Email marketing vs marketing automation

The first thing you should think about as soon as your business starts to grow is how to scale it quickly and efficiently. This depends on the marketing approach you take. Two of the most common marketing strategies are email marketing and marketing automation. Even though the thought might look like one, there are a couple of key differences between them. Today, we will talk about the relationship between email marketing vs marketing automation, and how to figure out which one is better for your business.

Using CRM will be beneficial for both strategies

Customer relationship management software substantially helps businesses, no matter what marketing strategy they choose. You need a way to organize your moving customers and group them based on their demographics and other factors. Besides talking about email marketing vs marketing automation, we will also see how CRM affects both.

Let’s define email marketing

Sending emails is not email marketing. It is a part of it, but it is not the main part. The process of tracking the actions of the customers reading your emails is the basis of email marketing. It is a short and simple definition, but that’s the gist of it.

Once you start the email campaign, you want to know:

• when your readers read emails;
• how many readers opened emails;
• how many of those who opened emails visited your website;
• did your readers convert into customers;

All of this information is what you get with email marketing. Furthermore, if we add CRM to the picture, we will also have a database to store that information. CRM email tracking for movers is made easy because of the amazing features the tool has.

What about marketing automation?

Marketing automation software also monitors the interactions of your customers. But, it does everything on a larger scale, including all digital interactions between customers and your business. Email marketing only focuses on email interactions. Another benefit of marketing automation is that it compiles all that data for you. It creates an activity history of your clients’ purchases and other interactions and gives a 360-degree view of everything happening with leads in your business.

Inbound vs outbound marketing

Another way to distinguish email marketing from marketing automation is by its type. For example, email marketing is outbound only. You are sending emails to customers, and getting feedback.

With marketing automation, you can also create and manage material on your website, social media, and so on. You are creating both inbound and outbound programs.

The differences in email behavior tracking and web behavior tracking

As we mentioned before, one of the big differences between these two concepts is in the tracking process. With the help of CRM email marketing for moving companies, you can track how your customers react to the emails you send. You can see whether they opened an email, clicked on any links, and so on.

However, with marketing automation, you get both email data and data about other behaviors of your clients:

• did a customer visit your landing page?
• how many customers visit your website every day?
• did someone download any material?
• are your clients watching webinars on your website?

All of this information is available to you through marketing automation.

Email marketing offers a single path approach

There is a lot of investment required with email marketing. You need to create emails, segment your customers, do post-delivery analytics. Building a campaign has a template you need to follow, and all email campaigns are pretty much the same. It is a single, repetitive path you take.

Marketing automation is adaptive

On another hand, marketing automation also requires a lot of work upfront. However, there is a lot more in return. One of the reasons why companies do CRM email integration for movers is to improve the process and make it more streamlined. With the help of CRM, you are building automated programs with multiple choices and options. You can easily create customer-centered messages and send them to your customers after they interact with a specific part of your website.

Lead scoring is possible with marketing automation

With regular email marketing, the tools you are using only have customer information that you provide. You need to enter customer contact information and other personal data. However, with marketing automation, the system gets to learn from customers based on their interactions.

You will be getting better results because the customers tell you what they want. A part of marketing automation is done through surveys and polls. You can ask your clients a bunch of questions, and feed the answers directly into the system.

As a consequence, you will have everything you need to do lead scoring.

With email marketing, you can only create revenue assumptions

When you send an email to a customer, you can only tell if they opened it, or clicked on the CTA button. However, even if the customer makes a purchase at a later time, you can never tell if that happened because of the email or not. With email marketing, you can only create reports that assume the amount of revenue based on the number of opened emails and purchases.

Marketing automation offers a different approach. Because it tracks the full journey of your customers, you can clearly see all of the actions a client took before they made a purchase. Thanks to this approach, you can precisely determine the most efficient actions that will result in a purchase. This will give you correct reporting when it comes to your future revenue.

Email marketing vs marketing automation – which one is better for your business?

As we can see, there are many differences between email marketing vs marketing automation. Both approaches can be useful, but that all depends on what your business needs. Create your business goals before you choose a path to take. That is the best way to make sure you went with the right business decision!