B2B companies are swiftly adopting marketing automation for its array of benefits. But how do you decide which tool is ideal for your brand?
As more and more people come together online to interact with content and each other, marketing automation is being pushed to the forefront. Automation is no longer a buzzword.
Your users spend most of their time online. With increased web presence and interactions, they expect better, personalized engagement.
And the most effective way to serve that is through marketing automation tools.
Marketing automation rules the marketing domain, simplifying everything from social media ads to email campaigns, scheduling, and publishing content. It’s etched into every business component, from strategy to execution.
What are Marketing Automation Tools?
Some business operations are repetitive and mundane. They require less of our thinking processes and more of us to be efficient. This is where marketing automation comes in. These tools and software automate such tasks across the overall marketing strategy.
From lead generation to email marketing, these tools oversee every taxing process. And there are countless automation tools to level up your marketing strategy.
But not every tool is the right one for your brand.
Its compatibility depends on several factors- business goals, sought-after features, and available resources. So, to help your business make the right decision, we’ve compiled a list of the best marketing automation tools in the market right now.
Key Benefits of Marketing Automation
Let’s glance at the different benefits of integrating marketing automation tools to scale your marketing operations.
Increase prospect funnel
Lead generation is an essential step in marketing automation, involving several steps. Automating leaves more time to focus on the overall marketing strategy and nurture leads. More prospects means more customers.
With this software, you can get detailed insights into consumer behavior patterns through tracking methods like following a user’s path through site visits.
Personalizing the buyer’s journey
77% of buyers prefer tailored content targeted at every stage of their research. With marketing automation tools, you can streamline the process of creating target-specific content and schedule them for a timely launch. It also helps you to extract data from the content you generate, giving a clear picture of customer engagement.
How are your social media channels performing? Is your website getting frequent visits?
Marketing automation software helps get answers to such questions relevant to your content marketing strategy.
Big data for better decisions
Although big data is gaining importance, not all businesses know how to use it to their advantage.
With marketing automation, you can seamlessly embrace big data, acquiring valuable information at scale. These tools are the best solution for measuring campaign performance and predicting consumer behavior.
You get a comprehensive overview of prospects with ease.
Sales & Marketing Alignment
It’s not surprising that integrating sales and marketing teams can seem like being on the edge. But it’s a crucial component of successful marketing.
With the increasing innovations being introduced, the buying cycle also transforms. It emphasizes the need for sales and marketing teams to grow closer, fostering efficient collaboration.
In case these departments are not aligned, it can impact process quality and outcomes of deliverables.
The bottom line? Marketing automation can improve your brand’s lead quality.
Criteria for Selecting the Best Marketing Automation Tool
Here’s a list of key factors to help chose best marketing automation software.
Automation capabilities
Most tools automate at least two channels: emails, ads, and social media. You can check the automation capability, ranking, and workflow.
Integration
Nitpick whether it helps with content management, customer relationship management, pipeline management, etc. Ensure that it aligns with the tasks you would like to automate. The marketing automation software that integrates with these tools ensures a smooth workflow.
Price to value
The price of these platforms ranges from free to high costs. When you research this feature, you will be able to perform a value comparison of the various options out there.
Reporting & Analytics
An efficient marketing tool must have the feature of reports and analysis. The top platforms offer reports that can help you apply metrics and visualize data for future strategy.
Best Marketing Automation Tools: Ciente’s Top 10 Picks
Let’s walk through the best tools for scaling up your marketing operation.
1. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is the most flexible and comprehensive marketing automation platform. Its flexible functionality is its strongest point, along with its impressive deliverability.
With this platform, you can integrate all automated processes with manual ones. It’s based on the concept of adding features, such as notification emails, empowering marketing and sales teams, and not replacing them. ActiveCampaign collates email marketing, automation, sales automation, and CRM tools in a single channel.
This comprehensive platform is ideal for managing customer relationships and driving brand growth.
2. Sender
Sender is an all-in-one marketing automation tool for businesses of all sizes. It’s an affordable tool, particularly for helping with email and SMS marketing automation. This software is your perfect go-to for expanding your business without exceeding your budget.
Whether you wish to scale or build your list, Sender serves as your go-to.
Sender provides a series of features, such as intelligent automation, segmented lists, and a pop-up builder. You can also design dynamic features into your workflows such that they pop out. With this, you can grow your subscriber lists, increase customer engagement, and accelerate the ROI cycle.
But unlike traditional marketing automation tools, Sender doesn’t just help you curate and edit your campaigns. It serves as the number 1 WordPress plugin for your brand newsletter. Designing a newsletter is now a breeze with its drop-down system-
Choose from a free template diverse library to build a newsletter that can convert in a single click.
3. Omnisend
Omnisend offers excellent support, and its overall functionality is what distinguishes Omnisend from other marketing automation tools.
It serves as an efficient tool for beginners and experts, as it comes along with learning resources. In the off chance that your team doesn’t know how to use it, there’s a free app just for you to master this platform.
Additionally, it’s one of the only marketing automation tools whose free plan actually entails a myriad of features- ones that are accessible only through premium plans on other platforms.
When you choose Omnisend, you can easily add multiple channels, such as emails, push notifications, and social media, to the same automation software. It’s flexible, allowing you to launch an immersive customer experience by delivering messages automatically through their preferred channels.
Omnisend’s pre-built workflow categories span the entire customer journey. It is intuitive enough not to hassle users with confusing features and drop-down options.
4. Adobe Marketo Engage
Source: Marketo
Marketo, founded in 2006, was later acquired by Adobe and integrated into its enterprise marketing cloud. First, a marketing software automation company; it’s now one of the most popular marketing automation tools.
Powered by AI, this platform works for any channel and engagement. It operates as a central hub for all your marketing functions, and also seamlessly connects sales to operations. This promotes alignment between the two teams, driving a predictable pipeline and revenue.
And the most fascinating factor?
It works at all stages of the marketing funnel- automated nurturing to multi-step campaign execution. It is compatible with all operational tasks, from digital advertising to social media management.
The flexibility Marketo offers makes it a perfect choice for large-scale marketing operations.
5. HubSpot
A popular marketing automation tool, HubSpot’s focus on inbound marketing makes it stand out among other platforms. It offers the additional benefits of CRM, Sales, and Service Hubs, allowing teams to work in synergy across different departments.
With HubSpot, you can showcase your brand expertise on different channels. It enables you to launch campaigns designed to succeed by streamlining marketing activities. You can access several benefits, from leveraging the power of chatbots and email triggers to increasing audience reach.
Hubspot offers data-driven insights that promote the optimization of your overall marketing plan.
6. Pardot
Source: Salesforce Pardot
It is a perfect choice if you are looking to manage account-based marketing.Salesforce’s marketing automation tool is built on long-term trust and value.
Integrating Pardot with Salesforce fosters a seamless alignment between sales and marketing. So much so that your campaign goals effectively rest on positioning your offering as the solution, not the product. Pardot builds that bridge between the two teams to never let the ball of opportunities drop.
Additionally, it’s also a robust tool to help brands get more high-value leads, accelerate the sales pipeline, and get insight into overall marketing performance. And simplifies market segmentation and categorizes customers into groups.
You can find a variety of templates for emails, landing pages, and forms on this platform. And you can leverage multiple drag-and-drop builders across visual editors to find the right template for your audience.
Pardot also offers real-time alerts on prospect activity to inform you when the account is close to a purchase. And then your team can get down to responding proactively through existing marketing content that can be shared with just one click.
7. Customer.io
This marketing automation software works well with various channels. When you select this, you can customize messages along with automation. It helps brands adhere to customer-centricism while automating operations.
You can automate multiple channels, such as email, SMS, push notifications, and apps. One of the features that stand out is its A/B testing capabilities, allowing you to test up to eight variations of a newsletter. The detailed analysis gives you an idea about what’s working and what isn’t.
Another highlighting feature of this platform is its prompt customer support.
With Customer.io, you can take email marketing to the next level, knowing that the right content delivers at the right time.
8. Orrto
Ortto is worth choosing due to its extensive user activity tracking and reporting. Among the premium automation solutions, its interface can be described as whimsical and colorful. And extremely user-friendly.
The vibrant interface adds to its overall appeal, and its workflow builder comes with a revision history. If you make an error, you can easily restore the previous version.
Additionally, Ortto also offers an effective reporting/analytics feature. And this is its most impressive component. Why? You can nearly track every behavior of each user by keeping tabs on email open rates, reactions, and subscriptions. There are 60 preset activities, and you can add more custom ones.
But there’s more. This feature offers 10 different ways for you to visualize this data. You are presented with user data in the way that suits you best.
Each workflow is extensively detailed. You can zero in on the most specific touchpoint to get a more granular picture of a customer’s journey- where they drop off and why.
Further, syncing your ortto account with Zapier elevates its capabilities to automate your marketing workflow. You don’t just sync data across, but orchestrate how this data flows across your operations.
In simple terms? ortto builds a marketing ecosystem that works seamlessly with your other marketing functions.
9. Brevo
Brevo offers you the bang for the buck- that’s how good it is.
Even on a free plan, your team can automate emails, WhatsApp, and SMS, a mix of both traditional and modern channels. And its workflow builder entails a plethora of options as well. Whether it’s A/B splits or delays, webhooks or CRM updates, you’ll find the basic features on the platform.
And the best part about this marketing automation tool is that it is free! With this, you can automate more than four channels. And it offers more than a marketing workflow- Brevo is also a CRM and meeting scheduling platform. This all-in-one tool benefits users by providing a toolkit to enhance customer relationship management.
Bravo’s AI integration makes it easy for you to craft impactful email subject lines and manage email marketing.
10. Mailchimp
The marketing tool has expanded from an email marketing tool to a well-established automation solution. You can go for this to deliver robust and user-friendly email automation. It is integrated with several features to promote the prospects funnel and customer retention.
This is the ideal fit for your business if you have established customer reach and have a lead-nurturing strategy in place. Its customizable templates are a highlighting feature.
Mailchimp is integrated with audience segmentation and A/B testing, helping brands launch segment-specific campaigns aligning with customer pain points.
Free Marketing Automation Tools for Small Businesses
The top free marketing automation tools for small businesses include:
- ActiveCampaign
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- ortto
- Adobe Marketo Engage
- Intuit Mailchimp All-in-One Marketing Platform
But as these have been mentioned in our overall list of the market’s top marketing automation tools, we’re going to include a few honorary mentions for small businesses-
Braze
Braze is all about lasting and trust-driven connections.
This top-performing customer engagement tool helps marketers collect all types of customer data from any channel or source. Using this, your team can interact with customers through a single platform in real-time across multiple touchpoints.
And with ample space left for creativity.
Source: Braze
One of the most popular aspects of Brave for clients is its ability to empower all teams, from the initial planning stages to the final execution of all campaigns. The platform is simple to use and quite intuitive to navigate. One can build audiences, pull code blocks, and preview test devices to avoid any breaks.
Brave is easy to get started with and convenient, with ample customization features.
Dotdigital
One of the best features of Dotdigital is its ease of use. The company consistently tweaks its UI/UX design to ensure users can intuitively navigate the tool.
Dotdigital is built for a simple and positive user experience with numerous features to help elevate your marketing comms. It all depends on your business needs and how you utilize and adapt the features into your campaigns.
Source: Dotdigital
You can easily segment your audiences and use the straightforward drag-and-drop options to send out emails. It’s a breeze for businesses looking to create email templates and automate their emails on a single platform.
But that’s not all. Dotdigital proactively takes care of its customers’ end-to-end journey. Their customer support is one of the best in the market. Especially for timely response and issue resolution.
Constant Contact Advanced Automation
Constant Contact’s Advanced Automation is all about merging efficiency with growth and productivity. If you’re busy with frivolous, repetitive tasks, when do you focus on the actual creative strategies- ones that actually bring growth to your business?
This is what Constant Contact helps with.
It helps you send compelling and authentic marketing messages straight to your target audience’s inboxes. And ascertains that you reach them at the right place and time.
Source: Constant Contact
Each feature of Constant Contact is built to deepen relationships with customers, from email and SMS to e-commerce. Engage with your audience where they are- orchestrate entirely personalized campaigns with just a few clicks.
The best thing about Constant Contact is that users can set up automated emails and organize contact lists without feeling overwhelmed. This has facilitated smoother comms for Constant Contact’s clients with their customers-
Enabling them to stay informed in a meaningful way by saving tons of time through automation and existing templates.
AI in Marketing Automation Tools: The Future
Marketing automation has always been a rule-based system. But when paired with AI, it can take modern marketing to the next level. As functionalities transform, marketing automation has evolved into being more adaptive and agile.
This is why over 90% of marketing professionals have integrated AI into their framework- to automate and personalize customer journeys efficiently.
How does artificial intelligence do this precisely?
1. Predictive Analytics
Deriving insights from a heap of customer data to discern their past behaviors and outline a pattern. These patterns then help you segregate customers into different segments and outline personalized offers or predict buying times.
With this, targeting becomes extremely in-depth, and your message reaches them at the right moment and channel. Especially, ones with the maximum chance of conversion.
2. Hyper-Personalized Content
Gen AI models, such as ChatGPT, have left a substantial impression on the marketing world. With businesses seeking out diverse content formats at scale, AI has become the go-to. You can curate content that adapts in real-time and personalizes depending on audience sentiments.
Even with advances in image creation and editing, such as Nano Banana, marketers can now create targeted ads, product demos, and videos. Meanwhile, platforms such as Adobe Creative Cloud can design graphics from clear, simple text prompts.
3. Conversational AI
Customer service has always been “the” industry pain point. Customers seemed to have difficulty getting their problem resolved or even getting through in the first place. AI is actively changing that.
AI has made customer support more proactive and efficient. It’s about meeting customers where they are, even when they are done with their purchase. It’s not just about integrating an AI agent but about maintaining a balance between human touch and machine efficiency.
With this, modern tech is adding efficiency to marketing comms and freeing up marketers to do what they do best- orchestrate stories.
4. Campaign Performance Optimization
It’s become imperative for marketers to measure their campaign’s performance. How else do they justify the marketing spend? And when the ROI doesn’t match that? It can lead to budget cuts.
But tracking each little elevation across the entire campaign can be a laborious process. AI-driven marketing automation tools not only track KPIs but also make tweaks in real-time. You receive real-time feedback and actionable insights as the campaign progresses.
Some AI-driven software also optimizes campaigns based on your brand KPIs.
Wrapping it up
Businesses must deal with various time-bound processes, each requiring precision and efficiency. But companies often struggle with managing these routine tasks.
Marketing automation is your go-to solution for streamlining workflow operations.
Selecting the best tools is crucial for effectively launching marketing strategies and enhancing customer experience. You can leverage the features of these platforms to propel a well-designed marketing plan. Identifying the distinct requirements of your brand will help you select the relevant marketing automation software.
With the right tools, you can transform data-driven insights into impeccable execution on a large scale.
