Email Sending Platforms
Email Sending Platforms (ESPs) such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and Emma Mailer to name a few are very effective for sending out bulk email.
The main features of an Email Sending Platform are that you can
- import your contact lists,
- send personalised emails,
- create even more personalised messaging is possible if you segment your lists and send more relevant messaging to each segment,
- design your email using a drag and drop editor.
Let’s not forget the reporting offered by Email Sending Platforms which reveal the open rate, click through rate, bounce rate and so on.  The reporting offers useful insights that can guide your future campaigns to be more successful.  Find out more about how to improve your open rates.
If you are using a paid version of the platform then it’s possible to use more sophisticated functionality such as split testing. You may have also have noticed functionality called Automation is available in the platform. More about this later in this article.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to certain software platforms and technologies designed to allow you to more effectively market to multiple online channels and automate repetitive tasks.
Marketing Automation enables organisations to deliver right message at the right time.
Marketing automation dramatically increases the effectiveness and efficiency of finding, nurturing, and converting customers.
Its suite of tools empowers sales and marketing professionals to drive more leads, convert more leads to sales, and optimize their return on investment.
With the power of Marketing Automation, you can:
- Monitor your prospects’ online behaviour on your website and social media
- Flag particular behavioural triggers
- Perform specific automated actions based on these behavioural triggers
- Send targeted automated emails based on these online behaviours and interests
- Score and nurture leads according to real time data and information
- Engage with these leads as just the right moment with the right message depending on where they are in the buying cycle
- Notify salespeople to act at just the right time
- Identify even anonymous leads
- Gather lead information through dynamic forms built for conversion
- Integrate to your existing CRM or use our built-in CRM
- Integrate to Social Media and Google AdWords
- Forge rich relationships by developing a deep and targeted connection with your customers
- Customise reports to understand your ROI, eliminate waste and invest in successful tactics
Regarding the Automation that is available in Email Sending Platforms from what we have tested this Automation functionality offers the ability to create Drip Campaigns and some behavioural targeting.  A Drip Campaign is a  set of marketing emails that will be sent out automatically on a schedule.  Drip Campaigns are great: according to research done by the Emma email-marketing suite, relevant targeted emails produce 18-times more revenue than globally broadcast ones. People who read your drip emails are far more likely to click the links in them, with a 119% increase in click rate from drip emails.
Setting up a drip campaign is high effort to start with but then becomes a real time saving as it runs automatically.
While Email Marketing Platforms have pushed hard to include Automation in their suite of tools you may have noticed the list of functionality under Marketing Automation Platforms far outweigh the functionality available in Email Sending Platforms
The main differences between the two systems are highlighted in this head-on comparison:
