Why choose marketing automation over email marketing?
Email Marketing is Great
Email marketing is a cost-effective, time-tested marketing strategy. It’s simple to use and can reach the inboxes of both current and potential patrons. Sophisticated email marketing tools can even help to segment audiences, track a particular recipient’s behavior within an email campaign, and give aggregate data on who interacted with the campaign and who didn’t. Great, right?
Yes! Email marketing is great, but it’s only a part of the picture. It’s like only seeing Act 1 of Don Giovanni. What happens next…does someone else die? What happens after a patron clicks away from the email? Are they gone forever? That’s where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation can monitor and compile every digital interaction a patron has with your organization and automate correspondence based on that behavior, and that’s just the beginning.
Marketing Automation is Better
So, what happens in Act 2? What happens beyond the inbox? Marketing automation moves beyond the intermission and gives organizations the information and tools they need to nurture patrons and facilitate a seamless customer experience across multiple platforms.
Data Tracking
Marketing automation tracks every digital interaction a patron has with your organization. With that data comes an activity history that compiles a complete picture of how patrons interact with your content online. This includes behavior on your website, social media, email campaigns, surveys, phone calls, and even when they enter your venue. This data gives valuable insight into a patron’s needs and preferences.
With this information, your organization can now begin to fine-tune marketing efforts by determining the exact impact of each marketing campaign, nurture patrons based on their personal interests, capture and identify potential patrons, and enable the planning of more targeted campaigns based on observed behavior. Marketing automation can even take this a step further and take automatic steps with intelligent action.
Intelligent Action
Marketing automation rises to the next level when intelligent action is automatically taken based on certain patron behaviors. Depending on the behavior, your organization can optimize the timing of subsequent contact, the messaging, the platform, and even create suggestions for offline contact such as SMS messages, phone calls, or surveys.
Additionally, since you now know your patron’s digital needs and preferences, you can deliver customized messaging according to these preferences. Marketing automation allows organizations to build logic, create paths, and use personalization across your digital marketing platforms to tailor the patron experience.
With marketing automation and the rich patron information it provides, organizations can now spend more time delivering data-driven marketing campaigns that can automatically respond to your patron’s behaviors and preferences. You might even have time to catch Act 2! Spoiler alert – Don Giovanni dies.