Keeping up with maintaining marketing data insights, prospects, and delivery can be a hell of a job even if you’re reaching out to a few people only. Even digital marketing companies struggle if there’s no sufficient tool in place to smoothen processes.
With millions of searches made online every day, you need the best marketing automation tool to be consistent, strategic, and win customers. In this post, I’ll share what marketing automation software does, what to look out for, and a critical look into the best and who they suit most.
Marketing automation streamlines marketing, selling, and customer lifetime value, but there are so many on the market. Thousands! Selecting the best one for your business is as hard as selecting the best website platform, a design firm, or one other critical part of your business. Many tools are there are just a rip off with less than valuable features that you can get at a lower cost elsewhere.
Also, choosing the right one is more than the pricing that it offers. You have to look into features and how well those features fit your needs.
The Essential Automation Features To Look Out For In A Marketing Automation Tool
Based on what your business needs might be, you should look out for the following features;
- seamless integration with website and CRM platforms
- Analytics
- Email messaging Template
- Email campaign reports
- Varied options for lead generation (social media, emails, push notifications, SMS, chats)
- Customer profiling
- Customer’s Journey/Sales Funnel
- Possibility to scale easily
- Ease of Workflow Setup
You need software to automate sales and marketing process, which could include emails, calls, adverts, and any customer outreach process that can translate to revenue. Most tools today offer insights to customer behavior, potential, and a system to track all sales process towards business goals.
Understanding these top marketing automation systems and the features they possess would help you find the best tool for your online business.
11 Top Marketing Automation Tools To Consider Using Now
After testing more than two dozen tools, we’ve put together a list of the best automation tools in no particular order and what the specials that they offer to your business.
Here they are:
- CM Commerce
- MailChimp
- Active campaign
- Drip
- Hubspot
- Marketo
- Customer.io
- Oracle Eloqua
- Infusionsoft
- Exponea
- autopilothq.com
1. Use CM Commerce To Track, Retain And Build E-commerce Customers
Previously Conversio, CM Commerce offers one of the best marketing tools, especially for e-commerce. Easily send welcome emails, newsletters, retain and recover customers who might have abandoned cart by following up.
You can also win back customers who haven’t bought from you in ages. And guess what? You don’t even have to write the emails. It has templates for most email sequences, so all you have to do is edit the branding and change one or two things.
You can also send customized receipts and offers to your customers through their receipts, which is great for upsells and cross-sells and ultimately increasing customer lifetime value. You can also take product reviews and sales feedbacks from customers through it.
Pricing starts at $20/month for up to 500 contacts.
Who should use it?
Small and medium scale e-commerce websites would benefit from this tool as you can start from a small package with access to great features and grow.
2. Use Mailchimp For Its Easy-To-Use Email Templates And To Track Lead Sources
MailChimp helps you carry out all your marketing in one place. You can manage your social media and ad campaigns in one place, alongside many easy to edit email templates. One thing I like about MailChimp is its channel marketing data that you can use to monitor things.
The good thing is that it works for both brick and mortar businesses and e-businesses. Asides the email marketing features, it also allows you to sync with your store to configure abandoned carts, product recommendations, and get predictions.
It has a free plan for up to 20,000 contacts, then $9.99/month for 50,000 contacts and others, making it one of the cheapest out there.
Who should use it?
This tool is a great option for any kind of business because it allows you to scale easily. A small business can start with this tool at its affordable rate and quickly grow with it.
3. Use ActiveCampaign To Scale With Email campaigns
ActiveCampaign provides easy to make email templates for your integrated leads. It doesn’t require any special skill to use with its flexible messaging editor. It also features sales and CRM tools.
I also like that it can track your website, and you can plug in automation goals and track to see how far you are or close to getting that goal. The tool is great for SMS, site messages, and setting up custom audiences for Facebook ads (especially with how they interact with your website – retargeting and all).
Pricing starts at $9/month with 500 contacts.
Who should use it?
It is perfect for a startup as you can begin with just 500 contacts and yet have most features available to you.
4. Understand Your Ecommerce Customers Better With Drip
Drip helps ecommerce website carry out easy customer segmentation, marketing, and sales tracking. You can understand your customer behaviour and know what they are likely to purchase. This translate to strategic marketing and the right personalization if you can use that data right. With that, you can provide every visitor to your website with a unique experience.
A Unique experience makes it harder for visitors to forget your website, increasing the possibility of them coming back to buy from you again and again. Click To TweetI also like their multi-channel features. Potential customers will interact with your store at different sections, from social media to email, mentions on review sites, etc. Drip makes it easy to put your brand out there and give the same seamless marketing experience, whether it’s in their inbox or Instagram feed.
Its pricing starts at $49/month for 2,500 contacts.
Who should use it?
If you already have an ecommerce store with a good number of leads, then you should try out Drip.
5. Use Hubspot To Interact With TAs, Manage Your Mediums And Track Conversions
Hubspot marketing automation software offers free and paid tools that automate your online marketing process from email marketing to monitoring sales funnel processes and CRM.
Hubspot works as an inbound and multi-channel automated marketing tool. You also get email marketing, ad management, basic website design, SEO, A/B testing, company performance analytics, and tools for building a content strategy. It’s not for ecommerce stores, but if you have a content-focused website, then you’ll enjoy its features. Hubspot has a free plan.
Who should use it?
Businesses that plan to use content marketing and don’t take orders through their websites are the best to use this tool.
6. Supercharge Your Marketing And Sales Funnel With Marketo
Marketo offers a marketing automation platform to both B2B and B2C businesses. It goes beyond email marketing and covers a model that shows and interprets your sales pipeline from lead generation to revenue, further aligning it to your set goals. Its strong distinguishing factor is its L2RM framework that displays the process of customers buying cycle for better marketing.
It offers website personalization, SEO, CRM integration, reports from campaigns, email marketing, lead scoring-nurturing and lead management, social marketing, the Marketing calendar, consumer and mobile marketing, digital ad management, and retargeting.
Marketo’s pricing depends on the tool you want to use. If you only want to generate leads, they have bundles for that. For email marketing, it’s the same thing. You have to contact sales though for custom prices.
Who Should Use Marketo?
If you don’t want to pay for all the tools when you need only a few, you can consider Marketo. However, given that it’s custom prices, I don’t expect it to be low-cost.
7. Use Customer.io To Timely Targeted Messages To Target Audience
Customer.oi offers some features that you might love. There’s an easy to use email template builder. You also get a clear metric graph that helps you understand how your emails translate to revenue. It offers different ways to bulk upload data and teamwork sync. While it excels at customer segmentation and collecting data, it’s more developer-friendly than beginner-friendly. Its pricing starts at $150/month for 12,000 contacts.
Who should use it?
This tool is great for medium-large businesses/marketing teams looking to rely heavily on data and acquiring leads from more means than just form filling.
8. Use Oracle Eloqua To Nurture And Convert Your Generated Leads
Oracle Eloqua offers you lead nurturing to lead conversion reporting with email marketing as its key channel and process indicator. This means that you have to generate your own leads, then Eloqua can help you track it. Through the email campaigns that you send out and they can be able to monitor lead conversion from there.
Asides from email marketing and lead nurturing, it also provides campaign reports, integrates with Wechat, A/B testing, and social media analysis. Its pricing isn’t on its website, but third-party reports peg it at close to $2000/month.
Who should use it?
I do not recommend it if you are just starting a business or nurturing a small business. Large enterprises are more likely to benefit.
9. Manage Sales, Customers, And Marketing Together On Infusionsoft
Now owned by Keap, Infusionsoft provides a platform that helps you nurture your leads to its revenue conversion state. It saves times by automating the whole process from marketing to sales and customer relationship management. You can follow-up, take bills, and collect payments automatically. It also provides sales forecast from lead to revenue. However, its marketing automation process is restricted to email marketing only.
Its pricing starts at $199/month for 2,500 contacts in your database.
Who should use it?
Infusionsoft can be used by a marketing team looking to automate the sales process. If managings bills along with marketing seem tasky, try it out.
10. Use Exponea To Get A Seamless Work Chart Of Your Leads
Exponea is an all-in-one tool that seamlessly follows potential customers from the point of generation to marketing to them what exactly they need. It uses an omnichannel marketing process to communicate with customers regardless of the channel they use to interact with you, device, or touchpoint.
With its data, you can uncover patterns in customer behavior. For example, if many people are repeatedly ordering two products together, from that data, you can turn them into a bundle or use a one-click upsell that comes off as more profitable for customers.
Also, if some customers only purchase certain products at certain times, you can tailor offers to them using the touchpoints that they come in contact with at that point. It also provides A/B testing, email marketing, and SEO reports. Its pricing is custom-based when you contact them.
Who should use it?
Exponea works for offering personalization and creating strategies aimed at boosting customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty. It is a worthy investment for a business with cash for marketing.
11. Fast track Marketing & Build Any Sequence With Autopilothq.com
From managing leads, emails, and monitoring lead growth to conversion, this tool thrives in getting the job done when it comes to giving your marketing team a simple platform. Its best feature is the drag-and-drop tool for building sequences. You can create any kind of experience based on what you build.
If you want customers to go somewhere based on a particular trigger or action, you got it. It also helps with improving customer lifetime value because you can build a full customer journey from first purchase to repeat purchase.
Who should use it?
Small and large marketing teams who want to build automation based on customer behaviour and interaction.
Choosing The Right Tool Is Smart Marketing
It’s smart marketing when you let automation tools do most of the work for you. You can reduce the loss of customers, improve customer relationship, and increase revenue with marketing automation tools. Isn’t this what we all want? Simply choose a tool that fits your budget, business model, and needs.
If you are already using one, let us know which one in the comments and how the journey has been. If you’re not sure how to go about this, send us a message, and we’ll help you out as soon as possible.
The Brand Ally is a web design and digital marketing company. We provide great website designs, mobile app development, SEO, social media marketing, and Google Ads.