As your business grows, so do your marketing needs and the ability to scale. And that leads you to ask, What is the difference between email marketing vs marketing automation?
There are thousands of marketing tools, many promising some combination of email marketing, marketing automation, personalization, and analytical functionality. And, in many cases, are currently claiming some sort of AI or machine learning functionality.
While both email marketing and marketing automation use email as the primary channel to engage with your audience, email marketing tracks only the actions taken by recipients of your email blasts.
On the other hand, marketing automation monitors every digital interaction a lead has with your business. It also compiles all that data into an activity history that gives a 360-degree view of your leads and their digital breadcrumbs.
To break it down further, here are five key differences between email marketing and marketing automation for your consideration.
Email Behavior Tracking vs. Web Behavior Tracking
Many of the differences between email marketing vs marketing automation stem from what data the platforms collect. Email marketing can track a recipient’s behavior within your email campaign. Did the prospect or customer open your email? Did they click a link? Which link and how many times? And you get aggregate data, so you can see what percentage of people did what with your email, and what percentage did nothing.
With marketing automation, you get that email data plus much more. A lead’s behavior can be tracked everywhere they interact with your company on the web. After they clicked that link, did they go to a landing page on your site? What did they do next? Did they open an infographic? Download an eBook? Watch a webinar? Having the full picture of each lead’s journey through your funnel lets you plan more targeted campaigns based on observed behavior.
Single Path vs. Adaptive, Customer-Centered Messaging
Email marketing requires a significant investment of time on the front end – from the creation of emails, to list segmentation and post-delivery analytics. When you’ve built a campaign, a basic email marketing program typically sends emails out to everyone on your list, and then it’s done (This is sometimes called “batch and blast”). Depending on the sophistication of the email marketing automation tool, you might be able to send the same email to different segments of your list, with dynamic content applying itself so that people in different segments get slightly different messages or offers.
Marketing automation also requires lots of hands-on work upfront, but you get more for your effort. You still have to create your emails, plan your campaigns, and segment your list, but you can build automated programs with more choices and options. Drip campaigns send a series of messages out over time; and you can set them up to go out to people automatically as people engage with your website.
Nurture campaigns are a type of drip campaign that sends different follow-up communications based on how a prospect interacts with your messages. The platform will manage your leads automatically, based on their data profiles and digital body language. Meanwhile, real-time analytics track engagement metrics and qualification levels. Here’s the irony: because of these automation tools, it’s much easier to create dynamic campaigns that follow the actions of individual leads, instead of a single, homogenous list. These feel more personal to the recipient. Such adaptive campaigns help the marketer make the customer the center of the campaign experience.
Static Information vs. Dynamic Lead Scoring
Another difference between email marketing vs marketing automation is lead scoring, and that’s only available with marketing automation. Email marketing tools know only the information about your leads that you provide, which is often just contact information. This means you aren’t going to gather a lot of ground-breaking insights unless you use a separate analytics tool. And that will mean managing another tool and consolidating data from multiple tools to gain a single picture.
Marketing automation, with all the data it collects, can score your leads’ intent based on their firmographics data and behavioral cues.
For example, if your best customers are companies of a certain size, you can create a form that asks “what size is your company” and give the good answer a high score. If you know that people who watch one of your webinars are likelier to convert, you can score the action of watching that webinar. The net result is better leads generating higher scores, letting you more easily identify prospects likely to convert to closed/won deals. This allows you to tailor campaigns based on that intelligent scoring information, and to quickly, automagically, pass those leads to sales when they’re ready for a conversation.
According to a CMS Wire survey, companies that lead score found:
- 42 percent named measurable ROI on their lead generation program as a main benefit
- 38 percent named increased conversion rates of qualified leads to opportunities
- 31 percent named increased sales productivity and effectiveness
- 27 percent named shortened sales cycles
Your takeaway: If you have a long or complicated sales cycle, lead scoring is probably worth the trouble, and you’ll need marketing automation to do it. If your sales cycles are short and you sell goods or services that don’t require a lot of consideration, lead scoring may not be worth the trouble.
Revenue Assumption vs. Revenue Attribution
When you send a lead an email through an email service provider, you can tell if the lead clicked on a link with a call to action to purchase. Separately, you can use your CRM to see whether that lead became a customer. But just because a customer opens an email and later makes a purchase doesn’t mean they made a purchase because of the email alone. They may have engaged with a dozen additional touch points and assets on your site. It’s no small wonder that 78 percent of marketers struggle to measure content ROI.
With marketing automation, you can track the full journey a lead takes and (usually) see the exact path to purchase, including any subsequent actions taken outside of email. Instead of making assumptions about purchase behavior, you can map it. That lets you see which actions and assets actually drive conversions and sales, and which are a waste of time.
Simple Automation vs. Intelligent Follow-Up
Most modern email marketing tools offer some kind of automation component, but the capabilities depend on the platform. In simple systems, this could mean scheduling email blasts in advance for specific dates. In more advanced marketing automation platforms, you also get transactional triggers, the ability to apply segmentation rules, sending by time zone, and the capability to create nurturing programs with if/then logic built in.
The leading marketing automation software takes automation to the next level with intelligent action based on behavioral analysis. Depending on lead behavior, the system can optimize the timing of contact, the message shared, and even create suggestions for offline contact such as phone calls or direct mail.
Email Marketing vs Marketing Automation: Which One Should You Choose?
Choosing between email marketing vs marketing automation can be difficult and both are useful tools for any marketer to start conversations and make connections with the people in their lead base. The choice between solution is right for your business depends on how much you want (or need) to accomplish with your leads before they make it to the sales team.
If your sales cycle is simple and your leads don’t need a lot of attention – maybe one or two touches, such as a newsletter or a few promotional blasts – an email marketing might be exactly right for your needs, and a marketing automation platform may prove too advanced (and expensive).
If, on the other hand, you’re ready to start nurturing, scoring, and qualifying leads based on their engagement with your brand, marketing automation is worth the investment. In most cases, the decision will depend on the scope of your product offering, the speed of your customer journey, the extent of your content marketing, and the quantity and diversity of your leads.