As an ActiveCampaign partner, our clients often contacts us to discuss their needs for email marketing and marketing automation. However, we have come to realise that these terms are often used interchangeably within the marketing technology arena, but they are actually not the same thing. As such, we want to take some time to take a closer look at what they both are and how they can help your business.
What is email marketing?
A quick Google search will tell you that email marketing is effectively “the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email.” (Wikipedia).
Because it revolves around the sending of an email, the pivotal piece of information to have for your contact is their email address. Without the email address, you are simply not able to reach out to the contact via email. As such, for anyone looking for a solution for pure email marketing, ActiveCampaign offers a simple contact database where the only required field to create a contact record is the email address.
Now, ActiveCampaign does of course allow you to collect additional information in further standard as well as custom fields, so that you can interact with your contacts more meaningfully, but you can start with just the email address as well.
Email marketing can be done manually, so by creating and sending a campaign each time you wish to send out an email. They can also be sent using automations, where you build a list of emails that you would like to send at specified intervals. For example, you might like to send a series of PDF articles to anyone who subscribes to a list. After they sign up they might immediately receive the first email, thanking them for subscribing and directing them to a webpage where they can download the PDF document. 24 hours later the automation could then send them a second email containing the link to the next PDF, and then the following day the third email would go out to them.
This ability to auto-schedule the sending of emails is a simple example of a basic but powerful function of email marketing, which hopefully shows you how you could use a form of follow-up marketing to nurture your leads into customers.
Which businesses need to use email marketing?
The short answer is, every business. However, the extent of the email marketing you do will differ based on the size of your organisation.
For instance, if you are a small business and have never done any email marketing before, having basic email marketing capabilities may well be enough for you.
As you grow, or if you are a business that relies on getting notifications out to your contacts on a regular basis, you may like to use the more advance scheduling and automation features available through ActiveCampaign.
Whatever you are looking to do, we would love to support you in getting your email marketing up and running. You can reach us on 01889 280010 or by email on hello@zephi.co.uk.
