Top 5 Marketing Automation Software Products

We live in the economy of scale. Several loyal customers cannot ensure the success of a business nowadays. Marketing effort must result in dozens and hundreds of leads for sales, which must be tracked till closing the deal and beyond, through the contract lifecycle. Doing this manually for hundreds or even thousands of contacts is impossible, which means every business must find some marketing automation solution. This blog post will describe top 5 marketing automation software products to help your business grow and succeed.

We’ve composed this list based on our customers’ experience along with open sources like Capterra, Forbes and PCMag. The point is, there is no fit for all sizes, as every business has their unique needs and preferences. A single solution will not cover all of them, most likely, so you will need to build your own marketing automation software suite. The only alternative is hiring a remote software development team to deliver a custom marketing software.

Capterra defines software popularity as a combination of 6 parameters:

• Number of customers (businesses)
• Number of software users (individuals)
• Vendor’s reported revenue last year
• The number of direct Google searches for this marketing tool
• The quantity of Twitter followers in the respective software groups
• Alexa/Compete rankings of the vendor’s website

The software below is listed in no particular order as it covers a wide range of needs and greatly varies in functionality and popularity. Keep in mind, however, the most popular brand will not necessarily be the most suited for your needs. Without further ado, let’s get to the description of the best marketing software suite you can use to boost your sales.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft.com offers a robust solution for automated email marketing, with ample possibilities for target audience filtering, follow-ups, creating landing pages, nurturing the leads, following the contacts throughout the whole process of closing the deal and beyond.

Everything has a price, however, and Infusionsoft is no exception. The system is a bit too pricey for a startup and has some pretty considerable drawbacks. The reporting, for example, is so detailed that important data is hard to find amongst the details and re-configuration of the once-set campaigns is quite a challenge. The learning curve is present, indeed, and it is quite a long one, though the solution begins to shine after a year or two of usage, when it grows with your business, offering new and new features as the need for them arises.

Salesforce

Salesforce is positioned as #1 CRM system on the market. It offers cloud deployment, short learning curve, a plethora of features and functions, in-depth reporting, detailed monitoring of all the stages of the sales process and automation of a multitude of internal processes. It seems pretty affordable with merely $125 monthly fee.

The other side of the coin is that this is not a software usage fee, but an agent’s license, so 4 agents would cost you $500/mo., which is a decent sum for many startups. To say even more, many functions labeled unlimited (like mass email sending) are quite limited in fact (no more than 1000 emails per day on the biggest package). In addition, many API calls within the software also have a monthly limit and reaching it results in either the offer to upgrade your plan or blocking out these features till the monthly reset.

Thus said, Salesforce can be a great all-around solution for a one-agent business with a decent flow of orders, but as the business grows, Salesforce can become too costly in the long run.

Hubspot

Hubspot is the inbound marketing solution aimed at SEO optimization of your content, landing pages and social presence. It helps your business be found on the Internet, and convert mentions to incoming traffic to leads and, finally, to customers. Email drip campaigns, social and search marketing, as well as lead nurturing options are present. This tool provides intense reporting options, flexible CRM system and helps incentivize agents to write more engaging content and promote your brand better.

The downside to this is a certain clunkiness of dashboards, reported by many customers. Some areas of the pipeline get excluded if a certain percentage is not reached, while some important data might be left there and overlooked as a result. The price tag is also quite decent, though the successful marketing effort covers the expenses many times over.

Eloqua

Oracle Eloqua is a marketing solution for delivering multi channel campaigns and engaging the prospects in the right time and place, while providing detailed real-time reporting and insights. The ease of visualization of data transformation and workflow processes using drag-and-drop canvas is tremendous. This B2B platform helps businesses manage both data flow and customer experiences in a fluent and efficient way. Once a visitor performs any activity or views a page, so sales team is ready to react as soon as the opportunity appears.

The difficulties appear when third-party integration is required, as this tool does not offer such degree of open API as one would expect. There is no live customer support, which might seem uncomfortable for some customers and might result in longer issue resolution times, yet email ticket system works well almost all of the time.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is an elegant email marketing tool for creating personalized emails that drive engagement and turn prospects into customers. A built-in easy and intuitive email builder, convenient campaign configuration and contact management, easy follow-up builder for highly-personalized lead nurturing — this is just a glimpse of what this software can do.

The cons include somewhat bulky email campaign preview functionality, as you can send only 5 emails for free and this must be done manually. The price tag is also a bit high for using the tool as a monthly newsletter, yet it is worth every dollar if used at full capacity.

Conclusions

To wrap it all up, these are the most popular solutions, both specializing in the certain area of marketing automation, or aimed at providing all-around capable systems, and there are a plethora of alternatives in each category. They all have their pros and cons, yet the most often mentioned flaws are the inconvenient user interface and high price tag.

This has clear explanations: if the solution has simplified functionality, it cannot satisfy all the variety of customer’s requirements. On the other end of the scale, when there are too much features and settings, the user feels overwhelmed and uncomfortable. The vendors try to keep the balance, yet some features are always lacking or excessive from the customer’s point of view.

The pricing policy is also explainable — while the businesses want to allocate resources wisely, the vendors have to make their profit. This most often results in only the most basic functionality being available for free or cheap, with the more advanced functions demanding more expensive packages.

What is the solution then? A pretty obvious one is developing a custom CRM/marketing tool for your own needs. While the costs of such development might seem too high, such a solution has 2 unbeatable advantages:

• it will include all the features you need and nothing surplus (and can be updated relatively easily)
• It will cost a great deal less in the long run, as you will own it, instead of paying monthly subscription fees.

The companies that have already built a strong internal development team often go for this route or decide to hire a dedicated team for the project. Thus said, going for one of the popular marketing automation software products or developing a personalized solution is the choice you should make.

What about your experience? What marketing automation software do you use? Would you like to change it, how and why? We would appreciate your thoughts in the comments below! And if you liked the article — please share it with your friends and colleagues!