Getting a job is always a hot item on the “To-Do” list of many college students. Unfortunately, it is never easy to check off this item and move on. Especially, nowadays, landing a job has become more competitive than ever  due to the increase number of college graduates and better level of education, leading to higher expectation from many companies. Recruiters do not only look for students who excel in academics but also have previous working experience; especially “completing an internship is preferred but not required”.

I used to question why an internship could be such a huge determinant in job application process. I finally found the answer after working for Beachbody LLC this past summer as a “Database Marketing Intern”. The experience was mind-blowing as I got to witness digital marketing effort at an enterprise level.

In college, I was exposed to the concept of SEM by learning how to conduct campaign via Google AdWords and analyze the data using Google Analytics. Participating in Google Online Marketing Challenge gave me the chance to apply theory to real life situation, to see the numbers in action. Despite that, most of the time, the biggest budget given to me was about $250 and the collected data volume was about 30,000 people. Furthermore, the learning curve was mostly based on trials and errors as the campaign progressed.

However, the internship has taught me the importance of A/B testing, strategic planning, and working with big data in order to optimize any email marketing campaigns. Within the consumer product industry, contacting the customers via email is very different from running promotional ads on Google page or social media, whether it is to raise brand awareness or to push for conversion. Unlike other digital acquisition channels,  email is considered to be most cost-effective in reaching massive audience. At the same time, marketers can easily incorporate various content, such as: creative images, videos, engaging content, as well as customize the email length for different delivery purposes. In spite of various advantages, email marketers encounter many challenges due to a number of external factors. Since Gmail creates sub-categories within its inbox, many  advertising emails tend to end up in Promotional Tab which explains for the significant drop in average open rate. At the same time, including certain “taboo” words in email subject line by accident can trigger spam notification. Secondly, due to the change in consumer behavior, email personalization is a “MUST” for every company. Nowadays, customers prefer to see advertising emails that are specifically catered to their personal interest or past purchasing behavior. Generic email blast would not get their attention anymore. Finally, once an email is sent out, marketers can no longer make any adjustment, which means that the finalized email needs to be free of error.

With that being said, what constructs a successful marketing email? Within a classroom setting, the answer would be targeting the right customers with good content. In reality, there is no answer except for conducting A/B testing on a daily basis. A test can be for the length of the subject line, the preheader, the ad design, and email content. As the average open rate is around 2%, in order to draw a conclusion, a test group population usually ranges from 75,000 to 150,000 email users. Having the right email software platform to support such huge capacity becomes critical, which leads to the partnership between the company and an email service provider such as: Saleforce, Campaign Monitor, etc. The competition between the email service providers to acquire more clients also paves the way to numerous innovative features and technology within email marketing. These new tools and their information would never be found in any university textbooks. Then, even when an email campaign already goes live, marketers still need to collect data and analyze the performance of that specific email for future improvement. Many reporting tools have been created to assist marketers in data mining process. Instead of Google Analytics, the internship gave me the opportunity to explore and better understand Omniture with last-click model and Epsilon with more thorough website orders.

To summarize, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having an internship experience when pursuing a career in digital marketing. The knowledge that I learned in class about SEM and SEO is definitely helpful but it is only the fundamentals of a bigger world filled with great advances and technology. To work in such dynamic field, I personally think that marketers need to non-stop exploring and learning outside the book to keep up with all the current trends.