© Mailigen, Inc. All rights reserved 2012. Mailigen Email Marketing Solutions

Whitepaper 2012

Best practices in email marketing

email marketing v.s. marketing automation

2Email markEting v.s. markEting automation

© Mailigen, Inc. All rights reserved 2012. Mailigen Email Marketing Solutions Phone: (+1) 718 303 1864

The marketing automation world is booming, giving rise to new marketing automation tools. It feels like I get a new sales email every day from a start-up company offering me some sort of new automation tool. All of them automate some form of the marketing process. To date, I don’t think any of them really automate the entire online marketing process. The most recent capabilities I seem to be getting inundated with are:

• Email marketing

• Marketing automation

• Social media engagement

• Social media monitoring

• Content curation

• Content syndication

For someone who doesn’t work in this space every day, it can be hard to decipher between email marketing and marketing automation capabilities and tools. Often, the sales email I re-ceive doesn’t even really tell me what their tool does. Some, even after I click through to their site, don’t really tell me why I need their product. So, it’s easy to see how business owners and marketers can be confused by what they need, when they need it and which tools to use to automate their marketing.

Email marketing and marketing automation are two relatively similar systems that tend to cause confusion as to what their functionalities really are. Many companies have difficulty de-ciding which system would be best for their business because they seem so alike. One reason in particular is that both email marketing and marketing automation use email as the prima-ry vehicle to communicate with potential consumers. Essen-tially, marketing automation is often an email marketing tool with some type of CRM. Even though they have many similari-ties there are important factors that differentiate them.

Email markEting v.s. markEting automation

DEfinitionsDefined, marketing automation is a subset of customer relation-ship management (CRM) that focuses on the definition, sched-uling, segmentation and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would oth-erwise have been performed manually much more efficient and makes new processes possible.

Email marketing defined is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail. So while they both have their resemblances, marketing automation goes a little deeper than email marketing. Most of the good email marketing tools on the market, like Mailigen, have built market-ing automation into their product features. Email marketing au-tomation includes functionality like autoresponders. Other no-table features Mailigen uses to take email marketing one step further are mail-merge personalization, auto customer profile updates and segmentation.

DistinguishErsWhen it comes to differentiating the two, there are a few major distinguishers - • Process • Awareness • Integration

Email marketing and marketing automation have the same goal: staying in contact with possible customers with hopes of in time, converting them into paying customers. However, the two different systems also have two different processes in reaching this goal. Marketing automation attempts to convert prospects through targeted efforts, such as sending more relevant email messages. Email marketing, on the other hand, sends out the same or a similar message to all prospects, such as an email newsletter. Essentially, marketing automation tailors each email so that it is a little more personal, thus making it more engaging and encouraging the prospects to continue reading—ultimately converting them into consumers. That means it is critical you procure an email marketing tool that provides marketing auto-mation functionality like segmentation and autoresponders.

3Email markEting v.s. markEting automation

© Mailigen, Inc. All rights reserved 2012. Mailigen Email Marketing Solutions Phone: (+1) 718 303 1864

Awareness is a major distinguisher be-tween the two. Awareness refers to the system’s ability to detect if and when a prospect clicked a link in an email, whether or not they went to a specific page on your website and whether or not they filled out a contact form. The tool is “aware” of these actions which can help you analyze wheth-er or not a certain email campaign is successful. Basic email marketing, on the other hand, does not have the capabilities of performing such tasks to the extent marketing automa-tion does. You must have a more advanced email market-ing tool to perform some of these tasks. Mailigen, however, can offer that advanced email marketing tool. Like market-ing automation, the Mailigen email marketing tool is capable of real time reporting—determining the number of emails opened, which prospects clicked links, as well as the number of emails that were received. Not only that, but Mailigen can also report the click through rate percentage, open and click tracking, and detailed click through and links clicked (unique vs. total). Mailigen is building unique and beneficial capabili-ties than most email marketing tools available today.

Integrat ion can sometimes be the deciding factor for businesses on whether or not they want to use an email marketing system or marketing automation. This is largely in part because marketing automation systems integrate closely with sales force automation (SFA) and other CRM tools. Mailigen can integrate with these CRM systems through the API to make marketing automation even more efficient. This makes it easier to personalize different cam-paigns and gather insights as to how the prospects engaged with each campaign. It is important to keep in mind that Mailigen recognizes this advantage and therefore offers simi-lar features that can be equally valuable; such as personaliza-tion and customization, social media integration, link track-ing, advanced search options, and many more. Marketing automation can also be quite an investment for companies. Seeing that it is very complex, not only does it come with a much higher cost, but it also can be more difficult to imple-ment and creates a higher learning curve.

Furthermore, there is no right or wrong in each system. When companies decide which capability is a better fit for them, they base that off of the type of business and campaigns they will be running. If, for example, the business cycle is less than one week, it involves a simple selling process, and the company is looking to send offers based on shopping cart abandonment, they would most likely lean toward email marketing because it is less complex and they wouldn’t need all the tools and functions marketing automation has to offer. On the other hand, if a com-pany has a selling process of longer than one week, they need to qualify leads beforehand, and they want reports that show the effectiveness of each campaign, then marketing automation would be right for them.

Our Mailigen experts are always available to answer any questions you may have.

If you want to find out more about email mar-keting or marketing automation and what process would be best for your business, please contact our team at Mailigen and we will help you!

© Mailigen, Inc. All rights reserved 2012. Mailigen Email Marketing Solutions

Mailigen is quickly becoming a leading provider of web-based email marketing soft-ware for any size business, organization or individual. Our product philosophy is simple, make it flexible, easy to use and cost effective. As part of the iMedia family, Mailigen has a dedicated product development team with an eye for building client driven software services with industry leading functionality.

To find out more about Mailigen solutions, please visit www.mailigen.com

Published by Mailigen

Copyright© 2012 Mailigen Ltd. All rights reserved.

No part of the contents of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of Mailigen Ltd.

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