Discover Shopify App Store – A Comprehensive Handbook 2024
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Summer Nguyen | 11-11-2024
Does your team have more money than time for a lot of repetitive marketing tasks? Does your team want to scale effective marketing channels but one or a few people can not handle all the tasks? Does your team wish to improve the marketing efforts in a defined strategy with better targeting & segmentation? If one of these is the case, marketing automation tools will be a great help and revamp.
According to Google Trends, the term “marketing automation” has been searched tripled times compared to over the past five years. And due to Instapages, 51% of companies currently use marketing automation tools.
In this article, we will share a review list of the best marketing automation tools for you to accomplish effective communication with customers. We will explain why you should acquire a marketing automation tool and the top criteria to consider when choosing a solution.
Table of contents
Marketing automation is a significant process in which you use software to execute marketing & sales tasks such as lead capture, nurturing and management; email marketing; social media; sales-boosting, SEO, advertising, digital marketing, and analytics & reporting.
Marketing automation has been facilitating marketing operations in a vibrant way. Because consumers don’t actually find your brand or your salespeople, statistics have shown that they love to learn about the product at their own pace and expect to be reached when they need/want to make the decision. That is actually the meaning and purpose of marketing automation tools.
Automation marketing works entirely effectively for both B2B and B2C sectors. For example, with B2C businesses, you will have powerful landing pages, worked cart abandonment emails or effective follow-up email campaigns. With B2B, you can choose the right pool of audiences and know exactly when they are ready to close the deal.
Marketing automation tools don’t magically help you to tell what is the best audience and what they care about. This is actually your work at the beginning of the business. But marketing automation tools can refine the list of prospects that you have actively draw in before, based on sketches of who you are after.
Marketing automation tools support you in segmenting and distributing the right content to the right audience. A good marketing solution is a tool that can track the behaviors of your audiences such as website visitors, email recipients, newsletter subscribers, social media audiences, etc. For example, pages they land on, the content they read, newsletters they subscribe to, buttons they click on, emails they open, products they view/share/add to wishlist, and products abandoned in the cart, etc.
Content is also a cornerstone of any marketing action. That said, effective marketing automation tools are those that have stunning ready-to-use templates for popular content types. For example, if you are using an email marketing automation tool, see whether it provides pre-made email templates that can be easily inserted right into the layout and conveniently customized for specific events.
Another important character creating relevant content and message for every brand touchpoint. If you are using a content marketing automation tool, then it should let you know what are the most suitable topics or keywords for a group of users.
Triggering marketing is a typical usage of marketing automation tools. Thus, an impactful automation tool is the one that can perform the right action at the right place and time. For example, showing forms on a scroll or displaying pop-ups on mouse hover or click.
In other words, you can design a workflow for the system and be confident that it will perform actions. And because there are a myriad of conditions that you can think of and want to apply to your workflow, you should choose a tool that is fully-customizable or embraces a flexible workflow designer.
Yes, ease of use is always considered as an essential factor when choosing an automation tool.
First, choose a tool that can visualize any process of your marketing campaign. For example, it can be a sales funnel for your Facebook audiences or free document subscribers. The visualized flowchart benefits your marketing a lot when there is a complex process and whenever you need to show the chart to other members of the team.
Second, the user interface is a worth-to-consider feature to be included in your desirable marketing tool. While the work of marketing research is complicated enough, you will be more pleased with a drag-and-drop design interface whether it’s a flowchart, email template or lightbox layout. Besides, look for apps with a user-friendly management dashboard or intuitive reporting. It might drain your energy out if you have to spend hours arranging elements or figuring out how everything works in a chaotic interface.
Build. Run. Measure. Learn. This marketing cycle lies right in the implementation of marketing automation tools. As a foundational stage of the process, measuring abilities cannot be underestimated in your choice.
First, it must show important metrics of marketing actions. For example, let’s say you are acquiring a sales & marketing automation tool, thus, the report has to calculate page views, form submission, CTA clicks, social post clicks, popup clicks, etc.
Second, if you wish to More advanced, the report can let you know which campaign, email, content type brings you the largest number of contacts.
Another useful feature is email notification. You will need it for updating your team on the sales performance or other metrics such as click rate, open rate, or churn rate.
For example, you can import the contact list from files or third-party services to the tool’s audience list. This will save you a lot of time in manual tasks.
Therefore, if you want to grow your business with marketing automation tools, you should check whether the tool allows integration with your platform or current third party integrations. Not just basic integration like import or export, if you expect a greater result, you can look for even complex synchronization scenarios. To mention a few, sending the form completion statistics, passing contact details to other apps, or synchronizing business data from one app to the others.
So, based on the key factors we have collected and shed light on, here are the top 11+ marketing automation tools that will help you to simplify and improve your marketing and sales efforts in this year.
With AVADA email marketing automation platform, if you are looking for an easy email marketing solution to use, you are at the right place. Avada is a rapidly-growing email marketing platform for marketers that need to automate the email workflow for better results and ROI. Let’s see how this tool elevates your marketing automation.
AVADA Email Marketing’s highlight features:
Avada Email Marketing works intuitively with popular platforms: Shopify (and Shopify plus) and Magento. The tool is designed for small to medium business that requires an easy-to-use but powerful and convenient solution for marketing activities. Built with a user-oriented mindset, the all-in-one email marketing solution can reduce your workloads and lift up your campaigns’ targeting and performance.
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Moosend is another premier solution for those who want to get something done quickly. Labeling itself as the “easiest email marketing” ever, this brand has proven that you can utilize the tools without knowing a single line of code.
Moosend’s features:
In conclusion, Moosend is a good choice for its affordable price and an exclusive list of features. You can definitely build impactful automated marketing campaigns with less time and expect to get better results.
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Activecampaign has been a robust all-in-one marketing solution for marketers, sales teams, and entrepreneurs for such a long time. From sales to marketing, the tool can help you to create automation workflows that are personalized to each customer. Let’s see how you can upgrade your marketing and sales with Activecampaign’s features:
ActiveCampaign’s features:
Activecampaign is well-known for its extensive pre-built automation library from which you can choose the most suitable ones for your campaign. Besides the above features, it also provides a variety of useful tools assisting you in creating a complete customer journey for your any segments. For example, CRM, landing page builder, personalized Facebook ads, SMS marketing, etc. These features will allow you to connect and control all customer touchpoints in one place. Thus, this is a great go-to marketing automation tool for businesses of all sizes.
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Born in 2014, Omisend has incrementally become a popular choice for email marketing. The most outstanding feature of this tool is its focus on e-commerce and convenience for creating essential email types from cart abandonment to driving more newsletter subscribers.
How Omnisend empowers you with its features?
To sum up, if you are in the entry-level or your industry needs only basic automated marketing for typical customer journeys, Omnisend will definitely please you with its user-friendly and easy-to-use interface. With the 4.6/5 rating on G2 and 4.8/5 on Capterra, Omnisend will not let you down. On the other hand, if you are looking for a more diverse solution with a larger range of selections, for example, more pre-built templates and campaigns, you might need to switch to a different complicated tool.
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Being a product of Salesforce, Pardot embraces powerful and scalable feature sets that are specifically designed for B2B businesses. It provides a full solution to marketers and assists sales & marketing activities of all stages. Placing emphasis on creating meaningful connections between the brand and leads, Pardot has become one of the leading solutions in the area. If you are running a B2B business, this could be your significant tool.
What are the powerful Pardot’s automation features?
Overall, Pardot is a powerful end-to-end and all-in-one marketing automation software, which covers and streamlines every aspect of your marketing and sales process. The platform can handle everything from social media, email marketing, account-based marketing. This is surely a good option for large companies with larger marketing and sales operations.
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When launched in 2012, Sendinblue positioned itself as a solution for small-to-medium businesses’ problem: automating email marketing on a budget. At the moment, it is still a feature-wise solution that is exploited by a lot of companies.
Are you curious about its features? Here they are:
In closing, if you are a small business or solopreneur, you definitely need to try some features of Sendinblue. If you find these features are effective for your marketing, stay with it until you want to scale up and need more complicated CRM or automation features.
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Klaviyo is another popular name in the marketing area. Serving as a multi-channel marketing automation tool, according to many users, the tool is well-known for its precise interface and operation. Klaviyo positions itself as an email marketing and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce, which means you will see a lot of personalized and optimized features when creating emails and SMS with it.
So, What are Klaviyo’s important features?
Klaviyo is well-known for its convenient and robust segmentation, customization, and personalization when creating automated sequences. You will rarely find blocks or problems when working with the workflow, email, form, and landing page builder of Klaviyo because their development team knows the users very well. Klaviyo receives a 4.6 rating on G2 and a 4.7 on Capterra.
Price: no plans. Charge for email contacts and SMS messages
Keap is another leading automation tool in the market for small-size-businesses. The tool impresses users by its powerful and flexible automation features which help to guide your leads down to the sales funnels. Let’s see what features Keap provides us to save time and improve the marketing results.
Keap’s marketing automation features:
Overall, Keap - a long-standing provider in the field of automation, has delivered such stable and efficient services to users. Keap actually made essential marketing automation for all e-commerce businesses, at the same time, kept the solution interface extremely lean and user-friendly. Keap receives a 4.1/5 score on both G2 and Capterra.
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Wigzo is a SaaS-based and in-class personalized marketing automation platform to power up your e-commerce and retail brand at scale. It is a full-fledged customer data platform that helps e-commerce enterprises automate their customer engagement through different touchpoints via SMS, Email, On-site, WhatsApp, In-app, and so on.
Wigzo’s marketing automation features:
Price: Starting from $80/month.
Are you looking for a multi-channel marketing automation platform? This can be a promising candidate. WebEngage helps you to connect every touch of your brand with customers and turn them into sales.
This tool presents a lot of awesome features. Let’s see:
Altogether, if you are looking for an affordable tool with dynamic features for engaging with customers from multichannel. This tool might be what you are looking for.
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Act-On is another name of highly-evaluated marketing automation tools, especially for beginners in the market. With good and basic features, the tool can guide users to get familiar with automated marketing tools and methods.
Let’s look at high-point features that are highlighted by users of Act-On:
In brief, Act-On can supply your basic needs for marketing automation at the beginning of your business. It’s interface is intuitive and easy-to-use for an entry-level team. Also, it’s a grab and go tool and quick for creating and running your marketing campaign anytime.
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Marketo is a robust marketing platform from Adobe company. Being one of the biggest names in marketing automation, Marketo provides solutions to businesses of all sizes. Specialties of Marketo range from email marketing, personalization advertising, content created by AI, social media, etc.
Here are outstanding marketing activities that this giant covers:
As you can see, Marketo is quite overwhelming for small or new businesses that haven’t actually defined their marketing as a revenue driver. For instance, if you are looking for an “email marketing automation tool”, then learning to use Marketo might not be a well-suited tool.
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Founded in 2006, Hubspot has become a popular name in the marketing realm when we talk about inbound marketing. Hubspot Marketing Hub is a marketing management and automation solution that helps companies to streamline their sales funnel as well as elevate marketing activities’ effectiveness. Let’s take a look at this well-known tools’ feature category and see what you can do with it.
Hubspot Marketing Hub’s outstanding automation features:
Overall, Hubspot Marketing Hub is a good solution for both marketing teams at the start and medium level. For the starter level, you can take advantage of Hubspot’s blog creator to build a solid cornerstone for your inbound marketing and SEO. At a higher level, you can entirely use the workflows builder to tailor the customer journeys which work best for converting and boosting sales. However, the SEO feature is available in the Pro plan only, which will cost you $800 per month. This could let a lot of users down because the plan is quite high-priced for a number of newcomers.
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LeadSquared is an end-to-end marketing automation tool for businesses of small to medium sizes. The tool mostly focuses on single usability but it could help businesses a lot. In most cases, you will find this tool extremely useful for drip marketing campaigns. With basic and advanced email marketing features, LeadSquared sure will help reduce a great amount of time and effort in one of the most important marketing tactics. Let’s see what is included in this package.
LeadSquared’s highlight features:
Besides, LeadSquared supplies a powerful sales automation & management system, which allows users to set up automated sales workflows to avoid leaked leads and boost conversion. In sum, if you are seeking a simple but powerful tool for your email marketing campaigns, this possibly be a compromising solution. The tool receives a 4.5/5 score in G2 and 4.2/ 5 in Capterra
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Your selection should be based on your marketing and strategy priorities. None of these marketing tools mentioned above provide every feature that you might need. But, all of the tools embrace the most essential marketing automation features that are workflows creation (with tag, score, and “if/then” conditional statement) and marketing assets creation (email, landing page, form). Because with these elements, you can create an automation system of your own, then you can enrich your customer database from data collected from automation campaigns. The more understanding you get about your customers, the more effective your marketing tactics you carry out.
This is the end of our sharing, hope that you get valuable recommendations for your marketing automation selection!