It’s Time to Transform Your Business: Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools
Before diving into the best marketing automation tools, let’s first establish what exactly marketing automation is and why do we need it.
Marketing automation refers to using software platforms and technologies to streamline and simplify repetitive, time-consuming marketing tasks such as e-mails, social media marketing, website analysis, campaign management, etc. So marketing automation will help you be more productive, efficient, and stress-free.
There are so many successful marketing teams out there that use marketing automation to boost their sales, increase revenues, improve customer engagement, and of course, to make their campaigns more accurate. The aim is to achieve a better ROI (return of investment). And many teams fail to prove how their campaigns can do all of this.
So what do you think differentiates successful teams from those that fail to perform? You know, they are not necessarily better or more creative – they have the right tools – marketing automation tools that support their campaigns. In marketing, just like in any other field, you can achieve amazing results if you have proper tools.
So many choices are available, but in this article, we have focused on the top 5 marketing automation tools that will make every marketer’s life easier:
1. Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the most popular marketing automation tools. It’s an inbound marketing software company (inbound marketing is the process of attracting customers through content marketing) that has everything you need in order to run a successful inbound marketing campaign.
This tool is user-friendly and really intuitive, which makes it easy to use even for a non-technical business. Hubspot can do a little bit of everything, but not at a deep level. So it’s an all-in-one tool that is great for small and medium-sized business marketing teams. Currently, more than 73,000 customers in over 120 countries are growing their businesses with the help of this platform.
HubSpot gives marketing tools for web analytics, social media automation, SEO, landing pages and forms, content management, automated email responses, as well as custom emails. On this platform, you can also easily edit and publish content, modify a design, and optimise blog posts or the landing pages using various keywords. As you can see, there are quite a lot of things that you can do with this tool.
Moreover, Hubspot easily integrates other platforms and they have online support available 24/7. The platform gives a free CRM (customer relationship management) tool, as for the other services prices range from $50 to $3,200+ per month, so Hubspot is a little pricey.
2. Marketo
Marketo (an Adobe company) is a powerful, multi-functional cloud-based marketing automation tool that helps marketing and sales specialists build brand value and drive revenue. It can be used for email marketing, personalised messaging across multiple channels, customer engagement marketing, social media, landing pages, web analytics, etc.
Marketo is a mature tool with many simple, basic features, but also more complex ones like
account insights, revenue attribution, mobile marketing and much more. So as you can see, this tool can do a lot of things, making it a great option for medium and enterprise businesses.
If you’re looking for a marketing automation tool that goes beyond basic functionality then Marketo is a good choice. The pricing starts at $895 per month.
3. Eloqua
You’ve probably heard about Oracle. Well, Eloqua is now part of the Oracle suite of tools. Using this tool, you can target customers and track them across all stages of their buying cycle. Eloqua will basically help you plan and execute automated campaigns while delivering a personalised customer experience.
You can think of Eloqua as the Apple of marketing automation. This platform is a great device for personalising every step of the marketing process across different channels like email, video, web and display search, as well as mobile.
Eloqua is a marketer-friendly platform that is suitable for organisations of any size. People from Eloqua spend a lot of time teaching and helping their customers use the product in the correct way. The pricing starts at $2,000 per month.
4. Pardot
Pardot (now part of Salesforce suite) is a B2B marketing automation tool that offers an awesome platform for marketing and sales teams to work together in order to close more deals and maximise ROI. These things can be done through lead generation (the process of attracting potential customers), email marketing, social marketing, etc.
With Pardot you can create dynamic marketing campaigns, measure these campaigns within a customisable dashboard, identify gaps in campaigns before launch and much more. It’s a user-friendly tool that also works well with other platforms.
Pardot is a great solution for small and midsize companies. Their pricing ranges from $1,250 to $4,000 per month.
5. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a powerful tool that gives hundreds of pre-built automations that combine CRM, email marketing, marketing automation and much more. This tool comes in handy when you need different types of auto-responses, for example, a welcome email. Besides this, it can automate your customer’s contacts and list management.
ActiveCampaign is great at integrating various automations into the processes of real humans. It’s amazing that we have all these tools, but the human touch is still necessary.
This platform is really intuitive and it comes with an affordable price ($9 – $400+ /month), so it’s a good choice for small businesses.
6. Bonus: MailChimp
Mailchimp – an all-in-one marketing platform that is great for small businesses who just want to test the water. It’s a freemium tool that has a ton of features, with an easy to use interface even for the non-techie. Mailchimp allows you to send thousands of emails at once, it can be used to create and manage mailing lists, and automate email campaigns.
The ideal email starter platform is really affordable ($Free – $265+ /month). On the free plan, you can send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. Most of the tools and templates are accessible on this free account, which makes it ideal for personal and SMB accounts.
Conclusion
All these marketing automation tools can help you boost your work efficiency and productivity. So which one of these marketing automation tools would you choose for your business?
Additionally, if you think you need help with social media management, email marketing, SEO, PPC (pay-per-click) and Google Ads, we would love to hear about your project. We love challenges, they keep us alive. 😉
