s allowed, or what “good” actually looks like now.

On top of that, email as a function has changed a lot: In many organisations, email is still deprioritised unless you’re in a big enterprise or ecommerce.

Leaders would never turn it off completely… but they rarely invest in it properly.

That makes it hard for you to justify spending time learning it properly.

The good news is though that it's shifting. There is a growing recognition that email and CRM are not “batch-and-blast” channels; they are impact channels that underpin revenue, retention, and customer experience.
And with that shift, the skill set required is changing too.

In this blog, I want to talk about:

The skills and knowledge areas that are becoming non-negotiable
Where most email marketers are currently under-supported
How to think about your own strengths and gaps
Where to sharpen if you want to be relevant in 2026 (and beyond)

First: email has always been a multi-discipline job

I’ve said this many times: to do email well, you’re asked to be:

A data analyst
A strategist
Technically savvy
A designer or at least design-literate
A content creator
A copywriter
An analyst
A compliance and consent guru

And now… we’re adding even more on top.

No one is brilliant at all of these. I’m not!!

I know my strengths (strategy, systems, data, deliverability, audience psychology), and I know my weaknesses (I am not a visual designer; I know what I want but it takes me ten times longer to do it).

That’s fine and totally okay

The point is if you understand the skill landscape, you can:

Lean harder into what you’re great at
Get help where you’re not
And deliberately sharpen the areas that will matter most in the next few years

Let’s talk about those areas.

Skill 1: Customer & Audience Experience Strategy (not “just campaigns”)

If you’ve read my 2026 predictions, you’ll know I don’t think the traditional “Email Marketing Executive” role survives in its current form for long.

Where I think we’re going:

From “email campaign doer” → to customer and audience experience strategist.

The job is shifting from:

“Build and send campaigns”
to
“Understand our audience so deeply that we design email experiences that actually move people and support the whole customer journey.”

This means sharpening skills like:

Journey thinking: Can you map the full lifecycle (from first touch to long-term retention) and see where email should show up and what job it does at each stage?
Audience understanding: Do you genuinely understand your subscribers; their motivations, objections, context, and constraints - or are you guessing?
Message fit: Can you decide what needs to be said, when, and to whom based on where they are in their journey?
Psychology basics: Do you know how people make decisions, how trust is built, and how to respect attention rather than abuse it?

This is less about being good at “creating campaigns” and more about being obsessed with:

Experience
Flow
Relevance
Context

If you spend 90% of your time inside the email editor and almost no time inside journey maps, customer interviews, and data, this is the skill to sharpen first.

Skill 2: Data Literacy & Data Strategy (from guessing → to guided)

You’ve heard me say this before:

Email without data is guesswork!!!

Email with the right data, collected at the right moments, wired into the right decisions, becomes a system that tells you a story: who to talk to, what to say, when to send it, and when not to.

In my Data Power Email Playbook, I break this down in detail. For this blog, let’s translate that into skills.

You don’t need to be a data scientist.

You do need to be able to:

Understand what “data” actually means in email (it’s not just form fields).
Design a data collection strategy: what you’ll ask, why, when, and how it will change what you send.
Honour the difference between consequential and intentional opt-ins, and design different experiences for each.
Use progressive profiling so your understanding gets better over time without interrogating people on day one.
Use data to drive exclusions, not just inclusions.
Interpret signals and build simple engagement scoring to predict action and inaction.
Measure impact in a way leadership can actually understand.

These are all teachable skills.

Practical translation: what you should be able to do with data

You should feel comfortable with things like:

Explaining data types: explicit (what people tell you), implicit (what they do), contextual (where they came from), and outcomes (what happened).
Designing forms and flows that ask only for data you’ll actually use.
Creating welcome experiences that differ based on why someone signed up (consequence vs intention).
Setting up simple tags and fields like optin_type, motivation, topic_interest, cadence_preference.
Using behaviour (pages, clicks, replies, purchases, inactivity) as triggers, not just “time since last send”.
Building exclusions: “if in active sales cycle, don’t send this”; “if new subscriber, don’t drop them into promo chaos yet”; “if multiple complaints, cool off.”
Creating basic engagement tiers (hot, warm, cooling, at risk) and adjusting cadence/CTAs accordingly.

If those concepts feel fuzzy, that’s a clear development area — and one that will make everything else you do more effective.

Skill 3: Deliverability Literacy (this is now non-negotiable)

This is the one I am going to be blunt about:

Going into 2026, not understanding deliverability is not an option.

Most marketers I meet:

Think deliverability = their ESP’s “health score”
Think the platform will tell them if something is wrong
Have never run proper inbox placement testing
Have never validated their data beyond a one-off clean
Have no idea how their domain looks to Gmail vs Outlook vs everyone else

Deliverability is not a setting. It’s a result of your behaviour over time.

Skills you absolutely need here:

Knowing the difference between delivery and deliverability
Understanding domain vs IP reputation
Knowing how warmup actually works (and when you need it)
Being able to interpret basic inbox placement tests
Knowing how list hygiene, exclusions, and engagement affect reputation
Understanding that your ESP is an infrastructure provider, not your deliverability bodyguard

This doesn’t mean you have to become a postmaster. It does mean you should be able to:

Look at a campaign and say, “We’re teaching Outlook that we’re ignorable - that needs to change.”
Recognise when a problem is content, when it’s data, when it’s frequency, and when it’s technical.
Explain to leadership, in normal language, why blasting disengaged lists “just in case” is expensive and risky.

If you’ve never done any deliverability testing, never looked at provider-level performance, and are still trusting a green light in your ESP, this is your homework.

(And yes, this is exactly what I teach in my Deliverability Masterclasses and audits, so if you want structured help, that’s there for you.)

Skill 4: Stakeholder Persuasion & Commercial Storytelling

This is a big one, and it comes straight out of the “send it to everyone” problem I see constantly.

You can be the most skilled email strategist on earth, but if:

Your CEO, board, or product teams keep insisting on full-database blasts
Email is seen as volume not value
Nobody understands the risk of bad practice

…you will lose.

So the emerging skill here is:

Being able to persuade stakeholders that email is an impact channel, not a “spray and pray” tool.

This means:

Talking money, not feelings. You need to show commercial impact, not “I think this is better”.
Quantifying the cost of inaction. Not “one email will lose us £X” but “over time, this behaviour degrades inbox placement and visibility, which quietly erodes pipeline and revenue.”
Framing risk. “If 40% of our list is disengaged and we keep blasting them, we risk losing visibility to 40% of our audience” is a very different conversation.
Proposing low-risk pilots. “Give me 10% of the list to run this smarter strategy; if it doesn’t work, we stop. If it does, we scale.”
Using frameworks. Pulling from PPPP™, ecosystem thinking, impact-first thinking, and exclusion strategies to show structure, not personal opinion.

In other words: You need to be able to sell email strategy inside your own organisation.

This is why I say persuasion is now a core skill for email marketers. You are not just sending emails; you are advocating for a healthier, more profitable channel.

Skill 5: Curiosity and “Why?” as a default mode

The marketers who develop the fastest and build the strongest programmes have one thing in common:

They are relentlessly curious.

Instead of accepting:

“We’ve always done it this way”
“That’s how the last person set it up”
“Leadership wants it sent to everyone”

…they ask:

Why this?
Why now?
Why this audience?
Why this format?
Why this cadence?

Curiosity looks like:

Digging into why a segment performs the way it does, not just noting that it does.
Asking why people signed up and using that answer to shape journeys.
Questioning the default “newsletter + promo” shape and exploring lifecycle, onboarding, re-intro flows, and awareness use cases.
Looking beyond your own brand or organisation - reading, testing, learning from other industries.

Curiosity is a skill you can train by defaulting to one simple habit:

Never run a send, build a journey, or accept a request without asking, “What is this for, and what else could we do instead?”

Skill 6: Exclusion, Segmentation & “Send Smarter” Thinking

A lot of marketers still think their main job is deciding who to include.

The more advanced work, and the skill that quietly separates junior from senior thinking, is:

Knowing who to exclude, when, and why.

This is where your stakeholder persuasion, data literacy, and deliverability knowledge all meet.

Skills here include:

Designing exclusion rules: sales conflict, service conflict, new subscriber protection, provider remediation, at-risk engagement.
Understanding that emailing disengaged people is sometimes strategic (for awareness, remarketing, or seasonal buyers) - but only if the message and cadence fits who they are and where they are.
Moving beyond “send less vs send more” to “send differently to different groups”.
Building simple “keep/kill/snooze” frameworks for dormant audiences.

This is not a “never send to disengaged people” stance, it's a “don’t ignore who they are when you do” stance.

Skill 7: Progressive Profiling & Signal Use (not creepy personalisation)

We’re past the era where “First Name” personalisation means anything.

The skill you need now is the ability to build richer understanding over time without being creepy or creating friction.

That’s progressive profiling and signal use.

You should be learning how to:

Start with minimal viable data at sign-up and add layers gradually.
Use simple, human questions like “What brought you here today?” or “What are you working on right now?” instead of dumping ten fields on a form.
Add preference and topic questions inside welcome flows and follow-ups.
Infer interests and stage from behaviour: content they read, pages they view, events they attend.
Feed that back into segmentation and automation, so what you send actually changes based on what you’ve learned.

The skill here is not “maximise data collection” but really “collect only what will change the journey, and then actually use it.”

Skill 8: Technical Fluency (you don’t need to be a dev, but…)

You do not need to be an engineer to be great at email! But you do need to be technically fluent enough to:

Understand how your CRM, ESP, and website talk to each other (or don’t).
Spot when data flows are broken or incomplete.
Know how authentication works at a basic level (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and why it matters.
Collaborate with dev/ops teams in a useful, specific way rather than just saying “email is broken”.
Help shape architecture that supports your strategy, not fights it.

Technical fluency is increasingly part of the job, especially as email and CRM become more tightly integrated with product, sales, and success.

Skill 9: Measuring What Matters (and reporting like an adult)

Finally, you need to be able to move away from:

“This email had a 41% open rate.”

to:

“This email helped shorten time-to-value for this cohort.”
“This nurture series contributed X to pipeline over 90 days.”
“Our exclusion framework reduced spam complaints and increased revenue per 1,000 sends.”

Measurement skills:

Knowing which metrics matter for which campaigns (awareness vs activation vs retention).
Looking at trends over time, not single campaigns.
Using provider-level and cohort-level data to spot problems.
Summarising results in SLT-friendly language: risk, opportunity, and money.

You don’t need to build full attribution models (and honestly, they’re often flawed). You do need to show that:

Email supports impact
Smart strategy reduces risk
Your work is worth resourcing

So, where do you actually start?

If all of this feels like a lot, here’s how I’d prioritise sharpening your skills over the next 12–18 months:

Deliverability literacy
Learn the basics properly. This alone will change how you think about sends, segments, and strategy.
Data & exclusions
Understand consequential vs intentional opt-ins, start progressive profiling, and get good at saying “this group should not get this email and here’s why.”
Audience experience strategy
Map journeys, define roles for email at different stages, and shift your mindset from “campaigns” to “experiences”.
Stakeholder persuasion
Practise talking about email in terms of risk, opportunity, and money — not just content.
Curiosity as a habit
Build the muscle of asking “why?” and exploring alternatives.

The tools will keep changing (of course), the templates will keep changing, the “email hacks” will come and go. BUT...these skills will not.

Want help sharpening these skills?

This is literally what my work is built around, I:

Train marketing and CRM teams on deliverability, data, and ecosystem thinking
Run masterclasses on building email as a strategic, impact channel
Audit email ecosystems so you know what to fix first
Help you make the case internally so you can stop being “the person who sends the newsletter” and start being the person who owns a critical growth function

If you want support to move from an inherited, passed-down email… to a something you’re genuinely proud of:

👉 Book a free consultation with me
👉 Join one of my upcoming masterclasses

Because the skill set for email is changing, and you get to decide whether you’re dragged by it,or leading it.

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