Email marketing: automation or classic marketing?

Email marketing has evolved significantly, providing marketers with increasingly sophisticated tools to reach their target audience effectively. This strategy goes beyond the simple newsletter; it offers a new way to communicate relevant information or solutions to your target.

Let's explore the difference between classic email marketing and automated emails, their advantages and discover (or rediscover) two of the most popular tools in the industry: Mailchimp and Klaviyo.

Automating the sending of some of your emails allows you to be proactive and saves a lot of time. However, classic email campaigns, which are sent manually, are sometimes necessary.

Let's see the difference between the two techniques.

Classic Email Marketing

Although still effective, traditional email marketing relies on a manual and sometimes reactive approach, for example, to respond to a specific problem. Campaigns are developed and deployed based on predefined programming, often without considering individual user behaviours. These emails are generally periodic newsletters, seasonal promotions, product announcements, or important communications.

Automated emails

On the other hand, email automation represents a significant advance in terms of personalization and efficiency. These emails, designed and written in advance, are triggered based on user behaviour. Common examples include welcome messages, abandoned cart reminders, product suggestions based on purchase history, and more.

The advantages of automatic sending

The benefits of automated emails are undeniable. In addition to saving time by automating repetitive tasks, you can improve the relevance of your messages by tailoring each email to the behaviours of your current and potential customers. This results in a significant increase of:

• Opening rates,
• Click rate,
• Conversion rate,
• And even sales.

To take full advantage of your email marketing strategy, you must choose a tool that will meet your needs. Two major players in this area are Mailchimp and Klaviyo. These are also the preferred tools used by our experts at Webit.

While Mailchimp offers a user-friendly interface and a wide range of templates, Klaviyo stands out for its ability to integrate complex customer data for hyper-personalized campaigns. Let’s look at these two tools in more detail.

Mailchimp: simplicity and versatility

Mailchimp shines with its ease of use and versatility. With an intuitive interface, the tool lets you quickly create email campaigns. Monthly newsletter, new product, promotion, important announcement: in just a few clicks, you can create a template, add your images and text, and that's it! Your email campaign is ready to send.

Audience segmentation features and in-depth analytics also make Mailchimp a popular choice for SMBs, startups, and large enterprises. Thus, you can address a specific clientele (a single segment of your audience) or all of your subscribers.

In addition, Mailchimp offers the ability to design a series of automated emails using more than a hundred predefined paths. You also have the option to create a custom path that will meet your needs. This feature is particularly relevant for sending a welcome message to new subscribers, an abandoned cart reminder, similar product suggestions based on purchased products, a birthday promotion, etc. All are programmable in advance to be sent at critical moments in your user's journey.

Finally, Mailchimp also offers the possibility of adapting your email campaigns to publish them on social media, creating landing pages, launching postal campaigns and analyzing all these beautiful results easily thanks to a refined interface and intuitive.

Please note that you will need a paid account with the platform to use Mailchimp's automation features fully.

Klaviyo: for maximum customization

Klaviyo excels at extreme customization. By integrating in-depth behavioural data, the tool allows the creation of ultra-targeted campaigns. Its advanced automation tools and the ability to have unlimited audiences and segments make it a powerful choice for growth-oriented businesses.

The tool also offers the possibility of sending SMS/MMS for free each month (around 50 free SMS/MMS per month in Canada). This allows you to reach your target audience, who already receive a multitude of emails every day, differently. As with emails, SMS/MMS can be sent once or included in an automation scenario.

Like Mailchimp, Klaviyo offers pre-built automation paths that adapt to your CMS. You can also create your automation scenario without limitations.

Several other features are also available with Klaviyo: multi-step forms to collect more information about your subscribers, creation of pop-up type messages, forms integrated into a page or section of your website, drop-down forms on the side of a page, teaser forms and A/B tests to optimize all these options.

Finally, Klaviyo easily integrates with the most popular e-commerce platforms, such as Craft CMS, WooCommerce, Magento and Shopify.

Please note that, like Mailchimp, you will need a paid account with Klaviyo to benefit from the tool's features.

If email marketing is a topic that excites you, we invite you to read our other article on the subject (in French only), which will teach you even more about email types, automation, anti-spam law and more.

Establishing a practical and relevant email marketing strategy is a complex matter. Thanks to our expertise on the subject and tools like Mailchimp and Klaviyo, we can help you create emails and automated paths that meet not only your objectives but also the needs of your customers.

Let's go further than the simple monthly newsletter. Together, let's create relevant emails that will positively impact your customers and your business.