10 BEST MARKETING PLATFORMS IN APRIL 2020

To improve businesses, you must have to take help from the best marketing automation platforms. In this modern age, you cannot avoid it anyhow. That’s why we who do businesses should know the best marketing platforms and adjust with it gradually.

What Is a Marketing Automation Platform?

With more than 60% of marketing leaders now using at least one marketing automation platform in their toolkit, 2020 is shaping up to be a great year in product innovation and market penetration for these types of products. But what exactly is a marketing automation platform, and how can it help your business grow?

Well, as the name suggests, these systems enable marketers to automate a large chunk of their activities, it enables companies to target their existing and potential customer base more effectively. The application can be very narrow e.g. a standalone e-mail package or could encompass a broad range of different channels such as e-commerce, social media, CRM, website and content personalization, and more.

How do the best marketing Automation platforms work?

This automation enables marketers to integrate data along more touchpoints to understand their customer journey in more comprehensive detail and optimize each interaction with the business.

Traditionally, the uptake has been higher in B2C businesses, as there are typically a greater number of customers, which requires a heavier focus, however more and more B2B businesses are embracing automation, with 50% of millennials now a core component of the workforce, B2B customers expect the same level of customer experience in their purchase journey as in the B2C field.

The total market for this sector is projected to reach $7.63 billion by 2025, and the field is still competitive with a lot of key players scrambling to capture the market through innovation and acquisition of late adopters.

So how do you find the perfect solution for your business? Simply searching for the best marketing automation platforms will usually deliver a list based on sales revenue, and these results are likely to yield the pricier options available. If you’re a small to medium-sized enterprise, going for these solutions may not be cost-effective or the best option for your business.

Automation Software Packages

In this article, we’ll look at marketing automation software packages, weighing up the pros and cons of your business. We’ll look at these tools based on their price and their ability to execute, measure, and analyze marketing efforts effectively.

This should enable you to familiarize yourself with what’s available before speaking to a consultant. MarketingAutomationInsider.com has a very helpful article on the most popular marketing automation software for 2015. According to them, there are three key trends in the industry which will continue to shape the future of the best marketing automation platforms:

Statistics

• Marketing automation is becoming cheaper with more and more key players entering the market
• The technology has reached the tipping point and mass adoption is set to continue
• Whilst the above is true, there is still a large chunk of businesses who are late adopters, and the majority of growth will come from these businesses

Looking at the statistics, here are the most popular marketing automation tools available right now, with their current market share in brackets.

1.HubSpot (36.3%)

2. Infusionsoft (24.3%)

3. Marketo (11%)

4. Pardot (8%)

5. Eloqua (7.8%)

6. Act-On (6.5%)

7. Silverpop (2.8%)

8. Ontraport (1.9%)

9. Sharpspring (1.3%)

(Source: https://www.iris.xyz)

What Is a Marketing Automation Tool? 

A marketing automation tool is a piece of a software platform that enables the automation of activities related to marketing. This can help organizations increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing campaigns.

With the help of the best marketing automation platform, you can automate repetitive tasks such as social media posting, digital advertising, campaign management, data analysis, and email amongst others.

While automation is the primary function of a marketing automation tool, it also offers other options such as CRM integration, web, and marketing intelligence.

Throughout this blog, we’ll look at the 10 most innovative marketing automation platforms worth considering in 2020. Before we delve into the platforms, let’s look at some of the key features of a marketing automation tool.

If you want to know more about Marketing Automation Trends, you can know from here.

What Are the Key Features of a Marketing Automation Tool?

A marketing automation tool can be a standalone product focusing on one area with limited features, or an advanced system that manages and connects a variety of different data sources, channels and touchpoints within a marketing campaign. Marketers can find the best solution for their activities based on which of these features they need to effectively deliver on their objectives. This section looks at some of the key features to consider when looking at the best marketing automation platforms.

1. Integration

At its core, one of the most basic and standard functionalities of an automation tool is the ability to integrate your tech stack. Systems such as CRM tools, CDP tools, CMS systems, and Analytics can be brought into one place, enabling you to have full visibility and a single source of truth. This degree of integration allows you to streamline your operations and manage campaign activities effectively.

Some tools, such as Click Dimensions will only work alongside Dynamics CRM, so it’s important to make note of what systems the software will need to integrate with and plan accordingly.

2. Lead Management

Another fundamental feature of any marketing automation tool is lead management. This includes identifying your prospects and capturing leads, mapping their activities across the sales funnel, and monitoring and tracking potential buyers. A seamless lead management system helps marketers know exactly what their prospect is doing. It’s important to understand what processes your business has currently to manage leads, and what you’re looking to achieve, for example, do you currently use lead scoring to identify what leads to prioritize? Do you want to customize user journeys based on this? These are all important questions to answer when considering this.

3. Email Marketing

Marketing automation is often confused with email marketing automation. Email marketing is only a fragment of a complex war chest of marketing tools. Automation platforms boost email marketing with complex capabilities such as triggers, events, personalization, scheduling, and tracking.

You should consider how you want to use this capability to nurture and engage new prospects and increase your revenue with your existing customer base.

4. Segmentation

Segmentation is the key to personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, making it an essential feature for a good marketing automation system.

Marketing platforms should enable you to segment your customer base on a variety of different characteristics and combinations such as referral source, physical location, demographics, firmographics, behavior, and predictive analytics.

It is therefore critical to understand how the system will connect with your CRM system, how your data is currently structured, and how you plan on effectively segmenting your user base.

5. Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and reporting are imperative to any marketing campaign. Robust analytics and reporting functionality are a major essential for any marketing automation tool. This includes comprehensive data collection and analysis, customized reporting for different stakeholders, and facilitating data-driven decisions. Again, this links to integration, to report effectively, you will need a system which effectively links the different data sources from systems within your business, you want to find a solution that can give you a holistic picture of your customer journey, and enables you to optimize customer touchpoints.

6. Social Automation

Social media campaigns are an integral part of marketing strategies. It is therefore critical that the best marketing automation platform tool easily integrates with various social channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. This also includes automation, scheduling, tracking engagement, and omnichannel campaign integration. Best Marketing Automation Platforms will lead you the way to success.

Some advanced tools also offer features such as social listening and sentiment analysis to enhance your social marketing efforts. Automating social media efforts will help you to not only optimize this channel but also understand the business implication of your social media activities.

7. Workflow Management

Every automation tool must provide basic workflow creation and management functionality. Workflows can enable an automated response based on set behavioral triggers such as page visits, interactions with emails, social engagement, forms, and requests. Workflow management is, therefore, a critical feature in any automated campaign.

Some platforms such as HubSpot are great at doing this across sales, marketing, and customer service systems. Depending on your requirements, you should look for a system that can connect your different channels with automated workflows.

8. Real-Time Notifications

Digital marketing campaigns need to continually evolve through testing and continuous improvement, it is, therefore, vital to be able to continually track and monitor activities. An effective automation tool needs to be able to provide you with real-time data.

This is critical, especially when connecting multiple systems together, you should take stock of your existing systems, how frequently data can or is being updated as some are faster than others.

The benefits of an Automation Tool 

So, what is the benefit of a marketing automation platform, and why are businesses investing heavily in these systems?

The Best Marketing Automation Platforms enable businesses to make savings in their overall marketing costs, by automating key steps of their marketing activities, there is a reduced need to hire additional bloggers, PR specialists, and marketers to run an evaluate a complex campaign. Automation also leads to a reduced likelihood of human error, however, most importantly it allows marketers to connect various data sources to build a more holistic picture of what is going on and through this retarget and remarket to customers more effectively — it allows a level of personalization that is not possible through traditional techniques.

How Does A Marketing Automation Platform Work?

The Best Marketing Platform has made a life for marketers a lot easier than it ever has been.

• You can complete a complex task through a workflow with the click of a button, or with minimal input through triggers and automation.
• It can enable you to shift towards an inbound model, where customers come to you through lead nurturing and complex targeting.

Let’s take an example of a campaign with Marketo, before marketing automation, you would push out content across different channels aimed in most cases at a broad audience and hope that they would eventually find their way to your website and purchase goods or services. Best Marketing Automation Platforms need to get your desired success.

With Marketo, you can set up a custom user journey, based on criteria, each customer will see different content on your website, by tracking their activities, you can assign them a lead score that displays different content to them depending on where they are in the user journey according to their score. If they click away from your website, you can retarget them with online advertising. This way, you can tailor content and message to them based on how they’ve interacted with your business at different touchpoints and measure the effectiveness of your campaign at each step.

In short, marketing automation software has considerably extended what is possible with marketing campaigns. In other words, it has enabled personalization and journey optimization to a degree that wasn’t possible before. Using a tool like this can help you to nurture customers until they are ready to make contact with your business, enabling your sales team to focus on converting qualified warm leads at the point of the first contact.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing put simply is a methodology that attracts customers through the use of valuable content and personalized experiences that are built around their interests. (https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing) In contrast, outbound marketing is about interrupting audiences with content that they may or may not want. Inbound tactics seek to form connections by creating content that solves problems. This stronger connection is only possible through the use of automation, and data-driven targeting.

Best Marketing Automation Platforms are all related to it. Some of the inbound marketing channels that marketers use to target their customers are Email, Facebook, Instagram, Automatic Chat Bots, Affiliate Marketing, and YouTube. As a user, you come across this experience every single day. When you repeatedly look at those, it delivers tailored content that forms a relationship with you and seeks to solve the challenges that you’re facing. You then think these people are giving me this for free, imagine what I’d get if I actually paid them money? That is inbound marketing.

Some of the key features of marketing automation software include:

• Social media marketing
• Analytics for CRM
• Lead Management
• Account-Based Marketing
• Inbound Marketing
• Targeting & Segmentation
• Marketing ROI
• Campaign Management

In a rapidly changing landscape, if marketers cannot acclimatize with the trends to automate their emails, websites, and social media, they will easily fall behind competitors in 2020 and beyond. 

So, you must now be wondering what these tools are? Below are 10 of the best marketing automation platform for small and medium-sized businesses, correct as of April 2020.

1. HubSpot

www.hubspot.com

HubSpot Marketing Automation tool

Founded in 2006, HubSpot is the biggest name in the best marketing automation platforms today. Their products and services are primarily aimed at providing tools for social media marketing, content management, search engine optimization, sales enablement, e-mail marketing, and web analytics. They have a model whereby the entry-level product is free, and users can turn on various features that enable a greater deal of automation if needed.

Known as a leading growth platform, HubSpot gained fame for its inbound marketing campaign offerings. The tool has over 64,500 subscribers for its marketing hub, sales hub, and service hub, along with a powerful CRM. The company also hosts the HubSpot blog, which is a content goldmine for beginners to marketing as well as small marketing teams. It is one of the Best Marketing Automation Platforms.

HubSpot provides a full high growth suite for your marketing and sales tasks, and, thanks to it, you can easily integrate chatbots for your websites, or you can set up an email autoresponder for your customer list. It’s just an easy, and intuitive platform to use. 

You can master the use of the software through HubSpot Academy, and they will guide you thoroughly. Once you master it, the possibilities are endless. This will help your business reach that next level because by utilizing the combination of these high growth suites you will able to automate your workflows beyond emails and will be able to scale fast and spend less time on repetitive tasks.

What HubSpot offers

HubSpot offers a vast array of advanced features like custom landing pages, dynamic content, Search Engine Optimization, forms, social automation, automated email, and personalization capabilities. These features make the tool the right choice for startups and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB). As it’s the number on the system at the minute, it’s naturally compatible with other leading CRM systems such as Salesforce and integrates with various e-mail and enterprise platforms.

The entry-level version of HubSpot is free and features a lot of advanced functionality such as 2000 free email sends each month, and integrations with website APIs and ad/ analytics platforms, advanced features such as workflows and automation within the CRM start at $50 to $2400 per month. With its customer-centric approach, easy-to-use UI, and advanced functionality, this product makes our list for the top automation platforms of 2020 for good reason.

What are the best features of HubSpot

The features of HubSpot are continually being developed. And the tool has a vast array of features such as Sales, Marketing, Automation and Analytics that can be turned on at the touch of a button. Check their website regularly as they’ve constantly bringing out new features and tools.

In terms of advanced features, users love the content optimization system within the product which has content that changes based on the customer lead score/ lifecycle stage. It also has excellent tools to help with SEO and can make recommendations about your pages. Blogs and other content can easily be analyzed for performance as well.

Features include:

• Business blogging
• Social media management
• SEO tools
• Lead management
• Landing page and call-to-action button generator
• Website builder
• Marketing automation
• Email campaign management
•  Competitor benchmarking
• In-depth revenue, full-funnel, marketing channel analytics

Price: $200/month (3 users, 100 contacts); $800/month (3 users, 1,000 contacts); $2,400/month (3 users, 10,000 contacts) although the features can be customized based on what functionality you want to use the platform for e.g. CRM, Analytics, Sales, Customer Service or Marketing Automation.

2. Maropost

https://www.maropost.com

Maropost is a Toronto based marketing automation start-up and has been recognized as a leader by G2 Research. It offers unified customer engagement solutions primarily in the B2C arena. There is a plethora of advanced features such as AI-powered recommendations for customers, machine learning tools, multi-channel engagement, and an e-commerce optimization tool. The product is highly scalable and offers out of the box API integrations with a variety of platforms and third-party tools. To stand out in an area such as eCommerce is especially challenging for start-ups and Maropost does this effectively with its advanced feature set, this is why we’ve included it in our top automation tools for 2020.

What Maropost offers?

Here are some of the key features of Maropost:

• Automated e-mails
• Data segmentation and targeting
• Drag-and-drop functionality
• Custom landing pages
• A personalized dashboard with widgets
• Social Media Marketing
• Email and multichannel marketing
• SMS Messaging Campaigns

What are the best features of Maropost

Maropost excels in content creation across a range of channels including email, phone messaging, social media and web-based campaigns. It has a strong automation functionality across these platforms. Maropost also partners with companies such as Adobe, Zoho CRM, Sugar CRM and Salesforce to ensure seamless integration into their CRM software.

Pricing: Basic subscriptions start at $279/ month with 10 users, the professional subscription is $479/ month with 20 users, custom enterprise packages are available for most users.

3. SendinBlue 

https://www.sendinblue.com

The third popular platform which businesses use for marketing automation is SendinBlue. This company originally started life as a digital agency but ended up developing a powerful email marketing tool which soon transformed into a well-known marketing automation package. 

SendinBlue is an all-in-one digital marketing toolbox that provides relationship marketing solutions. With advanced features such as landing pages, Facebook ads, retargeting campaigns, complex automation workflows, and transactional emails, SendinBlue is an ideal fit for medium-sized businesses looking to expand their marketing functionalities. SendinBlue is a close competitor of Mailchimp and offers similar features. Its advanced features and modern appeal make it a contender in the top ten marketing automation platforms of 2020.

What SendinBlue offers?

Here are some of the key features of SendinBlue:

• Mobile-Friendly Email Design Templates
• Custom HTML Designs
• Customer Support
• Unlimited Contacts
• Customized Sign-up Forms
• Advanced Contact Segmentation
• Real-Time Reporting
• Link Tracking
• Hard Bounce & Subscription Management

What are the best features of SendinBlue

SendinBlue offers a unique arsenal of personalization features to create a unique experience for customers, whilst the software is a fully fledged marketing automation platform, its strongest feature is still the email marketing functionality that served as the foundation for the tool from its inception.

Pricing: The free version boasts basic features, and the paid version costs between $25 to $173 with a more comprehensive set of advanced tools.

4. Ontraport

https://ontraport.com

Ontraport is a marketing automation platform and CRM system that can enable you to manage all of your assets in a single location. It is an ideal automation solution for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and small businesses.

The tool has all of the basic features you’d expect from a marketing automation platform, in addition to this it has a host of other functionalities like landing pages, workflows, sales funnels, customer journey mapping and custom web forms. This enables businesses to enhance the experience for customers.

Ontraport gives you the software in which you can integrate all your marketing campaigns in one place. You can then launch your automated marketing campaigns and integrate all your lead generation pieces from emails to pages to popup forms.

We’ve chosen this product for our top 10 list because of the ease of use and ability to manage the customer journey across the different digital touch points.

What Ontraport offers?

Here are some of the key features of Ontraport:

• Email marketing
• Customized Landing Pages
• SMS Text Marketing
• Custom Forums
• Membership Sites

What are the best features of Ontraport

Ontraport is a powerful automation platform, however its standout feature is its block-based editor that is used for creating emails, landing pages and web forms. It allows users to create coupons and countdown timers along with social media integration which is unique. The software also boasts an impressive campaign builder tool which visualizes workflows and triggers effectively.

Pricing: Ontraport offers 4 different plans.

• Basic ($79/month)
• Plus ($147/month) 
• Pro ($297/month) and 
• Enterprise ($497/month)

5. ActiveCampaign

www.activecampaign.com

Founded in 2003 in Chicago, ActiveCampaign is a leader in the small business marketing automation space.

The company boasts 50,000 satisfied customers as of 2019 and contains a multitude of advanced features. These include things like lead scoring, event tracking, SMS marketing, predictive targeting, dynamic content and basic automation features.

Whilst it isn’t as feature rich as some of its competitors, it is an ideal fit for smaller businesses and start-ups with just enough functionality to get going, and with a price tag of $9 it is ideal for stretched budgets.

The tool integrates well with a lot of other platforms and is ideal if you don’t want to spend dubious amounts on IT consultants and marketing automation in general.

This product features in our list as it’s a no-frills option for businesses on a tight budget.

What ActiveCampaign offers?

Here are some of the key features of the product:

• Marketing automation
• Smart auto responses
• Integrations with over 200 external services
• Drag and drop email creation
• Track your contacts on your website and in apps
• Campaign, contact and list reporting
• Track where your contacts live or travel
• Live ecommerce data and even videos to your emails

What are the best features of ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign boasts a simple and straightforward interface which is perfect for small to medium sized businesses. Its segmentation tool is effective with tags to help you set up a target audience in minutes. The software also integrates well with most major tools and has an excellent technical support team that go above and beyond to help you solve challenges.

Pricing: The prices range from $9 to $229 per month

6. Mailchimp

www.mailchimp.com/

Most marketing professionals will be familiar with Mailchimp’s email marketing platform. But the email marketing giant is now heavily invested in marketing automation for small and medium-sized teams.

Spearheaded by its mascot Freddie, and a quirky UI jam packed with witty calls to action, Mailchimp is one of the most memorable marketing automation platforms in the industry.

Mailchimp’s marketing automation suite offers advanced features such as creating HTML email templates, landing pages, Google remarketing ads, and Facebook and Instagram ads, A/B and multivariate testing, and standard and comparative reports. 

A key reason that it’s such a popular platform, especially with small to mid-sized businesses is that it has a similar model to HubSpot, it has a free version with basic features and paid features ranging from $9.99 to $299 per month.

What Mailchimp offers?

Here are some of the main features of the product:

• Subscription services
• Email templates with drag and drop designer
• 750+ integrations
• Website integration
• Activity dashboard
• Custom Landing pages
• Automated scheduling
• Customer segmentation
• Campaign analysis across different touch points
• Multivariate testing
• Social media marketing

What are the best features of Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a versatile and cost-effective marketing automation tool. Its strongest features are its easy to use visual editor and landing page creation tool. With an array of themes and options to customize, it allows you to send professional e-mail campaigns that convert leads effectively. It also has an excellent audience dashboard and analytical capabilities to ensure you’re getting the most out of your campaigns.

Pricing: Mailchimp offers a basic free version, paid versions cost between $9.99-$299 per month.

7. Act-On

www.act-on.com

Act-On is primarily aimed at medium-sized businesses. It promises customer world-class customer service and a faster time to conversion for your prospects. The tool is also recognized as a visionary in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management.

The software has a unique feature called ‘Adaptive Journeys’. This customizes web forms, messages and lead scoring amongst other based on customer-specific settings. It has an advanced set of sub-features for both inbound and outbound marketing. You can also use its advanced analytics features to optimize landing pages, social media content, lead nurturing and website performance. Other features include lead scoring, advanced segmentation and automated reporting.

The tool is compatible with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, and Infor CRMs. Act-On is one of the marketing automation software tools in 2020 that is rightly suited for medium-sized businesses looking to enhance their marketing operations. It provides similar features as some of the more established players in the industry.

What Act-On offers?

• Marketing Automation
• Email Marketing
• Website Lead Generation
• Social Media Marketing
• Marketing Analytics and Reporting
• Account Based Marketing
• CRM Connectors
• Martech Integrations

What are the best features of Act-On

Act-On is an excellent marketing automation that can help small marketing teams deliver campaigns effectively. Its standout feature is the ease of scheduling email content thanks to its workflow templates. This allows users to schedule campaigns months in advance and have full visibility of upcoming activities. The software also boasts outstanding analytics capabilities that can give you a holistic picture of how your campaigns are performing.

Pricing: The price for Act-On ranges between $500 for onboarding to $900 for multiple users.

8. Pardot

https://www.pardot.com

Salesforce is listed as the most innovative company by Forbes, and their answer to marketing automation is a highly effective tool that delivers innovative features for customers. It helps B2B small to mid-sized organizations to increase their revenue by automating their marketing campaigns. Perhaps you are currently using Campaign Monitor or Mail Chimp to send mass emails? If this is the case, Pardot is the next step in your automation journey, it boasts a multitude of advanced features that can help take your campaigns to the next level. It is a lead generation and nurturing system. Pardot helps an organization to track and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and gain insight on personalizing content based on user behavior. Businesses are extensively using this software to leverage their sales and marketing tasks. Pardot offers email automation, targeted email campaigns and lead management for B2B sales and marketing companies.

The platform also features analytics with marketing ROI tracking.

What Pardot offers?

Here are some of the key features of Pardot:

• Website Analytics
• Customized landing pages
• SEO
• Social Media Marketing
• Performance reports
• Lead Generation
• Marketing Automation
• Email marketing

What are the best features of Pardot

Pardot is developed by Salesforce, for Salesforce. It integrates seamlessly with the CRM system and allows a plethora of customizable features. Thanks to the trailblazer community and extensive materials from Salesforce it is an excellent, scalable solution that can cover all marketing automation needs for any business. The team are constantly developing unique functionality such as Engagement Studio and Connected Campaigns which can give your business a competitive edge in marketing.

Pricing: Starting at $1000/ month, Pardot is one of the more expensive options, most advanced features only become available beyond the $2000/ month plans.

Contentpersona.com

9. Marketo

Marketo was founded in 2006. It is an advanced tool used by mid-sized businesses, it’s intuitive interface and advanced features make it a standout product, and one of the most successful in its area.

Marketo CRM is, undoubtedly, well-integrated. It tracks all engagements you have on your website, meaning if a visitor comes to visit your website and downloads an image, then Marketo professionally automated software will track all these engagements and will show all data pertaining to the visitor, including his or her email address. You can then retarget and remarket to your prospect anytime, and eventually increase their likeability to convert.

Marketo is one of the market leaders in automation and has been for a number of years. The recipe for its success is down to its vast plethora of powerful automation capabilities that center on account-based marketing.

The tool is intuitive and simple to use and provides a lot of additional features such as account insights, profiling, integration with digital (including mobile), revenue attribution, predictive content and advanced analytics. These combine to make it one of the smartest tools available — one where you can truly track and deliver a unique experience to your visitors.

This makes it an ideal product for mid-sized and enterprise level businesses who need a tool to make sense of large datasets. It was acquired by Adobe in 2018 meaning that it’s backed by one of the largest tech companies out there today, the pricing for Marketo starts at $1,395 per month.

What Marketo offers?

Users tend to like Marketo because of its advanced feature set, extensive support and online guides as well as its reporting and customizability. It truly is an enterprise level software that can handle campaigns for mid-sized businesses right up to Fortune 500 companies.

Features include:

• Marketing Automation from email campaigns to lead scoring and nurturing
• Social media sharing
• Landing page and forms creation
• Content optimization
• CRM integration with Dynamics and Salesforce
• Reporting and analytics
• Event marketing
• Lead management
• Unlimited users
• A/B testing

What are the best features of Marketo

Marketo is one of the most widely used marketing automation platform, this means it integrates well with most systems and boasts the LaunchPoint ecosystem which makes it a unique tool for marketers. It’s standout features are also its workflow automation tools and robust mobile marketing tools, which a lot of other platforms lack.

Pricing: This starts at $1,395/month for consumer email marketers or $2,995 for firms looking for a more complex solution.

10. LeadSquared

https://www.leadsquared.com

LeadSquared is lead conversion, marketing automation, and sales execution platform which helps small and mid-sized B2B and B2C businesses capture leads and turn them into paying customers.

It enables marketers to increase the velocity and productivity of sales. Their marketing automation software pushes leads down the sales funnel quickly and aids in building a long-term relationship with the prospect.

LeadSquared helps you manage your entire database on its easy-to-use interface. It includes services like mobile CRM, marketing automation, and sales CRM. Besides, it helps businesses close sales and manages their pipeline. What’s more, it helps them increase their ROI.

LeadSquared has a powerful CRM platform that guides the sales and marketing teams and helps them build a comprehensive picture of the user journey.

What LeadSquared offers?

Key Features of LeadSquared:

• Lead CaptureAnalytics
• User Journey Optimization
• CRM
• Workflows and Triggers
• Re-marketing and Re-engagement
• Multiple integrations with systems

What are the best features of LeadSquared

LeadSquared, as the name implies excels in lead generation and has a plethora of tools to automate this process. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use. It boasts an excellent campaign dashboard which can give users an understanding of how campaigns are performing.

Pricing: $400 basic system, $1200 standard, $2500 enterprise subscription

WRAP UP!!!

The above list looks at the top 10 marketing automation platforms in 2020 for small to mid-sized businesses. Each package has its merits and disadvantages, however, there are a number of key factors to consider when choosing a marketing automation platform.

As a starting point, you should always look at how these packages solve business challenges. You can purchase an all singing all dancing software, however, if it’s seldom used, it is a waste of money. Weigh up the current ambitions, and scalability of a product, and come to a conclusion using a cost-benefit analysis. Do you have a large enough customer base to justify your investment? Will you need to invest in any additional software due to compatibility? Will the implementation cause a disruption in your business? These are all critical questions that should be considered as part of your marketing automation journey.

Out of the above list, our top pick for emerging platform is Ontraport.

Ontraport – The top emerging platform

Because of its four distinctive plans and advanced features make it the most cost-effective and advanced solution for small to mid-sized businesses. The first plan they offer is Basic ($79/month), the second one is Plus ($147/month), the third one is Pro Plan ($297/month) and, finally, the fourth plan is Enterprise ($497/month).

HubSpot — The big-name contender

Out of the more established big players in the market, I would recommend HubSpot. The high satisfaction among its user base speaks for itself. It is the clear market leader for mid-to-large-sized businesses. The free version can enable startups to grow their business and once they reach a certain point, they can activate the more advanced features of the product.

Now that you’ve read our article, which solution do you think is the best for your business? Let us know in the comments below.

My advice is: research according to your needs and picks one powerful platform out of these ten, integrate it with your marketing efforts, and watch your business grow.

Conclusion

To conclude, when looking for a marketing automation tool, it’s always recommended to start with your company objectives and budget. Most tools offer a core set of functionalities such as workflows, email marketing, social media connectivity, and analytical dashboards which can perform the vast majority of requirements for most campaigns. However, ease of use and additional features such as customizability, connectivity with other systems, and a large online developer community are what sets a lot of these tools apart.

When looking at these systems, make use of the free trial offers to test drive the system and see if it meets your requirements. Also, these systems, whilst automated, require human input, you need to ensure that you have the right skill set within the organization and discipline to effectively utilize and maintain these systems. In a lot of cases, implementations fail because of a lack of focus on operational utilization as opposed to functionality.

Want More Info on Marketing Automation?

Whilst this article gives a good overview of some of the platforms out there, the details go far beyond the scope of this article – in truth, we could probably write a 200-page book on this subject, so please contact us to discuss your experiences, and how you’d like to improve your marketing performance through automation. We’d love to be able to guide you in the right direction and help you get started on your automation journey as soon as possible.

Parting Thoughts

Whilst most of the tools covered today offer basic automation features such as workflow management, e-mail marketing, and CRM connectivity. The advanced product features and the way in which these are combined are what sets them apart. These features determine the suitability of these tools with various industries and business sizes.

The right product depends on a lot of factors, for example, if you’re in e-commerce, you might opt for a specialist tool such as Maropost, if you’re an entrepreneur in a start-up ActiveCampaign might be the easiest/ cost-effective solution for your business. It really depends on the use-case and your objectives.

Marketing automation as of recent is becoming an ever-increasing priority for businesses of all sizes. Your organizational goals and capability to utilize these systems should be the starting point for your journey. We hope the above article will help you in your journey to grow in 2020.

Which of these marketing automation software platforms will you explore for your marketing strategy in 2020?

The article has been initially published at contentpersona.com