Businesses today are rapidly working towards transforming their marketing tactics in a more profit generating manner. From converting leads to analyzing consumer behavior, there are various aspects that come under the umbrella of effective marketing. Since most brands today face a time crunch, there is a need for platforms that can help marketers save time in building their digital marketing strategy while ensuring that their campaigns generate good engagement and impact. This is where the concept of online marketing automation tools comes in.
Online marketing automation tools not only help marketers save time and energy, but also provide a wide array of flexible and customizable features that can be used to give a boost to less responsive campaigns. By integrating different services ranging from email automation to targeting mobile automation services, these tools ensure that marketers utilize various platforms for their strategies. Let us take a look at some of the most popular online marketing automation tools.
1. Marketo by Adobe
Marketo is one of the most well known online marketing automation tools because of the wide range of features provided by it. By integrating dozens of integrations through its own marketplace called Launch Point, it works towards closing the gap between sales and marketing. Adobe Marketo is a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud.
- Application: By going beyond basic automation features, it is one of the best marketing automation tools for business and introduces advanced functionality features and customizable features that can be altered as per the needs of the business. Through smart mobile features that can be optimized, the tool extends its features to campaigns through SMSs that can be accessed through various devices.
- Ease of Use: By providing an A/B testing feature for emails, the tool provides automation options like multiple subject line testing for different emails. It schedules emails for different dates, timings and texts so that marketers can carefully gauge the campaigns that work best for them. With the flight segmentation feature, business owners can even segment and tag their leads on the basis of their location and geography, thus making specific target marketing simpler.
- Key Feature: The Engagement Engine feature offered by the tool helps users to increase the frequency of their less engaging campaigns in a manner that makes them better for customer engagement. Not only does this help in serving better content, but also helps brands to target customers across various channels. Through its micro targeting feature, the tool allows users to personalize web pages on the basis of their website visitors, user experience, response to promotions etc.
- Pricing: The platform offers 4 different paid plans- Select, Prime, Ultimate and Enterprise and the pricing for them can be requested on their website.
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2. Customer.io
Customer.io helps users to automate emails effectively by targeting audiences on the basis of their engagement. This includes customizing content on a real time basis to ensure that personalized messages can be integrated effectively.
- Application: By integrating data on mobile and desktop devices, the application offers features like conversion tracking, A/B testing, in-text conversations and integrating customer profiles. One of the main features of the tool that make it a go-to name is its flexibility of use. Features can be worked up as per the user requirements through a little investment of time.
- Ease of Use: With a fast and lightweight user interface which makes website navigation fairly easy, it also offers excellent personal customer support. Rather than just focusing on pageviews, the tool also works upon triggering emails based on events. Thus, being one of the best marketing automation tools for business.
- Key Feature: The tool offers 2 different ways of usage, either through initiating marketing automation through the platform’s lightweight user interface or through advanced features offering more flexibility and customization which is more suitable for enterprises.
- Pricing: The tool offers a free trial plan and paid plans starting at $75 per month.
3. Constant Contact
Constant Contact goes beyond the usual online marketing automation tools and takes into account other services like coupons, deals, effective Facebook Fan promotion and event management. With its autoresponder feature, email marketing campaigns can be targeted and automated as per the specified requirements of the user.
- Application: Being the best online marketing automation tool for beginners, the tool offers a wide array of features including image management and other reporting tools. The former feature allows users to add images to their email marketing campaigns while gaining access to thousands of pictures in their media library. The reporting tools further help in providing easy to comprehend reports on various marketing parameters.
- Ease of Use: With the social media integration feature, users can integrate automated Facebook campaigns to other social media sites as well. This helps in improving the reach of campaigns across different platforms. With a promising delivery rate, the tool helps in making automated campaigns as effective as possible.
- Key Feature: With an all-in-one repository of ready-made templates, the tool ensures that users save time and style and edit the best templates for working up campaigns quickly and efficiently.
- Pricing: The priced models start at $20 per month.
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4. Pardot
Pardot is one of the top marketing automation tools for business as it lays major emphasis on boosting sales and offers features like CRM integration, lead scoring, ROI reporting, lead scoring, prospect tracking and email marketing to amp up engagement on campaigns and boost revenue.
- Application: By allowing users to target communication across various channels, the tool offers features that can help marketers to target mobile notifications as well. It is especially useful for B2B companies as it helps in spam analysis, A/B testing, ROI reporting and developing dynamic content.
- Ease of use: The platform allows users to boost website traffic by allowing them to view the number of visitors on the website, their usage time, engagement, etc. that can be used to drive customized campaigns. Through a file hosting gesture, the tool allows users to generate URLs for tracking the performance of their campaigns. With real time lead scoring and sales alerts, the platform helps in gauging the minds of behaviors and turn campaigns towards the sales boosting direction.
- Key Feature: Through a lead nurturing and automated lead assignment feature, the tool lets users to automatically assign sales reps to potential leads, thus, saving a lot of time and energy. With the progressive profiling tool, users can even build a detailed profile of their users.
- Pricing: The platform offers 4 paid plans- Growth, Plus, Advanced and Premium starting at $1250 per month. The Advanced plan is the most popular one.
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5. Hubspot
HubSpot is an inbound marketing software. It offers a variety of marketing automation tools for business and focuses on added functionality features targeted specifically towards small business owners. From managing marketing automation and content marketing to social media management and CRM, this tool offers features for turning outbound links to inbound ones.
- Application: Using this tool, marketers can boost website traffic by optimizing web pages and creating premium content for blogs, websites, social media platforms, etc. Besides this, marketers can understand consumer behaviors and segment them on the basis of their engagement and user history.
- Ease of Use: With a user friendly interface, the tool provides closed loop reporting to ensure that campaigns are more effective. The tool also provides custom-event automation triggers and predictive lead scoring for boosting sales and revenue.
- Key Feature: By providing an in-built analytics tool, the platform allows users to integrate their social media activity across various platforms under a single dashboard. The tool also offers mobile optimized templates which ensure that marketers can quickly start off their campaigns without the hassles of editing and designing.
- Pricing: The tool provides a free version and 3 paid versions- Starter, Professional and Enterprise starting at $40 per month.
Thus, using the above online marketing automation tools, businesses can take full advantage of integrated services and features to maximize their brand engagement while boosting website traffic and sales. By saving up on time and resources, businesses can effectively work towards developing other aspects of their marketing tactics while making full use of upcoming market trends.
