When paired with an overarching marketing strategy, email marketing can open the door to improved deal flow, deeper prospect relationships, and provide tangible value and measurable results for your private equity or venture firm. If you’re new to email marketing or retooling your existing tech stack, it may seem like a daunting task to find the right platform to meet your needs. We can help.
There are countless email marketing tools available, most promising some variety of email automation, personalization, and analytical functionality. If you’re looking to automate email, sales, ad campaigns, or track anonymous site traffic, conduct lead scoring, and more, you may require a more robust marketing automation platform instead of a simpler email marketing tool.
When building your own tech stack, it’s important that all of your technologies work together on the frontend and backend of the applications, while also taking into account your needs, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. Not every firm or business needs marketing automation, and for those who do, the old adage “less is more” should be kept in mind when evaluating and choosing a platform.
How do you decide whether an email marketing or marketing automation platform is right for your firm, and where to go from there?
In this second installment of our email marketing series, we’ll explain the differences between the two, outline considerations and factors to keep in mind, and provide an overview of the most popular options on the market. This overview will not be an exhaustive list of platforms, but instead will provide you with a starting point to better equip your firm to make an informed decision as you move forward.
What is an Email Marketing Platform?
Email marketing itself covers a more narrow scope than marketing automation. An email marketing platform is an application that allows you to plan, execute, and report on email marketing campaigns. While this type of platform often comes equipped with features like an email builder, email scheduler, analytics, or even email automation, it is strictly used only for email marketing. As briefly touched upon in our first installment in this series, emails can generate brand awareness, sales, leads, or educate with thought leadership and other content.
Standalone email marketing platforms like MailChimp are relatively simple to implement and use right away, and can even provide some level of email automation without requiring an all-in-one marketing automation tool. If you’ve already had a baseline of success with email marketing, introducing automation tactics within your email marketing program can allow you to streamline your process, allowing you to trigger emails automatically and personalize audience segments. It’s important to note that email marketing platforms, while incredibly useful and versatile, can only track the actions taken by recipients of your email blasts on those emails.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation software, on the other hand, monitors every digital interaction a lead has with your business. It also compiles all that data into an activity history that gives a 360-degree view of your leads and their digital breadcrumbs. Put simply, marketing automation is a robust, all-in-one marketing technology that streamlines tasks across channels including email, social media, and web, and commonly includes features like:
- Lead Nurturing
- CRM Integration
- Campaign Management
- Lead Management
- Lead Scoring
- Landing Pages
- Email Automation
- Reporting and Analytics
- Scalability
Marketing automation is a very powerful tool because it allows you to individually track user behavior, provide real-time access to marketing data for your business development team, and leverage personalized content for prospects based on actions they take across your marketing channels.
5 Factors to Consider When Choosing the Right Email Tool
In order to determine the level of technology you need, and ultimately, the best option on the market for your firm, it’s critical to know up front your business objectives and marketing goals, existing tech stack, team knowledge level, bandwidth, and budget. All too often, marketers dive headfirst into marketing automation long before they really need it, or take on a new email marketing tool without the immediate resources to support or make use of it.
We’ve outlined five factors you should keep at the forefront when discussing with your team what kind of tool you require and while evaluating platforms.
1. Alignment With Your Existing Marketing Strategy
Most importantly, the platform you select needs to match your business objectives and marketing goals. Do you want to improve the quality of leads for your business development team? Do you want to enhance visibility into the sales cycles to optimize marketing engagement? You may also want to think about the current state of your website and overall messaging. Does your firm’s website clearly tell your story and have content to drive action? Do you already have a messaging framework in place or are you still struggling to align your team on how you’re presenting your firm?
If your firm is new to email marketing, or you don’t already have a solid content marketing plan in place that you are executing on via a regular cadence, a more streamlined email marketing tool may be the better fit. Only once you establish a clear baseline, and your strategies and goals evolve, should your team consider marketing automation. Tools can help scale a solution to a problem, but they shouldn’t be expected to solve the issue itself.
2. Working With Your Current Tech Stack
The odds are that your firm already has a tech stack in place. This tech stack can include standalone tools for data storage, website analytics, CRM, SEO, webinar hosting, social media management, live chat, and more—all used together to optimize and augment your marketing processes throughout the customer lifecycle.
When evaluating new software, it’s important to avoid creating a bloated tech stack. This can not only slow down overall marketing operations, but it can also negatively impact ROI. Define your outcomes and strategy first, and then identify which tools are being underutilized and where you have real capability gaps.
New tools in your tech stack also need to be vented out to ensure they integrate seamlessly with your other technologies. While most email marketing or marketing automation vendors offer APIs, it could be an add-on to the price of the platform or you may require a service like Zapier.
3. Technical Literacy and Knowledge
Understanding your team’s level of technical literacy and knowledge is also key in determining the right platform fit. Does your firm have an IT team or a marketer with development expertise that has the know-how required for running a marketing automation tool? Are you working with a digital agency that can help with initial implementation, troubleshooting, and overall support?
It is also important to recognize that technology isn’t perfect and things may break—so having extra help to resolve your unique issue is critical. What kind of customer support is available through the vendor and how immediately can you expect to receive an answer?
Alternatively, if customer support is not offered by the vendor itself, it’s important to consider whether there are online resources available. Is there a library of how-to videos, webinars, or guides? What will these resources teach you and how will you access these resources?
4. Your Team’s Bandwidth
Although these tools help automate processes, implementing, managing, and leveraging them to their full capacity still requires time, effort, and resource drain on your team. Do you have the proper bandwidth to make the tradeoff between time/effort and the outcome worth it?
To maximize ROI, your team will likely require training and a willingness to develop and execute new business processes. Additionally, if you have a marketing and business development team—and they have been operating in silos previously to this point—they will need to work more cooperatively on communications, messaging, and more. Overall, a standalone email marketing tool, while still requiring bandwidth of your team, is much more manageable than an all-in-one marketing automation system. Remember, it’s best to scale tools once you have established a baseline.
5. The Inevitable: Pricing and Cost
Pricing structures can differ from platform to platform, but most costs will be variable based on the number of contacts. When researching pricing for different platforms, make sure to take a close look at the base price, the limits on contacts, how database scaling will affect cost over time, and which features and benefits impact the price most.
On the whole, standalone email marketing tools like MailChimp are more affordable than marketing automation systems. And, while marketing automations can increase ease by combining multiple tools in one, you may be able to build your own tech stack with the key capabilities you need (without the ones you don’t) for a lower cost than opting for an all-in-one platform.
A High-Level Look at Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Platforms on the Market
We’ve rounded a list of the top five most popular email marketing and marketing automation tools on the market below, with a brief overview of each. Keep in mind, this is not an exhaustive list, but should instead help serve as a starting point to lay the groundwork for researching, exploring, and finding options that best fit your firm’s needs.
1. DealCloud Dispatch
DealCloud Dispatch is built for the private equity and investment banking space, so it’s not surprising to see its prominence growing in this industry. With Dispatch, you can send branded communications to your key institutional relationships while also collecting engagement metrics on each campaign to better understand the ROI of your marketing activities. DealCloud, its CRM component, is designed to correlate with monetary cohorts, including funds, fund sizes, and fund participants, and allows for enhanced due diligence workflows and risk assessment.Unfortunately, DealCloud Dispatch does lack sales automation and anonymous visitor tracking capabilities, key features which can not only increase efficiencies, but let you know in real-time when leads are getting warmer. Additionally, there is room for improvement when it comes to APIs in place for integration with other software.
2. SharpSpring
SharpSpring is a marketing automation platform that offers a full suite of marketing functions, while also featuring a full sales platform with a built-in CRM. The CRM is very intuitive and acts as an all-in-one workstation, allowing users to view contacts in one centralized area. Additionally, SharpSpring even allows you to create ads with the contact data from the CRM, automating the creation of dynamic audiences and improving ad targeting.
While SharpSpring offers a competitive list of capabilities at a middle-ground price point that allows for unlimited users, it does lack some more sophisticated tools and the onboarding process can be thin. If your firm is just getting to email marketing, a standalone tool may be a better fit for entry-level users.
3. MailChimp
Unlike the other platforms mentioned here, MailChimp is strictly an email marketing tool—not a marketing automation platform—but it still packs a punch in its capabilities. It is one of the most well-established emailing marketing tools on the market and is well-suited for beginners just getting into email marketing.
It includes capabilities including email automation, data segmentation, email templates, personalization, A/B testing, lead capture forms, and integration with CRMs. Additionally, it is priced competitively, and requires minimal training to get up and running.
4. HubSpot
With HubSpot marketing automation, you don’t need any design skills to create personalized, professional emails—thanks to its drag-and-drop editor. Its email platform is powered by HubSpot’s CRM, so you have access to accurate customer data to customize emails and can A/B test to tailor your messaging. It also includes powerful lead management software that further helps to customize marketing messages. Chances are, you’ve likely visited HubSpot’s resource library and blog at some point. The company prides itself on producing helpful content and providing top-rate customer service.
HubSpot is far from one of the cheapest options on the market—and with so many bells and whistles, there is a learning curve to implementing, onboarding, and getting comfortable using everything it offers. It’s important to keep in mind the resources your team can put forth in a tool as robust as this to make the most of the price tag.
5. Marketo
Marketo specializes in B2B marketing automation. It offers a comprehensive marketing suite covering email marketing, marketing analytics, content AI, Marketo Sales Engage, mobile marketing, social media, digital ads, and more. When it comes to email marketing specifically, Marketo allows you to tap into your customer’s behavior and automate emails, use A/B testing, and even create predictive content.
One of Marketo’s biggest drawbacks is lack of a CRM, which means that you’ll need to integrate with a third-party platform for this. It’s worth noting that it does offer a robust integration with Salesforce, providing a bidirectional sync for leads, contacts, and Salesforce campaigns. Despite not having a CRM of its own, its price point falls into the enterprise-level and it doesn’t offer an affordable entry-point for smaller firms.
Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Comparison
Get Advice on Building Your Tech Stack
Email marketing is a powerful solution for private equity and venture firms looking to reach—and engage—prospects. However, choosing the right platform is critical.
The way you build your tech stack influences much about your company—from how efficiently you’ll be able to work, the potential drain on your internal team and resources, to your firm’s ROI. We can help you get it right. Shoot us a message to connect and subscribe to our newsletter to get the next post in our email marketing series straight to your inbox.