What is the Difference Between Email Marketing and Marketing Automation?

By Jon Miller, VP Content Marketing and Strategy   

What is the difference between email marketing and marketing automation? And how do you know if your company is ready to make the switch? Here’s a quick primer on the key differences, and a handy-checklist to help you know when it’s time to graduate.

Feature Comparison

There are many differences between email marketing provider and a marketing automation platform. An Email Service Provider (ESP) provides functionality to send mass blasts and track open rates, but with marketing automation, you have access to powerful, strategic features like multi-step drip campaigns, lead scoring, and marketing program analytics.

Take a look at this feature comparison:

             


Email Marketing Alone Just Doesn’t Do it

If you are relying solely on email without automation, you are probably coming up against a few barriers.  Here are some challenges you might be facing with email marketing alone, and how marketing automation can help:

Email Marketing is Time-Consuming

·         Marketing automation removes the tedious manual work of crafting individual emails and allows you to focus on creating multi-stage, automated campaigns to nurture your leads and automatically respond to their actions while you get other work done.

Your Sales Teams Don’t Know Which Leads Are Worth Their Time

·         Marketing automation allows you to automatically monitor and score your leads based on how they engage with campaigns or content, in addition to demographics or lead characteristics, so you can identify truly sales-ready leads to send to your sales team.

You Are Unable to Keep Leads Engaged Through Your Communications

·         Marketing automation allows you to automatically nurture your leads.  This means you can segment your database based on criteria most relevant to your business and lead them through your funnel using content and calls to action that are most relevant to each group, keeping them more engaged with your communications.

You Are Having Trouble Scaling Programs

·         Marketing automation is a solution that can grow as your company’s needs grow. Instead of just building more and more email programs, you can run multiple types of campaigns, create lead nurturing programs, score your leads, and attribute revenue directly to each marketing program.

You Can’t Attribute Revenue to Your Email Marketing Efforts

·        Instead of relying on CTR and OR for marketing success metrics, marketing automation allows you to clearly demonstrate which marketing programs – email or otherwise – are bringing in revenue, allowing you to make better decisions on which programs to run and which are most cost-effective.

Checklist: Top Signs You Need Marketing Automation

If you are still unsure whether it is time to graduate from your Email Service Provider, take a look at your organization and marketing practices. You should consider marketing automation if:

  • Your customer buying process lasts longer than a week
  • Sending emails alone does not seem to drive sales
  • Your marketing team needs an easier way to create and send targeted, multi-touch email campaigns
  • Your marketing department does not have enough time to do everything they need to do with their current resources
  • You sell different products or services to different demographics
  • You want to send different messages to different titles and industries
  • Your sales people are complaining about the quality of leads your marketing team is delivering
  • You want to know which of your marketing campaigns are the most effective
  • You can’t tell if you should be spending more or less money on marketing

Still not sure? Check out our new whitepaper Graduating from Email Marketing to Marketing Automation for more insight.

Video: 10 Strategies For Content Marketing

This week, we’re going to dive into the archives and give you a presentation well worth watching if you didn’t see it the first time around. In this Dreamforce 2011 session, Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, and Jon Miller, VP Marketing of Marketo, offer 10 timeless strategies for content marketing, events and marketing automation success.

Infographic: How B2B Marketers Score Big With Social Media

We’ve been talking a lot about social media on the DGR blog this week, so let’s go for the hat trick: A new infographic, courtesy of Marketo and ColumnFive.

The infographic looks at how B2B marketers are scoring big with social media. There’s an interesting story here, although by now it’s probably not a surprising one: A whopping 93% of B2B marketers now participate in social media, and B2B marketers are actually likely to have more experience integrating social media into their campaigns than their B2C counterparts.

Marketo Infographic

So, how does this play with our post last week about how relatively few B2B marketers are tracking and responding to brand mentions on social media, or our celebration of the many marketing vendors that have invested in acquiring social marketing solutions? Let’s just say that it’s complicated. These data points may represent a fast-changing marketing landscape, or they might reflect a big (and growing) gap between B2B marketers that get social media and those that still don’t have a clue.

Let us know what you think it all means, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on new developments in this constantly evolving space.

Happy Graduation, B2B Social Media!

It’s graduation time! While a slew of early 20-somethings enter the woeful workforce, the B2B world has something else to celebrate: its “graduation” into the social media big leagues. Yesterday’s post highlighted that half of B2B marketers are ignoring social media, but recent industry moves paint an interesting picture: One that indicates a positive progression for B2B social media.

More than four years ago I started writing about B2B and marketing automation. We focused on how companies were implementing a marketing automation process (MAP) and tying it to their demand generation efforts. The cool kids in school were taking it a step further with lead scoring and nurturing initiatives.

The very first article I ever wrote covering the retail space was about how retailers were tapping Facebook and MySpace to connect with their customers. The conversation in Retail TouchPoints centered on getting as many followers as possible. The “strategy” was merely an equation:

Lots of names + an interest in our brand = success.

The B2C conversation evolved from populating social networks to creating a more cohesive, cross channel engagement strategy that connected the dots between e-commerce and brick and mortar. While social commerce rapidly emerged as a result, we couldn’t figure out how to spin the story for DemandGen Report. How do you encourage B2B marketers to engage with their prospective buyers and customers on….Facebook? It didn’t add up.

But now it does.

The recent acquisitions of social media solution providers aren’t just an indicator of the market’s growth— they validate the natural progression we’ve seen in the B2B space. That calls for a graduation celebration, because dare I say it — I believe social media for B2B is finally happening on a grand scale.

To mark the special occasion, here’s a timeline of a few marquee social events covered in DemandGen Report:

 

Q2 2011:

  • We start to see socially-focused product features in marketing automation solutions, such as Silverpop, and Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Radian6 ensues massive buzz.

Q3/late summer 2011:

  • HubSpot acquires social media firm Oneforty and merges its directory of social media applications with the HubSpot App Marketplace.
  • Silverpop partners with Janrain to offer social sign-in capability
  • “The Social Enterprise” takes center stage at Dreamforce 2011, where Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff introduced a new framework of apps and innovations that leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies.
  • Vendors take the opportunity to launch social suites at Dreamforce, including Eloqua’s Social Suite

Q3/late fall 2011:

  • Marketing automation vendors across the board, including Pardot, eTrigue and Treehouse Interactive, rolled out a number of socially-focused features and functionality to help marketers integrate social media into their demand creation campaigns.

Q2 2012/late spring 2012:

  • Silverpop launches free Facebook app to help marketers convert “Likes” into revenue.
  • Marketo acquires Crowdfactory and launches social marketing suite
  • Oracle acquires Vitrue, a platform that gives marketers a single set of tools to manage their presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and other social media platforms.
  • Salesforce acquires Buddy Media to combine the platform with Radian6, its social media listening platform, to enable users to listen, engage, gain insight, publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs.
  • HubSpot partnered with HootSuite to help marketers connect social media to generating, managing and nurturing leads — to help marketers “close the loop” on social media marketing.
-Amanda F. Batista

Social Articles Of Interest in DemandGen Report:

Why B2B Marketers Should Embrace Social Sign-In

Tapping Into The World Of Social To Drive Sales

Pinterest and B2B Marketing: Pinning Down The Newest Social Media Player