What is the Best Marketing Automation Software?
What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
Business and technology have completely transformed over time, introducing businesses to more skillful strategies to manage their operational efficiency. Marketing automation is a category of technology which streamlines the preparation and implementation stages of marketing tasks, sales funnels and workflows.
At a fundamental level, marketing automation software helps companies optimize their strategy when providing tools and solutions that reduce the demand for manual procedures. The benefits of those solutions could be important for many businesses, and can include:
- Enhancement and automation of digital marketing campaigns
- Detailed reporting that provides valuable sales, marketing and business insights
- Faster lead time when planning and implementing robust sales and marketing initiatives
- Competitor research that allows for more a more targeted approach
- Organized and effective lead management processes
While marketing automation technology has its advantages, it’s important to find a solution that has the ideal user experience. Marketing automation platform is available in all shapes and sizes, and finding the best one for your company is very important to make the most of its own value. This article will help you determine the best marketing automation software for your business.
What is Marketing Automation Software?
The ultimate objective of every marketing team is to generate high quality leads, nurture them with personalized and relevant content, and pass them along to the sales staff to be turned into happy (and hopefully repeat) customers. Marketing automation applications helps marketers achieve it by scaling and automating the more repetitive jobs that would otherwise take hours of manual labor.
Products include attributes like implementing marketing campaign sequences across a number of channels (e.g. email, societal, cellular, landing pages, etc), landing page customization, direct list segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, and analyzing marketing campaign performance to learn what works and what does not for an individual client or even person. Many advertising and marketing automation products incorporate with third-party tools and platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc). Who doesn’t want to have everything in one place?
There are many things to consider when determining the best marketing automation software. There are several questions you and your team will want to consider.
- Is the business focused on B2C or B2B advertising?
- Does your company prefer to use an inbound or outbound marketing strategy? Maybe a mix of both?
- How large is the lead list?
- How robust of a system do you need?
- Do you want to be a reseller of a system?
Certain marketing automation products match each of these particular needs better than others, but it can be difficult to find out which goods have all of the requirements of your unique business requirements.
Top Rated Marketing Automation Platforms
SharpSpring
SharpSpring is a marketing and sales platform that permits users to automate email workflows and send prospects targeted messages based on demographic and behavioral information. It offers features like email drip effort automation, direct list production and segmentation, engagement-based lead grading, customized email templates, and a robust visual workflow builder that allows users to design sequences with customizable triggers and filters.
SharpSpring is often compared to HubSpot based on functionality. They remain competitive by offering software at a lower price point.
Pricing:
HubSpot
When researching the best marketing automation software, it is hard to find a list that does not include HubSpot. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software company that assists companies transform their advertising by outbound (cold calls, email spam, trade shows, TV advertisements, etc) lead creation to inbound lead generation campaigns.
HupSpot prides itself on users being able to make simple campaigns all the way to complicated and complex campaigns. This is important when you have users with different needs and skill sets.
The biggest question mark with this platform is how much time you have to learn the platform. The training can be long and intensive, but once completed, it is easy to use the platform to the extent of its abilities.
Pricing:
Pardot
Pardot, a salesforce.com Company, is a easy-to-use business-to-business (B2B) Marketing Automation platform that helps sales and marketing teams to optimize efficiency and increase earnings.
Pardot’s lead management applications comprises CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, direct scoring, and ROI reporting to assist sales and marketing teams collaborate to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing return on investment (ROI).
The top industries to use this particular platform are:
- Financial Services
- Healthcare
- Manufacturing
Pricing:
Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is a leading sales and marketing software geared toward small business owners helping them with organization, growing sales and saving time. It is also utilized by many bloggers for creating marketing campaigns and funnels and email advertising.
Infusionsoft makes it effortless to produce and implement a sales and marketing strategy; centralize customer connections; capture new prospects; close sales faster; and automate repetitive tasks such as follow-up, contact management, billing and payment — all from one easy to use dashboard.
Pricing:
Ontraport
Ontraport is a company automation software created best for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and tiny businesses.
While they have a CRM and marketing automation functionality, they have several other features to help you run and grow a small business, including but definitely not limited to:
- Email advertising
- Landing page Design and Functionality
- Robust Reporting
- Ecommerce Integration
- SMS capability
One of the most valuable and unique things Ontraport offers is their focus on details reporting and insights. While some tools can be a small black box, Ontraport gives you a clear look in the performance of your campaigns.
Pricing:
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an integrated email marketing and marketing automation platform geared to helping grow small businesses across any industry.
The most robust aspect of ActiveCampaign is their powerful and flexible marketing automation functionality. It’s by far one of the most comprehensive solutions on the market. On top of that, the email and campaign deliverability is rated one of the best in the market.
This probably isn’t a fantastic tool for beginners, those new to Digital Marketing campaigns, or those with low technical capabilities. It takes time and commitment to learn the tool — but once you do learn the stage, it’s pretty strong.
Pricing:
Marketo
Marketo has existed for a little while, and was recently acquired by Adobe and integrated in their enterprise marketing cloud.
The Adobe integration ensures that, should you use Adobe Analytics for data dimension and Adobe Goal for experimentation and personalization, you will have a powerful enterprise marketing automation and optimization suite.
On the other hand, the tool is generally geared towards business clients. This software might be little out of scope for most small business owners.
Pricing:
Choose the Best Marketing Automation Software for your Business
Choosing the right software is not only critical, but it can take time. Take the time to evaluate all of your options based on capabilities, ease of use, customer service, business needs and pricing. Don’t rush. Take your time — you will be glad you did.
