Email Marketing Vs Marketing Automation

Email Marketing Vs Marketing Automation

What’s the difference between email marketing and marketing automation? It can be a bit confusing because one does not necessarily exclude the other. Rather, marketing automation is a set of email marketing strategies and tactics. Marketing automation includes email marketing and provides better, more efficient, and more effective ways to complete large scale email marketing campaigns. At the same time, it can be overkill for smaller campaigns.

Email Marketing vs. Marketing Automation

Email marketing still boasts the highest overall ROI of practically any digital marketing strategy. But there are some downfalls as well: email marketing can be time to consume and difficult to follow up on as it scales upwards. When improperly managed, email marketing may leave marketers with no way to actually secure the leads that they have drawn in, and can ultimately become alienating to clientele. As email marketing campaigns continue to grow, they can be difficult to scale companies can run into daily email limits or simply not have the staff on hand to follow through.

Marketing automation seeks to address these problems. Through marketing automation, the majority of an email campaign functions as an automated process. Landing pages, web forms, and multi-step campaigns are all geared towards securing leads after the consumer has clicked on links. Emails themselves are automated through targeted and tracked systems, communicating with the customer as their relationship with your organization changes and grows. Only leads that are likely to commit to a purchase are forwarded on to sales professionals.

The Advantages of Marketing Automation

Automatically generates and scores leads. By only forwarding qualified leads, marketing automation can vastly improve the time usage of your sales professionals — making it easier to scale up a marketing campaign. As the email marketing campaign continues, interactions between customers will be logged and analyzed.

Provides a better end user experience. Users are contacted based on triggered actions and the evolution of their relationship with your organization, thereby sending them more relevant and timely communique’s. Users become frustrated when email advertising does not give them the information that they need or is set erratically or too often. A marketing automation system will only send customers emails on a consistent and scheduled basis.

Integrates with other marketing campaigns. Marketing automation can automatically connect to social media campaigns and even direct mail campaigns, to provide a holistic advertising environment. The more interactivity a brand has with a customer, the more likely they are to complete a sale.

Guides customers through sales funnel. Marketing automation can be used to take customers from the initial contact all the way up to purchasing all without the intervention of a live sales professional. This is extremely valuable when organizations are scaling their operations upwards and may not have the time to devote to each individual sale.

The Downsides of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation doesn’t only provide benefits; it can also produce some drawbacks. Marketing automation is complicated and can be costly to set up and run, compared to a simpler email marketing campaign. Many businesses starting out with an email campaign may not require automation immediately or may find it a cumbeesone waste of resources.

Email marketing campaigns can become costly and time-consuming to run, especially as an organization continues to grow. Email marketing services such as MEWS, can be used to make the process easier and more effective. For more information about how MEWS or marketing automation can work to increase your organization’s revenue, contact us today.