During the last 15 years, there’ve been a lot of innovations in the Email Marketing Industry.

The first email marketing services were created to send simple newsletters and manage subscribers effectively. Mailchimp, with 7 million users is the market leader.

As email marketing evolved, these companies included new functionalities like autoresponders which allowed customers to send a series of emails in a sequence, as soon as an event happened; for example someone signed up.

Most small businesses who do email marketing use basic services.

Marketing Automation:
Although marketing automation is not new, it has gained much popularity lately.
Marketing automation tracks each subscribers behavior to deliver him the most appropriate messages that will convert him into a customer.

The idea behind marketing automation is that each subscriber is interested in different products and services, and is at a different moment of the buying cycle. Following this, it makes sense to send them different messages. Marketing Automation software learns from what a subscriber does (by what he clicks on) to send them much more targeted messages that increase conversions.

InfusionSoft is one of the main players.

Compared to email marketing services, marketing automation has a very small market share. Main reasons is that it is highly priced for small business and it’s complicated and difficult to use. If a company wants to use marketing automation, they have to be quite knowledgeable about email marketing and spend some time at it.

Until now, most innovation in the email marketing industry were around the software.
The latest innovation I’ve seen focuses on the creation of the content.

Newsletter Content Automation:

NewsletterBreeze, founded in 2014 focuses on content generation. It integrates with companies like Mailchimp to send the newsletters.

The way it works is the following. After it’s configured for a specific industry, NewsletterBreeze starts bringing the most relevant content related to it. It brings the content from the web and from Twitter. Then it specifies how many times each article has been shared on social media. This information gives users good information on what’s the best content and lets them create quickly a newsletter.

Even though during the last 15 years there have been a lot of innovations in email marketing, many more are expected in the coming years. Email Marketing is the most effective way to convert prospects into customers and the majority of small business are still not using it.