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Digital marketing channels keep growing. Managing an effective marketing campaign in such a dynamic scenario means developing good automation. We test the top marketing automation suites to help you reach every customer in your audience.
Marketing technology has been changing drastically over the last several years thanks to targeted advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and even older staples, like email marketing. With ever more value to offer, marketing automation has emerged as a key driver for sales and building brands. This evolution continues in 2020 with SMS marketing as well a renewed focus on omnichannel campaigns, which add both complexity and nuance to marketing strategy. With all these new avenues opening up, however, the challenge for many has become choosing the best messaging route to specific customer segments and relationships as well as how to ensure loyalty in those connections once forged.
(Editors' Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation started out as a way to free marketers from tedious and repetitive tasks while assisting them in delivering effective marketing messages in a timely way. The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) as well as machine earning (ML) has helped marketers optimize the effectiveness and timeliness of their marketing messages using automation. By tracking users’ behaviors on websites and on other channels, marketers can then use this data to understand their interests and intent. AI can then automatically suggest what kind of content and marketing message will be most relevant to these leads, the best time to send these messages to yield the best results. When deployed properly, marketing automation can set businesses apart from their competitors with automated yet highly personalized emails that boost sales through customer engagement.
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These solutions can handle the complex, grueling work that is integral to a marketing campaign while pulling from multiple data sources. Marketing automation software culls information like the number of opened emails, e-commerce carts left behind, and web form data to make your marketing decisions easier. If you truly take advantage of the features a marketing automation platform delivers, then you can boost your company's bottom line.
Similar to standard email marketing software vendors, marketing automation software vendors have created workflow templates that help guide you through the automation process. This way, you don't have to build new sequences from scratch.
Basic templates usually start with an interaction, such as a "Welcome" or a "Thank you for making a purchase" message. Once a contact receives the initial email, he or she is guided through a sequence based on his or her actions. For example, if Clark receives a welcome message and he clicks a link to an offer, then that action automatically pulls him onto a distinct email marketing journey. Conversely, if Lois deletes her welcome message, then she may automatically be pulled off the workflow to conserve your email output.
How complicated and how deep your campaigns run is determined by which vendor you choose. For example, HubSpot and Pardot both offer unlimited email and unlimited sequencing options. This means you can create a workflow with multiple branches for each stage of the sequence, and you can create an unlimited number of sequences (not that you would). Conversely, Zoho Campaigns is mostly designed for users who want to follow customary workflows that guide users on basic sequences. As a result, Zoho Campaigns doesn't offer unlimited sequencing or branching. This tool is perfectly suitable for marketers who just want to make an offer after a welcome email or for marketers who want to wish people a happy birthday once a year.
More complex applications are tied in to potential sales. A customer who abandons a shopping cart on your online store will set off an alert. This can trigger an email to that customer with a generous discount code or other offers to sweeten the deal. Being able to deploy automated marketing messages on-the-fly speaks to the urgency of retaining a customer who has made a buying decision, but may be price sensitive or be looking elsewhere. Now, multiply these opportunities with the size of your contact list, and it becomes evident that marketing automation becomes a necessary tool for businesses.Top of The Marketing Automation Chain
Email marketing is a great first step toward developing solid communications with your customers and prospects. But once you have moved past one-off messages and have decided to create prolonged, personalized messages powered by customer data, it's time to try marketing automation. No tools better exemplify the simplicity, effectiveness, and scalability of marketing automation software than two of our three Editors' Choice tools: HubSpot and Pardot.
Both HubSpot and Pardot offer a vast array of functionality that should suit your business regardless of how intricate your marketing strategy might be. We found HubSpot to be better equipped for small businesses that are steadily growing their marketing activity, whereas Pardot is ideal for large enterprises with complicated marketing plans already in place. In total, we tested 10 marketing automation tools, each of which offer some unique features that make them stand out from the field.
Mailchimp, which is an Editors' Choice selection for email marketing, is extending its overall service in the direction of becoming a full marketing automation platform. Mailchimp's arsenal now includes postcards, landing pages, integration with Instagram and Facebook, Google Ads, social posting, and even a marketing calendar. Spreading expertise and ease-of-use within a familiar and user-friendly interface seems to have worked well for Mailchimp and is a strategy that remains consistent to its brand.Pricing and Plans
Marketing automation software is typically priced one of two ways: by the number of contacts in your database or by the number of emails you send each month. For example, the Growth Pardot plan costs $1,250 per month for email marketing, prospect tracking, lead nurturing and scoring, reporting, forms and landing pages, and standard Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM). This plan can be upgraded to two higher tiers, each of which offers additional features, plug-ins, and add-ons. However, all three Pardot plans give you capacity for 10,000 contacts.
Don't be alarmed by Pardot's price tag as it's easily the most expensive tool we reviewed. HubSpot's Marketing Hub lets you store 1,000 contacts for $50 per month in its Starter plan, $800 per month for its second-most feature-rich plan, and $3,200 for the Enterprise plan.
On the lower end of the pricing spectrum, you'll find products such as Infusionsoft, which costs $299 per month for five users, 5,000 contacts, and unlimited emails per month. The Complete package also includes Infusionsoft's four core feature sets (CRM, e-commerce, marketing automation, and sales automation) at no extra charge. SendinBlue and Zoho Campaigns both offer free plans for anyone who is unwilling to spend even a dime for marketing workflows. Both tools scale upward for added capacity and complexity, and each offers pay-as-you-go plans for companies just dipping their toes into email marketing and marketing automation.Powerful Templates
In addition to an organic integration with Salesforce, Pardot offers one of the cleanest user interfaces (UIs) and one of the largest variety of prebuilt templates on the market. But its best features are designed to improve your workflows once they've been created. For example, you can pretest the process of an automated program to see how it reacts. This is essentially a fire drill automation campaign to ensure your complex branching doesn't lead to a dead-end or a duplicate email. Pardot also lets you schedule social media campaigns and post in real-time to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter simultaneously. If you really want to manage your marketing program from within one solution, then Pardot also offers a search marketing tool that plugs into Bing, Google, and Yahoo. You can check search engine rankings, monthly volumes, and ranking difficulties as well as run competitor analysis and monitor your paid search campaigns. No other tool we reviewed offers search marketing functionality.Recommended by Our Editors