Generating leads for your business can be a difficult and often time-consuming process. You not only have to convert website visitors into leads but also have to ensure those meet your team’s criteria. Fortunately, there are several ways for you to drive people to your site and convert them to leads. Today there is a wide selection of marketing automation tools that help businesses attract the very best leads.
Many automate chunks of lead capture and nurture process. However, if you want a more comprehensive system you can opt-out for an all-in-one solution. These platforms are perfect for businesses that do not only want to streamline marketing, sales, and customer service. They also focus on how to grow their business.
The marketing automation tools mystery
There are two universal truths about marketing automation tools that you need to understand.
- Not every marketing or business team needs one.
- For those who do, choosing a marketing automation solution requires a lot more subtlety and nuance than just buying anything.
With that in your mind choosing the right tool for your team comes down to two things:
- Knowing when you are ready for marketing automation.
- Understanding your use case and needs.
Many marketers unknowingly make a mistake on the first part diving into marketing automation tools long before they need it. And many round-ups miss the mark on the second part, listing robust, expensive, all-in-one tools that not every team needs.
What is the best marketing automation tool?
Some platforms only offer email actions, drip sequences, and Customer Relationship Manager updates. However, others may help you with lead scoring, sales lead rotation, SMS, etc. A niche product may be better for SMB and B2C companies but B2B and enterprise must have a wider approach. Here are some key areas to consider as you evaluate marketing automation tools and choose the right for you:
- Ease of use
- Analytics and Reporting
- Support
- Limitations
- Pricing and Scalability
- Integrations
Do you have a need for marketing automation tools?
Most businesses today buy marketing automation tools without stopping to consider whether they really need it yet. Marketing automation can feel like an obvious step towards scaling your marketing operation. However, you need to have a true marketing operation first. There are three criteria which a business should meet before investing in marketing automation tools.
- Your marketing team has at least one person who only does marketing. Marketing automation can streamline and scale your efforts for sure. However, it is not a substitute for actual marketing know-how. Let us say you are a founder or early employee doing a bunch of activities, including marketing. You might think an automation tool is going to free up your time, but you are wrong.
- You have found at least one marketing channel that works efficiently for you. It is true that marketing automation tools help scale your marketing. But you do not want to scale something that does not actually work yet. If you think an automation tool will help you find a channel that works it will not.
- All of your marketing efforts flow from a well-defined strategy. For the same reason as above, you do not want an automation tool to just test out for successful possibilities.
- Your marketing team has more budget than time. When talking about efficiency, marketing automation tools help your team do more in less time. But you have to be comfortable with the financial hand-off that buys you that time.
Once all of these scenarios apply to your business then you can begin to consider a marketing automation solution.
All-in-one marketing automation tools
Generally speaking, organizations that really need a full all-in-one automation solution have already hit on a handful of them. The marketing channels often work for them regardless of which channel those are. This means:
- You have seen success across more than one or two channels.
- You have already invested financially in scaling your marketing operation.
- Your team needs to either scale the channels that are working and or experimenting with additional avenues.
If that sounds like your team, these marketing automation tools can handle it all effectively. From email automation to advertisement buying and lead nurturing all-in-one automation tools can help you a lot. They smartly scale and streamline every aspect of your marketing operation.
Omnisend
Includes a free plan for basic e-mail marketing. Automation ranges from $16 per month to custom Enterprising.
For marketing automation, it is hard to find a more comprehensive tool than Omnisend. What sets this platform apart from others on this list is the omnichannel functionality it has. You can add several channels to the same automation workflow such as email, SMS, Facebook messenger, push notifications, and more.
This means that you can create an immersive omnichannel experience for your customers. That automatically sends them the message via the channel they have opted in for. With advanced targeting, split automation, and easy drag-and-drop builder it is definitely a tool worth a look.
Adobe Marketo
Contact Marketo for the pricing information.
Adobe Marketo claims to offer marketing automation that covers any channel and every particular engagement. Since Adobe acquired it, the list of tasks that work together on Marketo has multiplied. Their full feature software can handle everything from digital marketing advertising to social media and account-based marketing. This makes it a really good option for larger marketing operations.
Eloqua
Contact Oracle for the pricing information
Eloqua which now is a part of the Oracle suite of tools sets itself apart. It works efficiently with nearly every tool in your marketing belt. Eloqua boasts more than 700 integrations. This means that it can make your steps of your marketing process more personalized and streamlined. It is also one of the only few all-in-one tools with an explicit emphasis on serving B2B companies and marketers.
Hubspot
Prices range from $50 to $3,200 per month, Based on features and scale
HubSpot’s marketing hub is fundamentally different from other marketing automation tools for some new reason. For one, their focus on inbound marketing is unparalleled. They also offer the added benefit of the Sales and Service Hubs. This means the team can better work together even across departments.
Pardot
Ranges from $1,250 to $4,000 per month, based on depth of automation and analytics.
Pardot which of Salesforce is another marketing automation tool that focuses on the needs of B2B marketers. With support for things like B2B analytics and account-based marketing solutions. The partnership with Salesforce makes Pardot part of a robust suite of products. These products work together to help sales and marketing teams be more effective together.
ActiveCampaign
Pricing ranges from $9 to $400+ per month, based on features and number of contacts.
As a marketing automation tool, ActiveCampaign does the best job at working automation into the processes of real humans. The reality is, marketing software can not handle everything. There are several aspects of marketing that need a human touch. ActiveCampaign built their software around this, adding features like notification emails. These empower marketers and salespeople, instead of replacing them.
Email marketing automation tools
We discussed many high profile all-in-one tools above. Email marketing automation is still one of the first things most people think of on hearing the term marketing automation. Email marketing automation tools are a lot cheaper than all-in-one tools. So, it does not make sense to shell out for more than your team needs or will use.
The use case for email marketing automation is also one of the widest. Your team will likely benefit from it if:
- You have seen some level of baseline success with email marketing.
- You need to send transactional emails in addition to marketing emails.
- Someone on your team has been manually sending every campaign to selected users.
Email marketing automation tools handle tasks like sending triggered emails and enable marketers. It can also build complex automated campaigns and personalized audience segments.
Mailchimp
Pricing ranges from $14.99 to $299 per month, based on features and contacts.
Mailchimp is in the process of growing from an email marketing tool to a fully developed marketing automation solution. While their expanded features remain to remain under test, Mailchimp is one of the original email marketing tools. They have turned that experience into a rock-solid and capable email automation tool that is a breeze to use.
Automizy
Pricing ranges from $9 to $119+ per month, based on number of active subscribers.
Automizy is an email marketing platform to increase your open rates. It provides a bundle of features that supports growing email open rates. This could include an artificial intelligence subject line tester, resend unopened emails, AB testing, and segmented email automation. Using Automizy keeps your messaging personalized and consistent.
Constant Contact
Pricing ranges from $20 to $335 per month based on features and list size.
Constant Contact is an email marketing automation tool for small businesses. With this tool, you can create automated trigger campaigns, collect new emails automatically, and send segmented follow-up messages. Using this your email program has all the features you need without the clutter some other tools drown you in.
Cutomer.io
Pricing ranges from $150 to $1000+ per month, based on features and support.
Built for subscription-based businesses, Customer.io’s automation tool is all about engaging customers throughout the customer journey. Tons of integrations make it easier to funnel data from across your technology stack. This data can further turn it into automated segments and email campaigns that resonate.
Drip
Pricing ranges from $49 to $122+ per month, based on active subscribers
Drip’s email marketing automation focuses on eCommerce businesses. This means it works with all of the other eCommerce tools you use. You can easily create personalized content and automate campaigns based on customer behavior. Drip also offers more than email automation, so all of your messages stay consistent. They all work together to drive customers towards a purchase.
Social media automation tools
Social media automation tools encompass one of the broadest fields. They offer solutions to automate various aspects of social media marketing, from content publishing to monitoring and analytics. As such nearly any brand can efficiently benefit from a social media scheduling tool like Buffer. That said, you probably do not need a fully-fledged social media automation tool unless:
- More than one person is publishing under your brand’s social media accounts.
- Your brand is active on multiple social networks.
- You are using social media for multiple purposes, like paid advertising or providing customer support.
Hootsuite
Pricing ranges from $29 to $599+ per month, based on social profiles, users, etc.
Hootsuite is one of the most comprehensive and fully featured social media automation tools. It can help you schedule your content, curate from a pre-approved library, and monitor conversations about your brand and industry. Hootsuite has everything you need to create a social media presence that makes a difference for your business.
Buffer
Pricing ranges from $15 to $99 per month, based on the number of social media accounts, users, etc.
Originally, Buffer is a social media content scheduling tool. But it has grown to reflect the way today’s brands really use social media. The tool still makes it easy to schedule and curate content. However, additional ‘Reply’ and ‘Analyze’ solutions help connect social media with all the other teams. This bond is necessary to work with modern organizations.
CoSchedule
Pricing ranges from $80 to $400+ per month, based on number of social profiles, features, etc.
CoSchedule’s automation tool offers one of the best solutions for planning and strategizing social media content in advance. It maps out all your content while including what you will say and when. This makes it is easy to get a bird’s eye view of your end-to-end social production. Plus, CoSchedule’s suggestions and analytics make it clear what resonates so you can reuse and create more content like it.
Sprout Social
Pricing ranges from $99 to $249 per month, based on features and the number of social profiles.
Sprout Social has one of the widest feature sets along with the social marketing automation tools on our list. It individually revolves around solutions for everything from social management and marketing to customer care, employee advocacy, data, and intelligence. The publishing wing of Sprout Social’s solution is great for teams too. This makes it easier to collaborate on both strategy and execution.
Mention
Pricing ranges from free to over $600 per month, based on the scale of your social listening operation.
Mention is a leaning brand into the social listening aspect of social media marketing. It enables brands to track mentions across digital media landscapes. You can keep track of how your campaigns spur conversations throughout the web and not just on social media. Mention makes it easier to automatically track competitors and industry trends too.
Customer Journey marketing automation tools
While talking about customer journey automation from a marketing perspective we are really talking about three main stages:
- Firstly, generating leads.
- Secondly, scoring qualified leads.
- Lastly, nurturing the acquired leads.
The tools in this section make one or more of those steps work better without a human babysitter. Customer journey automation tools are best for enterprises, and B2B marketing and sales teams. They ould help scale your operation if:
- You have already mapped out the journey customers take from new leads to sales.
- Your marketing and sales teams work closely together to manage the customer journey.
- You are using an account-based sales or ABM model.
Leadfeeder
Pricing ranges from free to over $55 per month, based on features and the number of unique leads.
Companies and their employees visit your website. However, those potential leads can vanish if they do not fill out some kind of form while they are there. This means your team could be missing out on tons of valuable potential leads who might become your customers.
Leadfeeder helps you surface that information by showing you all the companies that visit your website. You can create Custom Feeds to narrow that list down to your best fit leads. You can have notifications of new leads automatically sent to email and Slack for the right team member. This tool is best for B2B and enterprise marketing teams who need a better way to grow. This could include identifying both new leads and target their marketing to the best-fit prospects.
Act-On
Pricing ranges from $900 to $2000+ per month, based on features and number of users.
Act-On’s marketing automation software focuses on enterprise brands. This tool helps to connect two important things:
- Your marketing and sales team.
- The breadcrumbs lead drop across the internet.
This means it is easier to identify and agree upon the best leads to pursue. Thus, it makes Act-On a great option for large and B2B companies using an account-based marketing strategy.
LeadSquared
Pricing ranges from $150 to $2500 per month, based on contacts and features.
LeadSquared is one customer journey automation tool that focuses primarily on the lead nurturing phase of the process. This tool helps to move leads through the sales funnel faster so you land more new customers in lesser time. You can set triggers, conditions, and actions to automate your drip marketing. This way you can never miss an opportunity to advance leads towards a purchase.
Infusionsoft by Keap
Pricing ranges from a one-time fee of $499 to $1999, plus $199 to $399 per month, based on multiple points.
Infusionsoft is a marketing automation software to streamline communication between your company and potential leads and customers. They focus on small businesses meaning they have made it easy to build emails, workflows, landing pages from simple templates.
Pricing Automation
You might keep the prices competitive prices as your competitor shift or optimize your model from top to down. Anyhow, pricing automation software makes it easier to react to competitive pricing changes. It smartly turns your pricing strategy into an advantage.
Pricing Automation tools generally focus on eCommerce businesses in mind. These are the companies who are most likely to benefit from one of these tools. Let us say you are working in an eCommerce and selling competitive products to a price-conscious market. A Pricing automation tool can be a good option for you.
Prisync
Pricing ranges from $59 to $229 per month, based on features and the number of products.
Prisync is a pricing automation software focusing on eCommerce brands. The eCommerce industry tends to harbor some of the most price-conscious consumers. So it is vital that brands can react to competitive pricing changes in a hurry. Prisync automates that process so you are always on top of your competitor pricing and all its aspects.
Wiser
For pricing related queries contact Wiser.
Wiser offers one of the most extensive pricing strategies and automation tools on the market. This tool can help with everything ranging from A/B testing your prices to estimating demands. Thus, it comes out in helping you find the right sweet spots to maximize your bottom line. As demand and other market forces change, Wiser does the heavy lifting so your pricing strategy always works for you.
Informed
Pricing ranges from $129 to $319 per month, based on market places, repricing strategies, support, etc.
Informed is a repricing automation tool that focuses on eCommerce businesses and online sellers. With support for 13 different marketplaces, their tool works no matter where you are selling online. Its approach to repricing is undeniably unique. Their solution allows you to choose between creating your own repricing strategy or using their AI-powered suggestions.
Skuuudle
Pricing ranged from $89 to $999+ per month, based on analytics and other features.
Skuuudle focuses on brands with a large catalog of products. It makes it effortless to monitor competitor pricing and match products at scale. This makes sure you never miss a chance because of the price. Skuuudle is also one of the few pricing automation tools that pull data from both eCommerce sellers and the marketplace.
Advertising Automation
With everything that goes into creating and optimizing digital advertisements these days, most marketing teams need a helping hand. Its benefits range from building advertisement across advertisement channels to optimizing bidding strategies. Therefore, Advertising Automation is one of the best ways to scale a digital advertising effort.
Very similar to all0in-one tools, you really do not need advertising automation until:
- You have seen traction on more than one advertising platform. It can be Facebook and Twitter, or Google AdWords and Instagram.
- You are looking to refine advertisement creative and bidding strategies, instead of heavily testing.
- You want to Advertise to hyper-targeted segments, such as remarketed audiences.
AdRoll
Pricing is based on CPM (Cost per mile). Please contact AdRoll for more specific pricing information.
AdRoll is probably one of the most popular digital advertising marketing automation tools surely for a good reason. Their software makes it easy to run advertisements across every channel from the display and social, to email. On top of everything, AdRoll offers retargeting campaigns that pack a serious punch. Therefore, you can stay top of mind with new prospects and re-engage inactive customers.
Metadata.io
Pricing ranges from $1000 to $5000+ per month, based on monthly advertisement spend, channels, etc.
Metadata.io is one of the only tools on the market that enables B2B marketers to run account-based advertisements. Using Artificial Intelligence and multivariate testing it identifies the most effective combinations of advertisement creative, copy, and placement. Therefore, it helps to get the best results for your advertising budget.
Zalster
Pricing starts at $39 per month. The monthly fee is based on monthly Facebook advertisement spend and the average price is usually around 2%.
Zalster is an advertising automation tool that handles Instagram and Facebook advertisements. Besides the automation and optimizations for Facebook and Instagram advertisements that users set up in their campaigns, it offers more. Its features help in reporting, auto boosting of posts, and creative tools. Therefore, simplifying the everyday workload for marketers.
Revealbot
Pricing ranges from $49 to $2999 per month, based on monthly advertisement spend.
Similar to Zalster, Revealbot focuses on two advertisement platforms exclusively i.e. Google and Facebook. It focuses on providing in-depth advertisement campaign analytics so you can effortlessly find the most effective campaigns and double-down them. You can create rules to automatically optimize campaigns and even get full campaign reports via a Slack bot like Emma.
Trapica
For pricing related queries please contact Trapica.
Trapica focuses on social media advertisements. It aims to use AI to help you find the best, most targeted audience to spend your advertising budget on. Their algorithm offers a deeper look at who your audience really is. Their robust targeting features help you reach that audience at just the right time to spur a purchase.
Shoelace
Pricing ranges from $79 to $1500 per month, based on features.
Shoelace focuses on customer journey retargeting and shows the right advertisements to the right customer at just the right time. It makes it easier to use advertisements throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey. It continuously nurtures and pushes leads towards a sale. Their software offers segmentation that enables hyper-targeted advertisements and sequences that prevent advertisement fatigue.
Loyalty and referral marketing automation tools
Loyalty and referral marketing is one major aspect of marketing often left out of the conversation around marketing automation. But they both capitalize on the most powerful marketing tool. An automated loyalty or referral program could be a good choice for your business if:
- You have seen demonstrated results from word of mouth already.
- Your products do not require extensive research or negotiation to arrive at a purchase decision.
- Your industry’s average customer lifetime value is high enough that the upfront investment makes sense.
If so, these tools will help your spur and take advantage of buzz. Therefore, taking your referral and loyalty programs to new heights.
Referral Rock
Pricing ranges from #200 to $800 per month, based on the number of members, programs, etc.
Referrals are so powerful but you have to be proactive about encouraging and capitalizing on them. Referral Rock makes it easy to set up the right type of referral programs for your brand. It can range from referring a friend campaign to influencer marketing and business partner programs. Thus, you can set it up once and let the referrals roll in on autopilot mode.
TapMango
For pricing related queries, please contact TapMango.
TapMango’s customer loyalty automation platform takes the punch card of old and modernizes it for present day’s customers. It has flexible reward structures, tons of options and promotions, and a branded mobile application available. Thus it makes it easy for both you and your customers to inspire and reward loyalty and referrals.
Ambassador
For pricing related queries contact Ambassador.
Ambassador makes it easy to build a powerful army of brand ambassadors for your business. You can hand-select the customers you want to mobilize, automate, and test reward incentives to find the perfect mix. Ambassador puts brand advocacy on auto-pilot so you can live a hassle-free life. It offers tons of integrations and pre-built templates, so marketers can get their program off the ground in a jiffy.
Clutch
For pricing related queries, please contact Clutch
Clutch’s unique approach to loyalty marketing emphasizes building a deeper understanding of what drives loyalty for your unique customers. The integrated platform makes it easier to attribute loyalty and sales from any channel. And the flexible rewards help you appeal to any and every type of customer and their motivations.
Belly by Mobivity
Pricing ranges from $129 to $179+ per month, based on features, email campaigns, etc.
Now part of Mobivity, Belly helps you reward and encourage both loyalty and word of mouth marketing. It incentivizes both purchases and digital promotion like online reviews. Belly’s tool even helps bridge the gap between brick-and-mortar sales and digital loyalty with a point-of-sale iPad display.
Conclusion
Selecting the best marketing automation software for your team can be so difficult. The right integrations, the best A/B testing functions, the strength of reporting, there is a lot to consider. It can be hard to keep up with what tactics work which do not. And, even when you do, it is hard to focus on all of them at once. You do not always have the time and energy to do it.
However, not every company or marketing team is ready to automate its operation. However, when the time comes, marketing automation tools can take a solid marketing strategy to entirely new heights. By identifying your unique needs and choosing the right tool to fill them you can improve your marketing insights. This way you can spend less time on the nitty-gritty, and more time growing the business.
