In this technology-driven world, automation is becoming necessary for businesses to maintain a competitive edge. Automation can bring a massive difference to your marketing efforts, particularly in marketing, where you can automate several repetitive tasks. The Salesforce’s State of Marketing report revealed that 67% of marketers use at least one marketing automation platform, and 21% have decided to use one. This has rightly led to the dramatic growth of marketing automation systems.
Page Contents
What are Marketing Automation Platforms?
Marketing automation platforms automate repetitive marketing work such as email marketing, social media posting, audience segmentation, and more. Automation does not just perform these tasks faster and more efficiently but also provides a personalized experience to customers. It even allows you to focus on other essential aspects which cannot be automated.
How much does a Marketing Automation tool cost?
This question does not have a single answer since these automation tools’ price varies widely depending on the number of tasks they automate. There can be additional costs for training and add-ons. There are several automation platforms available performing similar tasks. Some can be very expensive. Thus, you should weigh your options before deciding on a particular tool.
What does a Marketing Automation platform do?
There is a lot that a marketing automation tool can do for your business. To answer why use Marketing automation software, let me explain its benefits.
- Personalized workflows
Keeping track of customers’ needs every moment is impossible manually. However, automation tools can do that by using inputs from multiple channels. This way, you can deliver the right content to the right audience with personalized workflows leading to a loyal customer base in the long term.
- Streamlined processes
Marketing automation can streamline different processes across different departments since it saves the data in central storage. This gives a unified experience to customers throughout their buying journey.
- Integrated data and analytics
You need analytics tools to give meaning to the vast data gathered across different channels. Such automation tools give you essential market insights and help in efficient decision-making.
Best Marketing Automation Platforms
The endless variety of automation platforms makes it quite confusing to choose the right tool for yourself. So, here is a list of the 12 best marketing automation platforms.
- ActiveCampaign
This is considered the best platform for comprehensive customer experience automation and is popular among startups and small businesses. It combines a CRM solution for sales, marketing and customer support with email marketing. This helps target customers with personalized messaging, which converts potential customers into leads. The tools available also help you in social media marketing. Thus, ActiveCampaign can help marketers to develop a multi-channel marketing strategy.
Moreover, this platform is quite affordable compared to its competitors and keeps on adding new features to remain in the lead.
Source: HubSpot
- SendinBlue
Both small and large businesses can use this automation tool. It can primarily be used for SMS and email marketing. Moreover, it can offer many advanced solutions for marketing automation like reporting and lead scoring, simple to advanced workflow templates and tools for Facebook ads and retargeting.
The best thing about SendinBlue is that it offers an excellent free version and even the paid versions have a reasonable cost.
- HubSpot
HubSpot is an excellent choice for automating sales, customer support and marketing processes. It goes beyond CRM and integrates data from different departments in a centralized location, streamlining the entire business workflow. Moreover, HubSpot offers tools for SEO planning, social media management, client organization, team notification, forms and landing pages and much more. Thus, it enhances the overall customer journey and is a comprehensive marketing automation platform.
The best thing about HubSpot is that its software is relatively easy to use, even for a non-technical small business owner. The basic features like live chat, emails, etc., are offered by HubSpot free of cost, and the advanced features can be accessed by signing up for a free demo.
Source: Themeisle
Source: Themeisle
- Omnisend
Omnisend is primarily designed for eCommerce companies. It offers several innovative features for omnichannel marketing. It offers email templates to solve specific eCommerce challenges like reducing cart abandonment and driving product reviews and pre-built workflow templates to cater to online merchants. Omnisend’s segmentation tool allows you to target the right audience.
Omnisend provides essential services like email marketing for free. However, its paid versions can be relatively costly.
Source: HubSpot
- Marketo
Marketo is a popular marketing automation platform whose features goes beyond basic marketing automation like SMS and email campaigns. It has analytics tools to assess the impact of marketing campaigns on sales. It also provides tools for behaviour tracking of customers by gathering real-time data. Marketo also has a unique marketplace known as LaunchPoint, which offers different integrations.
Marketo is neither too cheap nor too expensive. It even provides learning resources for new users.
Source: HubSpot
- Autopilot
Autopilot offers valuable templates for several purposes, such as auto-responding to emails, sending newsletters at optimized times, lead capturing, and nurturing. It is an excellent tool for team collaboration as it allows you to work with team members to build workflows and campaigns. Moreover, it is an omnichannel communication tool that works across SMS, emails, Facebook ads, etc.
Autopilot is a visually appealing marketing automation platform that claims to be the easiest to use.
Source: HubSpot
- Pardot
Pardot is one of the most popular B2B marketing automation platforms. It takes care of everything from lead generation to sales automation. It uses AI to make its marketing automation more efficient. It has features like email marketing, lead nurturing and scoring, advanced segmentation, data-based personalization and an ROI reporting tool to assess the marketing campaign’s success. It even helps to track all interactions on your website.
Pardot is mainly used by large enterprises and might not be affordable for smaller businesses.
Source: HubSpot
- Mailchimp
This cloud-based platform is perfect for small businesses. It offers many CRM and marketing automation tools such as behavioural targeting, product recommendations, retargeting and follow-up emails, customer re-engagement, etc. It also has integrations with eCommerce sites. It offers drag and drop workflows for improving customer experience. Mailchimp can even be used for managing landing pages and digital ads.
Source: Themeisle
- Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the best email and social media marketing tools for small businesses. You can manage both from a unified dashboard. For instance, posting on social media can be done from the same platform where you set up email campaigns. Thus, social monitoring, posting and messaging are significant features provided by Constant Contact. The only drawback of this tool is that it does not offer very advanced features and cannot be used by companies to expand their automation efforts.
Its ease of use and reasonable price are the main reasons for its popularity.
Source: Themeisle
- Ontraport
Ontraport is an automation platform for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to expand. It gathers as much customer data as possible to implement smart segmentation. It is an omnichannel tool that uses SMS, emails and phone calls. It also has a Facebook Custom Audience tool. It offers analytics tools to assess which campaigns get more customer engagement. The major highlight of Ontraport is its reporting and insights. It gives a very clear picture of the performance of marketing campaigns.
Source: HubSpot
- EngageBay
EngageBay primarily works to automate and improve your customer support. You cannot have sales, marketing and customer support as disjointed functions existing in silos. Customer engagement after-sale is as important as getting that sale in the first place. EngageBay acknowledges this and takes care of the customer when he shows interest at various touchpoints. It, thus, integrates marketing and sales automation to improve customer experience throughout the sales journey.
The large amount of data gathered by the tool prepares the support representatives well to answer and resolve any doubts the customers might have.
EngageBay offers a free package to get accustomed to the platform and dashboard. However, the automation tools are available only in the paid version.
Source: Themeisle
- Acoustic
Acoustic is used for cross-platform multi-channel marketing. It offers a host of services ranging from personalized messaging and email campaigns to content management. Their marketing automation tool known as Acoustic Campaign comprises SMS, group chats, email, social media platforms, mobile apps and print campaigns. This tool can be used along with Acoustic Personalization and Acoustic Analytics for holistic marketing campaigns management.
The Acoustic Campaign tool has many useful and unique features: customer journey mapping, planning and budgeting, AI-recommended triggers, lead management and scoring, and advanced personalization.
Moreover, Acoustic has a community forum for asking questions and an online academy providing educational resources and training for users.
Source: Themeisle
Conclusion
Finding the right marketing automation tools for your for your business can be a tedious task and it can take a lot of time to evaluate the performance of these tools. Market is cluttered with ‘n’ number of tools & platforms which claim to be the best.
While usability and effectiveness of these platforms varies from business to business. What we have identified in this article are one of the most prominent ones, which are relevant not just at the starting but these platforms are robust enough to efficiently handle the scaling requirement for your business.
So, what are you waiting for? It is time to find the right automation that simplifies your processes and saves you time.