Email marketing is only one part of marketing automation. In order to have a successful business, marketing automation is key. If you’re a small business than email marketing is beneficial to you, but in order to expand and grow your business you’ll need to upgrade to marketing automation software.

How is Email Marketing Different from Marketing Automation?

Email marketing is simply email communication. Emailing lists of people with a commercial message that can include advertisements, business requests, or sales or donation solicitation. It’s also used to build customer relationships which is important for business stability and growth.

Whereas marketing automation helps your business effectively market on multiple online channels including email, social media, websites, etc. The manual tasks and multi-step processes are automated, so marketing teams get more done in less time.

Think of it this way, email marketing is “college”, but then you graduate to marketing automation which is the “real world”. The “real world” includes the ability to create landing pages, forms, A/B test content, inbound and outbound email campaigns, social publishes, automated programs, reports and much more.

Email marketing is great for small businesses or those just starting out, but in order for your business to grow and succeed you’ll have to upgrade to marketing automation. So let’s break down some of the key features.

Features of Marketing Automation

The following features help to highlight the competitive advantage that marketing automation gives your business.

Behavioral Based Automated Email Programs

When a client hits your website and starts their customer journey, you can automatically market to them with the information they’re interested in based on their behavior. No
more blasting the “are you the right person” emails to thousands of people on a list to find two qualified prospects.

Predictive Profiling

Have you ever visited a website and it asks for your email then the next time you visit it asks for your name? Without knowing it you are building your own profile. This helps you gather more information on potential leads.

Event Registration and Marketing

Do you hold webinars? Are you not able to control the event registrations and who gets invited? Then marketing automation is for you. It allows you to sync up your online meetings and web events. You are then able to leverage the behavior of those events to connect with the people that are most likely to engage.

Lead Scoring

For outbound prospectors you want to know who to call and who isn’t ready to hear from you. How do you choose who to call first? With lead scoring, that’s how! A score can be added or subtracted to every behavior in order to prioritize your call list.

Social Integrations

Have you ever missed notifications on your social media apps, whether it’s a comment or a retweet? Marketing automation solves this issue with social listening. You can view streams of your social media feeds, mentions, retweets, etc.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM groups individual prospects with the companies they work for. It allows you to focus campaigns directly to sales and marketing resources as a whole entity. Alternatively, it allows you to view all contact-level engagement to find your best prospects within each company.

This list doesn’t come close to all that marketing automation has to offer. So are you ready to graduate?

Why You Should Graduate to Marketing Automation

• You have a CRM system
• Large lead and contact lists
• Multiple segments or groups have contacts that overlap each other
• A Marketing Department manages your email campaigns

Email marketing is not the only effective way to reach your target market and grow your business. In fact, marketing automation has all the tools you need. Because of marketing automation, you are able to automate manual tasks, integrate marketing tools, consolidate information on your campaign performance, manage communications with customers and future leads, and much more. Email marketing limits your business to email communication only. Don’t stay back, graduate to marketing automation and watch your business soar.

Want to learn more?

BrainSell experts are hosting a free webinar on graduating from email marketing to marketing automation. Register below: