Email Marketing

The Three Pillars of Email Marketing: Which Tools You Need for Your Newsletters

Katharina Iken3/14/2021

An overview by Bjoern Sjut on the types of tools available in email marketing

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Table of contents
  1. 1. Newsletter and Marketing Automation Systems:
  2. 2. Sales Email Systems:
  3. 3. Transactional Email Systems:
  4. The boundaries between the three different email marketing systems are highly blurred
  5. If you are responsible in the field of e-mail marketing, you should consider these four points for your tool infrastructures
  6. Measure tracking consent across all three systems
  7. Cover the entire customer journey with the tracking data
  8. Personalization data should be used across all three systems
  9. The deliverability across all three pillars must remain guaranteed
Our e-mail expert Bjoern Sjut from Finc3 is at it again. This time, he introduces you to the various pillars of e-mail marketing tools. Essentially, when you use an email marketing tool, it's all about templates and personalization. However, there are three main pillars in email marketing:

1. Newsletter and Marketing Automation Systems:

This involves sending e-mails from a marketing automation platform. These types of tools focus primarily on templates, customer segmentation and tracking. Examples of newsletter and marketing automation tools include Mailchimp, Emarsys and Active Campaign.

2. Sales Email Systems:

Sales emails are usually sent from CRM systems, or are linked to a company's regular email server, such as Office 365 or G-Suite. These systems provide a software frontend to make work easier for sales staff. This means, for example, that not every email starts with an empty window. The goal is not so much to address large segments, but to increase the productivity of individual people in sales or customer success. Examples of sales email systems are tools like Pipedrive and HubSpot Sales Hub.

3. Transactional Email Systems:

Transactional emails can also be supported by templates. Technically, these emails are triggered by applications and then sent through a transactional platform. This means: The platform's email server is also involved here. Transactional email systems aim to send emails quickly and directly, such as invoices, registration confirmations and the like. Tool examples include SparkPost and SendGrid.

The boundaries between the three different email marketing systems are highly blurred

This leads to the systems being difficult to separate from each other. Templates are always involved, but the difference lies in the technology, who sends the email. It's also about what the email aims to achieve: Is the goal to send as many nice emails as possible to segmented users, or to increase the productivity of individual sales people?

If you are responsible in the field of e-mail marketing, you should consider these four points for your tool infrastructures

This is important because all three systems have the potential to embed tracking pixels and it often happens that opens and clicks are tracked in marketing automation, but not in sales emails.

Cover the entire customer journey with the tracking data

So you also need the opens and clicks from emails across all types of emails, not just campaign emails. Your goal should be a consistent data infrastructure.

Personalization data should be used across all three systems

Based on what customers click in the newsletters, for example, you should be able to optimize sales templates.

The deliverability across all three pillars must remain guaranteed

Even if you have different email sending domains, you must ensure that your emails actually arrive.
 

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Katharina Iken
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Email Marketing
Marketers use email marketing software to design, personalize, and send promotional emails or newsletters to appropriate target groups. While emails containing advertising content are usually directed at individual people and small groups, regular newsletters are often sent to all contacts or specific customer segments. Since many contacts can be reached very cost-effectively, email marketing is a very exciting channel that continues to enjoy great popularity. The functions included in email marketing software vary depending on the provider. In principle, however, marketers can use newsletter software to design and create bespoke emails using HTML and CSS. As a rule, the providers of email marketing software also provide easy-to-use, visual editors that can be used to implement emails and newsletters without any prior scripting knowledge. When sending newsletters, it is not only security that is important, but also legal compliance. It is therefore incredibly important that email marketing tools include functions that comply with the extensive data protection laws in certain countries, such as the GDPR in Germany. This includes, for example, that all recipients must have agreed to receive the emails with a double opt-in. In addition to the creation and sending of targeted marketing emails, email marketing tools can be used to segment recipients, manage newsletter cancellations, and track open rates, dwell time, and link clicks. Email marketing tools are often integrated with CRM software or the tools themselves act as CRM systems. This expands the segmentation functions that are usually already available in email marketing software, and recipients can be targeted even more accurately. In addition, email marketing is often a crucial component of marketing automation software, which is why the software occasionally appears in both categories. To qualify as email marketing software, the solution must: * enable the creation and sending of emails or newsletters via an HTML or WYSIWYG editor * offer a selection of email templates * give users the option to preview the email and send it as a test email * save, manage, segment, and track email contact lists * provide campaign-based reports and analyses If you want to further your education in email marketing and learn from experts, then the OMR Professionals Guide to E-Mail-Marketing is just right for you! It offers 107 pages of concentrated expert knowledge on email marketing. And if you prefer to learn in a flexible e-learning format, take a look at the OMR Email Marketing Deep Dive Webinar and the OMR Academy E-Mail-Marketing Fundamentals E-Learning Course.

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