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

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

Measure tracking consent across all three systems

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.