30-second summary:
- By simply adopting marketing automation technology, a company can significantly free up a marketers time and enable them to focus on more important revenue building projects as these tools can help to automate numerous repetitive tasks such as emails, campaign management, website analysis and social media marketing.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing a significant part in bolstering marketing automation technology and helping to drive adoption of the technology among companies.
- Marketers need to choose the right marketing automation tool that fits the size and spread of their brand.
- In order to pick the most apt tool, marketers will need to keep in mind the usability, pricing, ease of integration, capabilities around email, social media, content, ecommerce, CRM and sales competencies, while choosing the right marketing automation software.
The current marketing landscape can often defined as an unpredictable sector, where the customer is ever evolving.
Unfortunately, this only means that marketers have to spend a significant amount of time keeping up with news trends to entice the customer, rather than focusing on different ways to drive revenue.
How can marketers free up their time to focus on more important aspects, do you ask? Well, the answer lies in ‘automating’ or ‘marketing automation.’
By simply adopting marketing automation technology, a company can significantly free up a marketers time and enable them to focus on more important revenue building projects as these tools can help to automate numerous repetitive tasks such as emails, campaign management, website analysis and social media marketing.
The fact that companies and marketers are increasingly looking at adopting marketing automation software can be seen in Ultimate’s Marketing Automation July 2019 update, that stated that while over 51% of companies had already adopted marketing automation tools, more than half of B2B companies (58%) were also planning to adopt the technology.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are also playing a significant part in bolstering marketing automation technology and helping to drive adoption of the technology among companies.
In its first ever Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, Forrester had also predicted that the global spending on marketing automation tools will pass $25 billion by 2023, a 14% annual growth rate.
All of which is to say that if you as a marketer, are not using any marketing automation tools, then you should start to reconsider.
Marketers need to choose the right marketing automation tool that fits the size and spread of their brand.
In order to pick the most apt tool, marketers will need to keep in mind the usability, pricing, ease of integration, capabilities around email, social media, content, ecommerce, CRM and sales competencies, while choosing the right marketing automation software.
In this article, we have focused on the top 10 tools that marketers should definitely know about.
Hubspot
Perfect for: Content Marketing
Hubspot is currently one of the most popular marketing automation tools. Holding a marketshare of 30%, the inbound marketing and sales software provides web analytics, landing page, social media marketing, search engine optimization and content management.
The tool has been designed for small and medium-size businesses and enables them to launch marketing campaigns in a quick and effective manner.
Key Features:
- Users can easily edit, format and publish content and modify design
- Integrates easily with SugarCRM, Netsuite, Salesforce and other platforms
- Creates an email template, automates the subject line and content for each recipient.
- Uses keywords to optimize blog posts and the landing pages
- Support is available online and 24 X 7.
Marketo
Perfect for: Driving lead management
Marketo is a multi-functional cloud-based marketing automation software that enables businesses to drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing.
Designed for enterprises, the tool provides customer engagement marketing, real-time personalization to offer personalized messaging across marketing channels, and marketing management functionality, including budgeting tools and marketing calendars.
Key Features:
- Offers web-based email marketing platform
- Provides lead generation
- Automates marketing campaigns and engages the customer in a personalized manner
- Identifies customers and increases revenue
- Search Marketing
- Online 24/7 support.
Pardot
Perfect for: Marketing analytics
Pardot is a full-featured marketing automation tool that enables companies to streamline their marketing and sales teams by accelerate pipelines and drive sales through email marketing, lead generation, social marketing and provides sales intelligence.
Its customers also find the product easy to use and its interface effectively guides them to build campaigns.
Key Features:
- Customers can build dynamic and comprehensive marketing campaigns
- Has a customizable dashboard to track and measure campaigns
- Helps to identify gaps in campaigns before it is launched
- Email marketing campaigns: scheduled and Automated email sending facility.
- Integrates easily with CRM platforms like Salesforce, SugarCRM, Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamic CRM
Oracle Eloqua
Perfect for: Delivering personalized marketing campaigns
Oracle Eloqua is a cloud-based cross-channel marketing solution that primarily helps marketers to target customers and track them across all phases of the buying cycle.
Using this tool, marketers can plan automated campaigns while simultaneously personalizing them.
The tool is an effective personalization device that can be used across various channels like email, video, and mobile.
Key Features:
- Sales Enablement features that allows sales and marketing teams to work together to gain new clients and garner more revenue
- Measures performance of campaigns and other marketing efforts
- Easily integrates with Oracle’s Business Intelligence tool for out-of-the-box standard reporting and dashboards
- Collects aggregate profile and behavior data to manage and score leads without involving IT
ActiveCampaign
Perfect for: powerful email marketing campaigns
Boasting of numerous features and integrations, Activecampaign can often be described as a powerhouse email marketing software.
One of the key features of this tool is ‘automation’.
Not only does ActiveCampaigns provide autoresponders, but also automates a customer’s contacts, list management and its CRM system.
In addition, the tool also tracks website visits, various events of the customer and based on that it provides real-time analysis.
Key Features:
- Automatically fetches contacts and adds new contacts from various platforms like CRM, ecommerce, etc.
- Dynamic email content depending upon customer behavioral analysis, interests, social data, etc
- Online support and live chat support is available but on-call support is unavailable.
SendinBlue
Perfect for: All types of email marketing
SendinBlue offers services such as email marketing, SMS campaign, and transactional emails.
It requires no specific skill to create email designs or templates.
The interface is so simple to use with a drag and drop facility and customized template gallery which helps to create a simple but unique email template.
This email template is supported by all types of mobile devices with any version.
There are various other features such as importing contacts from another platform, customized contact search, responsive email design, campaign reporting, trigger marketing email as per the user interest, etc.
LeadSquared
Perfect for: a turbocharged lead capturing engine
Launched in 2012, LeadSquared is a marketing automation tool that helps to drive leads effectively through a company’s sales funnels.
The tool effectively accelerates the lead capture process by capturing leads from various sources, such as, email, campaign and websites.
The tool can also build customizable responsive landing pages with landing page builder, thereby, easily capturing more leads.
LeadSquared also helps to boost sales as it automates lead assignment within sales team by predefining distribution rules.
Key Features:
- Offers a customizable lead scoring feature
- Sends automated sales notification to the salesperson.
- Has various marketing and sales features including drip marketing, segmentation, sales funnel, behavioral insights, and marketing insights
Act-On
Perfect for: Connecting inbound and outbound leads
Defined as a comprehensive marketing automation tool, Act-On primarily offers a complete suite of applications, including email marketing, website visitor tracking, lead management, social media management, reporting and analytics, as well as integrations with webinar and event planning.
To its customers, the tool also enables its customers to track and segment its visitors as per their behavior.
Key Features:
- Offers organic plug-ins with social media and social marketing tools
- Features customizable lead scoring
- The solution helps to identify the potential buyer and helps to increase sales by accelerating buyers through the sales funnel
- Comes with an open API that enables to seamlessly tie in with any CRM system
Ontraport
Perfect for: Visual marketing automation
Ontraport is often described as a full-featured email marketing platform that features extensive marketing automation capabilities and a built-in CRM for managing contacts.
Although, email marketing is the marketing automation tool’s core product, it also provides a full-lifecycle CRM system that uses visual maps to track the company’s interaction with its customers.
The tool tracks the customer as it moves along the funnel and tweaks certain details to maximize the conversions and provide a holistic view on what is working and what is not.
Not only does it automate marketing efforts, but also combines offline and online campaign to provide a fully integrated campaign strategy.
Key Features:
- Seamless integration with CRM, ecommerce, and marketing automation tools
- Features a block-based editor for creating versatile landing pages
- Can build an ecommerce page using the software tools and capabilities
- Offes a visual campaigning performance reporting tool
- Can tracks customer behavior in great detail across many parameters
- Sends an unlimited automatic email, text using a tool with the correct user’s interest
AdRoll
Perfect for: Automating ad campaigns
AdRoll is helpful for retargeting customers through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and the web.
With cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities as well as flexible segmentation, you can provide customized experiences that dramatically improve marketing efficiency.
Key features:
- Retargeting ads across devices and platforms
- Offers optimization and conversion reporting
- Customized budgeting platform
- Features flexible segmentation and transparent analytics
Conclusion
Although not an exhaustive list, the article has taken an in-depth look at some of the top marketing automation examples that are available in the market today and will help guide marketers to pick the right tool for their company.