Are you looking for a powerful tool that can make all your marketing efforts simple and convenient? No need to search far and wide. Here are the best marketing automation tools you can try.

In a typical marketing role, marketing specialists may often perform repetitive tasks such as campaign creation, bulk email distribution, analytics reporting, social media marketing, and so on.

While these tasks are necessary to drive a company’s marketing initiatives, they can also be tedious and time-consuming. Imagine sending out promotional emails to 100,000 customers. You would probably go bonkers by the time you reach customer 100. But what if we tell you that there’s a better way to do these marketing tasks without going crazy?

Yes, and it has three words—marketing automation tools. These tools have been around for quite some time. The adoption of marketing automation has grown exponentially over the years. 51% of companies on average are on board with this technology.

From generating leads to tracking the customer journey, the power of marketing automation delivers efficiency to a marketer’s role. Rather than making their jobs obsolete, they help the sales and marketing team focus their attention on the right prospects.

While the benefits that marketing automation offers are plenty, choosing one can bring all sorts of complexities. In this article, we’ll show you the top companies to check out if you are scouring for the cost-effective marketing automation solution for your business.

What is a Marketing Automation Tool?

Basically, a marketing automation tool is a digital platform that allows marketers to automate their marketing processes. The obvious benefits of using them are the increased efficiency at processing marketing tasks and improvements in lead conversion and ROI.

With pre-made templates and just a few clicks, these platforms can automate repetitive tasks. This includes social media scheduling, ad campaigns, reports analysis, and customer data management.

While automation is the bread and butter of all marketing automation tools, it also offers a slew of other functionalities. Marketing intelligence and integration with websites, mobile apps, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are some of its most outstanding features.

Essentially, a marketing automation software does all the tedious work of running marketing campaigns. They capture, store, and track all types of data about prospects and customers.

It provides details on the number of email opens, abandoned shopping carts, the volume of clicks on promo codes, and many others. When adopted at their full potential, it can revolutionize the way you profit from your marketing efforts.

6 Top Features in Marketing Automation Tools

Before you jumpstart your marketing automation journey, let’s find out the key features that a marketing automation tool should have. This tool offers basic to advanced features to create and manage marketing campaigns. Here are some of the features to take note of when choosing automation software.

Email Marketing

Whoever said email marketing is dead is probably not aware of the benefits it brings to a business. Coupled with an automation platform, it can bring a marketing strategy to a whole new level.

Your marketing automation tool should have email marketing capabilities such as custom email messages, email ad campaigns, email group prioritization, action-based responses, scheduling, tracking, and more.

Integration

One of the key functionalities of marketing automation tools is its integration capabilities. You can integrate it with your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts. There you can build your social following, create social ads, and monitor engagement.

It can also integrate with other marketing technology solutions such as analytics software, CRM, and Content Management System (CMS).

E-commerce

Some automation software also has e-commerce capabilities. This is ideal for companies that promote and sell products or services online. You can add promo codes, affiliate programs, and discount links through this feature.

Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and reporting are the lifeblood of any marketing campaign. Custom report generation, data mining and analysis, and goals benchmarking are few of the advanced features in a reliable marketing automation.

Market Segmentation

If you want to filter and personalize your marketing campaigns, then look for an automation tool with segmentation features. Most marketing automation platforms allow data segmentation based on a customer’s age, location, status, behavior, device, and other demographic aspects.

6 Best Marketing Automation Tools

Now that you understood the key features of marketing automation software, let’s look at the six best marketing automation solution for your sales and marketing campaigns. Here they are:

Marketo

Marketo was announced as the leader in CRM Lead Management Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant. This further cement their position as one of the dominant forces in the marketing automation industry.

An Adobe company, Marketo boasts its enterprise-grade solution that seamlessly integrates with Adobe’s other products. It’s an all-in-one platform to drive measurable results for any digital strategies.

From email marketing, lead management, and revenue attribution, Marketo has stellar features to engage people in every stage of their customer journey.

Constant Contact

If your marketing operations are strong on email marketing, then you’ll love Constant Contact. Their easy-to-use automation features allow you to customize and design beautiful email messages, even without any design experience.

Drive sales the smart way by targeting an engaged audience and build relationships with them. Constant Contact lets you create welcome emails, trigger email series, segment contacts, management lists, and many more.

Use their first-month free trial to get a feel of their platform, then upgrade to the basic Email plan at $20 per month or Email Plus at $45/month for small businesses and organizations that need more robust features.

Hubspot

If you want to meet and exceed your marketing goals beyond email, Hubspot offers comprehensive workflow tools for just that. Touted as the leading purveyor of inbound marketing, Hubspot delivers powerful features that target sales, marketing, service, and CRM functions.

Get access to automation tools for marketing processes such as blogging, SEO, landing pages, lead management, email, and social media. Additionally, you can integrate a software like Salesforce, Zapier, Outlook, etc.

Their Starter plan costs $40 per month with all the basic features for small businesses, and up to $3,200/month for enterprises. They also have a friendly customer support team and loyal community if you have any questions about using the software.

Keap

Formerly known as Infusionsoft, Keap has been in the business for more than 15 years. They have a wide array of CRM, sales, and marketing tools to automate daily workflow. As a result, clients can conveniently acquire, and nurture leads at the fraction of the cost if they were to do them manually.

More importantly, startups and small businesses can start scaling their marketing campaigns for free with the Keap Grow plan (for the first month). For established businesses, their Keap Pro, and Infusionsoft plan offers a more robust automation and integration solutions.

ActiveCampaign

At the heart of ActiveCampaign is a triumvirate of a rewarding customer experience—email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM. Their leading-edge solution lets you capture and nurture leads, convert passive audience to an engaged customer, and provide ongoing support to delight your customers.

Also, they provide one-on-one training, free migration, and customer support so you get the help you need at any stage of your business. With 500 contacts, their Lite plan is at $15 a month. It Includes all the nuts and bolts to get your marketing automation rolling. As you grow your list over time, we recommend that you upgrade to their Plus and Professional, or Enterprise plan.

All their automation tools are customizable, allowing users to generate campaigns that work for them. So, it’s less about the process but more on achieving the best results for you.

Pardot

A strong contender in the B2B marketing automation is none other than Pardot. It provides a holistic solution for users to create meaningful customer connections and simplify sales and marketing processes.

Established in 2006, Pardot’s parent company is Salesforce. They offer special automation solutions designed for companies in these industries: financial services, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, and media.

Again, they are perfect for B2B marketers who need all the support tools to synchronize their sales and marketing goals. Create meaningful campaigns that engage and nurture customers with Pardot’s data-backed marketing solutions.

Marketing Automation Solution for Your Business

As a final thought, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You’ll be happy to discover that there are tons of marketing automation tools available for businesses of all types and sizes. The few we’ve mentioned are among the best in the industry. What sets them apart is their ability to provide cutting-edge features that simplify marketing operations.

We recommend that you take advantage of the free trials just to get your feet wet before committing. Work around your budget, compare with other competitors and consult your marketing and sales team before taking the plunge.

We hope that this list encourages you to integrate automation tools as part of your marketing strategy.

If you need a team of experts to accelerate your marketing goals, Full Scale is here for you. Get access to our pool of content writers, graphic designers, web developers, and project managers to carry out a holistic marketing solution for your business.

Contact us today to get started.