Marketing is an integral part of running a business. How else is your business going to generate leads and increase profits if nobody knows it exists?
The right marketing strategy sets your business up for success by making your brand visible to potential customers, which increases sales. There are, however, a lot of moving parts involved in running a successful marketing campaign. Performing these tasks by hand is not only time-consuming but also limited in its effectiveness.
Marketing automation solutions are designed to address these challenges.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is a term used to describe the process of using software tools to automate marketing processes such as multi-channel ad campaign management. Think automated marketing content across the web, social media, email, and text.
How Can A Marketing Automation Software Help Your Business?
One of the key benefits of using marketing automation tools is that they provide functionality that you can use to implement your marketing strategy without manually executing every step of the process.
Automating repetitive tasks makes it easier to nurture conversion-ready leads and frees up time for you to focus on the work that matters. What's more, the cost-and time-saving benefits of automation increase as your business grows because good marketing automation systems can be scaled up.
The Best Marketing Automation Tools of 2021
1. Hubspot
HubSpot's functionality is the pack leader when it comes to marketing automation. Hubspot comes with an easy-to-use visual board that helps you to create simple or complex marketing automation workflows. It also includes a comprehensive growth suite that covers sales, support, and marketing automation.
Whatever your marketing goal is - conversion, visibility, or audience engagement - Hubspot has a marketing automation tool for you. We particularly recommend Hubspot if your marketing strategy focuses on content, search, or inbound marketing.
2. Omnisend
Omnisend is the ideal marketing automation tool for growth-oriented businesses. Omnisend comes packed with features such as automation splits, drag-and-drop automation editor, advanced targeting, pre-built eCommerce workflows, and more.
Using Omnisend, you can build workflows to track click data, use widgets to seamlessly share content on your social media platform, set up automatic cart recovery, etc.
Pretty fantastic, right? But what sets this platform apart from the others on this list is the multi-channel functionality; you can add multiple channels to one automation workflow (SMS, email, push notifications, etc). This means that you can create an immersive user experience for your customers regardless of the channel they're on.
3. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a people-first marketing automation solution. This may sound counterintuitive for an automation tool, but ActiveCampaign does an exemplary job of working automation workflows around human processes.
Also, the ActiveCampaign's suite of marketing automation, email marketing, and CRM tools come packed with features and integrations at affordable pricing plans that allow you to automatically create incredible customer experiences based on different preset conditions.
4. Marketo
Supported by Adobe, Marketo is a fan favorite in the marketing automation niche. Marketo boasts about offering complete marketing automation that covers any channel and every engagement. You can track customer behavior, automate marketing campaigns, analyze revenue, identity lead, and so on.
Marketo's full-feature software can handle everything from account-based marketing to social media management —making it a really good option if you run large marketing campaigns and want to simplify the buyer journey process.
5. Pardot
Pardot is an effective marketing automation tool that is a great choice if you're a B2B entrepreneur. Pardot is a marketing automation tool designed to help you identify your leads and build meaningful connections with your target audiences by streamlining the process of closing a sale.
Pardot’s main marketing automation features include a powerful builder for creating marketing campaigns focused on customer experience, artificial intelligence, insightful ROI reporting, and more.
6. SharpSpring
SharpSpring offers marketing automation services, which include dynamic forms integrated with CRM, intuitive workflow templates for streamlining lead generation, easy analytics tools for tracking user behavior, social media marketing automation, and more.
Even better, SharpSpring can be integrated with any CRM software, which means that you can keep your existing CRM data when you port to the SharpSpring platform.
7. MailChimp
MailChimp started as just an email marketing automation tool, but it has grown to be a lot more. In addition to ruling the email marketing industry, MailChimp services catalog now includes a website builder, website and domain hosting plans, CRM features, landing pages, eCommerce integration, advanced analytics, data insights, and, most importantly, marketing automation tools.
The only drawback to Mailchimp's fantastic service catalog is the limitation of the design element for forms.
8.Ontraport
Ontraport is a simple business marketing automation solution designed for small business owners. The biggest selling point of Ontraport is its in-depth insights and reporting tools. Unlike other marketing automation tools on this list, Ontraport provides you with clear data on the performance of your marketing campaigns.
It also helps with lead nurturing and generation, creation and management of membership sites, integration of payment gateways, affiliate, and task management, and event management.
9. Keap
Keap(formerly Infusionsoft) is a cloud-based marketing tool that offers eCommerce, CRM, and marketing automation, functionality in a single service package. Infusionsoft is designed for you if you are looking to manage customer experiences and automate your sales process across both social media and your website.
Keap's main features include email marketing automation, reporting and analytics, payment gateway integration, appointment scheduling, and more.
10.ManyChat
Marketing automation is about more than just emails, and ManyChat understands that. ManyChat helps you automate monotonous chats on platforms like Facebook Messenger. What's more, using the inbuilt templates ManyChat provides, you can quickly build these bots in minutes.
And ManyChat can be integrated with third-party platforms like Hubspot, MailChimp, and ConvertKit.
In Conclusion
Great marketing is very effective at driving sales, but the day-to-day responsibilities involved could quickly become overwhelming. Fortunately, marketing automation tools are there to make life easier for you. So, kick back, and let it do that.
