Hiral Atha / 8 Mins Read
Updated: January 19, 2024
If you're wondering how marketing automation can help your business, then I have revived some of the best marketing automation tools, which are time-tested, highly acknowledged and worth betting your money on.
One common thing to almost all startups is a short supply of time and money. So when it’s time to prioritize, the marketing department often sees the biggest budget cuts.
Having a dedicated marketing team to handle the social media, marketing emails, apps, and campaigns can, after all, get expensive. So how does a business balance spending wisely and not cutting back on their marketing arsenal? Indeed by using smart technology.
The answer is marketing automation tools.
In recent years, marketing automation industry growth has been unprecedented. Reports predict the valuation to touch $5.5 billion in 2019. This number stands true, looking at the adoption rate among marketers.
According to Salesforce's State of Marketing Report, 61% of marketers already use at least one marketing automation tool, while 21% of the rest are on the verge of adopting one this year.
It is not just the adoption rate that is growing. With this growth, marketing automation tools are simultaneously filling the market. New tools are hitting the market every year, making it harder to pick an ideal tool for your B2B business.
If you choose the right one, it can handle the job of a well-recruited team of marketing pros. These tools do everything from sales to marketing to contact management and customer relationship management.
Marketing automation tools has numerous benefits.
They can help generate and qualify leads, increase renewals and retention, increase ROI and reduce manpower costs.
Marketing automation can increase sales by 14.5% and drive a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. As per Invespcro research, 80% of users saw an 80% increase in the number of leads, and 77% saw increased conversions.
Now that sounds like good business, doesn’t it? So if marketing automation is on your mind, choosing the right marketing tool – one that is both effective and affordable – is the key.
To get the maximum ROI from your marketing budget, pick a tool that offers features like robust features, detailed analytics, mobile optimization and the ability to integrate with other applications that you use seamlessly.
To help you with the research, we put together a list of some of the best marketing automation tools to help you decide on the perfect solution for your business.
An industry leader, no doubt, HubSpot Marketing has consistently topped the charts in being a highly favored marketing software for small and big businesses alike. With hundreds of companies like Bentley University and Care.com using HubSpot Marketing, your business would be in great company.
It has an extensive set of top-level features to help you grow traffic, generate leads and increase conversions. It helps create stunning websites for your business in steps as simple as drag and drop. It helps you prepare and optimize content that actually gets noticed.
They also have successful lead generation strategies like A/B testing, contact forms, personalized lead funnels and more. In addition, the company also scores highly in the customer service department.
With HubSpot Marketing, users can design their own workflows, prepare and publish content and import information such as contacts and profiles from their other business applications seamlessly. This allows you to keep your branding and communication entirely your own even as you use marketing automation.
It also helps that HubSpot is ready to use the software. You just create an account and begin distributing your content. It is mobile optimized and manages effective social media marketing too. It also offers social intelligence, analytics, smarter targeting, lead qualification, a dynamic dashboard, CRM, and more.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start between $800 - $2,500 per month.
Onboarding fees - $3,000-6000 range.
Another marketing automation tool greatly trusted by top businesses is Marketo. The software, with a massive clientele of over 2300 customers worldwide, offers targeted marketing functionalities like lead management, B2B marketing, email campaigns, personalization and more.
You can use Marketo to launch personalized campaigns based on different audience segments. It greatly enhances your social presence with its simplified social engagement features. It has an extremely easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that allows you to make compelling landing pages without any technical know-how.
Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with all the CRM platforms like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, making it easy to use your existing networks.
Exponea is an enterprise-grade Customer Data Platform & Experience Cloud that combines customer data analytics with omnichannel campaign execution while cracking the unified Single Customer View. Through this, digital marketers can understand their customers and immediately turn insights into actionable campaigns, ensuring improved customer experience and increasing customer retention.
With cutting-edge technology, Exponea empowers you to deliver personalized experiences to your customers at scale through deeply embedded AI-powered capabilities.
Exponea enables the fast transfer of know-how, resulting in a change of mindset and acting as a catalyst for the rapid, profitable growth of emerging e-commerce leaders worldwide.
Talk about personalized automated emails, and Customer.io is your go-to. It lets you send targeted emails to your customers based on their engagement with your business.
Additionally, it also offers real-time data tracking and analytics to help you better understand your customers. From what pages they visit on your website to their shopping history. This allows you to personalize your email campaign better. It is easy to set up, and customers have been able to get it up and running in a few days.
From deciding whether your users respond better to messages in the morning or evening to analyzing the effects of personalized subject lines, Customer.io nails the analytics for your business and automates your email campaigns based on the data.
Pardot, a Salesforce company, is perfect for sales teams that wish to shorten sales cycles, increase ROI and boost their revenue. The cloud-hosted solution offers everything from email marketing to lead nurturing and sales intelligence.
With one of the best email and social media marketing features on board, Pardot helps you engage your audience where they are and based on how they interact with your business. It targets customers based on their interests and ensures higher conversions. Its insightful analytics platform helps you better understand what parts of your campaign are performing and which ones need to be modified. Based on the results, it helps
It also offers API support for seamless integrations, A/B testing, the marketing calendar, email rendering preview, advanced dynamic content
With one of the best email and social media marketing features on board, Pardot helps you engage your audience where they are and based on how they interact with your business. It targets customers based on their interests and ensures higher conversions. Its insightful analytics platform helps you better understand what parts of your campaign are performing and which ones need to be modified.
Based on the results, it helps
Pricing: No free trial is available. Paid plan start at $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts. [All the pricing plans of Pardot offer features for up to 10,000 contacts only].
Aritic PinPoint is a comprehensive and fully integrated marketing automation tool. It is an AI-driven platform, ideal for B2B businesses with larger teams.
Aritic PinPoint comprises inbound marketing features to acquire leads, anonymous visitor nurturing to convert them into leads, advanced lead nurturing and profiling features, inventory management, multichannel marketing, and a host of integrations. Features users love:
Pricing: Free trial is available. Paid plans start at $19/month for 1,000 contacts
In addition to email and social media, direct advertising is another critical aspect of your marketing strategy. To help you with that, there is AdRoll. With intelligent integration options to Shopify, Marketo, SQL and many other prominent platforms, AdRoll helps automate your ad campaigns.
When you need to retarget customers on social media, the web or even email, AdRoll offers customized options. Its cross-platform and cross-device retargeting capabilities and flexible segmentation let you create customized campaigns for the segmented audience. Its dynamic LiquidAds, insightful analytics, flexible customer segmentation and pro-level optimization make it a top pick among businesses of all sizes.
Bpm’online marketing is one of the most user-friendly marketing automation platforms that allows users to easily optimize their front-office and back-office tasks without any technical prowess required. It offers lead management tools that help in demand generation and client retention and helps boost user adoption.
In addition to that, it helps streamline your company processes and boost employee productivity, helping them provide better service to your clients. Divided into three different modules, sales, marketing
With its built-in calendars, document processing, task management, analytics
Autopilot's visual marketing tool creates and manages efficient marketing automation campaigns. It is literally visually enriched and offers a unique customer experience. Autopilot, however, is often placed as an alternative to a fully-functioning marketing automation tool. Some of the features users love:
Pricing: Free plan for 1,000 contacts.
A free trial is available for paid plans. Paid plans start at $99/month for 1,000 contacts [Integration prices are separate].
Bizible helps you monitor all your customer interactions across channels and track the success of your campaigns. It provides deep insights into how your various customer interactions across all the different touchpoints influence your business.
You can track the performance of the various CRM campaigns, make adjustments and customize. It is extremely user-friendly and easy to set up, has great onboarding support, easily integrates with Salesforce reporting and collects data from a huge base of resources to give you the most insightful analytics.
With features like tracking multitouch, offline and online tracking and a high level of flexibility make it a great tool for marketing automation.
Designed for small businesses, ActiveCampaign handles your marketing automation, sales, and CRM expertly to let you focus on growing your business. One of the best features on offer here is their in-depth training and support should you ever experience difficulty using the service.
With ActiveCampaign’s unlimited lead scoring, you can monitor and optimize all your leads without upgrading the plan. In addition, it lets you easily organize, prioritize and manage leads and automatically distribute them to your sales team. It lets you automate your emails, so they go out to the right people at the right time.
You can personalize these emails and even create better content for your audience. It also scores high in terms of integrations, allowing you to integrate with all the applications you regularly use for CMS, analytics, customer support, sales and other tools.
LeadSquared Marketing Operation helps streamline your entire marketing operations with advanced lead management, analytics, website tracking, drip marketing, data synchronization and list segmentation.
Especially its drip marketing tools help ease leads down your sales funnel smoothly with the help of personalized and targeted email messages. It carefully monitors the engagement at each step to fine-tune your email strategy as required. Moreover, advanced email analytics help ensures that your campaigns make the desired impact.
LeadSquared lets you synchronize data easily from several different sources like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Unbounce and Instapage.
Infusionsoft is a marketing automation software helping thousands of small businesses and freelancers worldwide. From processing payments, creating landing pages and content, tracking orders or handling your referral program, Infusionsoft takes care of it all.
Its hassle-free data storage stores all your customer information and data, from interaction history to contact details and social profiles. It also helps build streamlined sales pipelines by automating follow-up emails, scoring leads and monitoring campaign success.
This tool is more of an underdog in marketing automation. Ontraport is a popular pick among a wide range of users. One amazing thing about Ontraport is that everything is testable. The reporting dashboard is kind of meek, with only a KPI metrics panel.
Users love the sequence builder inside Ontraport. However, Ontraport is not one tool that falls in the 'affordable' category. It is scalable otherwise. Features users love:
Pricing: Free trial is available. Paid plans start at $79/month for 1,000 contacts.
Choosing your ideal marketing automation tool for your business depends largely on what you want to achieve with the tool. You might first want to review some basic questions to determine if you are ready to adopt a marketing automation tool.
Marketing automation tools are the workers who silently hand all this and more, taking serious work off your hands and helping you focus on the other areas of your business while saving time, money and human resources.
All the 10 automation tools listed above are time-tested, highly acknowledged and worth betting your money on. So with that shortlist narrowed down, you can easily pick the one that best fits your business goals.
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Hiral Atha is the Founder and CEO of MoveoApps, a mobile apps development company. With over 14 years of experience in tech and software development, she has managed and led several app development projects from ideation to implementation.
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