Email marketing and marketing automation are powerful tools that can help boost your business. There are important differences between them. These two concepts can sometimes be misunderstood. Let’s get this out of the way.
Marketing Automation vs Email Marketing
Important Differences between Email Marketing and Automation
Your prospects can benefit from high-quality content in the form of blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, and other types of articles. This may be helpful when making decisions about whether or not to buy from you.
Marketing automation is a different matter. It’s more popular than email marketing, but marketers must have specific quantitative and qualitative skills.
Marketing automation blends elements from email marketing with those of other digital channels like social media, search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate programs, and so on.
After you’ve read some information about Marketing Automation vs Email Marketing let’s now learn more about what this term means.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation (or marketing software) tracks and automates actions taken by recipients based on known triggers.
Marketing automation uses activity levels to motivate sales teams. It has been a common industry term that is used with many products and languages.
What is Email Marketing?
Marketing automation, sometimes called marketing technology, is familiar and needs to be defined. Instead, it exists in the grey area between technology and marketing.
Email marketing (or direct mail), is an opt-in system that allows you to send marketing messages via email. It aligns with this definition. It is used primarily to create lists, from which messages can be sent via autoresponders, bounce-back systems, or other automation functionality.
Is email marketing automation not the same thing as Email Marketing?
It’s not. Email Marketing Automation Tool allows you to control all channels through which your message is sent.
You can, for example, send emails to all employees of your company using a single campaign. Affiliate programs and other information are also possible depending on your needs.
But, isn’t marketing automation tool more expensive?
Unfortunately, yes.
This hurdle must be overcome before you can push for marketing automation.
It’s very easy to send one email at the right moment when the prospect is available. However, it is not possible to do most campaigns.
The other side of the coin is that there are no better marketing automation tools than Marketo, HubSpot, etc.
Isn’t this what Marketing Automation was supposed to do? How is Email Marketing Automation different from Marketing Automation?
If you want to build a relationship with your customer, email marketing is better than automation.
An example of this is an email campaign that was generated using automation software. This software helps marketers to nurture subscribers, inform them about new offers, and win loyal customers.
An automation system, on the other hand, helps to create lists of potential prospects via autoresponder sequences and drip emails on email platforms.
Marketers need to know what kind of messages recipients like. Perhaps that’s why email marketing automation systems are so important.
E-mail is not as powerful by itself as two or more touchpoints with customers.
Which System Is Right for You?
Marketing automation systems are a way to optimize your sales and marketing efforts and enhance your existing CRM.
Modern marketing relies on marketing automation software. However, it is important to understand what you want from an email marketing platform before you decide which one to use.
Let’s start by examining the capabilities and features of a typical marketing automation software.
Automated email marketing campaigns
Marketing automation systems enable you to create automated email sequences that can be triggered by various conditions.
If your customer buys a subscription or product with an online coupon code from your company website, then they will receive a welcome email to check the functionality of your product.
Certain conditions trigger the mail. These are analyzed, compared, and compared with reports to encourage activated subscriptions or influence online purchases immediately.
Marketing automation systems can gather information like this and compare it to campaign goals. This allows you to automate future actions via sequences of emails or emails, which will be important later in predictive analytics.
Email Marketing vs. Marketing Automation: Why Marketing Automation Wins
It is essential to have the right leader in place to ensure that you can respond effectively.
Personalized emails are a great way to follow up with customers. They allow them to interact with your brand personality, and you can see the results of their efforts long after they have made contact.
The creators of an email list should be aware of the types and best ways to communicate with them.
Here are the key differences between Email Marketing & Marketing Automation –
1. Simple Automation vs. Intelligent Follow-Up
Marketing automation and email messaging are separated by the inability to follow up with messages if you haven’t heard back.
A colleague may forward your campaign to five more people on their contacts list. This is because it’s easier to find the answer in an internal network.
However, automated email engagements will only allow the recipient to receive one or two emails per month from marketers. It is a built-in behavior, but it does not require any context.
Programming into automated sales systems could make this even easier by sending an automatic reply message to the recipient.
2. Email Behavior Tracking vs. Web Behavior Tracking
Email marketing can track the activity of leads in your inbox but not the conversions to landing pages or calls that result from customers interacting with your brand.
Marketing automation will however track your prospect’s journey via optimization. This means that even if they visit an inbound landing page, but do not fill out a form when they follow up and download content, marketing automation will help them.
3. Revenue Assumption and Revenue Attribution
The second difference is how you treat revenue.
Marketing automation can be used to generate revenue assumptions as well as attribution. Email marketing tools have only attribution.
Let’s look at what this means. What if you have a campaign that alerts people at specific times of the day (e.g. a weekly direct mailing sent Monday mornings) but they don’t open it? Email marketing tools don’t allow you to manually adjust your list to prevent them from being too aggressive or wasteful with your time. You have no way of knowing who opened your emails between 1 and 2 pm.
Marketing automation uses historical data to determine where your customers have seen your brand and then presents those opportunities.
Perhaps you have tracked opens from Facebook last week, or a text message in two years. If so, then bid approximately 70% for this campaign.
4. Email Behavior Tracking vs. Web Behavior Tracking
Verify that all HTML links are being tracked by your email marketing software.
This is where outbound automation shines. It can automatically follow a variety of interactions for each prospect.
See more, submit a request, read the article and download an extension or app. You can also write a review.
Web-based tracking can be straightforward to implement with an A/B testing platform such as Google Tag Manager. However, it is difficult to determine what actions you get compared to digital interactions that may have been previously tracked manually.
You can still rely on third parties for links and calls to action. The tracking must verify which pages lead to action or visits that can then be resurfaced into social media marketing automation.
5. You can track activity in more ways
The Tech stack should include web scraper and Google Analytics, as well as a dynamic email marketing platform like MailChimp (or both).
Depending on your business size, it may be cheaper to focus on specific verticals first than go all-in on a tech stack solution that covers the entire technology stack. Budgeting is also an option for any additional prospects who still require hooks.
Conclusion
Email marketing remains one of the best ways to reach your target audience. However, as technology evolves, email marketing will become less effective.
You now know everything there is to know about Marketing Automation vs Email Marketing.
This is it for now. We’ll see you again with a new topic.