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Our Field Notes series shares in-the-trenches, first-person perspectives from the frontlines of marketing, creativity, and leadership. These reflections are shaped by lived experience and challenge the status quo — offering fresh ways of thinking about the work.
There is no better time to dust off the rust than when your direct reports go on vacation.
That’s what I kept telling myself when my email marketing director left me for a full week and the stress of carrying out her project list was settling in.
How bad could it be? I’m a VP with some distance from tactical work now, but I cut my teeth in email marketing tools for years.
Every time a non-marketer says “let’s just send an email” there is a collective eye roll across the globe from every marketer who knows how many actual steps it takes for a good promotional email to land in someone’s inbox.
I spent that week not texting her for help (which is the correct thing to do) and running test after test after test. I messed up image sizes, forgot to update UTM tracking on an entire send, and wasted my energy on subject lines I loved in editing but hated once they hit my inbox.
As a marketing leader, I spend the majority of my week in meetings. I tweak budgets, try to predict the unpredictable for my upline, and attempt to shield my team from office politics. Stress is a constant. After spending a week up to my eyeballs in the tactical side of email, all of the things I used to stress about earlier in my career came rushing back. Then clarity hit. Every level of this job requires a different level of stress. It comes in different forms, but it holds the same proportionality for each individual to their overall working experience.
When you’re delegating a strategy, you have to ask people to do a lot of things. The best leaders I’ve met are aware of what goes into each of those asks. They’ve been there, and when duty calls, they put on old hats and muscle through the work with a renewed sense of appreciation for their team.
Every function inside a marketing org holds their weight, you need to remind yourself regularly how heavy it is. It’s not just an email, it’s a symphony.
Last summer, I told LinkedIn about my experience in the email trenches and it resonated. If LinkedIn growth is on your to-do list, it can be a great storytelling format to share your own experiences where you dig back into the tools in marketing you haven’t used in while.