The Difference Between Marketing Automation and Email Marketing

By JOHN FOLEY – October 11, 2016

Do you know the difference between marketing automation and email marketing? We all know that email marketing can be a major part of any strategy. However, marketing automation can help take your marketing a step further.

The Definitions

So, before getting into the differences, let’s define what these strategies mean. Marketing automation is the use of software to automate your marketing processes in a much more efficient way. Email marketing is the simple communication of sending a message to one or more person’s inbox. Besides the basic level of building relationships and communicating with customers, prospects, or members, the two do not have much in common.

What’s The Difference?

For starters, email marketing is time-consuming. Having a successful email campaign takes a lot of effort and heavy manual upkeep. Marketing automation allows companies to decrease their manual workload and allow, not only processes like email blasts but, lead generation and campaign management to be set up and automatically executed. This allows you to time to work on many other aspects of your organization.

Personalization is hard when it comes to mass emails. Sending out emails to a large group of people makes it difficult to customize and understand what each recipient wants or needs. With marketing automation, not only would an email blast be automatically sent out, but also, various messages would be sent on a much more personalized level. Automated messages can be directed to each recipient based on certain actions taken by that customer, prospect, or member.

Further, marketing automation allows you to generate, track, nurture, and develop your leads. While an email may be step one in your campaign, the rest can be built off of automated messages. A well-designed campaign can automatically push your customers or prospects through the sales funnel. With consistent contact and limited time commitment, you are keeping your leads engaged and giving them the right content at the right time. Email marketing does not allow you to effectively track everything you need to know about your leads to drive a successful campaign – marketing automation does.

Your Marketing Needs More

A successful marketing campaign needs more than just emails. While having email templates is beneficial and important, content styles such as landing pages or dynamic forms play a big role as well. In today’s world, social media also plays a key role in marketing. Consider the results and analytics of your campaign. Sure, you sent out a bunch of emails. But, do you know how many of your prospects opened, clicked or bounced from those emails? Marketing automation can provide all of these capabilities and more.

In the end, email marketing is simply one element of the larger picture that is marketing automation. Together, the two strategies can turn leads to sales and help get your message to the right people at the right time.