Digital marketing is one of the core aspects of running a business in this era. Any business that doesn’t embrace digital marketing in these times will find it a little hard to reach its target audience. Two of the major components of digital marketing are email marketing and marketing automation. But how do these two terms differ?  That’s the question this article will answer. 

We shall discuss the top five differences between email marketing and marketing automation. These differences will help you determine which of the two digital marketing strategies to use and when. 

Let’s start by defining each of them;

What is email marketing?

It is a form of digital marketing that involves sending a message about your business to your target audience via email.  Over 4 billion people use email, so this method of marketing is effective and will continue to be as long as people continue using email. 

There are several email marketing tools that marketers can use to make it much easier to run email marketing campaigns. Some of the popular ones include; Mailchimp, Sendinblue, SendPulse, BenchMark emailm and many more. So, you can choose any of these tools based on the features it offers and pricing. 

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a component of digital marketing that involves using software to effectively run marketing campaigns on multiple platforms and automating repetitive marketing tasks. The goal of implementing marketing automation is to reduce the number of manual tasks that marketers have to do on a day-to-day basis.  

There are several marketing automation tools out there, and some of the common ones include; HubSpot, Marketo, Customer.io, Constant Contact, and many more. Most of these platforms have similar features, so your choice will mainly be based on pricing and the platform’s reliability. 

Five key differences between email marketing and marketing automation

• Customer behavior tracking differs.

Email marketing focuses on tracking the behavior of the customer when they receive the email. Some of the details collected include; whether the customer opened the email, whether they clicked the links in the email, how many of the customers clicked the link in the email, etc. All these details are used to fine-tune the next email marketing campaign to make it more effective. 

With marketing automation, tracking of the customer behavior is done on multiple platforms, including email, social media, your website, etc. Marketing automation tools will give data on how customers respond to your marketing campaigns on different platforms to help you decide on how best to improve before running the next campaign. 

• The amount of insight gathered differ.

With email marketing, you will only get information about the emails you provide to your platform to run the campaigns. This limits the number of insights you gather unless you use another tool. Using another analytics tool will require you to integrate and compare data from two tools, making the process tedious. 

With marketing automation, you can do lead scoring for the various contacts on multiple platforms to determine which of your prospects will likely become a paying customer. This data allows giving more attention to the leads with high lead scores. This leads to better results from your marketing efforts. 

So, if you want to get more insights from your marketing campaigns, it is much better to use marketing automation tools. 

• The precision of revenue attribution differs. 

One of the main differences between email marketing and marketing automation is their accuracy in attributing the revenue source. With email marketing, the marketer will always assume all paying customers are a result of messages and campaigns sent via email. But in some cases, this is not true and can be misleading. 

With marketing automation, the customer journey is tracked on multiple platforms, making it easier to determine the exact platform that influenced the purchase. So, if you want to get the most accurate data of where your customers are coming from, using marketing automation tools is the way to go. 

• There is a difference in the level of automation. 

Email marketing tools have some basic automation functionalities, such as scheduling a batch of emails to be sent to the audience and personalizing the email for each of them to look a little different. On the other hand, marketing automation tools use more advanced AI and machine learning capabilities to trigger more intelligent actions. 

Some of the automation actions that are possible with marketing automation tools include; creating transactional triggers, applying segmentation rules, sending campaigns to different customers based on their time zones, and many more. These tools also take more sophisticated intelligent actions based on the behavioral analytics they collect. 

• Content creation process is different.

With email marketing, you will only be concerned with the message that goes into a specific email and how to structure it in a way that makes it more enticing for the customer to open the email. With marketing automation, the content creation landscape is broad since you have to run and track campaigns on multiple platforms. 

You will have to create and manage landing pages, social media posts, Ad campaigns, and a lot more. These require way more time and technical skills than running simple email marketing campaigns. So, while choosing between the two, you also need to have that in mind. 

Conclusion 

Email marketing and marketing automation are both effective ways of reaching your target audience. However, with the differences discussed above, it is evident that email marketing is only ideal when dealing with small audiences and when running short-term campaigns that don’t involve tracking the entire customer journey. 

If you intend to run more broad and long-term campaigns, marketing automation is the way to go. You will get much more insights about your audience with marketing automation, making it a lot easier to streamline future campaigns.