How does Marketing Cloud differ from traditional marketing automation tactics?

Hi Suyash,

Many organizations are not delivering data-driven interactions and experiences to their customers. Instead, these organizations communicate and interact with their customers through a series of disconnected, independent campaigns and messages — often across many organizational functions that are not coordinated, data driven, or entirely purposeful.

Hi,

The demand for marketing automation software is on the rise. According to Technavio analysts, the global marketing automation software market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over nine percentfrom 2015-2019.

This increase in popularity has brought a cloud of confusion with it.

Many businesses are under the impression that “marketing automation” is just vendor speak for “email marketing”. The two are not interchangeable though, which means buyers often end up comparing systems designed for different jobs.

To avoid barking up the wrong tree, it’s important to learn the difference between email marketing and marketing automation — and when to opt for one over the other.

Email Marketing
If you’re like most marketers, then you already love email marketing. It’s a proven way to build trust with prospects, enhance relationships with current customers, and encourage loyalty.

One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that it moves business conversations to a more personal environment: the customer’s inbox. Additionally, email marketing typically costs less than direct mail, print advertising, or trade shows. The estimated return on investment for email marketing is between 2,500–4,300 percent.

But email marketing presents unique challenges as well.

Since each contact generally receives the same content — a newsletter, a thank you or follow-up email, or even an introductory auto-responder series — it’s difficult to send personalized communications. As your audience grows, you rely on static campaigns and separate lists, rather than one database of contacts that can be segmented and sorted into multiple campaigns. Your customers aren’t all the same, but email marketing often treats them as if they were.

Another challenge is the ability to directly attribute revenue to your email marketing efforts. Of course, most vendors provide metrics such as open and click through rates, but these data points don’t always connect to revenue or show if your campaigns are increasing sales long-term.

Marketing Automation
If you’ve ever tried to compare marketing automation software, you’ve likely found vendors proclaiming the technology is a “game changer” that will take your marketing “to the next level.”

What’s harder to find is a clear, unbiased explanation of what that looks like.

The confusion around marketing automation and email marketing stems from the fact that they are both rooted in email. Though both use email as the primary means of communication, it’s easiest to think of email marketing as the starting point that marketing automation builds from.

Full marketing automation systems go beyond the inbox to let you nurture leads and automate campaigns. In addition to email marketing, a good marketing automation system provides the following capabilities:

Landing page development
Website visitor tracking
Lead management (capture, score, and nurture)
A centralized marketing database
Native CRM integration
Data analysis and reporting
And those are just the basics. Many vendors outshine the competition by providing additional tools such as:

Dynamic website content generation
Multichannel campaign management
Mobile/responsive design
ROI and revenue reporting
Built-in ISV integration
As you can see, marketing automation platforms are powerful and complex. But how exactly does this power help you level up?

Marketing automation tools help you identify which stage of the buying process your prospect are in, and then guide them to the next stage — until they eventually convert into a customer.

For example, instead of a marketing campaign with a single email, you can design campaigns that weave your buyer’s needs into a series of emails. This means you can send an initial email to a segment of your list. Then, if a prospect takes a specified action — downloads a white paper, reads a blog post, or views your pricing page — it will trigger an email. A totally different email than the one that’s sent to prospects who didn’t take action.

Beyond click through rate, you can also track a prospect’s activity outside the inbox. This includes their behavior on your website, social media, and other aspects of their digital footprint. In turn, this gives you more insight into their needs and preferences.

In traditional email marketing, there’s not much you can do if your customer isn’t ready to buy immediately. But with marketing automation, you can continually engage prospects and identify signs that indicate they are ready to purchase. When those behaviors are detected, the system can alert your sales team to reach out.

The ability to track and nurture customers through the entire buying process allows you to determine the exact impact each campaign has. If you discover 75 percent of prospects convert after taking a certain series of actions — like watching a video or reading a blog post —  then it’s important to scale and replicate that process. Using marketing automation data, you can track what works, replicate it, and use analytics to measure and validate the success of your marketing efforts.

Hope this helps.