You must be exhausted. That is if you are yet to implement marketing automation in your business. Handling repetitive activities manually while also trying to keep up with the latest developments in business is often complex and time-consuming. Luckily, there are several tools you can use to simplify your everyday business tasks so that you get to focus your energy and time on boosting revenue. These essential features are what we call marketing automation tools, and we will highlight 7 of these features in this post.

But before that, here is a definition of marketing automation. It refers to technologies and software platforms developed for automating repetitive tasks and effective advertising on multiple online channels, in essence, websites, social media, email, and so forth. With automation, companies get to target customers effectively with promotional messages. This technology is a part of customer relationship management (CRM) that entails the identification, segmentation, scheduling, and monitoring of marketing campaigns. 

How does Marketing Automation help in business? It enables companies to implement effective welcome programs: boost customer retention rates; coordinate marketing campaigns across different channels, devices, and platforms, improve customer personalization; test and optimize marketing campaigns.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the best tools for your marketing automation:

Pardot

A Salesforce company, Pardot is marketing automation that is excellent for boosting income for your business. It enables companies to expedite growth by providing them with useful data that allows to connect with leads and earn business. How so? Pardot provides marketers with lead scores that enable them to determine the hottest leads, thus, ensuring that the approach to each target customer is personalized. Moreover, with Pardot, companies can boost follow-up speed by getting real-time alerts of prospect activity.

Aside from that, Pardot shines in helping businesses generate high-quality leads. Marketers can create customized landing pages and set them to trigger score increases, notifications, and so forth automatically. What’s more is that marketers can create more personalized emails, optimize them for the inbox, and thus improve customer buying experience.

And lest we forget, Pardot also allows businesses to access useful ROI information, thus, enabling them to gauge the success of their marketing campaigns. Still on matters reporting, Pardot provides life cycle reporting which helps you comprehend how both prospects and customers move through the sales funnel right from click to close.

HubSpot

HubSpot is excellent for inbound marketing and provides a CRM (at no cost) that enables companies to organize and monitor customers. To paraphrase, HubSpot says that its CRM is for automating the tasks that salespersons hate. This platform automatically tracks interactions and gathers information about deals on one dashboard such that the whole journey is visible. Other than the CRM, HubSpot offers landing pages, blogging, web, social media, ads, SEO, email, lead management, analytics, and integration with Salesforce.

Marketers can use the HubSpot dashboard to quickly sort the won contracts and those that are not and maintain a good view of their performance as far as their business goals go. With HubSpot’s CRM, companies can automatically keep tabs on prospect/customer touch points on different channels and continuously track all emails, meetings, and calls with particular customers. Last but not least, HubSpot also helps businesses to create customized paths to purchase and gather data showcasing how each advertising campaign contributed to sales.

ActiveCampaign

This marketing automation tool streamlined its entire products into a single SaaS, with the intention of allowing marketers to send fewer emails while getting favorable results. ActiveCampaign is keen on providing marketing automation solutions that can listen and learn as well, thus, enabling it to personalize messages to prospect thereby converting them into customers and eventually brand advocates.

The multichannel approach provided by this platform can learn of a company’s website by scrutinizing users’ mobile devices and emails. Its campaign creating tool enables marketers to develop marketing collateral, and ActiveCampaign merges consumer data to ensure that this useful information can impact the CRM, SMS, and email options this tool provides. Also, worth noting is that this information enables entrepreneurs to create customer segments.  

Marketo

This marketing automation tool entails email, mobile, digital ads, marketing analytics, web, and account-based marketing enabling companies to boost engagement via different channels on a single platform. Marketo’s goal is to assist brands in developing strong relationships with customers and foster end-to-end engagement. This tool is cloud-based and can, manage lots of activities daily.

So far, Marketo has provided customized solutions for technology, healthcare, media, financial services, manufacturing, higher education, to name a few. Its Engagement Hub collects useful data that allows companies to personalize all interactions as they adapt and analyze information. Given that Marketo offers immediate insights, this adaptation can take place in real-time.

ONTRAPORT

This platform is out there to help entrepreneurs in delivering their value to the planet by eliminating the burden of technology – according to their mission statement. ONTRAPORT intends to achieve this by enabling businesses to access comprehensive visualization of the customer’s journey. See, many brands struggle when it comes to determining a good understanding of their marketing campaigns are paying off. As such, ONTRAPORT exists to assist these businesses in identifying how their customers respond to messages via landing pages, email, postcards, and SMS. In turn, this information can be leveraged by brands to create excellent campaigns on the platform.

ONTRAPORT scales with companies as they grow ensuring that they realize expansion without the hassle of finding other tools. Its marketing analytics tool provides marketers with information regarding the results of their previous marketing efforts and projections of how their current efforts will achieve.

Act-On

Act-On helps you send the right message to the right prospects at the right time. Act-On will make sure you can predict and stay up to speed with modern customers. This tool enables you to reach and nurture inbound and outbound prospects at whatever stage in the sales cycle. You can optimize your customers’ experience by leveraging their unique behaviors, interests, and preferences. Among the things you can do using Act-On is create segmented contact lists, build adaptive forms, predict the perfect time to send automated messages, score leads automatically, determine the best channel to connect with your subscribers and implement multiple channels in one marketing campaign.

The marketing channels that Act-On supports include mobile, email, web, and social. It also partners with SMS, direct mail and ad retargeting vendors to give you more efficient ways of connecting with potential customers in their channels of preference. Act-On has a team of marketing automation professionals ready to offer hands-on assistance with setting up automation programs where needed. Other types of services you can find here include help with creating landing pages for your website, take a free course to improve your marketing skills or connect with other marketing professionals in your particular industry. 

Oracle Eloqua

Oracle Eloqua is a B2B multi-channel marketing software created and owned by Oracle Marketing Cloud. Its main job is to help marketers across different industries to track leads and customers throughout the sales funnel. The main functions of Oracle Eloqua include targeting and contact list segmentation, marketing campaign management, lead management, measurement of marketing results, and finally, sales and marketing alignment.

With this tool, you can create rich lead profiles to send relevant information to the right individuals and drive sales. You can create personalized marketing campaigns and send to audiences of your choice through display ads, email, web, video, search, or mobile. Plus, you can bring data from various channels in one place to understand your target buyers’ sentiments. By uploading your contacts on the cloud service, you can then segment and filter it depending on geographical location, attributes, behavior and so on.

The tool also offers marketers great campaign management tools to help you to sell to the right contacts and monitor your results in real-time through reports and insights. Oracle Eloqua is especially useful where you want to create a niche in the global market. Plus, you can target customers on WeChat too. By installing their App, you can create personalized customer experiences using the activity data on WeChat. This tool allows you to do all these via mobile too.

Conclusion

What should you consider when choosing a marketing automation tool for your business? Lots of people sign up for tools that they thought would be great for their brand only to realize later that it just wasn’t compatible with their goals, budget, and CRM. When researching a particular tool, compare the price, usability, and how it will integrate with your existing software. Also, assess the channel of marketing you would be using the most. Some tools, for example, may be better than others in email marketing but don’t have the same reach when it comes to social media.