What are the top marketing automation platforms for managing marketing campaigns effectively?

All MAP platforms offer emails capabilities. You will be able to automate your emailing campaigns based on triggers, create nurture campaigns, lifecycle campaigns etc. You can also segment your emails and personalize content based on segments. You will also be able to track the results of your email campaigns.

The MAP you pick should align with the email and nurture programs you are doing. Some tools are more advanced in their logic like Marketo, and others have basic structures for managing emails like a mailchimp. Understand what you structure looks like and now as well as what the ideal state is through scale. Get the that will let you grow to the ideal state.

A while back, a client was struggling with low engagement rates. We switched them over Hubspot, warmed up their audience, set up a few smaller segments, and tailored the messages just right to their specific audience. From these tweaks, their open rates nearly doubled and their click-throughs soared! Email is far from dead, and with the right strategy and tools, it can work wonders.

HubSpot offers a full suite of marketing automation tools, including email marketing, social media management, lead nurturing, and analytics. Its intuitive interface and robust features make it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.

This can all be done in your MAP system typically. Some of these automations can be built in your CRM but it is best practice to have it built into a workflow from the point of entry. You want to have your scoring, lifecycle stages, and data normalization built into the MAP. You can then have your distribution or the automation to hand off to sales through additional platforms like LeanData, Chili Piper etc.

Pardot and Salesforce are top-notch tools for managing leads, primarily because of their essential platform feature called Einstein. With Einstein, you can integrate AI into your CRM and gain insights into how your company interacts with customers, irrespective of the industry or function.

In today's marketing landscape, social media's importance is indisputable, and automation platforms play a vital role in managing this presence efficiently. They streamline scheduling, monitoring, and analyzing social media activity, freeing up time for strategic planning. Automation ensures a consistent and active presence, saving time and ensuring the smooth execution of your social media strategy.

Most MAP platforms also integrate with social media (facebook, LinkedIn) so you can track results from your campaigns from multiple channels (emails, content, landing page and social media)

While most systems have base level report structure without a solid field management and process you won’t be able to get much from the data. Make sure you have definitions for your fields, consistency on how you use them, and audits of the flows. You are only gonna get out raw data so it’s up to you to structure how it comes in and gets sorted to be able to have strong reports!

One of my clients used separate tools for email, CRM, and their content management—which made everything that much more confusing. We moved them to HubSpot, which integrated all these tools. Though it took some time to get everything set up correctly, the result was that everyone on their team could see the whole customer journey on one platform. Due to this now unified view, they're no longer struggling with data silos!

Personalization stands as a pivotal trend in marketing, with automation platforms leading the charge. These tools enable dynamic content creation and delivery tailored to user behavior, demographics, and preferences. Leveraging machine learning and AI, they craft highly personalized experiences, enhancing audience engagement and loyalty. Through automation-driven personalization, marketing messages strike a deeper chord with target audiences, fostering stronger connections and driving impactful results.

For reporting it‘s better to push all the data to your data warehouse and build your reports from there using power BI or Tableau. This will allow you to build much better reports than the reports on your MAP platform.

Something else to consider here is user-friendliness and support. One thing Hubspot is known for is their incredible support, and I've worked and connected with a bunch of great people there. Same cannot be said for other MAPs :)