That said, the world around us is evolving, and so do your customers. As a result, the marketing industry is growing multi-folds, and now we have different marketing forms and strategies, including offline and online. This means you must always be ready with solutions as per user demands and the latest trends to thrive in your business. But, it takes a lot of effort and time if you try to do everything by yourself or manually. Marketing automation has emerged to solve this problem and direct your efforts in the areas that need your attention rather than performing time-consuming, repetitive tasks. So, let’s first understand a bit more about marketing automation and how it can help you.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation involves software or tools that can automate, measure, and streamline marketing tasks and workflows to help businesses improve their operational efficiency and save time from repetitive, manual tasks. It helps you keep up with your customers and the latest trends, offers better targeting, schedules campaigns in advance, and lots of other benefits with accuracy. This is why brands from across the globe are incorporating some form of marketing automation into their workflow so they will have time to focus on other important aspects and grow their business. According to a report, about 51% of brands currently use marketing automation, while 58% of B2B companies are planning to adopt it in the future. But why are people going gaga about marketing automation? Let’s find out.
Saves significant time ⏱️
A marketing automation tool helps you save a lot of time by automating repetitive tasks such as scheduling posts on social media, sending emails, and more. Automating these manual tasks frees you plenty of time to focus on other marketing activities like strategizing, planning, and creativity.
Measures marketing performance 📊
You need to know your marketing KPIs so you can measure the success of marketing campaigns. Using a marketing automation solution saves you from using multiple tools and spending on them heavily and from the hassles of switching platforms. A decent marketing automation tool allows you to perform all your marketing activities with a better picture of traffic, clicks, the number of leads generated, conversion rates, etc., under one umbrella.
Helps you understand customers, their behavior, and trends 😊
Each customer is unique, and so are their needs, pain points, and preferences. And their behaviors are unpredictable and keep changing, so it becomes difficult to present a solution that can meet their demands. Therefore, knowing people individually is important rather than making assumptions based on just demographics or as a whole target audience. Marketing automation tools help you understand your customers more, current trends, and their behavior, which you can leverage to shape your workflows, trigger retargeting advertisements, and personalize your messages and campaigns effectively.
Makes your CRM more powerful 💪
Although both CRM software and marketing automation software are different, you can combine them to produce powerful capabilities. CRM software is contact and sales oriented with information like prospect/client name, address, contact details, conversations, etc. In contrast, marketing automation software focuses on marketing aspects only with data like contacts, location, resources the contacts utilize, visited web pages, etc. When you combine them, you can enjoy tremendous benefits such as viewing the contacts’ entire marketing and sales activities in a single place, their relationship with your brand, and more. It simplifies your outreach strategies like sending targeted emails. Apart from these, marketing automation software brings many other benefits to your business, including lead nurturing, faster customer acquisition, better campaign efficiency, instant follow-ups, and more. Now, it’s time to reveal some of the best marketing automation software to help your business grow.
ActiveCampaign
Want to save your time from repetitive tasks? ActiveCampaign is a perfect software that can take these responsibilities and handle multiple marketing channels to help you grow your business. It offers email automation, a significant part of every marketing strategy, and enables you to track engagement using tags, performance reporting, and analytics, custom fields, etc. You can pull information from both offline and online channels such as live chats, text messaging, social media, landing pages, and so on to automate your workflow. ActiveCampaign doesn’t require you to be a tech expert while using this marketing automation tool. Just drag and drop files in the automation builder and set up your workflows quickly. In the next step, you can add email automation, Facebook Ads, lead nurture, text messages, lead scoring, or any part of the user’s lifecycle. ActiveCampaign also allows you to segment your customers’ data to send the right information to the right customer. When adding automation into the segment, you can send follow-ups with email content, maintain A/B test flow, and make more effective drip campaigns. You can also check every performance report and tweak the stuff where you want in a single window. ActiveCampaign allows you to integrate with 850+ marketing tools, including landing pages, CRM software, integration tools like Zapier, eCommerce stores like Shopify, and CMS like WordPress. Apart from these, you get more features such as split action, notification emails, lead scoring, customer attribution, migration service for contacts, emails, and forms. Define your business type, choose the number of contacts, and get a plan based on your requirement at a starting price of $9/month. You can also take a free trial to make sure you are using better software. This should go to #2
Campaigner
Campaigner is an intelligent email marketing software that lets you automate marketing and experiment with multiple strategies for achieving maximum output. This marketing automation software is powered by effortless visual workflows and autoresponders to make email marketing look easy. Besides, you can set triggers for sending recurring email campaigns, in addition to using the all-powerful SMS marketing for better reach. Campaigner helps you differentiate your contacts based on their activity, demographics, and purchase behavior. Additionally, its dynamic content assists in personalizing the email to boost sales. This software permits repetitive use of content blocks to cut short your time designing mails. And one can use the translation to deliver the message with ease. But the best part is the experimentation. You can test multiple subject lines, sender names, delivery time, content, and practically every aspect with its A/B testing to see what works the best. You can sync purchase information by integrating multiple eCommerce stores like Shopify, Magento, etc. Finally, the simplistic drag-and-drop editor and the excellent analytics make this a must-have, one-stop marketing tool.
Omnisend
Drive your sales across different channels with a single automation platform of Omnisend, which is best for eCommerce businesses. With Omnisend, you can easily drag and drop multiple channels in a single workflow and provide a personalized and consistent experience to your customers by reaching them into their chosen messaging channels. Omnisend provides you with pre-built subject lines, workflow settings, and messages so that you can finish up fast. Through Automation Editor, you can also adjust any changes you wish. Features like pre-built messages for welcome series, product abandonment, cart abandonment, order confirmation, shipping confirmation, and cross-sell let you efficiently manage things and focus on what is necessary. Personalize your messages with special offers or incentives within a workflow. With the help of A/B Split Testing, you can see which incentive, subject line, or channel drives your conversions. Furthermore, take decisions after each report to improve your workflows. Omnisend provides you with scalable ways like conditional content blocks, personalized recommendations, automation splits, etc., to make your emails or messages more personal and targeted. Increase your sales, not workload, by choosing a perfect plan for you; choose the free plan or go with paid plans starting at $16/month.
HubSpot
Get all your tools for marketing under one roof with HubSpot. Attract your visitors through social media, ads, blogging, and more. Convert them into customers through email, landing pages, ABM, marketing automation, etc. You can track ROI through revenue attribution reports, and every customer data is available in your CRM for better personalization. HubSpot makes the job of new marketers easier who were previously struggling with using different solutions or stuck with high-end tools but didn’t know how to use them. With HubSpot, all the data and tools are robust and easy to use, saving your time and allowing you to provide a personalized customer experience that can attract and convert. In addition, it comes with popular features like marketing analytics, salesforce integration, and custom objects. As a result, you can better handle your marketing campaigns without wasting your time on repetitive tasks. Choose a free or premium plan starting at $45/month and avail more benefits.
Keap
Save time and grow your sales with Keap’s automation software. Its marketing, CRM, and sales platforms help you get your work done without wasting time and focus on the more important things to keep your business at the top. Using this software, you will get many quality contacts to add to the segmented lists and send personalized messages to customers. You can easily convert viewers into steady customers by engaging with them more and sending targeted follow-ups. Create contact forms and add them to your website or landing pages to trigger the automation. Through landing pages, collect leads from your social media or website and tie them into automated marketing campaigns and sales. As customers are always looking forward to a fast response, Keap helps you stay updated with every piece of information to keep them happy. Moreover, you can easily track your sales from the visual dashboard to maintain a promising sales pipeline. Their pre-made templates also let you create reminders for invoices. Furthermore, Keap supports payment with PayPal, Stripe, and WePay native integrations. Define your contact strength and opt for the plan that best suits your requirement. The price starts at $79/month, which is suitable for new businesses and solopreneurs.
Pardot
Are you ready to use marketing automation software to grow your sales and make revenue? Go with Pardot, one of the best CRMs that provides a complete solution to help marketers generate a streamlined pipeline, empower sales, and create connections to close deals. It also helps you increase engagement through effective management and sell efficiently by reaching genuine customers at the right time. Always stock your pipeline full with steady lead generation by using Pardot’s forms, landing pages, social connectors, and search tools. In addition, sync sales and marketing and create stunning email campaigns to sell your products more easily. Pardot allows you to track ROI with reporting to understand what is working and what needs to improve. You can also use the power of Artificial Intelligence to transform sales and marketing efforts and use data-driven and intelligent programs to speed up sales and generate leads. With the powerful builder, you can create the same experience for the customers as you would want and build multifaceted and dynamic campaigns. They offer access to visualize the complete map and understand the experience of each customer and your marketing workflows. It will help you fix the gaps in the campaign before the launch. You can check your insights on the dashboard directly to learn individual performance and prospect activity in detail. So, fuel your marketing growth with this automation software at a starting price of $1250/month for 10,000 contacts.
Mailchimp
Choose an automation platform that is always active, even when you are busy with other tasks. Yes, we’re talking about Mailchimp that allows you to turn viewers into loyal customers. It provides personalized and automated workflows for every customer to help you create and send emails every time you have something to inform. Through Mailchimp API, send messages about account activity and purchases. It has features like custom triggers, visual journeys, pre-built automation, scheduling tools, and more to help you spend more time on necessary things. Mailchimp automation adds a personal feeling without any individual effort. Send the correct message at the right moment to the right customer. Knowing a customer is necessary these days for delivering relevant emails based on how they connect with your business. Sell and market at one place by choosing any plan starting at $299/month for 10,000 contacts and other exciting benefits.
EngageBay
EngageBay is a marketing solution for automating workflows, which is great for small businesses. This automation software helps small-scale businesses to automate sales and marketing processes to improve the overall efficiency of their online business. As it handles automation effectively, there are fewer chances of errors, and you will get time to address crucial tasks. EngageBay is not limited to marketing; it is all about handling the entire customer process across the sales, service teams, and marketing. Use integrated sales, marketing, CRM, and service platforms to segment all the processes and set up some rules for using the automation platform. Enhance efficiency, boost your business growth, and use drag and drop builder to design your sales and marketing workflows with the visual builder tool with zero learning. Define emails in a queue and schedule them to send to customers according to the defined time and date. EngageBay provides merge tags for email personalization by company name, location, contact’s name, interests, and more. With their powerful tracker, you can track every action to process your sales and marketing more effectively. It helps you increase conversions by monitoring customer behavior and setting up web forms to engage web visitors and convert them into leads. Get your free automation software with 500 contacts and 1000 branded emails or choose from multiple plans.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue’s marketing automation software helps you automate tasks so you can reap more benefits with less work. It helps you complete your marketing strategy with email marketing, SMS marketing, chat, inbox, etc., and be everywhere for your customers. Personalize each step by adding valuable messages like CRM, transactional email, etc., for your loyal customers. With these features, you can schedule the time and date for each mail or message to deliver at the right time without delay. Additionally, enhance engagement rates by sending sales messages to the targeted audience. Using landing pages, signup forms, Facebook Ads, etc., you can turn your viewers into customers and grow your contact list to send updates, promos, etc. Check on reports and analytics to know each performance and take steps accordingly to increase automated marketing and sales. Through Email Heat Map, engage with customers and know how they react to each mail to enhance future campaigns. Also, you can perform A/B testing and decide the best strategy for you. Regardless of your technical knowledge, you can integrate with different plugins or tools to make things easier. Sendinblue’s free plan comes with unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails/day. You can also opt for other pricing plans to get more benefits.
Conclusion
Marketing automation software is transforming the way we do marketing. It has simplified the workflows and tasks with the power of automation to save you time and make your campaigns more effective. Ultimately, it helps you achieve better conversion rates and clock higher revenue. Thus, check out the above marketing automation platforms and choose the most suitable one for your business type and audience and grow your business more. Microsoft Power and its uses in automation. Watch the video version of this article below.Do Like and subscribe to the Geekflare Youtube channel.
