A successful marketing campaign required multiple repetitions of marketing tasks. With the help of marketing automation software, you are relieved of the responsibility of supervising such repetitive tasks as it puts your routine work on autopilot. However, you still have control of what happens in your marketing campaign but no longer are involved in the behind-the-scenes of the campaign. With the right automation software, you can have ample time in your hands to focus on your creative ideas to enhance the campaign. Remember that there is no one size fits all software solution. To choose the right software, you need to understand your specific goals and needs.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to the technologies and software platforms designed to assist marketing departments to more efficiently and effectively market on multiple online channels and automate all repetitive tasks.
Here's a list of the top 8 marketing automation software that you can choose from.
- HubSpot
- Constant Contact
- EngageBay
- ActiveCampaign
- Freshworks CRM
- Pardot
- Acoustic
- Act-On
Let's take a look at each of these options in detail and find out which one is best for you.
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is an excellent choice for those looking forward to easily supercharging their sales, marketing processes, and customer service with automation. This software goes beyond just automating your business as you can also integrate and optimize various departments in one centralized location and streamline your entire workflow. Your team wouldn't need to jump forth and back from different software to get the information they need as you can automate the transfer of data from one team to another.
HubSpot's marketing automation capabilities are super-efficient with fine granular control. You can set up single or multiple drip campaigns as complex as you prefer with dependencies, triggers, delays, and much more. You can also let email follow-ups, as well as campaigns, run automatically. Beyond email automation, HubSpot also allows you to contact and spearhead client organization, data management, lead qualification, team notifications, and much more. All your workflow will be smooth with the help of the clean visual interface. All the disparate parts of your marketing campaign and departments can be linked together to work efficiently and through the visualizing team and action connections, you'll have new ways to automatize your campaigns. By using one of HubSpot's suites, you get access to features like,
- SEO planning and blog post
- Ad management and tracking
- Social media management
- AI-powered live chat
- Landing pages and forms
- Revenue attribution reports
- A/B split testing
You can sign up for a free demo with HubSpot to access all of their features. There are 3 packs to choose from namely, starter pack, professional pack, and enterprise pack. Let's check out what these packs offer.
Starter Pack ($50)
In this pack, you'll be allowed to access features only a set number of times while other features are completely missing.
- The starter pack offers CRM, customer service, marketing, and sales.
- It starts with 50 dollars for 2 users and offers 1000 contacts
- For 11.25 dollars per month, you can add 1000 more contacts.
- For more than 2 users, you need to pay an additional 6 dollars per month.
Professional Pack ($1780)
- Professional packs come for 1780 dollars per month for 2000 contacts.
- It is 1600 per month if you pay annually.
- You can have 5000 more contacts for 250 dollars per month.
Enterprise Pack ($5000)
- Enterprise pack comes up with 5000 dollars per month for 10,000 contacts with all the features HubSpot has to offer.
- For 100 dollar increments, your number of allowed contacts increases to 20,000.
You could build your own HubSpot bundle and the number of features you need for each hub. If you want more marketing features you can opt-out of some of the features of CRM, sales, and customer service. Also, if you are an alumnus or current member of HubSpot's venture capital partners, incubators, or accelerators with a round of series A funding, you can get up to 90 percent off of the first year.
2. Constant Contact
Modern marketing requires being active on the internet on a wide array of devices at the same time. Constant contact is best for social media engagement and email marketing.
- This platform offers a unified dashboard to push new social media posts and reply to messages on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter from one place.
- You can also set up automated drip campaigns and email sequences with ease.
- You could schedule social media posts for the next month or quarter to sync the messaging up with the email campaigns.
- The platform has an intensely customizable emailer where you can segment your messaging with individual sequences based upon information about your contacts.
- You can gather crucial info about the members on your list manually or you could use the custom form builder that Constant Contact offers to capture it on the landing pages. Based on any of this information you can set up individual email sequences that will automatically be sent based on the triggers that you set.
The Email Plus Plan ($50)
Social media monitoring, posting, and messaging are available on all of Constant Contact's plans. The most useful email features are offered in the Email Plus plan where you can set up automated welcome and behavioral sequences along with some dynamic content. The plan starts at 45 dollars per month for 500 subscribers with the price scaling with the increase in the number of additional contacts you put forth.
The Pro Plan ($70)
If you want unified marketing and email with no advanced automation, you can still get an unlimited number of email sends and automated email resends to people who haven't opened the email, in the standard Email plan which costs 20 dollars per month for 500 contacts.
3. EngageBay
EngageBay is the best marketing automation software for improving your customer support as it considers that one can't have support, sales, and marketing existing only in siloes. It is especially important where your post-sale engagement is as important as getting the sale in the first place. EngageBay's automation capabilities will help your customer service by allowing you to set up drip campaigns, email sequences, and triggers with the same automation tools to support reps. On this platform, you can set up automation based on the following triggers,
- Tags removed or added
- Assigned rep change
- Ticket priority change
- Ticket status change
- Ticket creation
This will ensure that you can effectively streamline the flow of support requests and lessen the pressure on the reps to handle backlogs. All assignees and priorities are set clearly and automatically updated which takes a lot of manual work off your table. This system has a strong integration with sales and marketing automation which ensures a better customer experience.
How EngageBay Works
- EngageBay's automation tool begins action the moment a prospect expresses interest by joining your list.
- Then through the sales funnel and purchase, the CRM takes care of routine touchpoints, warming up, nurturing, and more.
- With all the information and subsequent interaction gathered, the support reps will be well prepared to handle all the traffic by your customers which is a huge task if your team is handling more than the troubleshooting issues.
The Growth Pack ($29.99)
EngageBay's services can be tried out for absolutely free. They offer a free-forever package that has no automation tools but has access to the platform and dashboard. In the Growth plan automation tools start at 29.99 dollars per user per month that can handle 50k contacts per month along with 25k branded emails.
The Pro Plan ($47.99)
You can upgrade to the Pro plan with 47.99 dollars per user per month which will have an unlimited number of contacts and double the number of emails, i.e., 50k emails every month.
4. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is the best software out there for email marketing which is the best option for digital marketing. This platform also offers an affordable tool for all the automation features for leads in your funnel along with omnichannel automation that includes instant messaging and SMS, Facebook, and live chat. Their most popular features at every point in the funnel are,
- Engage: subscription forms, site tracking, and automation maps
- Nurture: event tracking, dynamic/predictive content, and list segmentation
- Convert: win probabilities, split actions, and contact and lead scoring
- Support: e-commerce, A/B split testing, SMS, predictive sending
You can also set up a number of different types of emails such as,
- Automated funnels
- Scheduled emails
- Broadcasts
- Triggered or targeted emails
- Autoresponders
You can design the emails by using their intuitive drag and drop designer. Another way is to use one of their 25+ pre-made mobile-responsive templates. ActiveCampaign has 4 plans such as,
- Lite: $9 per month for 3 users
- Plus: $49 per month for 25 users
- Professional: $129 per month for 50 users
- Enterprise: $229 per month for unlimited users
Each tier mentioned above included advanced features while the pricing is based on the number of contacts on your list starting from 500.
5. Freshworks CRM
Freshworks CRM was earlier Freshmarketer and includes a lot of automation features to attract and nurture customers. It requires no additional technical skills or a support team to get going. You can access these features while using Freshworks CRM.
- Real-time funnel analytics
- Audience segmentation
- Advanced personalization
- Dynamic heat maps
- A/B and split testing
- Conversion rate optimization tools
- Website, form, and offline event tracking
- Visual drag and drop customer journey builder
- Email campaigns and contact management
Limited Free Plan
You can opt for either a free forever plan or a 21 day free trial for the paid plans. These prices depend on the number of contacts you have.
Paid Plans ($20)
They have Enterprise, Pro, and Growth plans for full Freshworks CRM which start at $20 per month for 1000 active contacts. The plan for marketing clouds starts at $19 per month for 500 active contacts.
6. Pardot
Pardot is the best marketing automation software for B2B businesses as it helps such companies to easily build relationships and generate revenue from them. Starting from lead generation to sales alignment, Pardot offers a wide set of features such as,
- Pardot Einstein for behavior and lead scoring
- Funnel and lifecycle reporting
- Campaign performance report
- Lead activity tracking
- Social media analytics, profiling, and scheduling
- Smart forms plus drag and drop builder
- Landing page builder
- Advanced segmentation
- Visual multipart automation creator
- Prospect scoring
- Lead nurturing email automation
- Dynamic data-based and content personalization
Plans Offered By Pardot
- Growth: $1250 per month for 10,000 contacts with basic features
- Plus: $2500 per month for 10,000 contacts with analytics + deeper automaton
- Advanced: $4000 per month for 10,000 contacts with all features and AI
- Premium: $15,000 per month for 75,000 contacts with supercharge features included
Add-ons Offered By Pardot
- Salesforce Engage: $50 per user per month
- Analytics Plus: $3000 per month
- Engagement History: $300 per year
7. Acoustic
Acoustic is the best marketing automation software for centralized multi-channel and cross-platform marketing. Briefly, it offers,
- Personalization
- Email campaigns
- Web content management
- Experience management
The marketing automation tool, Acoustic Campaign encompasses,
- Mobile apps
- Push notifications
- SMS
- Group chats
- Social media
- Advertisements
- Emails
- Print campaigns
You can combine Acoustic Campaign with Acoustic Analytics and Acoustic Personalisation to obtain powerful campaign management. With Acoustic Campaign you can have access to all these features,
- Reporting and analytics
- Advanced personalization
- One to one Ada and lookalike audiences
- Planning and budgeting
- Customer journey mapping
- Split A/B testing
- Lead management and scoring
- Seamless mobile and digitize channel campaigns
- Action, logic, and AI-recommended triggers
- Drag and drop campaign builder
Acoustic also has a public forum where you can publicly put forth your queries. They also provide an online academy full of educational training videos. It is best for businesses running campaigns across various platforms but it's overkill for anyone running a single-channel campaign.
Plans Offered By Acoustic
The pricing for the plans is not available online. For that, you have to schedule a consultation with the Acoustic team. Hence, you can't just sign up and start immediately.
8. Act-On
Act-On is perfect for marketing agencies as they can handle hundreds of clients at any given time. It offers the following features,
- Interactive reporting dashboard
- Pre-built emails, forms, and landing page templates
- Behavior and demographic segmentation
- Customer/prospect scoring
- Website and landing page tracking
- Automated engagement programs
You can customize the real-time analytic dashboard for both external and internal use so that both you and your client know what's happening. You can furthermore use this information to improve the customer ROI, optimize entire marketing campaigns, and build better technology stacks.
Closing Thoughts
You need the best marketing automation software to enhance your engagement with your audience and clients as well as to monitor and supervise the campaigns you run to promote your company. The best is to leave it to software that will automate all the emails and campaigns.
