Ask most people what makes a good email marketer and you get a list of tools. Knows their way around the platform, can build a workflow, understands segmentation, writes a decent subject line, maybe knows some HTML and can "send personalised emails to targeted audiences". 

All useful, all learnable in a few months, and none of it separates the people who are absolutely excellent at this from the people who have been doing it for eight years without getting any better.

What separates them is three things that have almost nothing to do with email, and I would take somebody with all three and no platform or email experience over somebody with every certification going and none of them (apart from if they did my Email Deliverability Certification - that is a given HA!).

Skill one

Learn to sell

Not sales as a job title. Sales as a discipline, meaning the practice of understanding what somebody needs (or what they don't know they need), articulating why your thing addresses it, and sitting comfortably in the moment where they say no (rejection is the best life lesson EVER). 

Marketers who have never sold anything write differently, and you can spot it quickly. 

What it looks like when somebody has never sold or done sales

• They write features where they should write outcomes. A list of what the product or services does rather than what changes for the person who buys it. Salespeople learn that distinction in week one because the alternative is silence on the other end of the phone. But it is HARD, I slip into what I call 'marketer' mode SO often and write from what I know all the time.

• They avoid the objection instead of addressing it. Price, effort, risk, timing, internal politics. The email skirts all of it, and the objection does not go away just because you did not mention it. It sits in the reader's head unanswered while they decide not to reply or take action.

• They ask for the wrong thing at the wrong moment. Somebody two weeks into learning who you are does not need a demo request or want to buy a 5 figure service or life changing product. A salesperson would never make that ask that early, because they would have felt the recoil in a live conversation.

• They cannot tell an interested no from a real one. Most email programmes treat every non-response identically, when a not now, a not for me and a not yet convinced require three different responses.

• They are uncomfortable asking at all. Which produces the opposite failure. Emails that inform endlessly and never invite anybody to do anything, from marketers who mistake reticence for respect.
  
  

What selling teaches yo

• What people really object to. It is almost never the stated objection. Price usually means risk. Not now usually means not convinced. You only learn to hear that by being told no repeatedly by somebody in front of you.

• How to ask without apologising. An ask wrapped in qualifiers reads as a lack of belief in the thing you are asking about, and readers detect it instantly.

• Where the real questions are. The questions people ask in the first ten minutes of a sales call are the content plan for your entire programme, and they are invisible to anybody who has never been on one.

• That the relationship outlives the transaction. Good salespeople are playing a long game with a small number of people, which is a far better model for email than campaign thinking is.

Skill two

Be all right with getting it wrong

Email punishes perfectionism more than any other channel, for two reasons that pull in the same direction.

Reason one: not sending costs more than sending imperfectly

An email marketing function that goes really quiet for six weeks while a template is perfected is not the way to go. Reputation fades from disuse, with Gmail in particular starting to cool on you after around four weeks of silence, and the audience habituates to your absence in the meantime (did you know our brains think that if we don't hear from a brand for a while, then they pop back up, we actually unsubscribed & causes negative emotions). 

So the cautious option is not the safe option. Sending something on Tuesday that is "okay" beats sending something excellent in six weeks, and the maths on that is not close.

Reason two: you will make a mistake at scale, probably publicly

I sent an email out BY accident to 500,000 people - yes, 500,000 flipping people. It was a lauch of a new product that hadn't launched yet; 3 weeks before it was meant to go out, I clicked SEND not schedule. 

Now, whilst there were tears, stress and the fear of losing my job at the time, it all worked out fine. No one died and the world didn't stop spinning. 

Instead, I learned important lessons:

1. Have an email contingency plan always - pre signed off templates so you can get the 'sorry' out ASAP 
2. Double, triple, quadruple check the send vs schedule button LOL
3. Make it into a opportunity - we actually had 10,000 people READY to buy the product they wanted it now, so we set up a pre order and made tonnes of pre launch revenue - silver lininngs 

So it is not a question of whether; it is a question of how you are when it happens, and the people who last in this job are the ones who can fix it, learn from it and send again on Thursday. The ones who burn out are the ones who experience it as a verdict on their competence.

Don't worry if you fuck up - I do it all time and I'm stil standing. 

What being all right with it looks like in practice

• Shipping at eighty percent and improving live. Because the feedback from a real send is worth more than another round of internal review, and internal reviews are creative killers. Quick wins are my best friend - get it out, then improve!! 

• Testing things you expect to fail. A test that confirms what you already believed taught you nothing. The uncomfortable ones are where the learning is. You can never know everything, I have been proved wrong COUNTLESS times - that is such a blessing. 

• Writing the mistake down instead of hiding it. A team that documents its failures stops repeating them. A team that quietly deletes the evidence repeats them every eighteen months when somebody new arrives.

• Saying I got that wrong, plainly. Without the defensive preamble. It builds more credibility than being right does, and it makes everybody around you braver.

• Not sending an apology email for most things. The instinct to apologise for a typo doubles the volume and draws attention to something two per cent of people noticed. Save the apology for things that cost somebody money or trust.

Skill three

Psychology, to the point where you can embody your audience

The deepest of the three, the hardest to fake, and the one I have spent most of my career arguing for.

Most email advice is mechanical. Right message, right person, right time. Almost none of it explains the person receiving it, which is strange given that the person receiving it decides your results and KPI's. 

What understanding the audience deeply means

Not personas, or a slide with a stock photo and a name and a list of frustrations, produced in a workshop and never opened again.

It means being able to sit down and write and create FOR them (and it's really really hard sometimes). To know what they were doing ten seconds before your email arrived, what else is in their inbox, what they are worried about at work this week, what they would never admit in a survey, and what would make them feel stupid, what their challenges are, their needs and how they make decisions. When you can occupy that position while you write, relevance stops being a targeting exercise and becomes the default state of your copy.

The specifics:

• How attention is allocated. The inbox is a task environment rather than a browsing one, so people triage rather than evaluate, and the question they are asking is whether something needs them rather than whether it is any good.

• How habituation works. Repetition builds recognition and erodes attention at the same time, from the same input, which explains almost everything about why sending more eventually stops working.

• How associations form. Every email is a pairing event, quietly teaching somebody what your name means, so after a year your brand carries whatever feeling it has been arriving with.

• How memory works. People hold a peak and an end rather than an average, which changes when you ask for things and what your last email before a gap should be.

• How decisions get made. Loss and gain framing, the effort asymmetry between deleting and unsubscribing, and the fact that most people defer rather than decide.

• How trust builds and breaks. Slowly and quickly respectively, because negative events carry more weight than equivalent positive ones.
  

Why this is a commercial skill rather than an academic one

Because it is what lets you evaluate advice. Somebody who understands the mechanism can look at any tactic, work out whether the thing underneath it applies to their audience, and adapt or discard accordingly.

Somebody who only knows tactics is stuck following instructions written for somebody else's business, which is why so much email advice fails for the people who follow it most faithfully.

The connection

They are not a random list, they stack! 

• Psychology tells you what is happening for the person and how they behave (enter Inbox Psychology). The foundation, because everything else is a guess without it.

• Sales tells you how to move them, and what to do when they resist. The application, and the part that turns understanding into revenue.

• Imperfection is what lets you practise both. Because neither of the first two is learnable in theory. You get them by doing it, getting it wrong, and doing it again, which requires being able to tolerate the getting it wrong part.

Which is why the third one is the gateway. Somebody who cannot bear to be wrong will never sit through enough sales calls to develop the first skill, and will never send the experiments that would teach them the second.

How to build them

Practical, and none of it needs a budget

1. Sit in on sales and support calls, monthly. Not once. Monthly, as a standing commitment, and take notes on questions rather than on outcomes.

2. Read your replies properly. Every reply is somebody telling you how they think, in their words. Most programmes treat replies as an inbox to be cleared.

3. Try selling something yourself. Even once. A workshop, a service, your own idea internally. The experience of being turned down changes your writing permanently.

4. Ship something before you are ready, deliberately. Pick one send a month and give yourself half the usual time. You will discover how much of your process was reassurance rather than quality control.

5. Keep a record of things you got wrong. What happened, what it cost, what you changed. It becomes the most valuable document your team owns and it makes failures cheaper every time.

6. Read outside marketing. Behavioural science, cognitive psychology, decision-making. The people who study attention and memory properly have been publishing for decades and almost none of it has reached email.

7. Write one email as the recipient before you write it as the brand. What are they doing, what do they already think of you, what would make them delete this. Then write the real one. It takes ten minutes and it changes the draft entirely.
   
   

The conclusion

The platform skills matter, and they are the easy part. You can learn a new ESP in a fortnight and a workflow builder in an afternoon, and every one of those skills depreciates the moment the tool changes.

The three above do the opposite. They compound, they transfer between industries and channels, and they are the reason two people with identical tooling produce completely different results.

Learn to sell, get comfortable being wrong in public, and understand people deeply enough to write as them. Everything else in this job is a setting.