Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – How Similar or Different are They?

Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – How Similar or Different are They?

Most people would agree that marketing has become extremely technology-intensive. IT spends in various other sectors may be paltry, but the spends by marketing on technology have remained steady, despite the sluggish economy.
Email marketing is a key component of marketing technology. Most companies may already be using it in one form or another. Another related component is marketing automation. However consumers often mention the two components in the same breath. There are even debates in the industry about marketing automation being what email marketing aspires to be. However, in reality, they are an adjacent, but comparable, bunch of tools.
Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – The overlap

• Email marketing was traditionally used to reach out to individuals, keep them informed and stay connected. Companies would purchase email databases and use an email server with the capacity of high-volume mail blasts to send out mails to those in that database. Better capabilities emerged over time including:
• The ability to get leads from alternate sources
• Management of such leads
• WYSIWYG editors to draft emails using templates
• Monitoring and analytics

Marketing automation goes a step ahead with:

• Automating email campaigns
• Not only manage but score, prioritize, and nurture leads
• Not limited to email campaigns but includes mobile and social campaigns

However, some providers and vendors of email marketing claim that they too offer these capabilities, thus confusing customers.
How they work?
All of these tools help you develop, improve, and promote leads effectively to a “marketing database.” In B2B set-ups, tools help qualify and nurture leads until the point where sales teams can engage them using CRM platforms. In the case of B2C, such platforms will likely produce specialized offers to further engagement or drive transactions. Users can segment databases into certain subsets and prioritize and engage them, depending on behavior and attributes.
What exactly do they do?
Managing leads
Marketers must understand how to manage leads and prospects. Some of the high-level capabilities that can be considered include:

• Lead acquisition
• Information management
• Lead prioritization and routing
• Lead nurturing and engagement

Managing campaigns
While email messaging is important, social campaigns are also becoming imperative. Several vendors’ social widgets aim to grab enrichable email ids so that one can continue proactively marketing to that person. The capabilities that can be included here are:

• Campaign design and management
• Campaign creation and development
• Campaign implementation
• Campaign monitoring and analysis

One area where email marketing is distinguished from marketing automation is Landing Pages. While one can consider building and managing of landing pages as an extension of campaign management, they must be examined as a distinct challenge. Some capabilities to check for are:

• Page form and creation
• Testing and optimization
• Integration of web content and experience management

While email marketing and marketing automation are equally essential in the toolkit of a digital marketer, both have significant overlaps. While email marketing vendors focus on B2C use cases, marketing automation vendors target B2B use cases. However, a fair amount of crossover is observed among subscribers sometimes.

Marketers must thus, while evaluating tools, learn what each tool does and check what best matches their requirements.