What is a marketing automation platform?
A marketing automation platform is a tool that allows businesses to do their marketing-related tasks automatically. From email marketing to social media, and from chatbots to analytics, marketing automation platforms are essential for lead generation.
Today, every business can -and should- have a digital presence. Marketing automation platforms are considered to be a good solution for the basic marketing needs of many businesses. The benefits of digital marketing are plenty and adding automation to the equation only makes it better.
Marketing departments use the platforms as well to remove repetitive tasks and increase their overall marketing efficiency. Many times, businesses make use of multiple marketing automation tools, commonly referred to as marketing technology. These marketing automation platforms guide in lead generation through email marketing, SMS, WhatsApp marketing, and chatbots found on social media or websites. Marketing automation tools spread the reach of various marketing campaigns to create inbound marketing.
Marketing automation software brings about the online element of a marketing campaign that includes data analytics. It also creates more short personalized content for individual customers.
What are the main features of a marketing automation platform?
The main features of marketing automation include:
- Account-based marketing
- CRM analytics
- Campaign management
- Inbound marketing
- Lead management
- Marketing ROI
- Targeting and segmentation
- Social marketing
- Email marketing
- Sales email tracking
The benefits of using marketing automation
To begin with, marketing automation platforms can help both B2B and B2C companies.
According to venture harbour, here are some of the benefits they can give you:
- Target potential customers across multiple channels
- Boost customer lifetime value through up-sells and cross-sells
- Save time managing your social media campaigns
- Schedule posts and campaigns ahead of time
- Reduce the time it takes to create campaigns
- Repurpose existing content to nurture leads
- Reward your most loyal customers with a referral program
- Taking the guesswork out of lead scoring
- Automatically follow up with leads
- Less repetition, more creativity
The top marketing automation platforms
You now know what marketing automation is and what are its benefits.
Here are the most notable platforms that make use of it.
Active Campaign
Active Campaign enables a business to be systemized. This tool is affordable and it’s reasonably priced. The “Lite” pricing starts at $9, and there are 3 more plans to choose from – including an Enterprise one. Pricing does not have any mandatory training packages or any hidden costs. It offers a subscription per month at a feasible rate.
Active Campaign, as a tool, only keeps getting better. Active Campaign released recently a new feature called site messaging. However, Active Campaign has many more features than messaging, including email marketing, marketing automation, and machine learning.
Moreover, Active Campaign’s visual campaigns are very user-friendly and any newcomer to the tool can handle it easily. And, for those that need the extra help, the platform offers many training options. On their website, you can find one-on-one training options. There is even an in-person option in the US for the Chicago area. Furthermore, you can find dozens of webinars and walkthrough videos.
Last but not least, the platform is known for its quick and genuinely helpful customer support.
Hubspot
Hubspot is the most popular marketing automation platform.
The platform provides a free version of their software – one without its marketing automation features. The platform allows you to automate your email campaigns without having to touch a single line of code. The automation will save you a lot of time so that you can focus on other things. You can also choose from dozens of triggers, actions and conditions so you can send your emails to the right leads at the right time.
Each workflow you build can have its own KPI. Therefore, you can know whether your emails are working. Hubspot allows you to create sophisticated, targeted workflows and provides you with every contact in your database. The visual editor in Hubspot makes it easy to create workflows in real-time, from simple to more complex follow-up campaigns. You can make use of advanced segmentation logic to find out exactly who is getting tagged to your workflow and when are they being tagged.
After this, you can personalize your emails for every recipient by using specific details from your CRM. But Hubspot does more than email automation. The platform makes use of workflows to set up webhooks, rotates lead to sales, scores lead, and it can easily manage your data in bulk. Furthermore, it updates properties, copies values, etc, and it also triggers internal notifications for you and your team.
Ontraport
Ontraport creates a whole integrated campaign. With Ontraport you can take your leads and customers through a continuous journey along with your brand. The marketing platform can direct your contacts as per their preferences and behaviour. Ontraport is great for optimization and building closer relationships with your audience. Also, it saves you time from the day-to-day marketing tasks and customer follow-ups.
This is done by automating their marketing journey and ensuring that all your customers and leads receive the right message that is intended to reach a specific time. Ontraport helps you automate any part of your customer lifecycle starting. The tool starts with lead nurturing and moves on with referral generation. Next, it encompasses all the post-purchase activities you may need.
This tool has a pre-built template that can be used to create campaigns that cover the most common funnels. Last but not least, the tool integrates email messages, internal tasks, SMS texts, landing pages, digital ads, and opt-in forms. Those integrations will help you create effective automated marketing funnels.
Sendiblue
Sendinblue is a great tool for many different professionals. Agencies, enterprises, eCommerce stores, startups, and marketers can benefit a lot from the tool’s features and flexibility.
Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing platform. This tool allows you to manage transactional emails as well as SMS campaigns and notifications without any additional cost. Sendiblue is also famous for its expert customer care. Its team is always available for providing the best support, should you face any issues. You can ask for help either by chat, phone or by email. The main features of this tool are email marketing, SMS marketing, chat, CRM, transaction email, and segmentation.
And as Sendinblue states on their site: “Sendinblue is an up to 4 times cheaper alternative to Mailchimp”.
Have you tried any of these platforms? We’d love to know what you think about them!
More marketing automation platforms
Now that you know the most popular marketing automation platforms, let’s take a look at the less known and newer ones.
WayMore
WayMore is one of the new-gen marketing automation platforms. It’s an omnichannel solution for your marketing needs with many functions. Accordingly, you can get your personalized messages across a number of channels, including email, messaging apps, push notifications, voice, and SMS. You can segment your users based on their behavior, personalize conversion funnels and create avid brand ambassadors.
The setup of the platform is super easy and does not require any technical skills on your part. It can easily be integrated with your CRM, E-Commerce CMS, customer support, Chatbot and analytics systems.
Last but not least, WayMore takes its support pretty seriously and offers a 24/7 support service to all its customers all over the globe.
Platformly
Platformly is a business management and marketing automation tool. As one will read on their website, this platform “helps you run, automate, and scale your online business”.
This tool gives you a complete picture of your campaigns, so you can understand the individual, rather than just the demographics.
What Platformly does is integrate sales and marketing with one purpose in mind: growth. There are also many integrations to connect with other apps, using Zapier or natively.
segmatiX
SegmatiX is another tool from i-DOCS – a suite of BSS (Business Support System) software modules. It is a fully-featured marketing automation platform designed to serve enterprises and startups alike.
The tool features many functions such as Analytics / ROI Tracking, Sales Intelligence, Segmentation in one place. SegmatiX enables you to create personalized documents that can be sent via several channels (electronically or printed). And with micro-segmentation, segmatiX helps you reach small or neglected market segments
SegmantiX is also available in SaaS and server mode.
Carol is Sr. Digital Marketing Professional currently working in a digital marketing company. He has more than 5 years of expertise in the field and loves to write on various topics related to Marketing, including Influencer Marketing, SEO, SMO, etc.
2 Responses
Very nice and useful list. Currently I’m using Mailchimp for my blog, with the free version. It’s worth to use and I’m thinking to upgrade to the higher business plan.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the Content you shared. The way you explained these platforms was really helpful for me. The way you summed up all the information is quite appreciable.