What is the best marketing automation software for your business?

Why is Marketing Automation software important?

In recent decades, marketing automation software’s has become increasingly popular, especially among digital agencies in Australia. Allowing businesses to expand their customer base through media channels without any personal interaction. It is used to identify potential customers, and send customized automated content based on the customer’s inquiries.

Marketing Automation allows businesses to gain access to web traffic data and is likely to encourage customer loyalty and retention, through informative and consistent content. With the decline of traditional media, mass marketing is no longer having the same effect that it did before the rise of digital marketing. Marketing automation is a customer orientated approach, ensuring customers are receiving unique and targeted content, which is relevant to their business. Marketing automation is cost effective, as fewer staff are needed to complete manual tasks. Companies can save money on their marketing budgets and use it on other areas of the business. It is also a great time-saving option when it comes to redundant and tedious tasks, leaving more time for creative campaigns and data analysis.

Commonly associated with irrelevant spam emails and text messages, marketing automation nurtures leads, which turns an expression of interest into a customer. Nurturing leads is the process of segmenting all leads into sub-segments to avoid the distribution of impersonal and irrelevant content. Segmenting the leads and tracking common needs and interests will allow your content to resonate with potential customers.

Having a hard time measuring ROI? Automated marketing allows you to see the response gained on all content that is put out. Simply monitoring the sales made from leads can give the business insight into the effectiveness of their automated marketing strategies, and can predict investments to be made for future stages of the sales funnel.

Choosing the best marketing automation software for your business

As it is such a large industry, and the options are endless, we have compiled a list of the different platforms so you can decide which one is best for you.

Oracle Marketing Cloud

The Oracle Marketing Cloud is the top-ranked marketing automation software, which services with almost 20% market share (datanyze). This software provides users with the best management tools to help engage the right audience whilst providing instantaneous data and insights. It is easy to use and provides a range of features for unique and complex campaigns. At $2800/month, the marketing cloud is one of the more expensive options compared to alternative programs and their customer support team lacks communication.

HubSpot: Professional

HubSpot is a popular automated marketing program as it is straightforward and provides a number of templates and custom features to suit your workflow requirements. It provides data on where leads are on the marketing funnel and allows you to see contact information, profiles and other contact data of the potential customer. HubSpot can easily sync up to Gmail, Facebook, Instagram and many more social media networks commonly used by marketers. Its easy to use layout makes it perfect for non-marketers using it for their small businesses. At $1050/month, HubSpot is relatively expensive, and the price can increase when purchasing extras.

Mail Chimp

Mail Chimp is a popular platform due to its simplicity and affordability. It offers a wide variety of templates allowing users to create unique campaigns with email, social ads and signup forms. With its low price tag of $282/month, Mail Chimp limits customization and lacks many features such as social CRM, and a workflow editor, making managing the steps difficult to create and edit. Limited email segmentation features and lack of customer support makes it less popular amongst larger businesses who are creating content on a larger scale. Ultimately, Mail Chimp works well for small businesses who require simple marketing automation software as it provides the essential features needed to create an effective campaign, without the price tag of Oracle and HubSpot.

Active Campaign: Professional

Active Campaign is designed to assist small to medium businesses with an affordable marketing and CRM program. Their main features consist of sending professional emails, creating and measuring campaigns, and tracking patterns in customer behaviour. Active Campaign allows the user to trigger actions and segment leads according to any criteria presented. At $288/month Active Campaign is an affordable alternative, offering features such as easy to build powerful automated workflows and SMS messaging that are not offered on Mail Chimp. Due to its affordability, Active Campaign is limited in its dashboard customization options and doesn’t offer a landing page builder.

Ontraport: Professional

Ontraport, similar to Oracle, and HubSpot is a high end email marketing platform which offers a plethora of marketing automation and CRM competencies. The core feature of Ontraport is the campaign builder, which allows the user to layout the visual components of the campaign, as well as follow live statistics on where leads are in each stage of the flows. It also offers the feature to share workflows with other users, with the option of selling them for a certain amount of money. Its medium price tag of $297 (USD) per month, is relatively affordable if the business requires all the features Ontraport has to offer.

Marketing Automation Comparison Table