CMO’s Guide to Deploying the Best Marketing Automation Tool

Marketing automation tools are the talk of the town. From offering the marketing team significant resources which saves time to providing tools that streamline marketing efforts, automation tools have become the necessity for every marketing team. Any B2C or B2B company realises how even the most basic marketing tasks can take a toll on marketing executives and consume an ample amount of time as well. From staying in contact with potential clients to sustaining leads, managing email campaigns, and coordinating social media marketing efforts, all is done by the marketing team because of the dearth of resources like marketing automation tools.

This gap can be combated by some marketing automation tools that can make these tedious and time-consuming marketing tasks uncomplicated. From handling email marketing with autoresponders to tools that coordinate the firm's social media efforts and editorial calendars there are hundreds of tools that can make the lives of marketers simple and less stressful.

Best Marketing Automation Tools that Global Companies are Using

#1. Hubspot

HubSpot is a premium platform that starts at $200/month. HubSpot integrates all marketing efforts that one needs to pull off a better marketing strategy. It can overview social media, blogging, email and sales in one place. Everything is synced, so you can see where leads and sales are coming from with each marketing effort. HubSpot helps you automate social media, emails, and email workflows as well. So, if you’re looking for an “all-in-one” tool that gives you the basic functionality of various marketing systems, HubSpot is a good alternative for you.

#2. Marketo

Marketo, with a base cost of $895/month, is a good option for medium-large sized businesses. It is a multi-purpose marketing automation software offering customer engagement marketing, real-time personalization to provide customised messaging across marketing platforms and marketing management functionality, including budgeting tools and marketing calendars. Nevertheless, if one is just starting and wishes to do that with the basics and move into the more advanced functionality soon, it could be a good idea to start with a marketing automation tool like Marketo so that you don’t have to switch over all your data and campaigns down the line. Moreover, Marketo has a very enormous and active knowledge base, which is an excellent resource for new users.

#3. Eloqua

With entry-point cost as $2000 per month, Eloqua is by far the most priced and enterprise-focused marketing automation tool. The firm was acquired in 2012 by Oracle for $871m. One of the best features in Eloqua is HyperSites, which are fundamentally micro site landing pages that include extremely personalised information, such as a customer’s name and other details.

Eloqua doesn’t have a personal CRM but instead integrates with popular enterprise-level CRM systems like Oracle/Siebel CRM, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It does come with exceptional services but with a matching price tag. Hence, Eloqua is considered to be the best automation marketing software for large enterprises with big budgets.

#4. Pardot

The price for standard Pardot package is $1000. The marketing automation tool can target communications over manifold channels. Most marketing automation tools focus on email communications, but Pardot goes beyond that and lets you target mobile app notifications and messages. While Pardot does have integration with most of the known CRMs, they have just 32 third-party apps, which is significantly lower than other tools, such as Marketo. Its API access and A/B testing is only available to pro users hence are available only to customers paying for their $2,000/month package.

The price for standard Pardot package is $1000. The marketing automation tool can target communications over manifold channels. Most marketing automation tools focus on email communications, but Pardot goes beyond that and lets you target mobile app notifications and messages. While Pardot does have integration with most of the known CRMs, they have just 32 third-party apps, which is significantly lower than other tools, such as Marketo. Its API access and A/B testing is only available to pro users hence is available only to customers paying for their $2,000/month package.

#5. Customer.io

Priced at $75/month (and they offer a free plan too), Customer.io is one of the newer players in the marketing automation, but they’re growing very rapidly and are definitely a company to look out for. Unlike most of the other tools, Customer.io is built to trigger emails based on events, instead of just pageviews. Customer.io’s lightweight UI, fast personal customer support and flexibility are the features that attract customers. It is good for companies that are on the lookout to get started with marketing automation and prefer a lightweight UI instead of the typical enterprise software. Businesses that are looking for some more progressive functionality that requires flexibility and personalization, and have the required developers to implement such practices can use this tool.

#6. Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft’s entry point cost is $199 / month (+ mandatory one-off $1,999 kickstart package). It is one of the most popular marketing automation platforms, with over 20,000 customers. The CRM system on Infusionsoft is pretty great. One can get lead scoring, automated quotes, pipeline reporting, unlimited tags, and much more. If one has the eCommerce package, you can also use Infusionsoft to manage your site’s eCommerce system, which automatically adds customers into your CRM, enabling up-selling, customer lifecycle marketing, etc. Companies with a sales team can have the advantage when using Infusionspot, as their CRM system is one of their strongest and seamless offering.

#7. Ontraport

$297/month, there’s no question that Ontraport is designed with small companies in mind. Their email deliverability rates are some of the highest among all automation vendors, and their range of services are equally good. Ontraport offers the feature to build custom objects which are available only in enterprise systems. Custom objects allow you to create relationships between multiple databases. Ontraport has a large range of striking e-commerce features that include automatic credit card payment collections, cross-sells, cart abandonment, ability to add upsells, and credit card expiration notification automation. While you can create virtually any metric you’d like, their reporting dashboard isn’t particularly visually appealing as it doesn’t have graphs and charts. While Ontraport’s campaign builder is simple and sufficiently efficient, it adds text-based rules one under another.

No marketing automation software is either perfect or the best to address the ever-changing demands of brands, but they can help you out on most of your marketing woes. With constant development, marketing automation software are trying to offer solutions for brand’s every marketing need, so as to let marketing teams focus on their core tasks. Budget, requirements, and scalability of firms are what will provide the answer when faced to choose from the above available options.

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