Email marketing software will allow you to create and send beautiful looking emails to your prospects or customers. You’ll also be able to see which emails have been delivered, and get analytics on opens and click-throughs.
Marketing automation software includes email marketing, but takes you beyond just email, so that you can automate, track and analyse all sorts of interactions your customers or prospects have with your business. Marketing automation software such as ClickDimensions and Act-On also allows you to track visits to your website – and if your visitors have already interacted with your marketing communications (for example, by clicking through on an email or filling out a form on your website), then you will be able to see the specific journey they’ve taken.
With marketing automation, you can also adapt and tailor your communications (automatically) depending on how you leads and prospects interact with previous communications. You can set up nurture campaigns, for instance, that send a different follow up message to prospects who click through on an email link vs those who did not. You can also build dynamic content into your email templates, so that different customer segments receive different versions of your communications.
Lead scoring also helps you identify hot prospects, based on how they have interacted with your content. You can set scores for visits to specific web pages, email clicks, form submissions or other activities, and use that data to qualify your leads.