Email Management vs. Marketing Automation

Your business could be small enough to not need marketing automation. However, if your business is large enough to use one of the many email marketing platforms, it’s time to consider your marketing automation options. Before you can do this, it's important to understand the differences between what an email marketing platform offers and what marketing automation offers your business.

Marketing Automation Expands Your Knowledge Base

Data is foundational to both email marketing and marketing automation. However, the scope of the data differs. Email management options only track data related to your email campaign. Marketing automation solutions aggregate data from both email campaigns and the wider web. Thus you’re able to see when and where potential leads interact with your business.

Marketing Automation Makes Differentiation Possible

Email by its nature can tend to be impersonal. It can feel like spam because it’s predicated on ‘hope of interest.’

While MailChimp, Constant Contact and other email marketing platforms allow you to segment your audience, the ability to do so intelligently is limited. So even when you use a platform like AWeber to set up drip campaigns, at best, you’re doing so with educated guesses.

In contrast, marketing automation is built to give you more choices in how you segment your list and how you nurture your leads. They allow for complex drip campaigns that manage leads automatically, based upon information you’ve gathered and can substantiate.

Marketing Automation Makes Lead Scoring Possible

Email management tools rarely capture more than name and email, plus an address if you make it mandatory. In contrast, marketing automation collects data from multiple angles. A lead watches a webinar. The action is scored based upon the likelihood that action leads to deeper engagement. Every interaction can be scored so your sales team identifies likely prospects accurately.

Marketing Automation Tracks ROI

Clicking on a link in an email does not a sale make. However, if you’re also using marketing automation, you can track opening rates plus purchase actions. You can also see the path that led to the purchase—visits to informational videos, FAQ pages, etc.

Marketing Automation Adds Intelligence to Follow-Up

You can automate your email delivery. Setting up email blasts are the norm in email marketing as well. You can even set rules where your emails are delivered by time zone with some email management tools.

However, you need more than automation. You need intelligence if you want people to open your emails. That’s where marketing automation plays an important role. It allows you to set up transactional triggers. Your lead’s reactions to your messages prompt the delivery of customized messages, so he or she feels you are speaking to a genuine interest—not just ‘hoping’ for interest.

There Are Many Email Management Options

Email marketing management may be all you need at this time. So let’s explore this option.

While our title suggests MailChimp is the quintessential email management tool, we don’t want to suggest this is the best option. It’s just a popular option because it lets you get started for free, and remains free for as long as your email needs remain under 200 subscribers and less than 12,000 emails per month.

MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, ConvertKit, GetResponse and CampaignMonitor are all excellent email management choices.

All provide the ability to automate email delivery. All offer some form of list management, tracking and reporting, and email templates.

However, not every one of these choices allows you to set up auto responders or to create sign-up forms that trigger drip campaigns. That’s something you can do with AWeber and ConvertKit.

There Is More Than One Marketing Automation Provider.

What you ultimately need as you grow your business is a marketing automation platform that makes email management a part of its marketing approach. The main contenders in today’s market are Pardot, ActiveCampaign, Marketo and HubSpot.

Pardot

Pardot is a SalesForce product designed specifically for B2B marketing automation by businesses who use SalesForce. It’s also priced for large enterprises. So if your business isn’t B2B focused and large, Pardot won’t be a good fit.

ActiveCampaign

For smaller businesses on a tight budget, ActiveCampaign is an affordable option. It’s user-friendly and offers helpful pointers for creating workflows. Many of the features you need for effective customer relationship management (CRM) come with this platform.

• Lead scoring
• Lead segmentation
• Web activity tracking
• SMS marketing
• Personalize web content
• Bi-directional CRM syncing
• Event management
• Create invoices
• Split testing
• Create membership sites
• Bulk social media posting
• Sales reports
• Social CRM

It integrates with Outlook, Gmail and Salesforce. In fact, you could reach out to $2.5K contacts each month, get all of these features and email automation as well for $1 less per month than you’d pay MailChimp for email management of the same number of contacts. So when MailChimp ceases to fit your needs, this is a good option to explore during early growth.

Marketo

Marketo is another one of the CRMs that’s aimed at larger businesses. It’s price point isn’t quite as high as Pardot, but it only becomes effective for businesses with 10K or more contacts. The following essential tools for CRM make Marketo effective.

• Lead scoring
• Lead segmentation
• Web activity tracking
• SMS marketing
• Personalize web content
• Predictive analytics
• Bi-directional CRM syncing
• Event management
• Split testing
• Bulk social media posting
• Sales reports
• Real-time sales alerts
• Social CRM

Marketo integrates with Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and many other business-centric platforms. It’s possibly the strongest contender to HubSpot, yet it’s missing some elements that make HubSpot especially friendly to both B2B and B2C business models.

HubSpot

If you’re looking for a CRM that’s intuitive and easy to use, scalable, requires no coding abilities and focuses on developing your business, then HubSpot offers some features you won’t find with ActiveCampaign or Marketo.

One of the most significant benefits of working with HubSpot is the educational component. It’s more than a CRM with email marketing integration. It’s a cohesive platform where marketing strategy is its core. No other platform educates you like HubSpot does. You’ll understand how to use the internet to attract and interact with customers and close sales in today’s marketplace.

HubSpot has most of the tools the competitors offer:

• Lead scoring
• Lead segmentation
• Web activity tracking
• SMS marketing
• Personalize web content
• Predictive analytics
• Bi-directional CRM syncing
• Event management
• Create invoices
• Split testing
• Bulk social media posting
• Sales reports
• Real-time sales alerts
• Social CRM

It also integrates with Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Magento, MailChimp, WordPress, Zapier and Zendesk and many other business-centric platforms. (It’s too bad it doesn’t integrate with LinkedIn as well.) However, there’s more to HubSpot than these ‘facts.’

This is a platform that “consolidates the tools you need to be successful as a Marketer under one roof.” If there’s a tool that’s mission critical to your business, it’s probably already connected seamlessly with HubSpot.

Summary

Not every business needs marketing automation. However, it can be a powerful tool for growing your business. With cost-effective options available, it makes sense to focus on more than email marketing. Savvy businesses can also integrate marketing automation into their marketing and sales campaigns. Contact us today using the button below and chat with our marketing experts to discuss which options might be best for your business.