Marketing Automation Kills Email Marketing!?

Major online players are striving for a more personal web experience. The more information you know about a client (big data), the more personal message you should deliver to them. Old-school email marketing, when you blast out the same message to all of your subscribers, doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Why?

Inbox overflow

People receive way too many commercial messages per day. According to a report from 2013, people receive more than 400 promotional emails per month. I can imagine that this number is much higher nowadays.

What happens with the majority of these messages? They will never be opened, since they are not relevant enough for the receiver. People won’t bother with irrelevant messages. They will delete or never read those emails.

What do you need to do if you want to make your messages attractive for your subscribers? You need to personalize as much as possible.

Everything starts with personalization

Most email marketing tools are prepared for basic personalization, such as adding the %%name%% or %%address%% of your subscriber to the email template or email title. Personalized subject lines deliver 26% higher unique open rates so it definitely makes a big difference in the ROI of your email marketing.

If you want to go deeper than basic personalization, you may run into the boundaries of the email marketing tool you use. If you want to personalize the email content itself, you will need to look for a more specialized solution – a marketing automation tool most likely.

Email marketing is “only a feature” in a marketing automation tools…

Image source Venturebeat.com

…the most important feature though! That’s why it’s quite understandable who use marketing automation, won’t use a separate service for email marketing. Only 13% use marketing automation and email marketing tools the same time, **77% of marketing automation users use it instead of email marketing. **

ESP’s have to keep up with innovation!

The whole email marketing industry is going under big transformation period, and it seems that big fish are eating the smaller ones to make huge, robust, all-you-can-eat software tools, which are capable of doing everything: email marketing, lead generation, personalization, landing pages, content marketing, analytics, direct mail, text messages… almost everything.

What’s next?

There are now two separate markets. Email marketing industry is expected to grow to $6.5 Billion / year by 2018, while marketing automation is expected to reach $5.5 Billion / year by 2019. Since both markets are growing with a 10-20% per year, exciting acquisitions are likely to happen.

A growing market is generally good for us as well, since EDMdesigner’s responsive email editor is available for white-label integration into both marketing automation and email marketing tools. So if any of those are looking for a professional email editor, we happen to have one.