How is Email Marketing Automation Different from Email Marketing?

Using email marketing, especially for small businesses, plays a vital role in growing your business. Email marketing automation is the next step. It is one of the best ways to nurture and build relationships and provides assurance that you can reach your audience anytime without the fear of losing connection when social media platforms are down, like Facebook or Instagram.

Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social. You can personalise your customers’ experience, PLUS research backs up what most marketers already know: Customers love personalisation.

• 90% of consumers find personalised content very or somewhat appealing.
• 91% of consumers are more likely to patronize businesses that provide individualised recommendations and offers.
• A recent experiment revealed that when shoppers knew an ad was based on their activity on the site, their click-through rates increased by 11% and revenue from the product grew by 38%.
• In 2019, 72% of customers only respond to marketing messages that target their interests.

The leading type of personalisation experience that marketers use is email. The next step is email automation. Email automations lets you send the right message to the right people at the right time. This is done by using automated workflows which is extremely effective for lead nurturing.

With email automation you create a series of automated emails to help grow your relationship with your customers—and your business. Improving email marketing efficiency as a marketing channel through the sales funnel.

From our previous blog, 5 Email Marketing Tips to Boost Brand Awareness, we gave you a glimpse what are the different email marketing automation that you can use for your business. And here are the examples of email marketing automation:

• Welcome Email
• Promotional Email
• Seasonal Campaign
• Post-Purchase Drip
• Connect-Via-Social Campaign
• Newsletter
• Cart Abandonment Campaign
• Re-engagement Email

But what is the difference between email marketing automation and email marketing?

What is Email Marketing Automation?

Marketers use this approach to send out triggered or timed promotional offers to subscribers. It gives digital marketers the capability to send personalised messages to prospects and customers on a schedule or when certain conditions are met.

When marketers automate their emails, they avoid the hassle of having to create and send new emails every time a prospect shows interest in a brand, a customer abandons a cart, a business launches a sale, etc. In addition, studies show that marketing automation software can increase leads by 80% and conversions by 77%.

If you are still hesitant to try this process, here are a few reasons you should implement this in your business:

Keep prospects and customers engaged

Click-through data provided by email marketing automation allows digital marketers to identify the assets or links in their emails that get favourable responses. Based on this information, you can personalise the message in their emails to prevent complaints, build good brand impressions, and reduce the number of unsubscribes and bounces.

Increase engagement

Through email automation, marketers can send subscribers relevant, personalised, and timely messages. As a result, subscribers become more engaged with your brand.

Prospects into customers

Most customers prefer email as a method of communication, making it the ideal lead nurturing tool. By using email automation, marketers can convert leads through their sales funnel more effectively. By automating this process, they avoid having to send marketing emails manually.

Create segmented email lists

A business can segment its mailing lists using email marketing automation. Subscriber activity and CRM data (purchase history, last purchase, lead stages, etc.) can be used to segment marketing lists.

Boost efficiency

By automating CRM tasks with email automation, online marketers can save a great deal of time and effort. Besides storing and tracking client data, lead scoring and reestablishing contact with inactive leads, they can also calculate return on investment (ROI) for their customers.

How Does it Work?

Each time an event occurs or triggers, an email is sent, or a set of emails is sent. Depending on how many marketing actions a company wants to automate, the length of an automated email series varies. Using an email service, you can create an email flow for email marketing automation.

Based on information about leads, businesses can send the right emails at the right time to them using workflow. Digital marketers can gain insights into the activities of leads when they engage with a brand and use that data to set triggers that will enable them to send the most relevant messages. Both B2B and B2C companies can use email marketing automation.

In creating a simple email marketing automation or email funnel, a series of emails provide you with the opportunity to establish some familiarity with a new subscriber. When they’re most open to hearing from you, you can also explain your brand promise to them. These are some examples of what your welcome series should include:

1. Fulfilment and Introduction.
2. Invite them to follow you on social media.
3. Make sure you get to know them.

• Don’t forget to ask for their birthday.
• Find out what their email preferences are.
• Let them know where they heard about you.

Now that you have an idea of how it works. Let’s now talk about the different email marketing services and how to choose the right provider for your business.

List of Email Marketing Service Providers

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is an email marketing service for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. The platform is incredibly easy to use and extremely powerful. One of their unique features is that you can easily offer content upgrades and incentives via email sign up forms. Additionally, it provides easy-to-manage autoresponders that will let you send drip emails from their emailing service.

You can sign for free as long as your subscribers’ list is less than 1,000. The price for ConvertKit starts at $15/month, and they offer a 14-day free trial. To know more about their pricing comparison, visit their website here.

AWeber

One of the oldest and most popular email marketing providers in the world is AWeber. They provide small and medium-sized businesses with a wide variety of tools for managing their email marketing. Setting up an account is easy. They integrate with most platforms, including WordPress.

There is a limited free plan for the first 500 users. Subscriptions begin at $19 per month after that. In addition, they offer quarterly and annual plans that save even more money. Visit them here.

Constant Contact

One of the fastest-growing email marketing services in the world is Constant Contact. This is also one of the easiest email marketing services for beginners to use. Among the things you can manage is email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendars, and more.

You can use each account to send unlimited emails, track and report, share images, use list segmentation, integrate Facebook ads, and connect your Shopify store with powerful eCommerce features.

You can try Constant Contact for free for 60 days (no credit card required). Subscriptions start at $20 per month. View their other plans here.

Mailchimp

One reason Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world is that their email marketing service plan is forever free. With Mailchimp, you can easily create email campaigns using drag-and-drop, set up autoresponders, segment your contacts, and track your analytics. Additionally, you can customise delivery times based on user’s time zones, and you can segment based on geolocation.

With Mailchimp’s forever free plan, you can send 12,000 emails to up to 2,000 subscribers. Prices start at $10/month for up to 500 subscribers and increase with each additional 500 subscribers. Check out their other plans here.

SendinBlue

For businesses, SendinBlue offers a complete SMS and email marketing solution. Their email marketing platform is one of the fastest-growing in Europe. Users can send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and segment users with easy-to-use marketing automation tools. The AI algorithms can also select the best time for sending bulk emails so that they deliver them at their best.

SendinBlue offers a free email marketing plan with unlimited contacts. You can send up to 300 emails a day under their free plan, but they will brand every one of them. The Lite plan starts at $25 per month. If you want to add SMS to your account, the price will depend on your sending requirements. See more about their pricing here.

Sending automated emails helps you scale your email marketing efforts. If your platform sends a message every time someone signs up for your mailing list, you don’t need to make sure someone is available to do it. Whenever a customer performs any of the actions, you track through email automation, it automatically added them to your system. As a result, your system knows which messages to send them next without taxing your limited resources.

Whether you have any questions or simply want to chat, drop a comment below! We offer a full range of done for you realistic, practical marketing solutions for your business that deliver results and hit the spot with your customers. You can check out what we do here.

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