ATS Keywords
Email Marketing Specialist ATS Keywords: What Gets Your CV Past the Filter
Email marketing roles get flooded with applicants who list 'sent newsletters' and little else, so ATS software and recruiters are both trained to scan for specific platform names, campaign metrics, and technical terms that prove real hands-on experience. Missing the exact keyword a job posting uses, such as Klaviyo instead of 'email tool' or segmentation instead of 'targeting,' can silence an otherwise strong CV before a human ever opens it. This page lists the terms, phrases, and formatting choices that actually move the needle.
Optimize Your CVATS Optimisation
Must-Have Keywords
Include these keywords in your CV to improve your ATS score.
Strengthen Your CV
Power Phrases
Use these multi-word phrases to strengthen your CV.
Avoid These
Words to Avoid
Remove these overused or weak words from your CV.
ATS Score
Before & After ATS Optimization
Before
Missing Keywords
After
Added Keywords
Formatting
ATS-Friendly Format Tips
Use standard section headers — Experience, Skills, Education — since ATS parsers are trained on these and often fail to categorize content under creative headers like 'My Journey.'
Avoid tables, text boxes, and multi-column layouts for your skills list; many ATS parsers read these out of order or skip them entirely.
Spell out platform and acronym names in full at least once, such as 'Email Service Provider (ESP),' so your CV matches both the abbreviated and full-text keyword a system might scan for.
Submit as a text-based PDF or .docx, never a scanned image or design-heavy template, since image-based files can't be parsed at all.
Match platform names to the exact spelling and capitalization used in the job posting — 'Klaviyo' not 'email marketing tool' — since most ATS keyword matching is literal, not conceptual.
Place metrics directly next to the keyword they support, such as 'A/B testing — improved CTR by 22%,' rather than in a separate summary, since some ATS scoring weights proximity between skill and result.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Most modern ATS platforms rank and filter rather than outright reject, but recruiters commonly only open the top-ranked 10-20% of applicants for a role, so a low keyword match effectively removes you from consideration even without a hard rejection.
Only list platforms you can speak to in an interview; listing five ESPs you've barely used tends to backfire when a recruiter asks a specific follow-up question, and most postings only check for the one or two platforms named in the job description.
Two to three natural mentions across your summary, experience, and skills section is enough — repeating a keyword excessively reads as keyword-stuffing to both ATS quality filters and human recruiters.
Keep soft skills minimal and only include ones tied to evidence, like cross-functional collaboration with a design or dev team on a specific project, since generic soft-skill claims add no ATS value and dilute the technical keywords that actually get you shortlisted.
Include the platforms you've actually used plus category terms like 'marketing automation' and 'ESP management' so you match broader semantic searches recruiters run when a posting is platform-agnostic.
No — modern ATS platforms and recruiters both flag this, and it can get an application disqualified outright; keyword optimization should always be visible, readable, and honest about your actual experience.
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