Email Marketing
Email marketing is when a company sends email communication to potential customers or previous customers in order to promote the brand and drive traffic to the company’s website. How do companies collect email addresses? Most often, companies have opt-in mailing lists that website visitors can sign up for. Typically when buying online, the retailer will require the user to enter an email address to send a confirmation email for the order shipment, that address will also end up on the mailing list. Alternatively, companies can buy email addresses from data mining companies, or share mailing lists from neighboring businesses to fill out the list and reach more people. Email marketing can be done through mass emails or more personalized messages. Personalizing communication channels can make the person receiving the message feel more important, and valued by the brand. Managing all of the email addresses for specific email campaigns can tedious and difficult, luckily there are many services available to make the task less daunting. Services like Mail Chimp and Constant Contact can help companies build schedules, manage lists, and customize audiences to make sure the email is going to correct person. Email marketing is a subset of inbound and content marketing. Emails you create should be engaging, informative, and fun. The emails you send to consumers should be branded but useful, the objective is to draw visitors to landing pages or to encourage them to take action. Email marketing is incredibly important because it is one of the best forms of owned media. Promoting your brand through social media is great, but you don’t own the platform. As the old saying goes, don’t keep all of your eggs in one basket. If for whatever reason Mark Zuckerberg decides to ax Instagram, all of your work and leads are gone; with email, you own the mailing list and all of the content you send. On top of that, there is something to be said for cross-platform promotion and different avenues for communication.
The Balance Small Business has a great article about email marketing.
MailChimp
MailChimp provides a myriad of digital marketing services for companies. Primarily the company’s focus is on email marketing and marketing automation. MailChimp is a great service and it is free for companies that do not need a lot out of their email marketing services. Of course, MailChimp also offers paid services that come with more features, but for a lot of companies, the free service is fine while the business grows. With MailChimp, marketers can use the built-in analytics platform to determine how campaigns are performing, view open rates, and figure out where changes should be made to boost the performance of the email tactics. MailChimp says, “our approach to marketing focuses on healthy contact management practices, beautifully designed campaigns, and powerful data analysis.” Through this service, companies can create email campaigns and analyze data and even automate some aspects. Unfortunately, MailChimp does not give marketers the ability to automate email communications through any sort of segmentation, all segmentation has to be done manually.
Like how this sounds? Visit MailChimp’s website to learn more about this great service.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact, similar to Mail Chimp, is an email marketing service. The company helps to manage mailing lists and create and design email campaigns. Through Constant Contact, companies can view which recipients opened the emails, design emails with customizable templates and even automate each campaign. Constant Contact has positioned itself in the marketplace as an email marketing service provider for small businesses and nonprofits. The company offers many tools, like list building tools so that you can segment subscribers and send better, more personalized emails to each individual. Unlike MailChimp, Constant Contact offers automation for segmentation. This is to say that once a subscriber has completed a specified action Constant Contact will automatically update that subscriber’s status and begin to send different emails to help guide the individual along the path to conversion. This service is intuitive and easy to use, it helps marketers build campaigns and allows them to be automated to let the marketer focus on other more important tasks. This is especially beneficial to smaller businesses that do not have a large budget but need to get a lot done. Allowing the marketing team to design new campaigns or work with other teams to design landing pages by automating otherwise tedious tasks helps to get the most out of any budget.
If Constant Contact sounds like it would fit you and your company, visit the company’s website!
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is using technology to automatically manage campaigns and processes across multiple channels. Marketing automation is intended to be used for repetitive tasks like social media campaigns and email campaigns. The idea behind marketing automation is that it simplifies complex processes and eliminates the necessity for pressing “send” or “post” for each individual message you need to publish. Once you have created a campaign, you can let the schedule manage itself while focusing on other tasks. Once data and results have been gathered, you can go back and analyze the data, or tweak aspects of your campaign to get better results. There are many services that provide marketing automation for different channels. Hootsuite for example, allows users to automate their social media strategies by scheduling posts for a variety of social media platforms. Once posts have been scheduled, the software will automatically post to the desired platform. Platforms like this allow marketers to save time and focus on more important and pressing matters. Like anything else, marketing automation starts with lead generation; this can be done through free downloads on your website that require an email and some other small pieces of personal information to gain access to the downloadable content. This email will go into your database of emails, but with the help of a SaaS platform like Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, or Salesforce, you can automate the process of sending emails or other forms of communication to heat up these leads and prime them for action.
Salesforce, a Customer Relations Management (CRM) agency, has a great article about marketing automation.
Best Practices
Lead generation is key for any sort of marketing and it is the foundation necessary for automation. Because it is vital to generate interested leads that want information about a brand, marketers should focus on creating solid content that is engaging and relevant to the individuals the company wants to sell to. Quality content that is behind a subscription wall is a great way to generate leads. Users will have to provide at minimum an email address to access the content they desire and this provides the company with a way to communicate and send marketing messages that further educate subscribers. Leads do not all come in the same variety, different people are more ready to buy than others; this is why it is important to create a map for each stage leads will progress through as they become more ready to take action. A few examples of lead classifications to start with are Known, Engaged, MQL, Won and Lost. Known leads are leads that have given the company some personal information like an email address and are now open for communication. Engaged leads are those who have engaged with the brand in some way, like opening an email or following a link to a webpage. MQL, or Marketing Qualified Leads, are those that have been warmed up by the marketing team and are ready to be passed on to the sales team. Won leads are leads that have made a purchase and have been converted into a customer. Finally, Lost leads are those that have failed to convert and make a purchase. Segmentation and targeting is crucial to a good automation strategy. The more personalized and relevant communications between the brand and the lead, the better the chance of conversion. Personalizing communications with potential customers is a great way to promote action. To expanding on personalization, segmentation and targeting is fantastic for email marketing. This ensures that people are receiving emails that are relevant and for the stage of the marketing funnel that each individual is in. Not everyone on your mailing list is ready to buy, so you should send people information and content that fits the mindset of the person.
Agile CRM has made a great list of best practices for marketing automation.
Difference between Email and Automation
In this article, we have discussed a lot about marketing automation and email marketing. So how do they differ? How are they similar? Email marketing is the process of marketing to leads, or potential customers, through email. It is a form of inbound marketing because the recipients have signed up to receive these emails, so they must be interested to some extent. Then the task becomes priming the lead to make a purchase. This is done through consistent, personalized messages that are relevant to hat the consumer is looking for and why they signed up in the first place. Marketing automation is the process of automating the communication channels, like email or social media, to free up more time and allow marketers to focus on more important tasks like designing and creating campaigns. Email marketing does not have to be automated, but it may help to automate the process. The two are not the same but they go hand in hand. Yes, you can absolutely practice email marketing without automating the process, but automation has great benefits that should not be overlooked.