Why You Should be Using Marketing Automation Instead of Email Service Providers

There are a lot of business owners and inexperienced marketers who believe that an email service provider is “basically the same” as a marketing automation platform. This ignorance is commonplace, but not a good idea.

Multi-step Campaigns

Every step in your marketing campaign must be planned out in advance, lest you end up “winging it” and losing a lot of potential sales down the line. Since many potential customers are not immediately interested in buying, you need to plan for nurturing each lead that enters your funnel. Email service providers do not allow you to plan each step of your campaign, as they obviously focus on sending emails. Often, even collection is not covered.

Lead Completion

Effective marketing automation often includes options for completing the contact details of an incomplete lead based on data from elsewhere. In much the same way as social media companies collect information to be used later, your marketing process may need to connect names, contact details, preferences and other pieces of information to complete a given lead. Email service providers are not capable of doing this.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is when your system assigns a different priority level for each lead based on its likelihood of resulting in a sale, or in how long it is estimated to take to reach that level. Marketing automation scores leads, and allows you to set priorities, the factors that add into these priorities, and what is to be done when a lead reaches a certain score.

Analytics

While email programs will measure open rates, often this is the limit of their scope. In cases where you are working with websites, social media and other important variables, this can be limiting. Email is rarely the only method you end up using for your marketing.

Integration

In some cases, email service providers integrate to a point. However, they are rarely integrated into your website, your social media channels, your direct mail campaigns, or other methods you may be using. Email providers send and quantify emails, whereas full automation provides you a unified view of your total marketing investment.

Website Quantification

Marketing automation software provides you with quantification on your website, such as identifying anonymous IP addresses and determining actions and time spent on the website. This provides you a picture of whether a traffic source is useful or not.

Marketing automation has far fewer limitations than email service providers. MyMobileLyfe provides the marketing automation solutions your business needs to make meaningful connections with your customers: click here to get started today!