The Top 5 Automation Tools for Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing automation is the process of streamlining and automating marketing tasks to increase workflow and operational efficiency. These tools help us save time and money when generating leads for fast-tracking the growth of the revenue.

It’s safe to say that all marketing organizations have the same goal – to increase brand awareness and generate, nurture and convert quality leads at a minimum price. However, this is no easy task for any marketer or company to achieve.

Marketing automation tools help to solve this problem. They allow organizations to market on multiple platforms more effectively by leveraging technology to automate repetitive tasks.

Most market automation tools work by integrating customer data platform software (CDP) and customer relationship management systems (CRM). Marketers can use these tools to send personalized messages to leads. They can also schedule, automate and streamline common responses.

The essentials of marketing automation tools

Whether you’re a solo marketer or a huge team, the best time to start automating is now. According to Emailmonday, more than 51% of companies are using marketing automation tools to engage with customers through their content.

If you’re under a budget constraint, don’t worry. You can easily get by using free automation tools and upgrading whenever it makes sense for you. However, there are must-haves that every market automation tool should provide. Let’s look at some of the main ones below.

1. Tracking visitors

To deliver a personalized customer experience, you need to be aware of your potential customer concerns. Visitor tracking provides behavior tracking information for each visitor to your website. In this way, you can check which aspect of your product or service your potential customers are interested in.

2. Leads management and scoring

Almost all marketing automation software has a built-in scoring functionality called lead scoring. Lead scoring is a tool that auto-scores quality leads for your business for sale opportunities. Lead scoring tools rank the quality of your prospects according to how likely they are to convert, thereby improving your bottom line.

3. Lead support

To encourage potential customers to buy your products or services, nurturing them at every touch point is key. You can use sequences to manage a series of emails that add value to leads.

4. Enhancing the response

One of the key aspects of successful marketing is responding to leads in real time. You can schedule the date and time when you want to interact with your customers, so as not to lose them.

3 factors affecting marketing automation

1. Pricing

The main role of a marketing automation tool is to make your work easier. However, it should also be in your price range. After all, your primary vision is to grow your business, which requires an affordable and scalable marketing automation tool.

You can start with a basic plan and then you can upgrade it as your business starts to grow. This ensures that the tool will be accessible at every stage of your organization’s growth and development.

2. Integration with your software

You should already be using a CRM or other tool to manage all your leads and information. It’s therefore imperative to know whether the marketing automation tool you have chosen will integrate with your existing system or not.

Integration is important because you don't want to waste time transferring data and complicate the process of marketing. Therefore, choose the marketing automation tool that works best with your existing tools and helps you to generate revenue and leads.

3. Usability

A marketing automation tool should simplify your entire process, not make it more complex. Therefore, it’s important to assess the usability of use of marketing tools, so that your team has no problem utilizing the tool.

You can also request UX screenshots to get a clear idea of ​​how the automation tool process and processes will work. Some useful UX design tools can also make this process easier with a better user experience.

Marketing automation takes time and effort, so choose a marketing automation tool that comes with a strong customer support team and access tutorials, downloadable resources and case studies with tool demos.

5 marketing automation tools

1. HubSpot

Almost everything that HubSpot provides is available elsewhere at a considerably lesser  price. While HubSpot does provide a free version, it’s important to note that this edition is missing all of their marketing automation tools. HubSpot will cost you at least $800 per month (paid annually) and an additional $3,000 in onboarding costs if you want to utilize it for marketing automation.

Using a knowledge base software you can create detailed and SEO-friendly knowledge base articles that can help your customers just like blogs do.

HubSpot’s tool is incredibly user-friendly and simple to use, which for a firm run by non-techies may make all the difference. The analytics are excellent, which makes it possible for business owners. It can determine what is effective and what is not quite easy.

It’s easy to see why many would be impressed by what they have to offer, but it would be negligent not to mention that when your business expands, HubSpot's cost can become prohibitive.

If it were up to me, I would use this money to purchase ActiveCampaign, a much more sophisticated marketing automation tool. With the remaining funds, you could get a pro subscription to a reliable SEO tool like SEMrush or Deepcrawl and do some training on Google Analytics.

2. Marketo

The marketing automation platform Marketo may be the most well-known, and for good reason. It's one of the most highly-developed tools, with a comprehensive feature set that not only aids in managing email campaigns for marketers but also offers top-notch solutions for sales teams. LaunchPoint, a marketplace by Marketo, features numerous integrations.

Marketo is excellent for businesses who plan to utilize the tool's numerous features that go beyond simple marketing automation. It isn't the most affordable tool, but it's also not the most expensive either. If you're not intending to use the system's sophisticated features, you can get the same effects with one of the less expensive tools.

If you don't want to have to move over all of your data and campaigns later on because other tools will likely have more extensive features in the near future, it might be a good idea to start with Marketo. A terrific resource for new users, Marketo's knowledge base is also one of our favorite features.

3. ActiveCampaign

Over 90,000 businesses utilize ActiveCampaign, making it one of the top marketing automation solutions overall.

ActiveCampaign maintains its affordability as you expand, in contrast to products like HubSpot which first start inexpensively before sharply increasing in price.

ActiveCampaign also releases new features frequently in order to maintain their position as a leader. Predictive content, attribution, site messages and other features from ActiveCampaign were all released in the previous year. Being able to import and distribute automation "recipes" in a few clicks to build on sequences created by the ActiveCampaign community is another recent addition that we've found to be a huge time saver.

4. Autopilot

If you've ever created an email automation sequence, you're aware of how easily confusion may set in. This problem is solved by Autopilot, which enables you to annotate your automation sequences using emojis, stickers and explanations. This makes it simple for teams to work together on creating sequences.

Although it may appear a little disorganized at first, this capability enables you to revisit an automation sequence a year after creating it and rapidly catch up with what's going on.

The capability of Autopilot to initiate tasks in other programs inside of it is another great feature. This eliminates the need to set up integrations using a program like Zapier and makes your sequences much clearer.

Additionally, Autopilot's reporting is top-notch. By default, Autopilot advises you to give each automation sequence a goal so that you may subsequently read reports on whether or not it has achieved its objective.

5. Convertkit

The simplest marketing automation platform in this list is ConvertKit. It's a terrific solution for novices seeking a simple marketing automation tool because it's primarily designed for bloggers and content creators.

ConvertKit doesn't even have email templates, since they encourage customers to send plain-text emails to promote interaction, so don't anticipate any bells and whistles.

ConvertKit is a respectable and reasonably priced solution for new users, but it's really only practical for small content-based enterprises.

Final thoughts

The best marketing automation tool isn't one and done. I've outlined the choices I believe are optimal for businesses of various sizes and industries.

Deliverability, security, support and reducing training costs are going to become more important factors as marketing automation is continually developing. Even today, there are a lot of divergent views on which digital marketing automation technology is appropriate for each organization, especially when you take into account the fact that many firms will want a variety of solutions to cover all their bases.

Unfortunately, the majority of other business marketing automation systems that check these boxes (such as Pardot and Eloqua) are subpar, and their products are complicated and challenging to use.

ActiveCampaign is a rare exception. Their enterprise plan includes all of the tedious but essential features that you would anticipate as an enterprise client, such as dedicated IPs, SLAs, SSO and account management.