ReDrew Innovations

Have you heard? Email is dead! Says no marketer ever, at least they shouldn’t be! In fact, email marketing is more alive than ever with a projection of 4.481 billion email users by 2024, and a growth rate of 3% every year. Also, 73% of consumers say that email is their preferred marketing channel (DMA “Acquisition and the consumer mindset 2018” (2018).

Marketing Automation vs. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a marketing distribution tactic used to promote products and services by sending mass emails to consumers. Whereas marketing automation is a software platform designed to help marketers automate repetitive email marketing tasks. Marketing automation also provides a more personalized and targeted email experience for consumers.

According to HubSpot the #1 CRM software, marketing automation is technology that executes tasks based on if-then statements

Marketing automation and email marketing also differ in the sense that email marketing is only considered outbound marketing and marketing automation is considered inbound marketing.

You might be wondering why marketing automation is considered inbound marketing when it is essentially an automated version of email marketing?! The key difference is the fact that it is automated! The platforms used to automate emails also gives you access to powerful tools like multi-step campaigns, lead scoring, and analytics. According to Dayna Rothman from Marketo, a marketing automation software company, these features will help to make an email marketing campaign much more strategic. Marketing automation is also inbound marketing because it creates personalized and targeted consumer experiences that build meaningful and lasting relationships between a brand and a consumer.

Why Companies Should Automate Their Email Marketing

There are so many benefits to marketing automation. The best way to present them is in a list! Marketing automation allows businesses to:  

• Nurture leads through the entire buying process
• Delivers highly targeted, personalized messages that address consumer’s specific barriers to purchase
• Saves time and money
• Measured and optimized marketing investments
• Automates repetitive tasks
• Increase customer experience
• Streamline productivity and efficiency
• Empowers scalability
• Give more insight into analytics
• improves conversion and closure rates at the bottom of the marketing funnel

Marketing Automation Best Practices

According to HubSpot, there are three aspects of a business’s internal processes that need to be addressed in order to successfully use marketing automation and AI. They include:

Data Hygiene – the process used to protect, organize, and maintain brand data and accuracy. This can be done by:

• Putting your customers first and being clear in your data privacy procedures.
• Clearing out dirty data, which is inaccurate or incomplete data
• Staying updated on data knowledge

Tech Stack Organization – A full scope of all the different software and tools you use as an inbound marketer

• As quoted from HubSpot brands need to ask themselves “does your technology speak to each other? Are all the tools you’re using pulling information from the same database? Does all your software integrated or are you having to create workarounds to use the tools together?”
• Integrating software will be a hard job but it will increase accuracy and save time in the long run.

Cadence and Content – which means getting the right message to the right people at the right time. This can be done by:

• Leveraging data
• Creating an email marketing strategy
• Building a schedule
• Creating buyer personas or journey mapping

There are also customer-facing best practices that brands can focus on to improve marketing automation. They include strategizing and humanizing.

Strategizing – Thinking about things like the accuracy of your content, the level of personalization to the individual, and the timing of your messaging in conjunction to lead nurturing. This can be done by:

• Check grammar errors using platforms like Grammarly
• Utilize platforms that help with personalization like BrightInfo or HubSpot’s analysis tools
• Use recommendation engines like Qubit Pro that employ AI to provide users with a set of options based on their past behaviors on your site.
• Always be available to customers through chatbots that provide relevant answers

Humanize your content for consumers. In the marketing automation and AI module on HubSpot they remark that a “Forbes article suggests that emotional intelligence allows for significantly improved social listening, clarity in branding, credibility with customers, and acknowledgment and growth when mistakes happen.”

• Be empathetic
• Have human touch
• Have feedback surveys

Conclusion

Email marketing is not dead, and it defiantly isn’t leaving anytime soon! It’s a straightforward process that has plenty of benefits for businesses. This is your sign to integrate it into your business as soon as possible! You will reap great benefits and happy consumers.