Being one of the fastest-growing technologies out there, marketing automation software is a must have in any type of business, regardless of the industry it serves, or the volume of operation it has.
We’re all after the same end goal, larger revenue and fast growth at a minimum cost. But still yet, many businesses across the globe struggle to align their processes, and technology to achieve these very important goals. Marketing automation tools are solving this exact problem.
It enables companies to streamline, automate, and measure all of their marketing related tasks and workflows so they can increase their overall efficiency and find the path to growing their revenue faster. The best marketing automation software are designed in a way that they allow organizations to more effectively market on various channels and automate more tasks.
At it’s core marketing automation software enables the modern marketer to achieve their goals by, increasing lead generation, conducting thorough customer segmentation, ease the process of lead nurturing and scoring, creating true and meaningful relationship through marketing, cross-sell and upsell, increase retention rate , and most importantly make sure that return on investment (ROI) is always as expected.
Marketing automation tool is designed to automate most of your marketing actions or tasks, streamline the different marketing workflows, and measures the outcomes of your cross marketing campaigns. The best marketing automation tools should provide one unified marketing database for all your marketing information and interactions, in order to help the modern marketer to create a well segmented, personalized, and highly timed marketing experiences .
The top marketing automation software provide a handful of automation features to run across numerous aspects of marketing such as email marketing, social media platforms, lead gen tactics, digital advertising, and much more.
When it comes to marketing automation software, one of the most important thing by many marketers is having the ability to understand the entire analytics features to determine the success of their campaign across segments and channels.
The modern marketer will break it down as follows:
– Campaign KPIs
– Campaign ROI
– The impact of campaigns on company revenue.
Marketing automation software should be easily integrate with your CRM software, social media management software, your CMS tools, and ABM platform.
Thankfully, there are a handful of Marketing automation software technologies you can choose from. However, there are a few niche-specific attributes that apply to picking the right solution for your business. Here are some key elements to consider when evaluating your next Marketing Automation tool:
The pricing structure is always clear when it comes to Marketing automation tools.
The majority of solutions include a setup fee, but that fee may cover things like on-site training for your team to ensure the best possible use of their platform – HubSpot is a great example for a vendor that excel in this particular domain, with the aim of leading your business to a quicker and more effective path on return on you investment. Some marketing automation platforms have different tiers for different features, but also might include a usage fee wherein more users equals more monthly costs.
Some vendors may even charge you more for higher numbers of contacts or leads created in a specific amount of time.
Make sure you understand the price for each user, or a group of users in advance.
Considering pricing and the number of leads the system is actually allowing you based on the package you have selected, this should help you determine if one marketing automation tool is a good fit for your company or not. The most important thing to look at is what happen when you operation is growing and the number of leads/contacts in the system is increasing, will they charge you more for growth?
The majority of the modern marketing tools are scalable as they being created as a SaaS platforms.
In other words this means you pay the vendor each month/quarter/year to access to their tools and the data you’ve input into the system. Such software typically is browser-based, meaning you don’t need to download anything as you add more users.
The most important thing to look at is the way the system adjust to new changes in your organizational structure, what happens when you add more seats? how it behave when working remotely? and will it be able to grow as your business grow?
This is one of the most important aspects to look at when evaluating a new marketing automation platform. Why? since your team should feel comfortable enough to use this tool on a daily basis, moreover, each and one of your team members should master the new solution you’re evaluating so you can get the most value out of it.
What type of customer service will the vendor provide with? Will it just via email? live chat, SMS, or phone support?
The good news is, that regardless of the subscription you’ll end up choosing most of the marketing automation vendors are providing support in various languages and via numerous channels.
How well this new marketing automation platform you’re currently evaluating plays with the other tools within your existing tech stack? Will they offer and open API, one click integration? will you need any ‘expensive’ customizations? You must have the answer to this questions when evaluating a new marketing automation platform.
Top in class marketing automation platform, Marketo develops and sells marketing automation software for account-based marketing (ABM) and other marketing services and products including SEO and content creation.
Used by some of the world’s prestigious brands Marketo does not include pricing, free-trial, and a demo, however, considered by many as the best marketing automation software for enterprise grade companies.
Incorporated in Boston, Klaviyo offers an SMS and email marketing platform that automates campaigns for ecommerce. Open source API, designed templates, connects to all CRM software, and much more.
If you’re running an ecommerce business, Klaviyo is the best choice for you.
HubSpot is the world’s leader cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, boost ROI and optimize all aspects of inbound marketing to generate more, qualified leads. HubSpot is a top software platform designed to help the modern marketer to overcome and face the ever changing industry related challenges.
Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform mainly designed for growth-focused ecommerce businesses. Omnisend allows you to add several channels to the same automation workflow for smooth communication via different channels such as: email, SMS, web push notifications, and more.
ActiveCampaign brings in a more holistic approach to marketing and how well marketing should work with the rest of your organization. ActiveCampaign Customer Experience Automation Platform helps over 150,000 businesses in 170+ countries meaningfully connect and engage with their customers. It creates optimized customer experiences by automating many behind-the-scenes marketing, sales, and support processes.
Drip is a marketing automation platform built for Ecommerce – utilizing email, SMS and tight 3rd-party integrations to help businesses drive revenue.
Mautic is a free and open-source marketing automation tool for Content Management, Social Media, Email Marketing, and can be used for the integration of social networks, campaign management, forms, questionnaires, reports, etc. Mautic enables brands to integrate and personalize all their digital marketing activities into one roof, creating a more modern approach and help marketers in achieving their goals faster.
Eloqua designed by the industry leader Oracle is a SaaS platform for marketing automation that aims to help B2B marketers and organizations manage marketing campaigns and lead generation in the most effective way. Eloqua does not provide a CRM. Though you can connect Eloqua with other CRM tools such as Oracle’s CRM, SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, and more.
The last but not least on our top 9 marketing automation tools is the very popular Pardot by Salesforce.
Pardot is a marketing automation solution that helps companies create meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals.
Pardot gives you a one central interface to manage your marketing activities and report on their success. Not only that, but it tracks prospects as they interact with your company across all your marketing channels so you can tailor your outreach – for an updated customer experience.
Expert tip 💡: Check for user reviews (G2 & Capterra are great to start with) and contact companies similar to yours who are using the intended solution.
You can learn a lot by reading other user reviews about the vendors you’re evaluating, plus, you can even email some of the users and ask to jump on a quick 15-20 min call to discuss different aspects of the platform. Before you do, make sure to prepare an agenda and your most important questions in front so the ‘quick call’ will be more effective for both sides.
Not every company and or marketing team is ready to automate some or the entire of their operations, but when the time is right and your customer expectations are changing while your business grow, the right marketing automation tool can take your marketing strategy to a whole new level.
By identifying your specific business needs and choosing the right marketing automation tool, you can turn marketing insights into a world-class execution at scale so you can spend less time on the less important stuff, and rightfully spend your time growing the business.
