Marketing Automation: What is it and Why it Matters (10+ Tools Included)

Marketing automation entails the use of software to automate menial marketing operations. Marketers may use automating tedious activities such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns not just for the sake of efficiency, but also to deliver a more personalized experience to their consumers.

Marketing Automation, in fact, uses the data gathered from interactions with your website visitors to customize messaging so you can deliver content they are most interested in receiving.

What can marketing automation do for your business?

Automation is everywhere, real estate industry has real estate CRMs, the finance industry has accounting software and so on. So, why not for marketing?

When we examine typical problems that businesses face, we realize that generating leads and engaging customers throughout their journey are still top of mind. Businesses also have an increase in data flooding in, but they struggle to utilize it.

These difficulties can be overcome by leveraging data through marketing automation, which can simplify our operations.

1) Personalized workflows

One of the primary goals is to acquire new customers and increase revenue, but many marketers struggle with this. Marketing automation makes it possible for you to engage and convert more customers based on behavior and profile information. Marketers can set up personalized workflows that deliver the right message at the right time to net conversions.

2) Data analysis

As mentioned earlier, marketing automation uses data gathered from interactions with your website visitors to customize messaging so you can deliver content they are most interested in receiving. These activities create a wealth of customer data, which can be used alone or combined with other sources such as CRM data, email marketing data or social media profiles – allowing you to build comprehensive profiles, showing who they are and what they do online. With this data, marketers can make better decisions on campaigns and engagements.

3) Continuous learning

As your business grows, so does the flow of data. With marketing automation in place, you don’t need to worry about making sense of this information; it is great for continuously learn from interactions with customers or prospects – their behaviors, likes and dislikes – across channels. Marketing automation is always “learning,” updating results when new information comes in – giving you a more personalized experience for each customer.

4) Streamlined Process

By default, businesses tend to be busy most of the time just trying to keep up with incoming traffic and orders. This means missing opportunities because they are tied up performing other tasks such as manually updating listings on search engines or manually releasing email marketing campaigns.

With the adoption of marketing automation, you can automate certain tasks such as list updates and pushing out your marketing initiatives so you can focus on activities that bring in more revenue. What’s more, marketers can schedule their work depending on business hours or processes that they want to prioritize — whether it’s giving personal attention to potential and existing customers or focusing on lead generation and upselling – instead of needing to be available around-the-clock for incoming queries.

Best Marketing Automation Software to Use in 2022

Here is the list of some of the prominent and top marketing automation software that will help you automate your marketing activities effectively.

1) HubSpot Marketing Platform

This is a market leader for inbound marketing software. It offers best-in-class lead management, landing pages, blogging tools, social media integration and a variety of analytics features that help marketers get the most out of their campaigns. It has a strong emphasis on content creation and publishing to give your business a voice and attract users to your brand.

2) Salesmate CRM

This software fills a void in marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) systems by providing out-of-the-box features for managing your leads, closing deals and getting the data you need to focus on upselling and cross-selling. It is used mostly by businesses with smaller budgets who want to take advantage of marketing automation but don’t need a full-blown enterprise solution.

3) Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing

This product is an all-inclusive platform that helps businesses automate their marketing campaigns by providing them with analytics tools, marketing automation features and CRM integration. It also houses an extensive library of ready-made apps which you can customize to fit your business needs.

4) Oracle Eloqua

This platform is a fully automated marketing suite that provides real-time insights for your campaigns. It has a variety of integrated features for web, email and social media marketing – including content management tools that allow you to create personalized experiences for each customer.

5) Marketo Marketing Automation Suite

This is a powerful all-around tool for managing the entire lifecycle of your customer. It allows marketers to create personalized experiences for their users based on data gathered through automated activities, such as website engagement and email marketing.

6) Pardot Marketing Automation – By SalesForce

The Pardot Marketing Automation suite uses a combination of automation, intelligence and workflows to help marketers manage their campaigns. It offers more than 20 types of outbound email marketing templates, with the ability to create personalized messages using content assets from your website or portal. This is an established inbound marketing software that offers personalized lead nurturing, effective lead scoring and quick campaign deployment. It provides a comprehensive suite of analytics tools for marketers to measure campaign success.

7) AgileCRM

This is a salesforce automation application that combines outbound calling, email marketing, sales data analytics and lead management into one package based on the cloud. With it, you can see your pipeline at a glance so you always know who’s next.

8) Hootsuite Social Media Management

This platform allows you to schedule posts, monitor keywords and track engagement across multiple social media channels from a single dashboard. You can also monitor your competitors and see what they’re up to on social media.

9) Zoho CRM

This is a comprehensive marketing suite that makes it easy for you to create email campaigns, design landing pages, track social media activity and manage your website. With its keyword-based reporting feature, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what isn’t.

10) SugarCRM

This offers a comprehensive suite of tools for managing your sales pipeline and marketing campaigns, including landing pages, email marketing and social media management. You can build out a complete marketing campaign from a single dashboard, making it easy to track everything that’s happening with your leads.

11) ActiveCampaign

This is a powerful marketing platform that allows marketers to create automated campaigns based on user actions. For example, you can send an email to users who haven’t visited your site in 30 days or subscribers who are listed as “unsubscribed” in your CRM system.This is a cloud-based marketing automation platform that helps small business owners manage customer interactions. It comes with a variety of lead qualification and management features, including email drip campaigns.

12) Campaign Monitor

This is an email marketing tool that offers a wide range of templates and advanced customization features. It is packed with analytics and reporting tools so you can track the results of your campaigns and see which types of messages work best for your customers.

13) Ontraport

This offers email marketing, sales management and social media automation all in one convenient package. It provides a personalization engine so you can deliver custom content experiences to each of your leads and clients, while also allowing marketers to create automated email campaigns using templates or personalized messages.

This is a marketing automation platform for small businesses that make it easy to create, launch and analyze effective email campaigns. You can build your subscriber lists, send personalized campaign emails and track clicks within your dashboard.

Conclusion:

Marketing automation may seem like an investment at first, but marketers can expect their ROI to double over time due to its ability to save them time and money in the long term while still delivering a great customer experience.

Marketing automation helps you manage and organize your marketing activities, while also tracking user behavior so you can create segmented lists and send targeted messages. You can also track engagement statistics and see how many of your contacts actually open and click on the links in your emails.

Regardless of which platform you choose, the most important thing is that it fits with your overall business goals. It doesn’t make sense to invest time and money in a marketing automation platform that you don’t fully understand or one that can’t deliver the results you need, but as long as you do your research up front, it’ll be well worth the effort.