Marketing automation: definition

Automation works through predefined scenarios based on user behaviour: for example, sending a welcome email when someone joins a list, or a reminder email when they abandon a shopping cart.

Note:you may already have heard ofautoresponders,trigger marketingorautomated emails: all these terms refer to the automation of marketing tasks, so here we will stick to the term “marketing automation».

How is it different from email marketing?

L’email marketingconsists of sending an email to a list of contacts (one to many). It generally serves a fairly broad purpose, such as announcing promotions or new products, or sending news content through a newsletter…

In short, it looks like this:

By contrast,marketing automation sends automatic, targeted emails (one to one), triggered by specific actions of your contacts. These messages are therefore more timely and individually tailored to each user according to their progress in the customer journey.

marketing automation is not limited to sending emails: you can also use it to automatically add your contacts to specific mailing lists based on their actions, give them a score in your database, and many other ways to refine your relationship with your most engaged users.