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It is almost a truism that marketing has become highly technology-intensive. Even while IT spending in other categories remains flat or has declined, the marketing function's spending on technology has held up-even in the recessionary environment.
A nearly ubiquitous component of any marketing technology portfolio is email marketing. In fact, there is a high probability your company is already using some form of it, even though you might not be aware of it.
A related component is marketing automation. Cus- tomers often talk of these in the same breath. In fact, some would argue that marketing automation is what email marketing wants to be. In other words, marketing automation is an evolution of email marketing. In reality, it is an adjacent-but comparable-set of tools.
In this article, we will look at this distinction in some detail and also summarize what marketers should know when evaluating these technologies.
EMAIL MARKETING AND MARKETING AUTOMATION
Companies have long used email marketing to reach out to people to keep them informed and to remain connected with them. Traditionally, you would buy an email database and have an email server with the capability of high-volume email blasts to send out mailers to people in that database. Over time, these platforms/tools started building better capabilities, such as:
* The ability to capture leads from other sources
* The management of these leads
* Features such as WYSIWYG editors to create emails using templates
* Tracking and analytics
And this is where the overlap with...