Why businesses must scale up from Emails (ESP) to Marketing Automation

Usage of modern technology to scale up a business is not a new story anymore. But with access to marketing automation you can square your business growth by  nurturing your loyal ,lucrative customer relationships with ease.  Many industries and companies that previously used Email service providers or ESP (or in many cases no marketing software at all) are now aggressively looking for marketing automation solutions as a new alternative for business growth.

What is marketing automation?
“I can explain a move from an Email Service Provider (ESP) to a marketing automation platform with an analogy: still photographs versus video. ESPs are like still photographs: you can get great stats from using one, but each campaign is effectively a snapshot in time. Marketing automation platforms are like videos: you can see the behaviour of people in multiple campaigns over time, taking all the snapshots and connecting them together to make a flip movie or video out of them.” – Joseph Zuccaro, Founder & President of Allinio LLC

How is marketing automation useful?
A marketing automation platform (MAP) is often used along with a lifecycle marketing strategy to closely manage and nurture generated leads, aiming to convert warm leads into customers.

How is Marketing Automation better than Email Service Provider (ESP’s)?
While you are already using ESP like mail chimp, or constant contact you may not want to buy another email system. Both ESPs and MAPs(Marketing Automation Platform) are used to send emails for the organization, both do so very differently, and present information back to the marketing in very different ways.

Let’s discuss in detail how MAP is better than ESP

1. Customer Behavioural tracking vs Email behaviour tracking : Traditional ESPs are unable to provide new metrics of email, actual sales, and cross-channel marketing. Even more advanced versions of ESP have some list segmenting capabilities, but their main function is to fire off those emails without behavioural tracking or audience targeting. Marketing automation allows you to track email data plus leads behaviour like watch a webinar, download an eBook, and so on.
2. Customer-centric message vs Generic message:  Both MAP’s and ESPs can be used as a direct marketing tool to send an email. While most ESP’s are built on segmentation or targeting a list and then sending, Map’s predominantly sent emails via automation (like drip program) or in response to a prospect’s action that is monitored by the platform (like form submission, page visit, score threshold met, etc. These feel more personal to the recipient.
3. Lead Conversion vs Lead engagement: ESP’s is best used for sending emails to subscribers and reporting on those email sends is related to lead engagement and performance. MAP’s are built to cater to the sales organization. It presents actionable data to the sales team to determine where the opportunities for conversion optimization exists. So, most MAP’s will come with standard reporting tools that sculpt a more holistic view of the customer. Map’s are used to empower sales team; it reports the in-the-moment activity of a subscriber directly to a salesperson either via system notifications or tie-ins to a CRM platform to assign tasks.
4. Direct Integration vs Third-party and native form integration: MAP’s can consolidate and coordinate your omnichannel marketing campaign into a single platform that seamlessly integrates with your CRM simultaneously improving your marketing velocity and aligning marketing and sales teams into one unit. It is cumbersome to integrate an email marketing tool into a website. They do not allow direct integration. You need a third-party integration app like Shop Sync to integrate email marketing tools.
5. Automation vs Manual: Email marketing is time-consuming as there is no automation provided by the email service provider. Hence lots of manual work is required in sending emails. Whereas using marketing automation tools you can create multistage, automated campaigns for your subscribers conserving and reallocating valuable time and resources.

What does your Business need?
The most valuable treasure for any business is its unique relationship with its prospects and customers. The most thoughtful marketing strategies for any organization include engaging experiences for the customer and extended customer lifecycle. The marketing automation platforms assure convenience, power, and scalability to execute marketing campaigns and workflows.

How MAP can help your business growth?
For the growth of your business, you would need more than a system to send out emails to your subscribers. Marketing automation platforms provide you with the solution helping you generate more leads, drive sales and provide positive ROI for your marketing efforts.

MAP is not just an email activity. Let’s see how MAP can help in the growth of your business.

1. It will help you in lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing, and most importantly marketing ROI.
2. It helps to reduce customer churn.
3. It helps to market more effectively on multiple online channels like email, social media websites.
4. It helps to execute and design a time-bound marketing workflow
5. It can create campaign elements, dynamic content, and messages that can be repurposed to match specific prospects
6. It can plan, coordinate, manage and measure all of its marketing campaigns, both online and offline. You can develop and launch effective campaigns faster, cheaper, and at a greater scale.
7. It does not require software installation by the customer
8. It is equipped with dynamic form fields for building complete contact profiles,
9. It can help in building and launching landing pages and contact forms,
10. It can perform SEO audits

Let’s see how marketing automation fine tunes for each distinct stage of lead funnel: