Marketing automation tools are an essential player in the success of your business.
Without a doubt, marketing as a whole helps businesses gain recognition in their respective industries. The result is more customers, a better reputation, and ultimately higher profits.
But when word of mouth does not suffice in a vast economy, marketing automation tools must play a huge part in furthering your business goals.
Throughout this piece, you’ll learn about the fundamentals of marketing automation tools. You’ll also get a brief introduction on how to integrate these tools into your CRM. To find out more, continue reading!
What is a Marketing Automation Tool?
Marketing software, or marketing automation tools, describe technology that performs business outreach through automation.
Marketing itself involves advancing the sales of a service or product through a variety of relevant avenues, like market research or advertising.
Businesses must market themselves effectively to attract attention from potential customers and keep current customers engaged.
However, many of the tasks that take place in a marketing scheme or repetitive and tedious. Automation is a process that allows systems to operate automatically, without human intervention.
With the use of automation, businesses use marketing software — specifically marketing automation tools — to analyze data and work on various marketing campaigns.
Essentially, marketing automation tools empower businesses to do more with less. Email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, web analytics, and reporting tools are only some of the processes that marketing automation tools can target.
How Does a Marketing Automation Tool Work?
Marketing automation tools ensure that you’re sending the right message to consumers about your business. There are a dozen ways to do this.
For one, you can create personalized customer journeys where a customer’s path trigger’s certain reactions. Say a customer buys a product and signs up for your newsletter.
You can set up your system to automatically send whoever follows the steps above an email. In the process, you lead the customer to start a path in which they become more engaged with your brand.
Or you can use a marketing automation tool to send mass emails, utilizing psychographic data to deliver emails at optimal times.
Marketing automation software typically calls for other data-based operations as well. For instance, you can reach out to people on special dates like a birthday or anniversary and urge them towards engagement.
Similarly, you can prompt customers to buy the items left in their cart, give product recommendations, reward loyal fans, and follow up on product purchases.
These are only some examples of how marketing automation tools can work in your favor. And there are many more where that came from.
What Are the Advantages of Marketing Automation Tools?
Marketing automation tools are widely diverse. Thus, it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly the software can do for you and your business. But there are some general benefits you’re guaranteed to gain from using marketing software.
More Efficient Marketing Campaigns
The most successful marketing campaigns depend on personalized consumer targeting. By using marketing automation tools, you can easily identify who’s paying attention to your business and why.
You can then guide them along a hand-tailored customer journey. This involves turning unsuspecting prospects into leads; generating segments based on your data, and creating a customized lead nurturing campaign.
In the process, you’ll conserve resources. Marketing automation tools help busy teams avoid doing busy work. Marketing software can speed up or optimize daily business operations.
Essential personnel will be relieved from mindless duties and your business as a whole can save money by refining necessary marketing ventures.
Increased Scalability
Marketing automation tools also lead to improved scalability. When you start a business, it’s important to consider how you will go about furthering your success.
More often than not, this requires growth in several areas from how many customers you can service to how exactly you service these customers.
To accommodate this need, using technology that scales is a must. And no doubt, automation tools will scale much easier than any manual process.
Besides what is possible, using marketing automation tools will surely garner more lead conversions. Of course, this will be all the more reason to continue using marketing automation tools.
Enhanced Customer Experience
There’s no better business than a business that truly cares about its customers. The end goal of all marketing endeavors is to reach consumers.
Marketing automation tools permit this to happen in a few ways. First, you have some pretty accurate data about your customers which can greatly inform their experience with your brand.
On another note, marketing automation software is dynamic by nature. You can seamlessly integrate marketing automation tools into your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
In effect, this means you can speak to end-users in creative and engaging ways. Whether you want to shoot off an email, direct your customer to a certain landing page, or offer them a contact form, automated tooling can do it all.
10 Examples of Marketing Automation Tools
Here are 10 examples of popular marketing automation tools. Check them out!
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is a CRM and a content management system (CMS) all wrapped up into one. But as far as marketing goes, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is quite exceptional.
Described as inbound marketing, HubSpot’s approach to attracting, delighting, and engaging leads is more holistic than other similar solutions. For example, its marketing hub goes beyond simply email marketing and the platform’s expertise drips into content and search marketing as well.
To add, HubSpot comes employed with support and sales software. The combined effect of these tools is great, to say the least.
Some of the more nuanced things you can do with HubSpot include setting up autoresponders via email, monitoring and prioritizing social media engagements, and using live chatbots to qualify leads.
2. Marketo
Marketo is another big name in the marketing automation tools industry. Like HubSpot, Marketo covers a wide array of channels, allowing you to generate leads from almost any user engagement.
As opposed to HubSpot which is better suited for small businesses, Marketo is suitable for large enterprises.
Now officially an Adobe product, one perk of the platform is its ability to integrate with systems like SAP and Oracle, which are go-to CRMs for large business-to-business (B2B) companies.
Marketo is a bit more technical than a marketing automation tool like HubSpot, however, and requires its users to have some information technology (IT) expertise.
That said, the likes of email nurturing and responsive landing pages among other favorable features might be worth the trouble.
3. Constant Contact
The name alone of Constant Contact should suggest that this tool does its job well. Constant Contact is not as well-known as HubSpot or Marketo but it’s still a high-performing tool.
Tailored for small businesses, Constant Contact is a marketing automation tool with powerful email automation. A few of its perks include automated trigger campaigns, segmented follow-up messages, and automatic email collection.
4. Eloqua
Eloqua is an exceptional marketing automation tool that promises increased conversion rates. The tool sends ads to not only emails but mobile devices and search results pages.
In tracking customer activity and visitor behavior intensely — down to whether or not someone opens an email — Eloqua can provide a full slate of useful analytics for future marketing ploys.
Campaigns are also adaptable. With Eloqua, you can put customers on the path to which their best suited if and/or when their behavior becomes unpredictable.
You can also use historical data to optimize send times and deploy campaigns faster with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
Given all these assets, Marketo remains a fierce competitor against Eloqua.
5. ExactTarget/Pardot
ExactTarget is another fully-fledged marketing automation tool with multi-channel targeting. Besides merely sending personalized emails, you can reach customers through mobile app notifications and even their car’s dashboard.
Pardot is meant for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies and works under ExactTarget. ExactTarget is for B2B companies.
6. Customer.io
Customer.io delivers results by sending targeted emails, push notifications, and SMS messages straight to customers’ phones.
The flexibility and control that Customer.io offers are complemented by a user-friendly, bright interface.
Companies such as Reddit, Asics, and Shutterstock trust Customer.io to transform their customer engagements.
With Customer.io, you can check-in with customers and ask for feedback regularly, upsell products by utilizing data-driven segments, and re-engage inactive customers with automatic triggers.
7. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a unique marketing automation tool that allows humans and automation to work together.
Small and medium-sized businesses take to ActiveCampaign to add a personal touch to their marketing campaigns.
Somebody leave an item in a Shopify cart? Employ ActiveCampaign to remind them about their abandoned cart.
Or take into account which customers tend to open your campaign emails the most and lock them in as highly engages customers.
Notice that an interesting contact visited your web page. Send a follow-up email to give them more information.
Customization, naturally, is the name of the game either way.
8. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a popular technology with a particular focus on email marketing. Having been around for quite a while, Mailchimp is a reliable marketing platform to harness business procedures.
Other than curating your emails, your business can use Mailchimp to create a website and even set up an online store!
Design tools for creative templating and audience insights are also major advantages of the platform.
9. Omnisend
Maybe you can guess from the name alone, but Onmisend is an omnichannel marketing platform.
This means its efforts span email, SMS, push notifications, Facebook messenger, and whatever else fits the bill.
Marketers choose Omnisend over other marketing automation tools given its notable ease of use, ease of setup, and high-quality support.
10. Mautic
Unlike most marketing software, Mautic is open-source, meaning those with the expertise to do so can contribute to the platform’s source code.
Currently, Mautic has over 1000 contributors and over 200,000 organizations using the platform.
Mautic users can deploy the tool for content management, social media, and email marketing.
Naturally, reports, questionnaires, forms, and other types of campaign management play an integral role in the software too.
How To Integrate Marketing Automation Tools With Your CRM
Marketing automation integration is somewhat its own industry at this point. Businesses seek to sync their tools with other programs and furnish a revenue-boosting, comprehensive, software ecosystem.
Unfortunately, this undertaking can be quite difficult. While some marketing automation tools are equipped with the odd integration right off the bat, this is not always the case.
Oftentimes, businesses must go out of their way to build customized integrations. And companies that are not tech-oriented struggle the most with such a task.
Luckily, software partners like Trio have identified this need. Enrolling the help of qualified software engineers, Trio has the tools you need to integrate your favorite marketing automation tools with your go-to CRM!
Conclusion
Marketing automation tools encompass a growing industry that thrives off of its necessity. A business that intends to do well must retain and engage customers as the market sees fit.
The modern consumer responds best to personalized messaging. In practice, however, taking the time to get personal can be more cumbersome than it’s worth.
Fortunately, the digital age lends tools like Marketo, HubSpot, MailChimp, and more to automate marketing functions without the sacrifice of personalization.
But to integrate these tools with your CRM, some painstaking work is still required. All that said, Trio is a B2B company using code to optimize your business in whichever way you need. Contact Trio now to get started!
