In today’s world, marketing is done in many ways, and Digital Marketing is the Holy Grail of marketing communication. Digital Marketing is one of the most sought-after methods used by companies and marketers to market their products and services effectively. Companies have realized that the best place to find potential customers for their products and services is online.
But here’s the thing, Digital Marketing can be complex. The process of creating, running, and tracking the performance of your Digital Marketing Campaigns is not as simple as it sounds, and this is where Marketing Automation Platforms save the day for marketers!
With plenty of options available, finding the best Marketing Automation Platforms can be baffling if you don’t know what to look for. This article focuses on Marketing Automation Platforms and provides you with a comprehensive list of some of the best platforms you can use to refine your marketing analytics. It also introduces you to the various factors that you must consider before selecting a tool for your business.
Table of Contents
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing is all about putting across the right message at just the right time. Marketing, over the last few years, has evolved from being an art to being more scientific. From the invention of the Printing Press, the first big break, to the invention of the Internet, the golden age, Marketing has come a long way.
Every organization wants to optimize the budget they’re spending on Marketing Campaigns, reach the right audience and in turn, increase their Sales. This is the age of Data-Driven Marketing. The meaning of the term is really in the name itself, it basically means collecting and using relevant information to drive your Marketing decisions. With the stores moving online, you have a constant environment where you can observe, adjust and improve your business in such a way that the needs of your customers are met accordingly.
In today’s environment, there’s a tremendous amount of data coming from all over the place, it’s coming from your Website, it’s coming from your Mobile Application and it’s even coming from your own Business Systems. Having a large amount of data isn’t a problem, but you want to extract useful information out of it. This is where Marketing Automation comes into the picture. Marketing automation is all about using the right set of tools and software to automate your marketing activities.
Marketing Automation streamlines the process of creating, running, and tracking the performance of Digital Marketing Campaigns. It minimizes your marketing cost and boosts Conversion Rates. Marketers are not burdened with sorting out all of the information as Marketing Automation Platforms automate the process of data analysis using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms.
So, now you can be very scientific about your hypotheses and the campaigns that you run as Marketers, meet the demand of your audience and create personalized experiences for them.
Do You Actually Need a Marketing Automation Platform?
Marketing Automation Platforms provide users with a central marketing database for all marketing information and interactions, allowing marketers to create personalized, segmented, and timely marketing experiences for prospects and customers. Such platforms automate various functionalities for marketing aspects such as social media, direct email, lead generation, digital advertising, etc. You should also know about modern marketing stack.
One significant feature offered by Marketing Automation Platforms is the analytics feature that helps marketers determine the success of their marketing campaigns across channels and segments. The analytics feature measures the impact of marketing campaigns using various KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), thereby providing marketers with some crucial insights on how they can customize their marketing campaigns for improved performance.
Here’s why you need Marketing Automation Platforms:
- Marketing Automation Platforms enable your Sales and Marketing teams to focus on bringing new customers and making more sales by automating all the repetitive processes.
- With Marketing Automation Platforms in your arsenal, you can have good control over your Digital Marketing Campaigns and optimize your work by automating your Marketing Efforts.
- You can further refine your Marketing Strategy with Marketing Analytics tools.
- Marketing Automation Platforms help in analyzing your Campaign/Email Reports carefully. You can keep track of the Email Open Rates, Click-Through Rates (CTRs), and Lead Conversion Rates.
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- Minimal Learning: Hevo with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
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Top 10 Marketing Automation Platforms
Choosing the ideal automation platform that perfectly meets your business requirements can be a challenging task, especially when there’s a large variety of Marketing Automation Platforms available in the market. To simplify your search, here is a comprehensive list of the 10 best Marketing Automation Platforms that you can choose from and start automating your marketing activities:
1. Marketo
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Marketo offers a variety of marketing automation features that are capable of covering almost every channel and customer engagement activity. Its recent integration with Adobe has made it even more powerful and suitable for marketing operations. Marketo is now available as an integrated part of Adobe’s enterprise marketing cloud.
For further information on Marketo, you can check the official website here.
2. HubSpot
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HubSpot is a popular Marketing Automation Platform that emphasises on inbound marketing and focuses on content and search marketing activities. HubSpot offers a comprehensive set of tools such as Marketing, Sales, and Support Hubs, allowing teams to work collaboratively. All of its tools and software integrate expectingly well with the HubSpot CRM, allowing users/teams to combine growth data from multiple channels in one place and draw crucial insights. HubSpot CRM supports up to 1 Million Contacts and Companies.
HubSpot is an easy-to-use platform and supports both simple and complex workflows. HubSpot provides users with three subscription offerings, with the basic plan, known as the Starter plan, available at $40/month.
For further information on HubSpot, you can check the official website here.
3. Omnisend
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Omnisend provides omnichannel functionality and lets users add a large variety of marketing channels to a particular automation workflow, such as SMS, emails, push notifications, social media channels such as Facebook Messenger, etc. With intuitive features such as drag-and-drop builder, contact targeting, and advanced split-automation functionality, make it one of the most comprehensive tools to set up marketing automation.
Omnisend allows users to access its basic Email marketing functionality, free of cost. It follows a competitive pricing model, with the basic plan starting at $16/month, which can then be personalized, based on the automation features that you want to use.
For further information on Omnisend, you can check the official website here.
4. Eloqua
Eloqua, which is part of the Oracle suite of tools, is unique in that it can work with nearly every other marketing tool that you have. Eloqua supports up to 700 integrations, which means that it can make every step of your marketing process more personalized and streamlined.
It is also one of the few all-in-one tools that can serve B2B marketers and companies.
For further information on Eloqua, you can check the official website here.
5. Ontraport
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Ontraport is a Marketing Automation Platform, suitable for solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. Apart from its automation and CRM functionality, it offers a large variety of features such as email marketing, reporting, e-commerce activities, etc. that help entrepreneurs support and grow their small-scale business. Its reporting tool allows users to draw crucial insights into the performance of their digital marketing campaigns.
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Ontraport follows a pricing model that starts at $79/month and provides users with four different subscription plans to choose from, based on their business needs. It also provides users with a free trial.
For further information on Ontraport, you can check the official website here.
6. Sendinblue
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Sendinblue is a popular Marketing Automation Platform that supports advanced reporting and leads scoring functionality. It allows users to make use of a variety of intuitive features such as phone support, basic marketing automation functionality, sending at most 300 emails/day, etc. free of cost. It also allows users to run SMS campaigns.
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It allows users to choose from four different subscription plans as per their business needs, with the basic plan starting at $0/month.
For further information on Sendinblue, you can check the official website here.
7. ActiveCampaign
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ActiveCampaign, a Cloud-Based Marketing Automation platform, has been in the ranks of the best Customer Experience Automation software. ActiveCampagin provides marketing automation and email marketing functionalities, along with a CRM, suitable for a small-scale business. ActiveCampaign is one of the leading Marketing Automation platforms trusted by over 150,000 companies over the world. It optimizes your Marketing Process by automating critical routine tasks, saving you time for building strong customer relationships. Although it is one of the top marketing tools available in the market and is known for its powerful automation capabilities, it has a steep learning curve and hence, can prove to be challenging for a beginner or a user with limited technical knowledge.
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It allows users to choose from four different subscription plans as per their business needs, with the basic/lite plan starting at $9/month. It also provides users with a free trial.
For further information on ActiveCampaign, you can check the official website here.
8. Pardot
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Pardot by Salesforce is a cloud-based automation platform, suitable for enterprise clients, that have the technical capabilities and resources to train on its platform. It provides a diverse set of automation features, such as email marketing, leads scoring and nurturing, ROI-based reporting, etc. along with CRM integration support.
Using Pardot, you can get a holistic view of all your customer interactions by tracking your website, creating predictive lead scoring, based on various parameters, etc. Although Pardot is a powerful automation tool, it lacks lead generation functionality.
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With its basic plan starting at $1250/annum, it may not be an affordable option for many small entrepreneurs and businesses. It further allows users to choose from three other plans as per their business needs.
For further information on Pardot, you can check the official website here.
9. Autopilot
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Autopilot is one of the most easy-to-use Marketing Automation Platforms that provides an appealing, fun, and clean visual editor platform that supports automating various marketing activities such as complex email marketing and targeted messaging. It lets users develop an auto-responding functionality, that operates based on time sequences.
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It allows users to choose from three different subscription plans as per their business needs, with the silver plan starting at $49/month. It also provides users with a free trial.
For further information on Autopilot, you can check the official website here.
10. GetResponse
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GetResponse is a popular Marketing Automation Platform that provides features based on the plan a user has decided to purchase, with the most expensive plan offering advanced features such as email marketing, e-commerce tools, list building tools, etc.
GetResponse is simple to use and produces exceptional results, even when using simple features such as email newsletters.
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It allows users to choose from four different subscription plans as per their business needs, with the basic plan starting at $15/month. It also provides users with a free trial.
For further information on GetResponse, you can check the official website here.
What to Consider When Comparing Marketing Automation Software
Below are a few important factors to consider when comparing the Marketing Automation Software.
- Cost: Automated Marketing solutions can help you curtail your expenses exceptionally by making the right use of your Marketing Budget. The majority of these tools are fully managed, ensuring a minimal-to-no dependence on Software Experts. Most Marketing Automation tools come with additional costs for training and add-ons.
- User-Friendly: The main aim of Automated Marketing tools is to make the process of Marketing seamless. A Marketing Automation Tool with a minimal learning curve will help your team extract huge value, as it will also come in handy to a non-technical member of your team. The less intuitive the platform is, the more you will have to spend on training.
- Integrations: The Marketing Automation Platforms usually offer integration with various third-party apps and services. This is extremely important in order to utilise your existing services.
- CRM Capabilities: Some Marketing Automation Platforms (such as HubSpot and Active Campaign) offer an in-built CRM functionalities making it easy for users/teams to combine data from multiple channels in one place and draw crucial insights.
- Social Media Capabilities: In the world of Social Media, it is very essential that your Marketing Automation Platform integrate with the leading Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to run highly efficient Social Media Campaigns.
Some Limitations of using Marketing Automation Platforms
- High Cost: Most Marketing Automation Platforms require you to pay a monthly subscription fee. Their free trials last for a short period and only offer limited features.
- Difficult to set up, configure and use: Most automation platforms are difficult to configure. Due to this, they require users to possess the technical expertise to not only set them up but also to learn how to use the platform.
Conclusion
Marketing Automation Platforms can prove to be a gamechanger for startups, individuals, and small to medium-sized businesses trying to leverage Digital Marketing. With all the Automation, Customization, and Smart Features, the above-mentioned Marketing Automation Platforms can strengthen the ability of organizations to make the right Marketing decisions.
This article introduced you to some of the best Marketing Automation Platforms available in the market that you can use to perform and refine marketing analytics. It also provides in-depth knowledge about their features, use cases, and pricing. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution, that will not only help you transfer data from your Marketing Automation Platforms but also transform into analysis-ready form, then Hevo Data is the right choice for you! It will take care of all your analytics needs in a completely automated manner, allowing you to focus on key business activities.
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Hevo Data, with its strong integration with 100+ Sources & BI tools such as HubSpot, Pardot, and other Marketing Automation Platforms, allows you to not only export data from sources & load data in the destinations, but also transform & enrich your data, & make it analysis-ready so that you can focus only on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools. You can easily extract data from your Marketing Automation Platform using Hevo to track the performance of your Digital Marketing Campaigns and optimize it further to increase revenue. In short, Marketing Analytics is much easier with Hevo.
Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at our unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs!
Share your experience of learning about various Marketing Automation Platforms! Let us know in the comments section below.
Skilled in freelance writing within the data industry, Nicholas is passionate about unraveling the complexities of data integration and data analysis through informative content for those delving deeper into these subjects.