Today, marketing is the most important factor in every sort of business decision-making. Regardless of the size of the company or the vertical of the industry, marketing plays the dominant role in directing businesses to include or exclude values, features, talent, and others in any stream.
This is the age where businesses know no boundaries and wherever the internet is available, business opportunities are there and prospective leads exist. To cover marketing in such a limitless field, no businesses can keep their eyes away from the marketing needs within any organization.
Due to the diversified nature of markets and resources to target those markets, marketing is the biggest overhead among all the expenses of any company. Companies spend as much as 60 percent of their revenue over marketing. This is the time where organizations need to think in terms of monetary benefits and revenue growth.
Integrating marketing automation tools to devise, manage, and execute marketing strategies, monitoring and measuring the marketing campaigns, and tracking and evaluating marketing progress, communications, and the market can reduce your resources, efforts, and cost up to half of the overall expenditure.
How to Select the Right Marketing Automation Platform
There are countless tools and platforms are available for marketing automation and management. But, all are not equal and do not serve all the purpose. You need to think and evaluate again and again before selecting an appropriate marketing tool. Selecting the wrong one won’t serve any purpose.
Significant Factors to Consider When Choosing an Appropriate Marketing Platform
Here are some crucial factors that require your attention while choosing a marketing automation tool for your company.
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Accessibility
Before choosing any stack, it is important to select the platform that posses the ease that allows the team to seamlessly run their affairs. Find the solutions of the following concern before integrating any marketing tool into your system:
- How to use the platform, effectively?
- How to train your team?
- What is the feasibility to incorporate it through the organization?
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Features
The marketing requirement of each company and team differs from others. After ensuring the accessibility, based on your marketing needs and the prospects’ background, select the marketing channel and, then, choose a marketing automation tool that best supports that channel.
Not all the features in a marketing automation platform serve your needs. Focus on which can reduce the frictions in your required area of marketing. There are three different types of marketing automation support to create, plan, and execute the different phases in a marketing funnel:
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Channel-Specific Applications
To target the specific activity, such as email marketing or social media marketing. Integrating these tools with other stacks automates the rest of the marketing struggles by creating trigger-based actions.
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Tools To Capture the Leads
These are relatively larger and extensible marketing automation platforms that are used to plan, manage, and execute marketing across the channels to attract and capture the leads and go- hand-in-hand with the sales management software.
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Full-Funnel Management Tools
These are full-fledged marketing automation and management platforms that help larger organization manage their 360-degree marketing across the channels and execute full funnels strategies for inbound and outbound marketing.
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Cost and Value
Most of the marketing automation software are now SaaS—Software-as-a-Service. It means they provide you access on a recurring basis and can offer you personalized pricing as your needs. The different subscription plans propose different pricing structure which includes:
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- Flat Fee per month or year
- Pay-Per-User
- Pay-Per-Feature
- Pay As You Go
- Freemium plus any of the usage-based pricing
- Or more
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The other costs in the pricing include setup fees, training charges, or tiers of plans based pricing. Determine the total cost incurred and compare it with the projected ROI as per your use and requirements.
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Scalability
As we have learned earlier that most of the marketing tools are SaaS so they are usually quite adaptable to connect with other software. The scalability feasibility of the marketing automation tools helps the other RevOps to leverage the marketing data that can be accessed and shared across the board.
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Access to API
Despite integration are widely available, it is still important to go for the software that offers open API access. In many cases, it facilitates developers to link apps, instantly and accurately, for proper automation.
Common Features of Marketing automation Tools and Platforms
Marketing automation platforms have many of the features common but the end-result greatly differs from each other. Below is a list of a few of the inbound marketing features common among all the industry-leading marketing automation and management applications:
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- Email Marketing
- Social Marketing
- Digital Ads
- SMS and WhatsApp Marketing
- SEO
- Affiliates
- Content Marketing
- Contests
- Webinars and Video Conferencing
- Lead Scoring and Tracking
- Website and App Tracking
- Segmentation
- A/B Testing
- Reporting and Analytics
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Best Marketing Automation Software in 2020-2021
We have sieved, sorted, tested, and reviewed the top 3 marketing automation platforms to serve different phases of your marketing funnel:
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HubSpot
Everything you desire for the growth and expansion of the business begins with the increase in sales, and sales are driven by end-to-end personalized marketing that connects with the customer everywhere—from inbox to social media to search engines.
HubSpot is a totally full-scale marketing solution. In addition to syncing and managing the products and customers, it provides complete insights into the traffic drive, users’ interests, customer behaviors, and more.
HubSpot also offers free CRM to manage your customers’ data. HubSpot marketing automation is a one-stop station for cutting-edge inbound marketing solutions—from converting traffic into sales and personalized digital marketing to automated and segmented marketing campaigns and leveraging revenue tracking.
Connect HubSoft marketing automation with your eCommerce or any other online business to sync customers, products, contacts, and other details that materialize into the million-dollar data for targeted marketing.
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InfusionSoft by Keap
InfusionSoft is automated marketing, CRM, Sales, and eCommerce solution for small businesses. It is based on a trigger-based workflow setup. It allows businesses to manage online marketing and sales campaigns and engage customers with automated messages sent to them as per the set of instructions, called workflow.
InfusionSoft allows sales and marketing teams of small and mid-sized businesses to get detailed insights into subscribers’ data, invoices, plans, and others to maximize efficiency, automate repetitive tasks, and manage leads into customers and customers into upgrade prospects.
With InfusionSoft marketing automation solution, Lead engagement, customer acquisition, or customer retention—reach out to your audience, no matter what is the stage of their customer lifecycle.
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MailChimp
MailChimp is known for its active contribution to personalizing marketing efforts and targets. It brings excellence and acceleration in targeted marketing and sales with email marketing with robust and engaging marketing campaigns, communications, and many more customer support operations management. It automates internal processes and induces a trigger-based action system.
It easily connects with any of the third-party applications, to streamline workflow across. Based on triggers happened anywhere across the apps, signals the MailChimp to perform the tasks, automatically, as earlier it is programmed to act as per the rules.
Use MailChimp for effective email marketing and draw more leads, reach out to them and convert more into customers, extend customer lifecycle value, manage your mailing lists, send targeted and revenue-driven marketing, and sales-based emails, and track results with real-time analytics.
