No matter what type of business you’re running, marketing is absolutely essential. The problem with marketing, however, is that it can become time-consuming. You’re probably struggling with your resource management and would love some relief in this department.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many businesses are caught in a perpetual struggle with their available resources.

Fortunately, modern technology has supplied us with various solutions. If you aren’t using marketing automation software, you’re making a huge mistake.

In this article, we’ll help you better understand marketing automation solutions and provide you with reviews of some of the most popular marketing automation software options on the market.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Simply put, marketing automation uses technology to streamline a business’s marketing efforts as much as possible, while still remaining very effective. 

A single marketing automation platform is capable of managing all aspects of your marketing campaign, which includes email, mobile, social media marketing, ad management, post scheduling, and various other digital marketing aspects.

Marketing automation platforms also track and analyze your visitors’ behavior, helping you create a cross-channel journey for your leads. This helps you understand what each customer’s experience looks like, which can significantly improve your sales funnel efficiency, converting more leads to customers.

Why Use Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation takes care of some tasks that might waste your time. Although we’re talking about automation here, the effect of using these platforms doesn’t come off as unnatural and robotic. On the contrary, it’s all pre-programed by you and your employees to be an extension of your business.

Some people keep away from automation and prefer to micromanage their marketing efforts. The bigger your business grows, the less viable focusing on small details becomes. This, of course, translates to marketing, as well. Marketing automation allows you to see the bigger picture and make the most out of your resources.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing automation supplies useful and engaging content that helps create respect and trust for your brand. It’s about educating your leads regarding the services you offer, and showing them that you “mean business.”

Focusing Your Leads

Ad scheduling is far from the only marketing automation tool. As the prospects move further down your sales funnel, they focus more on the product types that spark their interest. Using targeted messaging, your company can reach out to specific leads and convert them to customers.

The more focused a lead becomes, the more the automation platform and the marketing team learns about the potential customer. Finally, the lead is handed over to the sales team, which, by then, already has more than enough knowledge to push them to convert, even to drive reselling.

Do More With Less

The biggest benefit of marketing automation is that it actually allows you to do more with less. This comes as a true blessing, as there’s a lot of pressure in the fast-paced world of digital marketing. 

Generating more leads, closing deals quicker, and growing your revenue has become a requirement if you want to stay afloat in the modern business world. Marketing automation is more than simple “automation.” It actually helps marketing teams efficiently hone in on their leads’ desires.

Understand Your Leads

Another benefit that comes as a “side effect” of marketing automation is the ability to track and optimize user engagement. All leads that come into your funnel are tracked, while the information on them is gathered. This allows you to communicate with your users in a more personalized way.

This goes the other way around, as well. Thanks to marketing automation, you can introduce yourself to your leads and learn which ones are good fits for your company. Leads that never end up converted to customers are irrelevant to you. But such negative lead generation still costs resources. 

Marketing automation helps you understand your leads in a better way and changes the method of lead generation. Additionally, it tells you which leads you can skip on.

Nurture Your Prospects

Your job as a business isn’t just telling the leads that you are there. The entire point is that you sell your products/services. Some leads convert to customers on their own. 

Others will never convert. But most require nurturing. Lead nurturing requires relevant information about them, which is exactly what marketing automation brings to the table. A brilliant knock-on effect of lead nurturing is that, once they become a customer, they become a very loyal one.

Best Marketing Automation Platforms

Naturally, you’ll find a wide variety of marketing automation services available on the market. Choosing a perfect one for you is never easy, which is why we’ve decided to round up a list of some of the best marketing automation options you’ll find out there.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a very popular piece of marketing software. Like most similar platforms, it’s a bundle of marketing and sales tools that help your marketing efforts. HubSpot, naturally, comes with marketing automation tools.

The free version of the software exists, but expect to pay up for a subscription if you want to use its marketing automation features.

Now, HubSpot may not be the cheapest option on the market, but this platform is among the most intuitive and easy-to-use. We’re talking about the bulk of its features, including marketing automation. Then, there are the analytics tools, which are simply brilliant.

But HubSpot is, yet again, hindered by its pricing. As your company grows, you’ll note that the HubSpot expenses are following suit.

2. Autopilot

Unlike HubSpot, Autopilot is purely a marketing automation tool. Building automation sequences can be extremely frustrating and confusing. The way Autopilot avoids this is perhaps one of its biggest upshots.

Autopilot uses emojis, explanations, and stickers to annotated automation sequences, which not only makes it easier for the creator to get around, but also allows them to make the sequences self-explanatory for other team members and collaborators.

Don’t be turned off by how messy the idea looks at first glance. Like anything else, Autopilot’s automation sequence method can seem a bit confusing initially. However, once you’ve figured things out, you’ll be able to go back to an automation sequence an entire year after creating it and still make sense of things quickly.

Autopilot also allows you to set triggers for various actions within the platform itself. In this way, you don’t have to bother using various third-party tools like Zapier.

3. Omnisend

Most marketing automation tools will work for most businesses. Omnisend, however, is specifically aimed at eCommerce companies.

Omnisend isn’t the best-designed marketing automation platform. However, it introduces very unique and innovative features, such as integrations with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Every eCommerce marketer will appreciate this hugely, seeing as how Omnisend allows them to automate their marketing efforts on a variety of channels.

Omnisend, unlike the majority of other marketing automation platforms, works solely with eCommerce companies. This has allowed them to specifically focus on eCommerce needs and challenges, such a cart abandonment reduction and product reviews driving.

This platform has been made for eCommerce platforms like Magento and Shopify. As long as you’re on one of the major ones, you don’t have to worry about its compatibility with Omnisend.

4. Rejoiner

Most marketing automation tools give your marketing team more wiggle room and provide a clearer overall picture on your leads. Marketing automation also helps nurture your leads and build better customer relationships.

However, some businesses find delegating the entire marketing automation management to a third-party service a preferable option. Rejoiner offers exactly this.

Of course, you can opt to use their intuitive and feature-rich platform, but if you choose, their in-house team of experts is more than happy to take the marketing automation helm and handle it for you.

The best part about Rejoiner is that it has an incredibly high customer satisfaction score.

The downside with this platform, however, is that it is far from cheap. Expect to pay somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000 per month for their services.

Bonus Alternative: Monday

Monday isn’t really a marketing automation tool, per se. It doesn’t offer all lead information gathering and ad automation features. Monday is a team collaboration platform that focuses on task and project management, and has some more basic CRM tools.

Its initial setup is very straightforward – it’s a simple grid and you choose what goes into it. Each row contains a task or something that you wish to track. The columns are assigned with task attributes.

So, what does this have to do with marketing automation? Well, although we don’t recommend taking things completely into your own (or your marketing team’s) hands, Monday is pretty much the only way to tackle marketing properly without any automation.

That said, Monday truly shines when used in combination with an automation tool. Think of this platform as a team collaboration tool for personally tracking your marketing automation efforts.

Monday helps you with overall team management, from project management, design, task management, HR, and software development to marketing, CRM, sales, and various other tasks.

Marketing Automation FAQs

How do you start a marketing automation?

Marketing automation is impossible without a piece of marketing automation software. The mentioned platforms are the exact type of tools that you’re looking for here. After you’ve selected a marketing automation platform, you need to integrate it with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform.

Unless you are using your CRM’s marketing automation features to begin with. Then, you import your contacts, set up email/post templates and other options. Automation is ready to start.

Does marketing automation really work?

Marketing automation depends on the person/team behind it. If everything is done properly, you can expect sales increases of as much as 15%. But marketing automation isn’t just about increasing your sales.

Perhaps even more importantly, marketing automation is about streamlining the processes that take up your business resources. Do less with more, that’s the final goal here.

Who uses marketing automation?

Every business niche can benefit from marketing automation. A company that refrains from using these tools is bound to realize their importance at some point. Sooner is always better than later.

Whether we’re using B2B adopters, such as software, electronics, telecommunication, and financial companies, or B2C businesses that range across various industries, marketing automation can make a huge difference in their success.

What is lead scoring in marketing?

Lead scoring means putting your leads against a scale that indicates how much value your business can expect from the said prospect. This is done so that the marketing specialists can properly direct their focus and effort when targeting and generating leads.

Marketing automation tools are of huge help in this department. A marketing automation platform will automatically rank the leads for you.

What is marketing automation integration?

A platform’s integration capability indicates its capacity to synchronize with other programs. This is important for making certain tools work in combination with one another. This is a crucial factor to pay attention to when choosing your ideal marketing automation platform.

For instance, do you want Slack integration? Is this irrelevant for you? Maybe your CRM can’t sync with a particular marketing automation platform. These are all factors that are well worth considering.

Marketing Solutions at Your Fingertips

Marketing automation is an immensely important factor for your marketing efforts. If you think that you don’t need this kind of a feature yet, chances are that you are wrong.

Each one of the platforms from the above list is great in its own respect. We can’t exactly tell you which one to go with, but we hope that we’ve provided enough information for you to make a good choice.

In any case, you should now realize the importance of marketing automation. Yes, all your competitors are likely already on it. And so are the big names. It’s only a matter of time before you recognize the need for it yourself.