Automation is Evolving October 11, 2018, | Posted by Samantha

One thing is consistent in the digital marketing space, and within email marketing in particular: technology constantly changes and develops and adapts to new demands. Site Impact’s experts have always looked at the cutting edge of what’s available in the tech space for email, and we’ve spoken before about how the industry is increasingly embracing automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other new capabilities to make marketing easier and faster. But it’s always worth looking at the state of the tech as a whole, and with new advancements in automation, there is a lot to be excited about. 

Automation is getting smarter

Even without drifting into AI and machine learning, automated systems for email are getting smarter, and this is especially good news for smaller brands that don’t always have the kind of budgets that big companies do. Earlier generation automation required and still requires a good bit of oversight to avoid errors: advance planning, checking, and rechecking take up time and effort, and without them automated systems can make costly mistakes. Newer automated programs take some of the drudgery out of that process of repeated verification by allowing for a certain amount of leeway in the setup stage. Marketers can set up behaviorally-triggered emails that deploy under more specific criteria than before, which saves money and helps to narrow the field. Other new options that make automation smarter include settings that allow for automatic systems to respond to issues that might crop up without the need for human intervention, even without machine learning--instead, a simple command to do or not do something when a certain threshold is hit, or a certain action happens, takes care of it.

Automation is more widespread than ever

While email marketers have notably been a bit slow to fully adopt automation, the technology itself is becoming increasingly widespread, with more and more email marketing platforms and services offering varying levels of automation to brands and companies at all budgets. The increased availability of the most basic tools means that the cost comes down, meaning in turn that more advanced tools become more ubiquitous--and the cost for them goes down as well. As more and more marketers embrace user-friendly tools to automate the process, companies that develop the technology are becoming more ambitious in offering new tools; the result is that even the most basic email campaigns can incorporate automation at a low price point. Because of this, older fashioned methods are falling out of style; so brands that aren’t already on the same page will have to get there soon, or risk losing opportunities in a more time-consuming process.

The state of the email marketing space is constantly evolving, and nowhere is this more noticeable than in the technical aspects. Automation is definitely here to stay, with the tools becoming more accessible to brands of all sizes, and basic functions becoming “smarter” not just through incorporating artificial intelligence, but through more fundamental developments in terms of giving users more control without taking up more time. Contact Site Impact to find out how we put automated deployment and data collection systems to work for all of our clients.