Email marketing and email automation are not the same: Here’s why!
Most marketers and small business owners believe that email marketing and marketing automation are one and the same. Since the terms are often used interchangeably and both the solutions use email as the primary communication channel, it tends to create confusion. But, however, the truth is that there are many differences between the two.

First, let’s talk about email marketing.
What is email marketing and where is it used?
Email marketing involves sending one-time emails to prospects to build trust, enhance relationships with current customers and encourage loyalty. Using this approach, marketers are able to move business conversations to a more personal front. It’s liked by most marketers because it costs less than print advertising, trade shows and other marketing channels, and promises a much higher return on investment.
It’s mostly used for sending email broadcast campaigns to a list of contacts. But the only problem here is monotony. Your prospects receive the same form of content — a newsletters, thank you mails or introductory autoresponder series — as it treats all your contacts as the same. So even if you’re using an autoresponder series of emails that are time based on the person’s last actions such as signing up on your list, the content is generic and not personalised for their needs.
But, what’s wrong with it?
Well, the behavior of customers have changes because of the wide range of information available today. So you need to give something valuable to your prospects in order to stand out and convert them into real-time paying customers. While email marketing suits best when sending them newsletters, blog posts, special promotions and webinar invitations, it fails when you want to connect with your prospects, or engage them. That’s where marketing automation is useful.
What is marketing automation and why is it better than email marketing?
Even though both are rooted on emails, marketing automation lets you segment the market and send even more personalized and more valuable emails to your list of prospects. Put simply, it’s more about lead-nurturing than information-bombarding. And we all know that segmentation is the key in marketing.
It helps you identify which stage of buying process your prospect is in. It’s more than just a single email in your marketing campaign. With marketing automation, you can design campaigns that weave your buyer’s needs into a series of emails.
For example, you can send an initial email to a segment of your list of prospects. Also, if a prospect takes a specific action, you can trigger another set of emails. Totally different set of emails are sent to the ones who didn’t take action.
It is beyond open and click rates. In this case, you can even track the inbox activity. This includes the behavior on your website, social media and other aspects of their digital footprints. In other words, it gives you more insight into the needs and preferences of your prospects. With traditional marketing techniques, however, that’s not possible. You can’t do much if your customer isn’t ready to buy immediately. While on the other hand, automation helps you continuously engage your prospects and identify signs that indicate that they’re ready to make a purchase.
The purpose of marketing automation is to create a multi-stage sales funnel that will alter the communications sent automatically, exactly at the right time for each of your contacts.
It helps you in automating the lead-nurturing process in a way that notifications are sent to sales team members, alerting them of qualified prospect activity such as website visits all the way to specific pages and email opens etc. This helps your sales team to respond at the right time.
With marketing automation, you’ve the ability to track and nurture customers through the entire buying process. And not just that — you can also determine the exact impact of each of your campaign. You can track what works and replicate it, use analytics to measure and validate the success of your marketing efforts.
It will help you make your marketing efforts more targeted and sophisticated. Also, your prospects will have access to more relevant pieces of content while going through the sales cycle.
More relevant emails mean more conversion. With a lot email marketing trying to add automation features to their product, it’s better to use automation simply because it adds more value.
In my next post I will share about how automation helps you generate quality leads.
