Best Marketing Automation Software

Most businesses consider marketing automation to be inevitable. The advanced functionality of AI and machine learning has encouraged marketers to believe that automating marketing activities would provide quick and better results than manual processes can leverage. As per the State of Marketing Automation 2019 Survey Report, 75% of marketers use marketing automation tools.

Selecting the best marketing automation software for a small business can add to its profitability and enhance its reputation. Whether you are a first-time buyer or intend to change the existing marketing automation software, if you want to improve your marketing strategies and achieve successful results, this buyer's guide to marketing automation software is for you.

Marketing automation is a smarter approach that helps sales and marketing personnel to automate tasks like -

• Creating, launching, and managing online marketing campaigns
• Tracking and managing prospects, leads, and customers
• Measuring marketing efforts to make informed decisions

Marketing automation can revolutionize your marketing by minimizing the use of resources and maximizing the returns on investment. It can streamline your campaigns, improve accountability within the team members, provide better customer experiences, and generate accurate reports.

The 5 best practices of marketing automation include -

Knowing your buyers’ persona before implementing a marketing strategy is a must. Interviewing customers, conducting surveys, analyzing reports, etc., can give you information about your buyers and help you design an effective marketing strategy.

Building a Workflow

Building a workflow while implementing a marketing strategy is important. All the team members should be on the same page and have complete information about the process.

Capturing the Right Information

Capturing the right information from your visitors is important to effectively approach them. With the correct information, you can analyze the buyers’ persona and journey and create personalized content accordingly.

Create Solid Content

Content is a driving force in capturing the attention of your customers. The content you create and publish should establish an impressive reputation for your business in front of your buyers.

Leads Segmentation

All buyers are not the same, nor are their requirements. Segmenting customers based on their persona, journey, geographical location, age, gender, etc., is important before approaching them with an effective marketing strategy.

There are four major key components that can make marketing automation successful -

Listing/Segmentation: Listing and segmenting the audience based on their journey, requirements, geographical location, gender, and other factors.

Lead Scoring: Lead scoring assigns value to the leads based on their possibility of converting.

Trigger: A trigger is a specified time or condition when a marketing campaign should be launched -for example, sending a discount coupon to the customer who is close to making the purchase decision.

Action: Action is something that comes after the trigger. For example, you could send a welcome email immediately after the customer signs up.

There are four stages of a customer journey: Introduction, Exploration, Purchase, and Retention. Marketing automation plays a major role in each stage.

Discover

Your buyers are not looking forward to buying from you at this stage. They are just discovering the products or services being provided by a brand. To engage customers at this stage, you need to post content on social media or send emails consistently so that they can consider contacting you when they require the products or services you are providing. Marketing automation software can assist you in scheduling and automating the process of engaging your customers at the awareness stage.

Explore

At this stage, your customers are exploring, evaluating, and comparing your products and services with the available options in the market. For example, if one of your prospects is exploring your products on your website, you can send them the discount code to grab the opportunity. Marketing automation software helps you monitor your customers' activities and act on them immediately.

Purchase

At this stage, the customer is deciding to purchase your products or services. Providing an excellent and seamless shopping experience to your customers becomes important so that they give positive feedback about your business. Marketing automation software can help you send automated emails to customers after a purchase, approaching them meaningfully and assisting them at each step of their purchase decision.

Retention

Retaining current customers and acquiring new business from them is one of any business's biggest achievements. With competition so fierce, it is difficult to stop your customers from being attracted to other products and services available in the market. Marketing automation software can help in upselling and reselling to maintain your customers' loyalty, ultimately accelerating your organization's ROI.

The software is an all-in-one marketing platform developed to automate, streamline, monitor, and measure marketing activities and processes so that businesses can gain operational efficiency, achieve their sales goals, and expand exponentially.

Whether you're sending marketing emails, prioritizing your customers, creating landing pages, or measuring the success of your different marketing programs, marketing software can make your business processes and marketing efforts seamless, ultimately resulting in improved productivity, reduced costs, and maximized conversions.

Marketing automation software is often confused with CRM. Many CRMs even have a marketing automation module, which makes marketers wonder whether they should invest in marketing automation software or CRM. If you look into CRM's features and capabilities, you will realize that CRM adds value to the sales department but misses out on the marketing department's requirements.

CRM is used to manage contacts and track opportunities. Marketing automation software is used to automate marketing programs, enhance customer relationships, and measure marketing efforts. This is the primary difference between both. 

Click to go through the buyer’s guide to CRM.

Let’s go through the capabilities of marketing automation software and how it can help your business.

Basically, the software includes inbuilt applications that are designed to optimize & streamline marketing tasks efficiently and effectively. It can help your employees to focus on strategic activities instead of monotonous activities and eliminate human errors. Moreover, it helps increase customer engagement, grabs more sales opportunities, and stays ahead of competitors. Some of the key activities of marketing automation software include -

Lead Capturing, Tracking & Monitoring

The software can capture the leads based on the visitors to your business website, track their information, monitor their activities, and perform marketing activities accordingly to achieve successful results.

Email Campaign Management

Successful email campaign management requires storing and accessing accurate customer information, consistency, and professional design. Marketing automation software includes features that can help send professionally designed emails to the right people at the right time.   

Social Media Marketing

Marketing automation software can schedule your posts on various social media marketing platforms. Posting effective updates on social media platforms can improve conversions and consistently benefit the business.

Resources Management

The task of managing resources optimally is crucial to running a business with high profitability. Marketing automation software facilitates minimizing overheads and maximizing ROI.

Landing Page Creation

The software includes design templates that allow you to create appealing landing pages, helping to attract new customers and retain current ones.

A/B Testing

A/B testing helps determine the user’s reaction to two different products or services. Marketing automation software can make the process easy and evaluate the results accurately.

Integrations

No more juggling between different software and Excel spreadsheets. Marketing automation software easily integrates with 3rd party tools like email, CRM, and social media to provide the user with everything from a single interface. 

Analytics & Reporting

Marketing automation software generates comprehensive and accurate reports, which help businesses make informed decisions and prepare successful marketing strategies for the future.

The way marketing automation software works depends on the tasks to be accomplished. For example, if you are trying to run an email marketing campaign, the tasks below can be sorted by using marketing automation software.

Step 1 - Segmenting based on activities and buyers' journey.

Step 2 - Selecting the target audience.

Step 3 - Designing a professional email.

Step 4 - Feeding the email content.

Step 5 - Executing the campaign.

Step 6 - Measuring the open & click rate.

Step 7 - Shortlisting warm and hot leads.

Step 8 - Moving warm and hot leads to CRM.

Step 9 - Reengaging the leads and prospects.

Based on Deployment

On-premise software is hosted on the business organization's server. It requires specific hardware configuration and complex installation.

Software-as-a-Service is a web-based software that is hosted by a service provider and made available to clients using multiple devices and platforms using the internet.

Based on License

Open-source marketing Automation Software provides free code that can be customized according to business requirements. It is free to download and deploy.

Free Marketing Automation Software is free software that is available on the cloud or can be downloaded with the source code, which cannot be customized.

Paid Proprietary Marketing Automation Software can be used on the cloud or can be downloaded after paying weekly/monthly/subscription or one-time charges.

Marketing is the fuel of any business. Regardless of the type and size of the business, it requires marketing its products and services to survive and grow. At some point, due to increased consumer awareness and buying habits, marketing needs to be infused with technology to cope with the rising competition in all sectors. So, let's look at how marketing automation software came into use.

In earlier times, spreadsheets were used to store the data of leads and potential clients and access it while contacting them by phone or email. It was in 1992 when Unica - a subset of CRM existed. The Internet was at its initial stage at that time. In 1999, Eloqua was introduced and transformed into a marketing automation service in 2003. Later, in 2005-2008, new marketing automation tools like Hubspot, Marketo, Ontraport, etc., were introduced, including email marketing automation, social media optimization, and many other marketing automation tools.

Marketing software has evolved with time and is continuously growing because businesses know the potential positive effects of marketing automation, which is adding to their profits. So, here are the upcoming trends in marketing automation software you must be aware of to pick the right one for your growing business.

Personalized Content

Personalized content helps provide a better customer experience, which ultimately leads to increased sales. People always appreciate recommended products based on their past purchases or an email addressing their first name instead of a common term. Personalized context is definitely a driving force in business growth, and marketing automation software can help deploy this strategy.  

Machine Learning

Once a user clicks a link or an ad, behavioral data is consumed by Machine Learning systems. This data can then be used in future marketing campaigns and when approaching buyers during their entire journey. This would not only help in marketing effectively but also enable you to provide better customer experiences.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help in studying user behavior, engaging customers, encouraging cross-selling, ensuring customer retention, and retargeting customers highly effectively. It can take marketing automation to the next level in an era when customers demand quick and personalized services.

Chatbots

Chatbots can make your business work 24/7. You don't need to be at your desk all the time to keep your customers happy. Chatbots can talk to your customers even if you are not around. They can capture information from customers, such as their preferences, queries, etc., and help you take quick action. Chatbots are already playing a very important role in customer service and marketing departments and will be highly used in the majority of organizations very soon.

Customer Retention

In the future, customer retention will be more important than acquiring new customers due to increasing competition and new products/services introduced every day. With the right marketing automation platforms, which have the latest features, it will be easy for marketers to innovate and execute strategies that help in customer retention.

If you are considering a marketing automation service for your business, it becomes significant to understand what to expect and the benefits it can deliver before you start looking out for options. So, here are some key benefits of using marketing automation software -

Reduces Staffing Costs

Marketing automation software can set up marketing campaigns that can be automatically triggered based on certain criteria. Moreover, posting social media posts and sending personalized emails can also be automated. In short, a single employee can do the job of 50 employees with the help of marketing automation tools, resulting in reduced staffing costs.

Increases Sales

Marketing automation platforms can automate the process of customer follow-ups, not letting you miss even a single opportunity. Moreover, it can help you cross-sell and up-sell in an effective manner. Proper lead management and prioritization, with the help of marketing automation software, obviously would lead you towards increased sales and high revenue generation.

Saves Time

Most marketing automation platforms allow scheduling and posting social media posts for different platforms from a single interface. Though there may be different software for this task, it would be great if you had a single platform for tracking leads, posting social media posts, and triggering email marketing campaigns.

Improves Accountability

Using marketing automation tools means clearly defined processes and accurate reporting, which shows the performance of each team member. This makes everyone involved with sales and marketing responsible for their tasks and try their level best to perform well and display their caliber.

Encourages Creativity

By using marketing automation software, you are replacing manual processes with automated processes. So, now your email campaigns, social media posts, lead nurturing, and many more marketing tasks are being managed using computerized rules. This frees up the time of your staff to focus on creative tasks that can enhance productivity and efficiency in your organization.

Streamlines Processes

Implementing a marketing automation solution allows you to visualize the entire customer journey and provides you the opportunity to streamline the processes accordingly. This helps in refining targeting and nurturing the leads, for example, automatically sending an email about the product information as soon as the customer completes the purchase on your online store. 

Improves Productivity

Your marketing automation software provides you with complete information about your team and who is doing what. You can manage your resources and assign tasks to people based on their skills and qualifications. This way, you can improve productivity and make the most out of the hours you have.

Augments Customer Retention

A marketing automation solution helps you target your customers at all stages of the customer journey. Moreover, it also allows you to trigger marketing campaigns across multiple platforms. Updating present customers with the latest updates in your products would help you augment customer retention and achieve higher returns.

Helps in Making Better Decisions

The reports generated by marketing automation platforms tell you about the success of your marketing efforts, target audience, returning customers, marketing expenses, and returns. Precisely, it can provide important information that can help you in making better decisions that can be remunerative for your business in the long run.

Marketing automation software is beneficial for improving the marketing and sales of your products and services. But, to select the right one that suits your business, it becomes essential to know the features to consider in a marketing automation solution as mentioned below -

Lead Management

Lead management would help you identify prospects, capture leads, track their journey across the sales funnel, personalize content, target potential customers, and ensure high conversions.

Email Marketing 

Email marketing automation would help you schedule email campaigns, send personalized emails, categorize email recipients, track email marketing strategies to reduce bounce rate, record communication, and analyze results like open & click rate.

Social Media Marketing

Marketing automation software can maintain your social media accounts, schedule your posts and updates, track the performance of your social media campaigns, respond to your customer queries, build targeted advertisements, and respond to your customer queries promptly.

Segmentation

The marketing automation solution you select should allow you to segment leads and prospects to select a suitable target audience for the marketing campaign. Triggering emails or sending messages without targeting the right audience can result in a fiasco, wasting your valuable time and money.

Analytics and Reporting

To make informed decisions, you need to pick a marketing automation tool that allows you to collect and analyze comprehensive data, generate customized reports according to your business logic, monitor campaigns, measure performance, and calculate ROI.

In addition to the features to be considered while selecting a marketing automation software, below are some factors that you need to consider before you decide to invest in one -

Costs: In many cases, marketing automation software vendors may charge hidden costs, extra deployment fees, or future maintenance costs. Before selecting one, you need to check the exact cost of the marketing automation tools and decide whether it suits your budget.

Limitations: Many marketing automation platforms have limitations in terms of features, email recipients, and social media platforms, or they are not scalable as per your requirements. You need to check the limitations of the marketing automation tools before you purchase them.

Mobile-Friendly: In this era, when everything is done using mobile, starting from buying groceries to booking flight tickets, it would be difficult if you are not able to manage your business marketing on the go. So, you need to ensure that the marketing automation solution you choose is mobile-friendly.

Integration: Before you purchase marketing automation software, you need to analyze whether you require it to integrate with the other tools you are currently using for your business, such as updating social media posts, email campaigns, maintaining customer databases, etc.

User-Friendliness: If your employees and team members don’t use the marketing automation software you have purchased, then that investment would be a waste. Ensure that the marketing automation tool you buy is user-friendly so that your staff adopts it easily and makes optimum use of it. 

Support: The marketing automation solution provider should offer prompt support so that you can easily resolve problems if you get stuck in the middle of a task due to a technical issue.

Reviews: Check the reviews of the users who are already using the marketing automation software you are about to buy to select the best one.

The price of a marketing automation software varies depending on the features it offers, the number of users it allows, and other scalability factors. The cost of marketing automation platforms can be as low as $9/month to $1250/month. For example, you can use ActiveTrail, which costs $9/month, or Pardot, which costs $1250/month depending on the features you require, and the number of users who would be using it.

If you are looking for marketing automation software for small businesses, you can go for eSputnik, which costs only a $1.99 one-time charge. You don't need to pay every month to keep on using it. The features in this tool, specially used for marketing automation for small companies, might be limited, but if your budget is a constraint, this option can suit you.

Also, there are free and open-source marketing automation platforms available like Mautic or OpenEMM, which you can also customize as per your business requirements. You can view the list of the top free and open-source marketing automation software here.

If you are looking for advanced features in your marketing automation solution that cheap or free software cannot provide, we would suggest you go for the marketing automation tools that offer free trials like Marketo, Act-on, ActiveCampaign, Keap, and many others mentioned in the complete list of marketing automation software intricately curated by the Goodfirms’ Team.

Before investing in marketing automation software, you need to conduct a self-assessment test within your organization and get answers to the below-mentioned questions.

• Do you have more leads than your business can handle?
• Do you have more leads but a low conversion rate?
• Do you want to generate more leads?
• Do you want to implement a highly effective marketing strategy?

If the answer to all the above questions is yes, then this is the right time to invest in marketing automation software for your business.

Buying the best marketing automation software is significant, but implementing it correctly is even more important. Failing to implement the marketing automation tool correctly can be disastrous for a business in terms of finance, productivity, and overall reputation. So, here are some vital points you need to consider to ensure the successful implementation of marketing automation software.

Define your goals

To implement marketing automation software, you need to know precisely what your organization wants to achieve. Most organizations hope to grow revenue, but there may be other reasons, like improving customer experience, streamlining the buying process, analyzing buyers' journeys, etc.

Ensure Compatibility With Marketing Strategy

Having the best marketing automation software but a poor marketing strategy can never yield the expected results. Marketing automation software can only automate the process; it cannot guarantee success if teamed with an ineffective marketing strategy.

Drive for Excellent Content Strategy

Content plays an important role in conversions. Make sure that you get fresh & crisp content posted for marketing your products and services. The quality, volume, and frequency of the content you post online can help you in the marketing automation process highly effective.

Provide Training to your Staff

Introducing a new marketing automation system in the organization would not be enough. You need to train your staff and ensure that they use it. Tell them about the benefits and motivate them by showing successful results using the marketing automation software.

The below quote by Bill Gates would clearly define why marketing automation fails for many companies;

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Besides that, there are 6 common reasons why marketing automation fails -

• Lacking human efforts
• Misinterpretation of buyers’ journey
• Implementing the same marketing strategy for different buyers
• Blasting emails at the wrong time
• Not publishing impressive content
• Posting updates or sending messages at the wrong time

Picking the best marketing automation software can be overwhelming when there are a plethora of them available in the market. There might be several questions coming into your mind while selecting one; after all, it is about investing your valuable time and money. We would recommend you to go through the list of the best marketing automation software listed by the Goodfirms team, as it includes the reviews of the users and a detailed description of each one of them, which can help you in selecting the right one for your business.

Why Goodfirms?

• The Goodfirms team follows a highly intricate research process and has been successful in providing a listing of around 9000 software applications used in different business sectors.
• The list of software curated by the Goodfirms team can make your selection process easy, as it includes unbiased reviews of the users who are already using these tools.
• The in-depth research conducted by Goodfirms has proven to be highly reliable and has won the trust of renowned companies and software vendors, as it is based on the latest technology trends prevailing in the current market. 

The word "automation" means to set it and forget it. But, in the case of marketing automation, we need to manage changes on an ongoing basis constantly. Several disruptions are happening externally in the market and internally in the organization. We must continually review the rules, processes, and strategies we have implemented along with the marketing automation software. Also, we need to ensure that sales and marketing departments are aligned and on the same page. The perfect combination of the best marketing automation software with perfect marketing planning and strategies can result in the consistent growth of a business.

So, if you are not using marketing automation software or are looking forward to purchasing an advanced one, you need to act now. We are in an era that requires our business to be sound in terms of technology and strategy to compete and stay ahead of the times.