Marketing automation has undoubtedly turned out to be a boon for marketers, at a time where a customer demands a consistent and personalized engagement from companies.
A slight lack in this and you will see your customer bidding goodbye to you! In simple terms, marketing automation can be defined as software that performs marketing activities that are of a repetitive nature.
This generally includes activities like generating E-mail campaigns, social media posts, pop up ads, etc.
So if marketing automation software is so useful, why are marketers still having a tough time to get the desired results out of it? Let’s find out.
Ignoring the first part of the marketing funnel:
How can you reach the second step of a staircase if you skip the first one? Well, you can always take a leap, but there’s a high chance that you might fall !
An abundant attitude among marketers is to ignore the brand awareness portion of the marketing funnel.
Creating content for brand awareness is the only manner in which potential quality leads can be created on a regular basis.
Marketers often have a tendency of shunning the lead generation process and spending the majority of their time in using marketing automation for converting the limited leads they had previously generated or trying to squeeze more business out of them.
What they don’t realize is that, in the process of creating value for a very small segment of the target audience, they are missing out on other large and profitable segments that are taken away by their customers.
Even if they do focus on lead generation, they always go for quantity rather than quality.
This involves buying lists of random leads and then nurturing them through marketing automation.
Spammy tactics like these provide the business with nothing but brand value depreciation. Sending unsolicited mails to people, who have never asked for your content, would hurt your website’s IP address reputation like anything.
Low e-mail deliverability rates would be a direct outcome of the minute customer engagement that such e-mail campaigns would elicit.
Therefore you should always conduct a thorough analysis of the current state of your business before getting into the trend wagon and purchasing marketing automation software.
The true potential of marketing automation can only be realized if there is a robust database of potential customers who are genuinely interested in the offering and thus have a high chance of conversion, through marketing automation.
Now that you are aware, when to use marketing automation to ensure the best results, let’s look at a few automation software services like Hubspot’s marketing software integrates that provide the best implementation services when it comes to marketing automation.
(1) SendinBlue
An Ideal software for e-mail marketing and SMS marketing. SendinBlue boasts of a user-friendly interface with a drag and drop facility and customized template gallery.
They also provide a free basic marketing automation plan that allows you to send 300 e-mails daily.
The cheapest plan starts at $7.95 per month that provides unlimited contact storage and 40000 e-mails.
(2) Pardot
It is one of the best software for medium-sized enterprises and B2B firms. They specialize in various services like lead scoring and nurturing, CRM integration, e-mail marketing, etc.
Every interaction that you have with your leads is trackable so that you can easily conduct predictive lead scoring based on the parameters that you have set.
It might turn out to be a bit expensive for small-sized enterprises or individual entrepreneurs as their cheapest plan costs $1000 a month.
(3) ActiveCampaign
It’s highly popular e-mail marketing software. The software is well known for its flexible marketing automation functionality.
A few key features include producing e-mail content based on customer behavioral analysis, automatic addition of customer contacts from various CRM and E-Commerce platform, etc.
They also provide a free 14 day trial with monthly plans starting as low as $29 per month.
(4) Hubspot-
The Hubspot marketing automation software is specifically designed for small and medium enterprises.
Hubspot’s marketing software integrates automatically with its free CRM So that you can generate numerous creative automation ideas, that would have been difficult if you had separate tools for automation and CRM.
Key features include setting up simple e-mail list auto responders or building customized and complex rules designed to target specific customers.
