Read on to discover more about the differences between marketing automation and email marketing, and discover what marketing automation software can provide to your organization.
Strict Definitions
The main difference between marketing automation software and an email marketing campaign is scope. While email marketing has a solid track record in providing leads and prospects to businesses in a variety of industries, marketing automation is simply a far more sophisticated approach.
Let’s take a look at the definitions of each strategy;
Email Marketing: Basically a tool to deliver mass email marketing campaigns to large databases of prospects. The tool will also include a facility for tracking replies for each communication, and for commissioning reports on the effectiveness of each campaign.
Marketing Automation: Far more wide-ranging than email marketing, marketing automation pulls together a variety of different channels, enabling a wholly integrated marketing solution. Inbound leads via websites and social media, content marketing strategies, email marketing and other lead sources are operated together.
Advantages of Market Automation
Scope
The primary and most obvious advantage to market automation over email marketing is the sheer scope it provides. While email marketing is highly effective at targeting pre-defined groups of prospects and encouraging them to move further into the acquisitions or sales funnel, marketing automation yields far more comprehensive results.
Efficiency is vital in business, and the ability to manage and oversee a range of marketing strategies is incredibly valuable. Rather than wasting time and resources developing different marketing strategies and then arduously pulling them together, marketing teams utilizing marketing automation software find all these strategies integrated within one convenient hub.
The benefits of this cannot be underestimated. Suddenly, organizations discover that – not only are their marketing strategies suddenly far more effective in terms of customer acquisitions – but they also have far more time to spend on other areas of their business.
Nurturing Leads
Email marketing is effective in gaining leads and in introducing those leads to your acquisition funnel, but marketing automation software moves this a step further. This kind of software facilitates the nurturing of leads and the management of these leads as they progress towards your desired outcome.
Marketing automation software also reflects the nuance and versatility of the products and services offered by individual businesses. For example, different leads may be suited to different product packages, in which case market automation software enables businesses to guide that lead towards the outcome which most suits their needs.
This kind of segmentation is an imperative part of modern business. An organization must have the agility to provide the services or products that a consumer requires, but they must also be able to recognize these requirements and tailor their responses accordingly. Demonstrating this agility and versatility to the customer increases the likelihood that that customer will remain loyal post-conversion.
In addition to segmentation, marketing automation also enables organizations to analyze leads as they are acquired and nurtured. High quality automation software will include a lead scoring tool which gives an insight into the likelihood of conversion and into which methods are required to secure a conversion. This represents the shift towards treating the customer like an individual, not simply one component of a wider herd.
Gain Knowledge/Wield Knowledge
All of the above really boils down to one thing; knowledge. Knowledge, and the ability to deploy and wield knowledge effectively, has become a sort of currency within the landscape of modern, client-driven business practice. Market automation provides a level of knowledge and insight which enables organizations to provide only the best products and services to consumers and cement their position at the head of the market.
Each interaction with a customer generates a wealth of information which can be used to specialize and refine future direct marketing strategies. With email marketing, this information can very easily fall by the wayside; however, with marketing automation, a bank of knowledge can be developed, stored, and then wielded by proactive organizations who are dedicated to providing the consumer with what they need.
The applications of this knowledge are almost endless. Everything – from creating lists of different customers or leads at different stages of conversion, to the deployment of workflow management tools aimed at simplifying business practices – can benefit from the application of in-depth and profound consumer knowledge. Market automaton software puts this information at our fingertips.
