The software executes repetitive tasks by following a set of rules that specify the exact action. The action is then automatically triggered by specific customer behavior. For instance, a welcome email is instantly sent when a customer clicks the register/sign-up CTA.
Marketing automation makes personalization possible by collecting and analyzing data. Every action taken by leads or customers is stored as data. This data is then analyzed and used to segment customers and leads based on similar qualities. With this done, actions can be targeted to specific customer segments, thereby increasing personalization.
Marketing automation tools come in various forms. Each software is designed for specific marketing needs. Here’s a list of different types of marketing automation software.
Email marketing automation enables marketers to nurture leads, analyze performance metrics, and send messages to targeted audiences while saving time.
Social media automation software helps small businesses schedule posts, manage multiple platforms, and track engagement from each post on each platform.
Customer relationship management helps you to manage interactions with customers throughout the lifecycle. It also tracks their data, analyzes, and automates follow-up tasks, saving time and reducing manual input.
Omnichannel marketing automation brings different channels together to give a unified experience to customers. Omnichannel helps you create consistent messaging across platforms for a seamless, immersive brand experience.
Web personalization automation adapts your website content based on user behaviors, preferences, and past interactions to enhance user experience.
Content marketing automation streamlines your content creation. You can also plan, analyze, and schedule content to ensure consistency.
Analytics and reporting automation tools help you to gather and analyze data to provide actionable insights. With analytics and reporting automation, you can optimize your strategies and make informed decisions.
Ad campaign automation for businesses, helps to create, manage, and optimize online advertising across multiple platforms. It ensures that you maximize your ad budget for the best result.
Some automation platforms are designed for single marketing needs. While some offer all-in-one solutions providing some if not all of the solutions listed above, saving you significant cost.
Let's take a look at 12 of the best marketing automation tools for your business. We'll discuss key features, their pros and cons, and pricing.
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Here are some benefits of using marketing automation software.
Marketing automation reduces the time you spend on repetitive marketing like sending emails, scheduling social media posts, managing leads, and focusing your energy on strategy and creativity. As a small business owner or marketing team, this makes you more efficient and able to focus on more client-facing responsibilities and business operations.
Lead generation is an important aspect of the growth of any business, and according to research, 80% of companies worldwide experience an increase in lead generation after using marketing automation. Automating the steps between the marketing and sales processes allows you the chance to focus on nurturing leads that show real promise. This can increase your sales and business revenue significantly.
Marketing automation eliminates the challenge of manual lead qualification and replaces it with a solid scoring model that qualifies leads based on predefined criteria. An automated lead scoring model qualifies generated leads using predefined criteria set by your marketing and sales team or you, if you're a solopreneur.
Marketing automation increases your conversion rates by delivering relevant and personalized interactions that guide your leads through the sales funnel. With marketing automation, your prospects are likely to receive the right message at the right time, increasing the likelihood of them taking desired actions.
To convert more leads into sales, marketing software scores your leads, prioritizes high prospects for sales follow-ups, and focuses the effort on visitors that’d likely convert, streamlining the process and driving higher success rates compared to when you engage in a manual outreach.
Marketing automation increases your conversion rates by delivering relevant and personalized interactions that guide your leads through the sales funnel. With marketing automation, your prospects are likely to receive the right message at the right time, increasing the likelihood of them taking desired actions.
To convert more leads into sales, marketing software scores your leads, prioritizes high prospects for sales follow-ups, and focuses the effort on visitors that’d likely convert, streamlining the process and driving higher success rates compared to when you engage in a manual outreach.
Marketing automation tools make lead nurturing seamless by making it possible for you to guide prospects on their journey with little to no manual effort. It ensures that your leads receive scheduled targeted attention that keeps them engaged and moving closer to conversion without overwhelming you.
There are cases where your leads could be qualified but not ready to make a purchase and need more touchpoints to build trust and interest. For small businesses, marketing automation solves this by handling the nurturing of leads.
Using any of the best marketing automation software relieves you of marketing tasks, but these best practices will help you get the best from your marketing efforts.
Before you sign up to use marketing tools, you should have a measurable goal in mind that captures your reason, key performance indicator (KPI), and the result you expect to have from automating your marketing operations. For example, your goal can be to reduce cart abandonment by 15%.
With this goal in mind, you should align your business objective and define the KPI to help you track the progress of your automation. Without a clear goal and KPI to measure, your automation can be aimless, wasting time and resources.
To ensure your campaigns are relevant, you need to know your audience. To know your audience means to dive deep into their preferences, pain points, and behaviors through analysis and data collection for the sake of enhancing marketing automation tools from personalization to lead nurturing.
How do you get the data?
You get it through your CRM tool and use it to track their interactions, to know what product your audience is interested in. By combining the data points, you can create a specified buyer persona that guides your automation strategy and ensures your business campaign speaks directly to your customer’s needs and desires at every point.
Creating multi-channel experiences is another best practice for marketing automation as it involves managing your campaign across different platforms. Most people make use of email marketing tools, but it is important to incorporate social media, SMS, and websites. Instead of relying on one touchpoint (email or SMS), automation in marketing ensures that your audience receives consistent messaging tailored to their preferences and behaviors.
A multi-channel experience allows you to collate data and insights better, but it requires careful planning to keep you going because its power lies in its ability to meet customers where they are while maintaining a unified brand voice.
Every day, consumers see content from different platforms, some of which come from your competitors within the niche. It’s almost like everyone is screaming in their ears “Hey! Come buy from us”. To stand out, you have to create engaging content that’s unique, and it could be in the form of blogs, webinars, videos, or even livestreams.
To make content engaging within an automated system, you should focus on relevance and personalization by utilizing data about your audience’s preferences and pain points. Engaging content also sustains long-term relationships by providing consistent value throughout the customer journey, not just during initial outreach.
Your marketing automation platform and your customer relationship management (CRM) system are supposed to be in sync to create a unified approach to lead management and customer engagement. When they are in sync, data flows effortlessly between marketing and sales, making it possible for you to keep your customer journey cohesive.
Before you decide on the tool to use for marketing, make sure it can integrate with your CRM. Ensure that the cost will not burn a hole in your wallet except on an occasion where one tool fits as a marketing automation platform and CRM.
Marketing tools allow small business owners to do more, even with a small team. By choosing the right automation software that can meet their unique needs, small business owners can connect better with their customers, generate more quality leads, and increase their conversion rate. The trick to choosing the right marketing automation software is to know your goals and target audience.
Beyond your goals and audience, you also need to choose the right channels and select the right tools that fit the size of your business. You can also utilize free trials and free plans to help you have a taste of what each tool has to offer. EngageBay is the best marketing automation tool for small businesses, and the best part is that it is scalable, increasing with you as your business grows.
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Learn how businesses like yours use EngageBay to cut down on costs, time, and resources, while boosting productivity and revenue.
READ SUCCESS STORIESBy implementing an effective marketing automation tool, your company can better target your audience and potential clients across multiple platforms, such as social media, email automation, and text messages.
Your eCommerce store will only thrive when you use the right marketing automation software to build seamless workflows. Otherwise, you may end up paying for something that doesn’t help you.
Email, the most flexible and universal messaging medium, continues to adapt to an evolving marketplace.
What does the future of marketing automation look like? Although we all wish we could gaze upon a crystal ball for the answers, we have a more reliable trajectory to guide us: trends!
As the world of software as a service (SaaS) continues to evolve, so does the need for efficient and effective marketing strategies. Today, SaaS companies use cutting-edge technology to reach a wider audience, personalize advertisements to target and convert leads, and offer exceptional services.
You won’t find a campaign setup like this very often. It’s all happening on its own. In all honesty, on its own. Step into the age of marketing automation.
One of the significant challenges of running a B2B business is to shorten the sales cycle. Enter B2B marketing automation – a process designed to streamline your workflows and automate repetitive tasks to save time and money.
Among the various marketing automation tools, Email alone takes up another considerable chunk of time, almost 3.6 hours each week.
What drives this seemingly magical experience for their subscribers is marketing automation. Netflix has not only enhanced user engagement but also significantly boosted revenue.
His welcome series brings in close to six figures and saves him time, which can be used in other business areas. The welcome series starts by thanking subscribers and setting expectations.
Successful business growth hinges on a strategy that aligns buyer needs and customer experience. The modern empowered buyer wants businesses that provide consistent engagement and a value-based experience.
Digital marketing is challenging and time-consuming, and the list of marketing tasks might seem endless. Because of this, marketing automation has become a reliable ally for all marketers.
Social media marketing resource NapoleonCat reports that 96 percent of marketers have used marketing automation, with email marketing the most popular usage.
However, 60% of businesses find the marketing automation implementation process complex. Also, 85% of B2B marketers feel they are not using the full potential of marketing automation software.
Marketing automation can help anybody set up and manage their campaigns, pipelines, and workflows.
Think marketing automation and automated customer journeys come to mind. And why not? They are perfect for engaging, converting, and retaining customers at scale. 67% of marketers use them. Most marketing automation tools use drag-and-drop customer journey automation builders to make it easy.
Marketing automation is the use of software to automatically handle repetitive marketing activities across multiple channels. It increases the efficiency of the marketing team by saving time, reducing error, and increasing personalization.
The major reason why marketing automation fails is wrong implementation. Since marketing automation relies heavily on data, when businesses provide insufficient or incorrect information, it affects the segmentation of the contact list, which leads to actions being taken to the wrong set of audiences. Another common error of businesses is relying completely on marketing automation without including a personal touch on major touch points.
The first sign of bad marketing automation on a platform is that the messaging feels robotic, sending out generic messaging with no human oversight. It simply focuses on getting repetitive tasks done. On the other hand, a good marketing automation platform uses available customer data to offer a personalized customer experience. What makes the difference is the level of human oversight involved in setting up the automation.
Marketing automation relies on data to offer a personalized experience. So, Google Analytics brings more depth and advanced data needed to understand user behavior and track your website and campaign performance. Combining marketing automation and Google Analytics is like two sides of a coin that ensures your campaign performs optimally.
To choose a marketing automation solution, you must first consider your business needs. Which of the automation software features best meet your business needs? You should also consider your budget. How much will you be willing and able to pay for marketing automation tools? Another important factor to bear in mind is the scalability of the software. This ensures the software can keep serving you even as your business grows.
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