Marketing automation vs. email delivery platform: Which tool is right for your team?

Email is an essential tool for marketing teams across sectors and industries. Most of these teams rely on email delivery or marketing automation platforms (MAP) to send emails. How do you decide which tool is right for your team?

To evaluate whether your marketing organization needs a full marketing automation platform (MAP) or an email delivery platform, you must comprehensively assess your business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you do just that.

Assessing your need for a marketing automation platform

Assess the current marketing system

Start by determining if your organization has outgrown its current marketing system. Marketing automation is often a solution for rapidly growing companies that need to scale their efforts.

If data in multiple databases can’t be consolidated, or the current email system can’t deliver the level of behavioral targeting needed, it may be time for you to investigate marketing automation.

As part of this assessment, consider how much time staff spends on repetitive tasks that a MAP could speed up or eliminate.

Dig deeper: Download MarTech’s buyer’s guide for marketing automation platforms (registration required)

Identify critical marketing automation capabilities

Next, identify and prioritize your software requirements and key capabilities. 

Determine if your sales reps need real-time access to marketing data, which would necessitate native CRM integration.

Assess the importance of a sophisticated social media presence, making social marketing management and integration critical.

Determine the kind of MAP needed

Marketing automation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Determine if inbound marketing (e.g., social media, blogging, SEO) is more important to your organization than outbound (email, SMS).

Determine if reporting and analytics are key features.

Assess whether lead scoring is a crucial part of your marketing program and whether greater capabilities in audience segmentation and personalization are needed.

Establish goals

It is critical to know the goals for the MAP if you decide to deploy it.

Determine if the goal is to improve the quality of leads handed off to sales or to grow revenue by increasing conversion at key stages in the buying cycle.

Assess if the goal is to improve visibility into the buying and sales cycles to optimize marketing engagement or to reach the growing portion of mobile users leads.

You’ll want to bring key stakeholders together to establish the organization’s goals.

Determine integration with existing tech stack

Identify all the tools already in your martech stack so you can ask the MAP vendor about integrations. (Many vendors offer app marketplaces for faster access to participating systems.)

Virtually all marketing automation vendors offer APIs, but they may be an add-on to the platform’s price, and developers may be needed to make the necessary connections.

Evaluate management support

You’ll need an executive sponsor to secure support at the C-level. This will require presenting a compelling case that the benefits of new software vastly outweigh the costs, such as converting more leads, making sales more efficient and improving campaign ROI.

Consider internal skill sets and staff

To maximize the ROI of any marketing automation investment, your staff will need training and a willingness to develop and execute new business processes..

If your marketing and sales organizations are operating in silos, they will need to work more cooperatively on lead scoring and routing systems, lead qualification definitions and more effective marketing collateral and communications.

It’s always a good idea to identify someone who will use the system once it has been adopted to take the lead in the selection process.

Determine measurement of success

It’s important to know why a MAP is being adopted. 

If your goal is to increase conversions, it’s important to know the conversion rate before you implement automation to measure its impact. If it’s to improve email efficiency, be prepared with metrics on open rates and clicks.

In addition to measuring against marketing goals, it’s wise to measure the depth and breadth of platform usage. Many marketers only use basic email capabilities within their marketing automation platform, meaning they’re paying for features that aren’t being utilized.

Calculate the full cost

Some MAPs are all-inclusive, while others feature add-on tools and services that can significantly increase costs.

Consider the costs of ongoing services and training and the indirect costs associated with getting your staff up and running on the new system. 

If there is no IT or design staff, be sure to ask questions about what these services cost hourly. If the platform offers design templates, for example, find out how many and how much it costs to customize template design.

If your evaluation determines that the organization needs more than basic email campaign development and execution, lead capture, scoring, nurturing, centralized marketing databases, and basic reporting, then a full MAP may be necessary. 

A MAP offers more advanced features, such as AI-powered dynamic content generation, email deliverability tools, ABM features, mobile marketing, AI-based predictive analytics, and social/lead profile integration.

Download the Martech Intelligence Report for marketing automation platforms.

This buyer’s guide includes profiles of 14 vendors, pricing information, capabilities comparisons and more. (Registration required.)

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