Below, you'll find our list of the top five marketing automation solutions on the market today. This list will help you find the right tool for your business objectives as well as budget.
If you're looking for an easy way to boost your sales, customer service, and marketing processes with automation, then HubSpot is an excellent solution. It goes beyond automating your business processes. Integrate and optimise different departments in one centralised location, streamlining your entire business's workflow.
Teams don't have to jump from one software to another to get the information they need and you can automate the data transfer process from one team to the next. HubSpot has long made its reputation in this field. Their marketing automation capabilities are powerful, with fine granular control. Set up a drip campaign (or multiple) as complex as you like with delays, triggers, dependencies, and more. You can let email follow-ups and campaigns run automatically with no hassle at all.
No matter how complex your sales journey or pipeline, HubSpot has the tools and features to not only add useful automation, but improve every part of the customer lifecycle. And, by using one of HubSpot's suites, you also get access to essential features like:
- Content SEO planning
- Ad tracking and management
- Social media management
- Automated live chat features
- Forms and landing pages
- Revenue attribution reporting
- A/B split testing
HubSpot offers basic features, like emails, landing pages, forms, and live chat capabilities for unlimited users absolutely free. So, you can try the platform without spending a penny.
The Starter Suite (sales, marketing, CRM, and customer service) starts at US$50 per month for two users and up to 1,000 contacts, making it extremely affordable for most businesses. However, keep in mind you only get access to HubSpot's Starter version of their Marketing Hub. So you're going to be somewhat limited in automation capability.
The heavy-duty plans remove those restrictions if you need everything HubSpot offers for the full marketing automation experience:
- Professional — US$1,780 per month (US$1,600 per month if you pay annually)
- Enterprise — US$5,000 per month for everything HubSpot has to offer
- Pardot by Salesforce
If you have a B2B business, you’ll need to market to other companies. This presents a unique set of marketing challenges. As such, you need a marketing automation tool built for the job. Pardot exists to help B2B companies build relationships and turn those relationships into revenue. You get a suite of tools perfectly designed for this objective, so you can accommodate an extended buying process and manage complex pipelines.
Plus, it's a fantastic marketing automation software built around Salesforce the world's #1 CRM – so, you know you're in good hands.
From lead generation to sales alignment, the software offers a wide range of features, including:
- Dynamic content and data-based personalisation
- Lead-nurturing email automations
- Prospect and lead scoring
- Visual multi-part automation creator
- Advanced segmentation
- Landing page builder
- Smart forms and form builder
- Social media management
- Lead activity tracking
- Campaign performance reporting
- Funnel reporting
- Pardot Einstein for lead and behaviour scoring
But it is a bit on the expensive side, so it's best suited for larger businesses. Their paid plans include:
- Growth - US$1,250/month for up to 10,000 contacts and basic features
- Plus - US$2,500/month for up to 10,000 contacts with more automation + analytics
- Advanced - US$4,000/month for up to 10,000 contacts with AI and all features
- Premium - US$15,000/month for up to 75,000 contacts and all features
- Constant Contact
Modern marketing doesn't happen on one channel. It's happening all across the internet on a wide array of devices, all at once. There are many multichannel solutions for marketing automation, but Constant Contact takes the cake for most businesses that need an easy way to join email and social media efforts. With its unified dashboard that anyone can use, Constant Contact lets you stay on top of both marketing fronts with ease.
You can push new social posts and reply to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn from the same place you can set up automated email sequences and drip campaigns. Schedule out social posts for next month or quarter and then sync that messaging up with your email campaigns.
Plus, with the platform's intensely customisable emailer, you can segment messaging with individual sequences that are based upon what you know about your contacts. Whether you've gathered crucial info about your list members manually or you use Constant Contact's custom form builder to capture it on your landing pages, you can set up individual email sequence tracks based on any of it that will automatically send based on triggers that you set.
The Plus package from Constant Contact starts at US$45/month for up to 500 subscribers, with the price that scales up alongside the number of additional contacts you need.
If you just want a unified email and marketing automation tool without all the advanced features, you can still get unlimited email sends and automated email resends to non-openers with the standard Email plan that costs US$20/month for up to 500 contacts.
- Sendinblue
Marketing automation isn't just about marketing efforts. The same tool you use to generate interest in your company in the first place can also be your most powerful weapon for not losing out on important sales opportunities.
Sendinblue's powerful automation features will help you remarket to customers and seal up the holes that allow leads to drop out of your sales funnel. For a lot of businesses, their prebuilt automations will be enough. But, with just a few clicks of your mouse, Sendinblue will set up a workflow to kick in when, for example, a visitor leaves your website with items still in their shopping cart or when they've clicked on or visited a specific part of your site.
Then, all you have to do is build the email message that gets sent when the trigger action occurs.
Sendinblue offers automation capabilities on all of their pricing plans. With the free and Lite packages that start at US$25/month. You will be limited to targeting up to 2,000 of your contacts in your automated workflows.
You can also upgrade to either Premium – US$65/month, or get the custom-priced Enterprise plans to get unlimited use of Sendinblue's marketing automations.
- Freshworks CRM
Freshworks CRM is an intelligent marketing automation tool that is an exceptional platform that anyone in the office can use.
This platform is perfect for SMEs because they don't have to worry about hiring a team of super-users just to run campaigns. They can get a lot of the marketing automation features they need to attract customers, nurture their audiences, understand their needs, and drive conversions in one software.
You also get access to incredible features like:
- Email campaigns and contact management
- Visual drag and drop builder
- Website, form, and offline event tracking
- Conversion rate optimisation tools
- A/B and split testing
- Dynamic heat maps
- Audience segmentation
- Real-time funnel analytics
You can try Freshworks CRM on their limited free forever plan or a 21-day free trial of their paid plans, which are incredibly affordable and accessible for businesses of all sizes. However, they depend on the number of contacts you have, so keep that in mind.
They offer Growth, Pro and Enterprise plans of the full Freshworks CRM, or just the marketing services. Plans for the full CRM start at US$29/month for 1,000 active contacts. Plans for Marketing Cloud start at US$19/month for 500 contacts.
What platform should you choose?
Whether you’re in a global enterprise or a proprietor at an SME, there are a lot of marketing automation tools available for you to choose from. The deciding factors on which one is best for you are your marketing goals, objectives, and budget. This is an important decision to make as a marketing automation tool can make or break your business goals.
On the off chance that your company has already decided which software to go to but lacks the necessary experience to maximise the output and results of the automation tool, then don’t worry. Non-Stop Digital can help you jumpstart your marketing efforts whatever automation tool you are using.
Contact us today so we could talk about how we could further improve your digital marketing objectives.
