Email marketing automation versus email marketing

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the sending of your newsletter to your customer base. You do this on a regular basis. Think once a week, or three times a week. Do you also send other emails based on purchasing behaviour, such as a targeted email to people who have bought brand X in the past six months? Then you are busy with email marketing. With email marketing you are sending targeted emails to your customers based on interests that your customers have. Besides regular newsletters, you also send out a different email every now and then. Sometimes focused on a campaign such as Valentine's Day (nice catch) and sometimes focused on the purchasing behaviour of your customer, such as brand loyalty.

Personalisation is central in this (and has been for years), but it often doesn't go much further than a personal salutation. This way of marketing is still extremely popular. And with good reason. It is still the best converting marketing channel. It costs little compared to the reach you have. And it contributes to your branding. So, there is certainly nothing wrong with just email marketing.

What is email marketing automation?

Email marketing automation goes far beyond email marketing. Email marketing is all about the interactions with your email campaigns. Think about the open rate and click-through rate. Email marketing automation is about the total customer journey with interactions a person has with your company. With marketing automation, you find the right touchpoints to approach your customer at the right moment with the right message. Email marketing automation is all about profile enrichment to get to a 360 degrees customer profile. Using all kinds of data, such as order data, most viewed pages, lifetime purchase value and age. This way, you know what your customer is interested in and when you can address your customer.

When you have collected all this data, it is logical to do something with it. This is where email marketing automation comes into its power. By having your emails sent automatically, at the moment a touchpoint is touched by your customer, the chance of conversion is the highest. An example of this is: your customer already bought the same brand twice. Chances are that your customer will buy this brand a third time. For this, you set up a trigger: when your customer has bought this brand three times within six months, he will receive an automatic email with cross-sell products.

Another example: your customer loves a certain brand. And it is his birthday soon. Again, you set up a trigger. Your trigger consists of a few filters:

• Customer always buys brand X
• Customer's birthday is in 5 days

In this way you can surprise your customer right before his or her birthday with a discount on his favourite brand. How nice is that?

When is email marketing automation interesting for you?

Email marketing automation is interesting for you if you want to do more than just send newsletters. With email marketing automation, there is a lot of profit to be made. This is because you let a large part of your email marketing run automatically. Once this is set up, you do not have to worry about it anymore.

Are you just starting with your email marketing? Then you don't benefit from email marketing automation yet. In that case, you first need to collect email addresses and leads.

If you are in the business a bit longer and for instance are doing lead generation, regularly send emails and get weekly registrations, then it is definitely worth considering. With email marketing automation, you are more effective with your time, energy and money. You know how to excite your leads more easily with personalized emails. Existing customers are better served this way. And this way, they will commit to you for a longer period of time.