In our previous article, we have already discussed 22 best Marketing Automation Blogs to broaden your horizon. In this article, we will discuss “Best Marketing Automation Software”. Marketing automation is a software that helps you build the customer database and helps you to follow up on those customers who already purchased from you and people who downloaded your free offers by sending them emails automatically based on their activities or interests.
Marketing automation is a must for any serious marketer. There are many tools to help save time and scale campaigns. However, you will find out that not every tool is created the same. It is important to pick the right solution for your business needs and not just buy into the hype. I compare and contrast 8 of the top marketing automation tools and explain their strengths and weaknesses along with pricing and features.
A while back, we were looking for a marketing automation tool ourselves. We researched, we talked to analysts, and we had deep dives with company reps. Since then, we’ve become very involved in the industry thanks to the complementary nature of analytics and marketing automation. We’ve even formed partnerships with several companies. Now finally, we present our top picks for marketing automation tools (in no particular order).
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation started out as a way to free marketers from tedious and repetitive tasks while assisting them in delivering effective marketing messages in a timely way. The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) as well as machine earning (ML) has helped marketers optimize the effectiveness and timeliness of their marketing messages using automation. By tracking users’ behaviors on websites and on other channels, marketers can then use this data to understand their interests and intent. AI can then automatically suggest what kind of content and marketing message will be most relevant to these leads, the best time to send these messages to yield the best results. When deployed properly, marketing automation can set businesses apart from their competitors with automated yet highly personalized emails that boost sales through customer engagement.
5 common marketing automation feature sets
While marketing automation tools can vary greatly with customization, integration, and personalization, common features do exist for marketing automation tools for a variety of processes. These five most common features are:
- Email marketing automation
- Lead nurturing
- Social media automation
- Analytics and reporting
- SEO, paid media, and digital advertising
1. Email marketing automation
Email is one of the oldest forms of digital communication, and it remains extremely effective. Although consumers have grown somewhat jaded to email marketing due to spam, email remains one of the most effective means of communicating with your audience. This makes it an excellent starting place for marketing automation.
Email marketing is one of the core components of what marketing automation vendors offer, allowing you to send emails en masse to segmented audiences. Advanced platforms automatically send emails after prospects take desired actions, like filling out a form or downloading a piece of content. Marketers can also use these tools to create, edit, and embed forms on their website for lead generation and email outreach.
The features below are common in most marketing automation solutions. Use them as a checklist when doing a basic marketing automation software comparison.
Segmentation and batch emails
As a base-level feature, marketing automation vendors include features that allow users to send emails en masse to segmented groups of customers. Templates and a native email design are also common features. These functions make your marketing efforts more personal if you use them to send segmented and targeted emails.
By segmenting your prospects and communicating with each group in a way that’s relevant to their interests, you build trust. And as a key benefit, one MailChimp study found that segmented campaigns had a 23 percent higher open rate than non-segmented campaigns.
Behavioral trigger emails
A behavioral trigger email sends designated content to prospects if they take an action on your site such as downloading content or completing a form if they’ve given an email address or are logged in. Follow-up emails offer your audience reassurance by confirming that their action was noticed by your organization and that you are currently in the process of responding to their request.
While most email marketing tools and MA platforms have the ability to trigger automatic emails, 49 percent of marketers don’t use these tools, so using these features gives you a competitive advantage.
Forms
A form creator gives you the freedom to build and edit your own email marketing forms. The tool provides code that you embed on your website pages, and the information the user enters will show up in the marketing automation tool. This code lets you collect email addresses and other lead data from visitors in exchange for content, promotions, or an email newsletter.
Mobile Optimization
Most people check email on their phone, so ensuring that your email content is readable and just as eye-catching on a phone as it is on desktop is essential. Most email and MA tools have made the switch to mobile optimization, letting you view an email in mobile and desktop view before sending.
Dynamic Personalization
Personalization of marketing emails has come a long way since we first started making different lists for different types of customers. Using dynamic personalization, marketing automation tools can pull pretty much any type of customer information from your CRM or contact list to build a tailored email.
These tools use dynamic tagging to select, match, and include content in the email. Marketing teams often use dynamic personalization to send mass emails while still keeping a personalized feel for the email.
Split Testing
Synonymous with A/B testing, this email tool lets you run different versions of the same email campaign to a test audience, analyze which version of your email has a better engagement rate and even automatically send the best performer to the rest of your list.
Teams often use split testing to find the best subject line, content, design, send time, or to test pretty much any element of the email you can change.
2. Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is a feature offered by some of the best marketing automation software tools. It helps companies track, segment, and communicate with leads in order to convert them from a prospect to a paying customer. Here are the basic and advanced lead nurture functions found in marketing automation programs.
Lead Database
Similar to a CRM database, a marketing automation lead database offers an in-depth perspective on prospect behavior. It tracks and connects common data such as customer behavior on your website, engagement with your email campaigns, shares and likes on social media, and conversations with marketing, sales, and customer service. A lead database may also communicate with the company’s CRM and will share the lead score with relevant integrations.
Drip Campaigns
The main form of nurturing new leads toward a sale, drip campaigns send content to prospects to build trust in your organization, expand brand awareness, and offer right-time content. Set up a drip campaign by choosing the content pieces that move leads through the funnel, and the drip campaign will send that content to the lead based on time, lead actions, or other triggers. Many companies choose to create a welcome series for people who sign up for their email list.
The best drip campaigns are set up as a logical progression from one action to the next. Did your prospect download a content asset from your website? The next step in the drip campaign is to follow up with an offer regarding that type of product, or with even more content about that same technology.
The most common drip campaigns run through email, but many of today’s marketing automation tools can also incorporate social media and other channels.
Task and Alert Automation
Most SaaS products include task automation, alerts, and notifications as standard features. These tools cut down on the manual processes and amount of memory juggling that goes into paying personalized attention to leads. As automation becomes more commonplace, it becomes more widely used, helping teams complete more tasks in less time.
Segmentation
Quality segmentation that takes into account demographic information, professional details, and online behavior helps marketers deliver relevant content to each individual prospect. This feature relies heavily on lead score functionality, but you can also segment your list based on demographics, browsing history, and purchase history. While list segmentation can still happen the old fashioned way via spreadsheet, lead segmentation tools will streamline the process and pull lead reports based on nearly any standard or custom information field or tag.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a method of ranking prospective customers by their potential to convert into a sale. Each user’s score determines the type of communication they receive from the organization, the frequency of that communication, and the department from which that communication originates. Lead scoring often combines demographic information alongside behavioral information such as website activity, past purchases, and social media actions.
Lead scoring plays a huge part in determining the way organizations interact with prospects. Advanced lead scoring features take into account recent behavior and adjust scores accordingly. A high lead score often indicates buying intention, which can help your sales team determine what type of offer to make.
Also read: 2019 Top 5 Marketing Software for Automation, Email, and Social Marketing
3. Social media automation
Standalone social media applications like Hootsuite and Buffer could be considered marketing automation tools, but they don’t offer as much functionality as full marketing automation software. MA software often features social analytics tools showing how many engagements you received on each post, so you can determine which types of content perform best. Other features allow you to schedule your posts in advance and track what your audience posts across social platforms as well as who shares your content and with whom they share it.
Using features built into the MA software, you can engage your audience by creating polls, sweepstakes, and referral programs. Event-triggered capabilities also let you prompt prospects to share content at precisely the right time while they engage with your content.
Posting and scheduling
Marketing automation software that includes social media management primarily helps teams post to all of their social media accounts from a single interface. These tools often have scheduling features where teams can set up posts weeks and months in advance, saving time.
Social listening
Social media marketing isn’t just about posting into the void and hoping that you’ll catch a prospect with your amazing content (although that’s part of it). Social media marketing works best when it’s a conversation between you and potential or current customers. Social listening tools scour social media sites looking for mentions of your brand, product, service, or designated keywords, so you can stay up to date on the conversation.
Social interactions through messaging
To follow up on all of those new possible customers you find through your social listening tools, social media marketing automation tools will also provide an interface for you to send direct messages. These features help you to engage with new social media contacts, facilitate fast damage control (should you ever need it), and provide customer service directly to leads, prospects, and current customers.
4. Analytics and reporting
The greatest benefit of automating your marketing efforts—after scaling personalized marketing to larger audiences—is getting in-depth analytics. Most marketing automation tools look like business intelligence software that provide custom dashboards displaying the company’s crucial KPIs in straightforward graphics.
Website analytics
Most companies analyze their website traffic through Google Analytics (because it’s free and powerful) or another on-site analytics tool. Make sure that your marketing automation software can integrate with your website analytics tool, so you can see all of your website traffic information in a single place. Integrated website analytics tools will let you see the full scope of your marketing efforts and how your campaigns affect your website traffic, conversions, and ultimately the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Advanced website analytics features will help marketers understand the impact of keyword targeting and SEO changes to website content, and they may include individual website rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Multi-channel analytics
Your website isn’t the only marketing channel that must connect with your marketing automation software. While most marketing automation platforms provide analysis for email and content marketing, you will want to analyze all your campaigns in a single platform. When researching a marketing automation tool, check to make sure you can connect to data from these sources:
- PPC and retargeting campaigns for search and display ads
- Social media
- Ecommerce platforms
- Direct mail
- Call metrics
- Traditional media (TV, radio, billboards)
- Organic search
Lead funnels
Marketing automation and analytics have turned marketing from an art into a science. Marketers now rely on detailed open, click, and engagement metrics to understand how customers interact with their content all throughout the sales funnel. This has come a long way since the days of using gut feeling to know when a lead should be passed to sales.
By aggregating data from across your marketing efforts, you can get a clearer picture of your funnels and the success of your campaigns. That includes providing insight into:
- Which types of content nurtures or closes leads
- Which types of content hold your leads back from buying or progressing down your funnel
- Where leads fall out of the funnel most quickly
- When your team should act quickly on hot leads to close the deal
Most marketing automation tools will provide visual dashboards of aggregated lead data and funnel visualizations to help your team better understand your lead funnels and find the bottlenecks.
Conversion rates & ROI:
One of the most concrete metrics available for marketers to report on the success of their campaigns is the measurement of conversions and return on investment (ROI). Modern marketing automation tools allow marketers to track their spend, attribute revenue, analyze conversion rates for individual assets and channels, and report these figures to C-level executives and stakeholders.
Also read: Should You Switch to Automation Marketing Reports?
5. SEO, paid media, and digital advertising
Mostly found in enterprise marketing automation software, SEO, paid media, and digital advertising features help marketers run their paid and organic campaigns from the centralized marketing tool where most other marketing campaigns live. SMBs may find that managing these campaigns in free or standalone tools is sufficient, but it helps to have all that data consolidated in a single interface for analytics.
Personalized customer targeting
Companies who do not personalize their marketing to the individual wants and needs of consumers will find themselves left in the proverbial dust of their competitors. Marketers find increasing success with personalization through retargeting campaigns, detailed audience targeting for ads, and multi-channel nurture campaigns that make use of all the places where customers spend their time. Teams that run these types of campaigns in a marketing automation tool can draw upon multi-channel data for specific customers and leads to build their targeting and segments.
Account-based marketing
Although the buzz about account-based marketing (ABM) has died down a bit since its height in 2016, many companies still use this marketing technique to increase revenue and ROI. ABM tools in marketing automation software help companies run multi-channel engagement campaigns that target specific companies.
Organic and paid search
Understanding how your website stacks up against your competitors and placing your site where you’ll get the most clicks on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is a full-time job. Gathering your website analytics, ad campaign metrics, and digital display targeting into a single interface can both make that job simpler and give your team maximum insight into campaign success.
Custom website landing pages and lead capture forms
Paid search and display media rely on an agreement between keywords, the ad, and the landing page. Most marketing automation tools will provide you with customized landing page builders and lead capture forms that teams can customize to fit your online ads to drive lead captures and provide immediate value to customers.
Why choose marketing automation software over other software options
Marketing automation software is sometimes confused with other tools because it has so many capabilities. Marketing automation combines the power of email service providers, social media automation, workflow automation, project management, customer relationship management (CRM), and even data visualization software all in one centralized location. This can make marketing automation tools extremely powerful and useful for companies. However, the combination of all these tools can mean heightened complexity that might scare away many users. So how does marketing automation software differ from these other tools?
1. Marketo
Marketo is perhaps the best known marketing automation tool, and for good reason. It’s one of the most mature tools, with a full suite of features that not only help marketers manage email campaigns, but also provide excellent tools for sales teams. Marketo also has a marketplace, called LaunchPoint, with dozens of integrations.
Whom it’s for:
Marketo is great for companies who are going to make use of the tool’s many features that go beyond basic marketing automation. It’s not the most expensive tool, but it’s certainly not the cheapest either. If you’re not going to use the advanced functionality of the system, you can get similar results with one of the less expensive tools. However, if you want to start with the basics and move into the more advanced functionality in the near future, it could be a good idea to start with a tool like Marketo so that you don’t have to switch over all your data and campaigns down the line. We also like that Marketo has a very large and active knowledge base, which is a great resource for new users.
It’s closest to:
Eloqua
Pricing starts at:
$1,195/month
2. Eloqua
You can think of Eloqua as the Ferrari of marketing automation. It’s fully loaded, provides an exceptional level of service, and comes with a matching price tag. One of Eloqua’s key differentiators is the amount of time they spend teaching and helping their customers get the most out of the product. Like Marketo, Eloqua also has a great marketplace with plenty of integrations with third party services.
Whom it’s for:
Don’t look at Eloqua unless you’re really going after enterprise-level software and you have the budget for it. Now, if you do, Eloqua is a great option, especially if you like having a lot of guidance from your technology vendors. You should also consider Eloqua if tight CRM integration is important to you.
It’s closest to:
Marketo
Pricing starts at:
$2,000/month
3. Customer.io
The main reason we love Customer.io is its flexibility. This is a tool that will really let you get what you want out of it. While it’s not all out of the box, if you’re willing to put in some developer time, you can really customize your Customer.io experience. Another great thing about this tool is its lightweight UI and fast, personal customer support. Customer.io is one of the newer players, but they’re growing very quickly and are definitely a company to watch. Unlike most of the older tools, Customer.io is built to trigger emails based on events, rather than just pageviews.
Whom it’s for:
Customer.io is great for two kinds of uses: 1. Companies that are looking to get started with marketing automation and appreciate a lightweight UI (i.e. not your typical enterprise software) and 2. Companies that are looking for some more advanced functionality that requires flexibility and customization, and are willing to devote the developer resources to implement it. We happen to fall into the second category, which is why we chose Customer.io for our marketing automation needs at Woopra.
It’s closest to:
Userfox
Pricing starts at:
$75/month (and they offer a free plan)
4. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a well known email marketing tool for small businesses. It does a great job of providing basic functionality in a way that is very easy for even non-technical users to take advantage of. The ease of use and affordable cost are its biggest differentiators.
Whom it’s for:
Constant Contact is for the small business owner who wants to quickly get started with organized email marketing and doesn’t anticipate needing any advanced functionality down the line. The tool is a great choice for you if you fit this description, but if you plan to expand your marketing automation efforts in the near future, this isn’t the tool for you.
It’s closest to:
HubSpot
Pricing starts at:
$15/month
5. HubSpot
The advantage and disadvantage of using HubSpot are one and the same: the system does a little bit of everything, but doesn’t do any one thing at a deep level. HubSpot describes itself as “inbound marketing software”, which means it offers a variety of tools, one of which is marketing automation. This all-in-one approach can be really convenient.
Whom it’s for:
Like Constant Contact, HubSpot is great for the small business owner, but where HubSpot beats out Constant Contact is in the additional functionality it provides beyond email marketing. If you’re looking for an “all-in-one” tool that gives you the very basic functionality of several different marketing systems, HubSpot is a good option for you.
It’s closest to:
Constant Contact
Pricing starts at:
$200/month
Conclusion
Marketing automation tools help businesses reach customers in a more personalized way. Marketing Automation is a well-organized, methodical process that includes a series of tasks to help businesses enhance its marketing efficiency and increase ROI. This blog post will present you with several benefits of marketing automation and the top 5 tools that every business should have in its toolbox.