Email marketing and marketing automation: what’s the difference?

Email marketing consists of sending messages, but does not allow you to learn about the preferences and purchasing behaviors of the targeted customer. Marketing automation, on the other hand, integrates the collection and monitoring of all digital interactions between the Internet user and your company as well as the analysis of this data, to derive exploitable communication activities both by email and on a website, an app or social networks.

Is email marketing important?

The advent of social media doesn’t mean the end of email marketing, however. In fact, it’s estimated that it will reach a value of $17.9 billion by 2027, up from $7.5 billion in 2020.

In other words, email marketing is still very much in vogue. And it deserves to be given a significant portion of your communication efforts, both within your overall strategy and in the text and images you send.

Some statistics remind us of the importance of e-marketing :

89% of communications managers consider it to promote lead generation.
72% of , particularly in the context of B2B campaigns.
52% of participants chose .
86% of professionals prioritize email contacts .
Is it possible to simplify an email marketing campaign?

Have you ever calculated how much time you spend sending emails? An American study found that 53% of its participants estimated that it takes more than two weeks to create an email marketing campaign.

As a small or medium-sized business owner, chances are you don’t have two weeks to spare to devote to an email campaign… To get the most out of this tool, you’d need to hire a team dedicated solely to communications, and for the majority of SMEs, that’s simply not possible.

This is where marketing automation comes in.

Marketing automation is email marketing to the power of ten

Organized by a marketing automation system, e-mailing allows you to get an adapted message across, promote appropriate products, and communicate at the right time with a targeted audience.

Marketing automation helps to attract more customers and then support them throughout their purchasing journey and finally, to raise awareness of a brand and gain market share by nurturing its leads.

What happens when an email campaign is executed poorly?

Customers click the “unsubscribe” button. You stop interesting them, they get tired of too many promotions that don’t concern them… And if your database contains countless expired contacts or too many errors (incorrect email addresses, misspelled names), the emails won’t even reach their destination.

Marketing automation can help you eliminate all these mistakes.

How does marketing automation simplify emailing?

For a business, it is essential to make contact, then engage, interest, influence the buyer by guiding them through touchpoints such as emails, social networks, the use of mobile apps, etc.

Of all these communication channels, emailing is the most time-consuming. By automating this marketing tool, you can not only simplify, but also optimize your campaigns:

Save time: Marketing automation involves using software to streamline the most repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks related to content publishing, online and social media advertising, and email campaigns. This makes it much easier to launch, manage, improve, and update your campaigns across all communication channels. It is also estimated that using a marketing automation tool can generate a .
Better understand your customers: Marketing automation software allows communications teams to obtain important data on customer interaction with landing pages, web forms, social networks, mobile apps, online and offline ads, phone and SMS campaigns and of course, personalized emails. Armed with this data, they can work to shorten the sales funnel and simplify the purchasing journey to convert leads into satisfied customers more quickly.
Automate emails: Email service providers do not have the features to segment the target audience. They do not allow you to track the preferences and purchasing behaviors of Internet users, nor to take into account their purchase history or their interactions with your brand, nor to measure their engagement on your web pages and on your social networks. In the best case, they will give you opening and click rates: an analysis that is too limited.

Marketing automation software, on the other hand, allows you to prepare highly targeted emails and generate segmented lists according to precisely defined granular criteria. This is what is pushing more and more companies to use marketing automation tools in order to.

More and more companies are using marketing automation to:

automate their emails (64%)
segment and target their audience (26%)
personalize the content of their emails (23%) .

 

Capture and convert pre-screened leads With a marketing automation system, it becomes easy to create a highly personalized experience for each prospect or regular customer, at each interaction with a portal to your business. Not only does it allow you to prepare , with perfectly targeted workflows and email templates, but your emails will provide recipients with relevant and interesting content, even in the context of a mass campaign.

According to a study, the result of such automated marketing is a

Email Marketing Compared to Marketing Automation

A quick comparison of features demonstrates the immense scope that marketing automation can have, compared to the limited capabilities of e-marketing.

How to determine your marketing automation needs?

Most businesses, regardless of size, will find benefits in using marketing automation. Some highly specialized products or those operating in very small markets may be able to get by with just sending prospecting emails, but this is the exception that proves the rule.

Many SMEs already know the benefits of marketing automation, but are slowed down in their efforts by the excessively high prices charged by certain platforms, the difficulties in getting to grips with the software and the superfluous functionalities.

Like most business owners, you probably use productivity tools like Zoom, DocuSign, QuickBooks, Calendy, or office suites like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace. When choosing your marketing automation platform, you should consider the integration possibilities with your other software.

Small businesses also appreciate having access to technical support to limit service interruptions. Especially since sales and marketing teams rely on the software to send their communications and respond to customers on schedule, whether by phone or by triggering a series of emails.

Your first steps on Act!

As the market leader in comprehensive CRM and marketing automation solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, Act! offers tools designed to improve communication and prospecting activities, increase sales and build lifelong customer loyalty.

Our mission is to provide small and medium-sized businesses with the tools that will help them foster contacts, attract new customers, strengthen existing relationships and transform the way they work. Act! Delivers a great experience and provides effective customer relationship management tools, from first impression to loyalty and service recommendation.

To support your business’s individual methodologies, we offer flexible plans and products tailored to your needs, whether you’re looking for simple, out-of-the-box features and integrations or a full-featured, fully customizable platform.