Best Marketing Automation Software
Are you looking for a reliable marketing automation software for your business? Here is a list of the best marketing automation platforms exclusively handpicked by GoodFirms after meticulous research and analysis. The marketing automation systems listed here offer A/B testing, customizable CTAs, email marketing, Google AdWords visibility, lead management, sales intelligence, search marketing, segmentation & targeting, social media marketing, campaign management, ROI tracking, analytics, and reporting. Leverage this list of the best marketing automation software with filters for features, business size, deployment type, and pricing model. Also, check the verified user reviews for the top marketing automation tools listed here.
List of the Top Marketing Automation Software with Reviews.
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We are a team of driven individuals who are on a mission to help online businesses across the world in growing their conversions rates by using the power of real time social proof. ... read more about Influence
Entry Level PriceFree versionFree TrialAvailableCategory Focus50% in Marketing Automation Software -
Inbound marketing automation software for small business owners and WordPress lovers. Free yourself from the gruntwork of social media scheduling. Drive more traffic and leads with a tool that learns what your audience likes best. Social media scheduling that learns from your audience to drive more traffic and leads while freeing you from low-level scheduling work, so you can spend more time on a ... read more about Spokal
Entry Level Price$29 Per MonthFree Trial14 DaysCategory Focus33% in Marketing Automation Software -
Sun Bear offers the affordable alternative to expensive, difficult to use CRM systems. Ease of customization and intelligent design combine to provide a solution structured to meet your specific needs. Sun Bear provides all of the functionality required by marketing and sales groups to manage and execute all of their lead generation, response management and lead management activities without the n ... read more about Sun Bear
Entry Level Price$99 Per MonthFree TrialN/ACategory Focus20% in Marketing Automation Software -
Oracle Marketing is the most comprehensive, integrated marketing solution available to launch cross-channel marketing programs and unify all prospect and customer marketing signals in a single view. This solution helps generate a higher return on digital marketing investments, create customer loyalty through superior campaign performance, and unlock real-time performance decisions during critical ... read more about Oracle Marketing Cloud
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus50% in Marketing Automation Software -
Unstack provides your business with the essential tools and playbooks required to build, measure, and win in today's market. - Industry-leading content and SEO tools for sites and landing pages - Baked in A/B testing and conversion tracking - Forms, unlimited contacts, and lead management - One-click API integrations that just work - Teams and collaboration. ... read more about Unstack
Entry Level PriceFree versionFree TrialAvailableCategory Focus100% in Marketing Automation Software -
Leadsberry's Survey Management tool focuses on the metrics like campaign cost, ROI and leads to deal conversion, which matter most to marketing and sales executives. ... read more about Leadsberry
Entry Level Price$99 Per MonthFree Trial7 DaysCategory Focus50% in Marketing Automation Software -
Provider of data-enrichment, content that converts, social selling, lead generation, lead nurturing and appointment setting, help UK businesses generate leads and expand their sales pipelines. We’ll help you discover your ideal prospects and do the legwork on your behalf to generate more conversations, meetings, briefs and opportunities amongst them. We plan, create and execute creative marketin ... read more about Rocket
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus33% in Marketing Automation Software -
ID who's visiting your site now - and what they've been researching across the web. 1) VisitorTrack identifies the anonymous business visitors coming to your website. 2) Then, intent data is fully integrated to pinpoint the companies already in-market for your products - before they have visited the website. 3) Get accurate contact record details matched for the people you target. All this in an a ... read more about VisitorTrack
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree Trial14 DaysCategory Focus33% in Marketing Automation Software -
CRM Lead Management & Tracking Software. A better solution to grow business. Manage leads and opportunities. Sales Performance Management Software. Monitor and scale the performance of your sales team. Meetings & To Do’s We know all your business needs. Schedule meetings, set reminders and create To-Do’s. Sales Performance Report. Campaign Reports, Measure the performance of your campaigns and ... read more about AdLuge
Entry Level PriceFree versionFree TrialAvailableCategory Focus50% in Marketing Automation Software -
PX is the worlds first transparent customer acquisition platform, providing a single marketplace for companies to acquire customers from hundreds of vetted and sought-after sources. The company provides solutions for marketers to grow and efficiently scale their customer base, and is active in the Home Services, Financial Services, and Insurance industries. PX was originally established as part of ... read more about PX
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus50% in Marketing Automation Software -
MyWiFi Networks offers the leading white-label guest WiFi marketing platform built specifically for resellers like digital agencies and MSPs. MyWiFi Networks is the easiest way to empower your client’s guest WiFi with social, email, SMS, and payment login options, real-time data collection, marketing automation with 3rd-party CRM integrations, and sub-user client access in over 30 languages. Ins ... read more about MyWiFi Networks
Entry Level Price$99 Per MonthFree Trial30 DaysCategory Focus50% in Marketing Automation Software -
SC-Networks GmbH is manufacturer of Evalanche, one of the modern, web-based e-mail marketing solutions on the European market. Evalanche is a marketing automation software that offers solutions such as email marketing, lead management, and quality assurance. ... read more about Evalanche
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus33% in Marketing Automation Software -
The next generation in lead generation and conversion - email marketing, CRM and more. For businesses of all sizes in the real estate, association, health, education, software, media, professional services, agency, and hospitality. At itracMarketer, our goal is to make the lives of marketers easier with a comprehensive and easy to use marketing platform that provides the capability to stay on top ... read more about itracMarketer
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus20% in Marketing Automation Software -
VoiceCRM
cloud-based CRM tool that provides quotes, forecasting, sales pipeline management, and more.Our professional CRM is simple to use and extremely powerful — you get a ton of features for the price. Connect your team and your data on one view, one platform, from any device so everyone knows what's going on. Get your team all on the same page with a shared, 360-degree customer view. Track and crush your growth targets with real-time dashboards in our professional CRM. View your business pe ... read more about VoiceCRM
Entry Level PriceFree versionFree TrialAvailableCategory Focus14% in Marketing Automation Software -
Marketing automation that drives revenue. Automate email marketing campaigns, prioritize hottest opportunities with lead scoring and web tracking, increase marketing ROI with useful insights, save time with deep CRM integrations (Pipedrive, Copper, Hubspot CRM). Also includes a powerful 2-way CRM-Mailchimp integration. ... read more about Outfunnel
Entry Level Price$6 Per MonthFree Trial14 DaysCategory Focus25% in Marketing Automation Software -
e-shot is the marketing automation platform that successful marketers use to deliver highly-effective campaigns. e-shot can help you to modernise your digital marketing and to embrace more targeted communication. From lead nurturing to remarketing, from newsletters to autoresponders, e-shot provides a simple solution to a sophisticated area of modern marketing. ... read more about E-shot
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus25% in Marketing Automation Software -
Unified digital presence solution which includes optimized landing page creation, fully paid ad campaign and lead capture. ... read more about Engeni
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus100% in Marketing Automation Software -
Indition
SALES TEAM CRM MADE EASY Find, Nurture, & Engage With Your Clients. Sell Smarter With Indition.Indition lets you work as a team. View all of your teams past touch-points with a potential customer before sitting down with them to close the deal. Indition Sales CRM allows you to store notes, log calls and emails, and view related tasks for both the company and personal contacts ... read more about Indition
Entry Level Price$30 Per MonthFree TrialN/ACategory Focus20% in Marketing Automation Software -
The fastest lead capture software, converting website visitors into subscribers and customer in matter of seconds. ... read more about Optingun
Entry Level PriceFree versionFree TrialAvailableCategory Focus33% in Marketing Automation Software -
A Platform built to empower your sales team. With Lead Management, Task and Activities, Product creation along with inventory, Lead Scoring,Workflow, Quote process , Invoice Process, Social CRM, Territory Management, Team Work, Kanban board, reports and dashboards. Robo CRM enables sales team to quickly prioritize work to help reach goal. ... read more about Robo CRM
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus25% in Marketing Automation Software -
Leadforms
Boost Website Leads With high converting, interactive Lead Forms. Absolutely no coding required!High converting multi-step lead forms that turns website traffic into qualified leads. ... read more about Leadforms
Entry Level Price$47 Per MonthFree Trial15 DaysCategory Focus33% in Marketing Automation Software -
Lead generation, lead nurturing, CRM, landing page and real-time customer chat system that overlays on any website. ... read more about MIYN
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree Trial14 DaysCategory Focus25% in Marketing Automation Software -
Force24 is a UK-based marketing automation platform. They are a 50+ strong team of passionate marketing experts with a range of skills including strategy, design and technical development. Force24 offers free training and support for all their clients on a 2 minute SLA, during UK working hours. 1 in 4 people who see the power of the Force24 platform go on to buy it - and what's more - they have a ... read more about Force24
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus100% in Marketing Automation Software -
SendPulse is a multichannel marketing automation platform with tools to help marketers build a seamless and coherent promotion strategy for their brand. The toolset consists of lead generation and nurturing tools like marketing emails, SMS, web push notifications as well as Chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram. SendPulse is an email marketing platform with additional channels: SMS, web pus ... read more about SendPulse
Entry Level Price$6.4 Per MonthFree TrialN/ACategory Focus25% in Marketing Automation Software -
Whether as a sponsor, CRO or SMO BSI life sciences software covers your specific processes and features. Plan and manage all aspects of your clinical trials, like patient engagement, clinical trial management (CTMS), trial master file (eTMF), study start-up, and trial supply management (RTSM) with the clinical software solutions from BSI. Regardless of whether you need a completely new system or w ... read more about BSI CTMS
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus20% in Marketing Automation Software -
User.com is an all in one Marketing Automation platform that helps turn visitors into happy customers with a range of tools, from visitor tracking, CRM, to email marketing. Connect with your customers and deliver consistent communication. ... read more about User.com
Entry Level PriceContact vendorFree TrialN/ACategory Focus20% in Marketing Automation Software -
Pulse Technology provides a platform for business owners and franchise systems to run their business smoothly. You’ll be able to keep things organized with our easy to use CRM (customer relationship management) system. Track all of your communication history for your customers and prospects. Your email and text message communication, notes, tasks, and appointments, etc. will be all stored in one ... read more about Pulse Technology
Entry Level Price$49 Per MonthFree TrialN/ACategory Focus16% in Marketing Automation Software -
Kreezalid is the perfect marketplace software to launch your website whether you build your marketplace for selling products, rentals, or sharing. Need a marketplace website to sell products, offer services or enable rentals? Our peer-to-peer marketplace software supports all types of marketplaces. With our marketplace builder, you get all the features you need, such as a dashboard for simple user ... read more about Kreezalid
Entry Level Price$99 Per MonthFree Trial14 DaysCategory Focus33% in Marketing Automation Software -
Lead Llama is a sales automation platform combining lead generation, list building, email marketing, and social automation to create a streamlined sales plan. Simplify your sales process with the Lead Llama Sales Suite. Our suite has a variety of tools to help you build targeted leads lists to find your ideal prospect. Send an unlimited amount of email sequences and newsletters to your newly found ... read more about Lead Llama
Entry Level Price$99 Per MonthFree Trial7 DaysCategory Focus25% in Marketing Automation Software
Buyer’s Guide
Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide
Most businesses consider marketing automation to be inevitable. The advanced functionality resulting due to AI and machine learning has encouraged the 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 not only add to its profitability but also enhance its reputation. Regardless of being a first-time buyer or intending to change the existing marketing automation software, if you are wanting to enhance your marketing strategies and achieve successful results, this buyers' guide to marketing automation software is for you.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a smarter approach that helps sales and marketing personnel to automate the 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.
What are the Best Practices of Marketing Automation?
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 in designing 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 should have complete information about the process to be followed.
Capturing the Right Information
Capturing the right information from your visitors is important to approach them effectively. With the correct information on hand, you can analyze the buyers' persona, their journey, and create personalized content accordingly.
Create Solid Content
Content is something that is a driving force to capture 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
Neither all the buyers are the same and nor are their requirements. Segmentation of the customers based on their persona, journey, geographical location, age, gender, etc., is important before approaching them with an effective marketing strategy.
What are the Key Components of Marketing Automation?
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 is assigning value to the leads based on their possibility of converting.
Trigger - 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 the purchase decision.
Action - Action is something that comes after the trigger. For example, sending a welcome email immediately after the customer signs up.
How does marketing automation relate to the customer journey?
There are four stages of a customer journey - Introduction, Exploration, Purchase, and Retention. Marketing automation plays a major role in each stage of the customers’ journey.
Discover
At this stage, your buyers are not looking forward to buying from you. 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. A 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 in monitoring the activities of your customers and acting on them immediately.
Purchase
At this stage, the customer is in the process of making the decision to purchase your products or services. Now, it becomes important to provide an excellent and seamless shopping experience to your customers, so that they give positive feedback about your business. Marketing automation software can help you in sending automated emails to the customers after a purchase, approaching them in a meaningful way, and assisting them at each step of their purchase decision.
Retention
Retaining the current customers and acquiring new business out of them, is one of the biggest achievements of any business. Competition being so fierce, it is difficult to stop your customers from getting attracted to other products and services available in the market. A marketing automation software can help in upselling and reselling to maintain the loyalty of your customers, ultimately accelerating the ROI of your organization.
What is Marketing Automation Software?
The software is an all-in-one marketing platform that is developed with the aim 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 it is about 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.
How Is Marketing Automation Software Different from CRM?
Marketing automation software is often confused with CRM. Many CRMs even have a marketing automation module, which makes marketers think about whether they should invest in marketing automation software or CRM. If you look into the features and capabilities of CRM, you would realize that CRM adds value to the sales department, but misses out on the requirements of the marketing department.
CRM is used to manage contacts and track opportunities. Marketing automation software is used for automating marketing programs, enhancing customer relationships, and measuring marketing efforts. This is the primary difference between both of them.
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.
What Does Marketing Automation Software Do?
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 on your business website, track their information, monitor their activities, and perform marketing activities accordingly to achieve successful results.
Email Campaign Management
A successful email campaign management requires storing and accessing accurate customer information, consistency, and professional design. Marketing automation software includes features that can help in sending professionally designed emails to the right people at the right time.
Social Media Marketing
A marketing automation software can schedule your posts on various social media marketing platforms. Posting effective updates on social media platforms can help in better conversions and benefit the business consistently.
Resources Management
The task of managing resources in an optimum manner is highly significant to run a business with high profitability. The marketing automation software facilitates you to minimize your overheads and maximize ROI.
Landing Page Creation
The software includes design templates that allow you to create appealing landing pages helping to attract new customers and retain the present ones.
A/B Testing
A/B testing helps in determining the user’s reaction to two different products or services. Marketing automation software can make the process of A/B testing 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, social media, to provide the user with everything from a single interface.
Analytics & Reporting
A marketing automation software generates comprehensive and accurate reports which help businesses to make informed decisions and prepare successful marketing strategies for the future.
How Does a Marketing Automation Software Work?
The way marketing automation software works depend on the tasks to be accomplished. For example, if you are trying to run an email marketing campaign, the below-mentioned tasks 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.
What are the Types of Marketing Automation Software?
Based on Deployment
On-Premise Software is hosted on the server of the business organization. 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 as per the 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.
How Did Marketing Automation Tools Come Into Use?
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 one point in time, due to increased consumer awareness, and their buying habits, marketing is required to get infused to technology to cope up with the rising competition in all the sectors. So, let's have a look at how marketing automation software came into use.
In earlier times, spreadsheets were used for storing the data of leads and potential clients and access it while contacting them through phone or email. It was in 1992 when Unica - a subset of CRM came into existence. The Internet was at its initial stage at that time. In 1999 Eloqua was introduced, which was transformed into a marketing automation service in 2003. Later on, in 2005-2008, new marketing automation tools like Hubspot, Marketo, Ontraport, etc., were introduced, which included email marketing automation, social media optimization, and many other marketing automation tools.
Upcoming Trends in Marketing Automation Software
Marketing software has evolved with time and is continuously growing due to the simple reason that businesses know the potential positive effects of marketing automation, which is adding up 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 in providing 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 to business growth, and marketing automation software can help in deploying this strategy.
Machine Learning
Once a user clicks a link or an ad, the behavioral data is consumed by Machine Learning systems, which can then be used in future marketing campaigns and while approaching the 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) would help in studying user behavior, engaging the customers, encouraging cross-selling, ensuring customer retention, and retargeting the customers in a highly effective manner. Artificial Intelligence 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 would talk to your customers even if you are not around. It can capture entire information from the customers like their preferences, queries, etc., and help you to take quick action on it. Chatbots are already playing a very important role in customer service and marketing departments and would be highly used in the majority of organizations very soon.
Customer Retention
In the coming future, the retention of the customers would be more important along with acquiring new customers due to the increasing competition and new products/services being introduced every day. With the right marketing automation platforms having the latest features, it would be easy for marketers to innovate and execute strategies that help in customer retention.
Benefits of Using a Marketing Automation Software
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 the options. So, here are some key benefits of using marketing automation software -
Reduces Staffing Costs
A 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 of the marketing automation platforms allow scheduling & 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 have a single platform for tracking leads, posting social media posts, and triggering email marketing campaigns all from a single platform.
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 tries 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 refine 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 the complete information about your team about 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 in targeting your customers at all stages of the customer journey. Moreover, it also allows triggering marketing campaigns over multiple platforms. Updating present customers with the latest updates in your products would help you in augmenting customer retention and achieving 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, 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.
Must-Have Features of a Marketing Automation Software
Marketing automation software is beneficial for improving the marketing and sales of your products and services. But, to select the right one which 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 in identifying prospects, capturing leads, tracking their journey across the sales funnel, personalizing content, targeting potential customers, and ensuring high conversions.
Email Marketing
Email marketing automation would help you in scheduling email campaigns, sending personalized emails, categorizing email recipients, tracking email marketing strategies to reduce bounce rate, recording communication, and analyzing 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 the leads and prospects, to select your target audience suiting to 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 the marketing automation tool that allows you to collect and analyze comprehensive data, generate customized reports as per your business logic, monitor campaigns, measure performance, and ROI.
How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Software for your Business?
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, the marketing automation software vendors may charge some hidden costs, extra fees to deploy, or future maintenance costs. You need to check the exact cost of the marketing automation tools and decide whether it suits your budget or not before selecting one.
Limitations - Many marketing automation platforms have limitations in terms of features, email recipients, social media platforms, or it is 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 a marketing automation software, you need to analyze whether you require it to integrate with the other tools you are currently using for your business for updating social media posts, email campaigns, maintaining customer database, 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 be offering prompt support so that you can easily resolve problems if 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.
Average Cost of a Marketing Automation Software
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 require 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 which 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.
When Is The Right Time To Invest In Marketing Automation Software?
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.
How to Ensure Successful Implementation of Marketing Automation Software?
Buying the best marketing automation software is significant, but implementing it in the right manner is still 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
You need to know exactly what your organization is wanting to achieve by implementing marketing automation software. Most organizations hope to grow revenue, but there may be other reasons like improving customer experience, streamlining the buying process, analyzing buyers' journeys, and many more.
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 the benefits and motivate them by showing the successful results achieved by using the marketing automation software.
Why Does Marketing Automation Fail?
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 due to which 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
Why Referring to GoodFirms’ List of Marketing Automation Solutions Can Help?
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?
- GoodFirms team follows a highly intricate research process and has been successful in providing the listing of around 9000 software being 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 technologies trends prevailing in the current market.
Key Take-aways
The use of 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 going on externally in the market and internally in the organization. We need to 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 a marketing automation software, or looking forward to going for an advanced one, you need to act now, as we are in an era that requires our business to be sound in terms of technology, and strategy both to compete and stay ahead of the time.
Marketing Automation Software Tools Comparison: ActiveCampaign, Zoho Marketing Automation, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Marketo Engage, and Oracle Eloqua
Feature | ActiveCampaign | Zoho Marketing Automation | HubSpot Marketing Hub | Marketo Engage | Oracle Eloqua |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Company Background | ActiveCampaign is developed by ActiveCampaign, LLC, a marketing automation platform company founded in 2003. | Zoho Marketing Automation was developed by Zoho Corporation, a software company that provides a suite of business tools. | HubSpot Marketing Hub is developed by HubSpot, Inc., a technology company providing marketing, sales, and customer service software solutions. | Marketo Engage is developed by Adobe Inc., a multinational software company known for its creative, marketing, and document management solutions. | Oracle Eloqua was developed by Oracle Corporation, a multinational technology company that provides cloud-based software solutions. |
Target Audience | Businesses of all sizes focus on automation | Businesses of all sizes | For businesses of all sizes, inbound marketing focus | For large enterprises, complex marketing automation needs | Very large enterprises with highly complex marketing needs |
Pricing | Freemium (limited features), paid plans start at $15/month | Freemium (limited features), paid plans start at $10/month | Freemium (limited features), paid plans start at $50/month | Paid plans | Paid plans |
Strengths | Powerful automation workflows, lead scoring, personalization | Integrates with other Zoho products, good for marketing ROI tracking | User-friendly, strong inbound marketing tools, CRM integration | Scalable, robust features for complex marketing automation | Enterprise-grade platform, advanced analytics, and lead nurturing |
Weaknesses | Can be complex for beginners compared to HubSpot | Limited features in the free plan | Less powerful automation compared to ActiveCampaign or Marketo | Expensive, requires significant IT resources | Very expensive, complex to implement and manage |
Best for | Businesses seeking powerful automation and lead nurturing capabilities | Businesses using other Zoho products, value for money | Businesses prioritizing inbound marketing and ease of use | Large enterprises with complex marketing automation needs | Very large enterprises requiring advanced features and scalability |
GoodFirms Notes: | ActiveCampaign offers powerful automation features but can be complex for beginners. | Zoho Marketing Automation is a budget-friendly option that integrates well with other Zoho products. | HubSpot Marketing Hub is user-friendly and strong in inbound marketing tools. | Marketo Engage offers powerful automation workflows but can be complex for beginners. | Oracle Eloqua is a powerful platform for large enterprises with complex marketing needs, but they are expensive and complex to implement. |