Marketing Automation vs. Traditional Email Marketing

Of the many digital marketing channels, email is one of the most powerful.

Whether your business is B2B or B2C, the ROI can be a game changer. In fact, a properly managed email marketing campaign can pay you back more than $40 for every dollar you spend.

You might be asking, with an ROI of 40X why isn’t every business crushing it with email marketing?

Well, it’s all about the email strategy you employ. The two prevailing options are marketing automation vs. traditional email campaigns. And when it comes to setting up these two types of email marketing, there are important differences.

In this article, we’ll highlight a few differences of email marketing automation vs traditional email marketing so you can see which approach is right for your unique situation.

The Traditional Email Campaign

Without any automation, going the route of traditional email marketing with DIY platforms (like Mailchimp or Constant Contact) can be an absolute beast — especially as your business grows.

Any email campaign — automated or not — must begin with a basic strategy to:

Build rapport with your audience.
Understand your audience and how they interact with your marketing content.
Entice readers to not only open your emails, but engage with any and/or all calls to action like “Read More” for a featured blog post, or “Buy Now” for e-commerce brands.

These three objectives are just the bare minimum, but accomplishing these objectives manually can quickly become completely overwhelming. Because you also need to track how often emails are being opened and how many “click throughs” are leading to conversions. And then you must redirect your strategy accordingly. It’s no wonder that you’re considering adopting an automated approach.

Automated Email Marketing

Not to be confused with spam, automated email campaigns contain relevant and valuable information. They’re sent automatically to current and prospective customers in a strategically targeted fashion. With marketing automation, you can deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Automated campaigns will not only help you accomplish the three objectives we outlined above, but will take your email marketing to the next level.

Build rapport with your audience. Automated emails have built-in intelligence that knows exactly the right information to provide to certain groups of customers. You “nurture” customers along the journey with relevant and valuable information and resources that builds brand awareness and trust.

Understand your audience. With tracking capabilities, you can see exactly how certain customers interact with your emails. By segmenting your audience and developing “target personas” you can then gauge interest and purchase readiness so you can further personalize the interaction by following up with the right message at a time when they may have a heightened sense of urgency to buy.

Entice readers to open emails. For any email campaign to work, the readers must open the emails. With an automated email approach, it becomes infinitely easier to ensure that the subject line makes sense based on where the recipient is in the purchasing journey. From there, you can track open rates and conversion success in order to double down on effective strategies or make the appropriate adjustments.

And with an automated approach, you’ll have more time to dive deeply into data about your customers, understand them better, and craft more meaningful content and interactions.

Once your email strategy is automated and optimized, you’re likely to see prospective customers convert faster and lifetime purchases for existing customers increase. Plus, when you are no longer worried about emailing your customers in a polished and professional manner, you’ll have more bandwidth to do what you do best — manage your business.