Best Marketing Automation Software in 2024

An Absolute Guide to Marketing Automation Tools

Marketing automation software allows marketing and salespeople to automate their repetitive tasks, organize their workflow, and evaluate the outcome of their marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation software sequences the data chronologically, manages it appropriately, boosts productivity, and thereby increases the organization’s revenue. With time, the amount of data has increased exponentially. Keeping up with it has become more peculiar than ever. To simplify this tedious process, marketing automation software comes to the rescue.

These tools are laced with features that help employees automate their repetitive tasks, generate leads, nurture the existing ones, and convert those which are on the verge of completion.

This guide will help you figure out your ideal marketing automation software that fulfills all your requirements.

What is the use of marketing automation software?

Marketing automation is all about the process of computerizing the tasks that cost a lot of unnecessary human hours, which one can invest elsewhere. It automates the process of repetitive tasks, optimizes the workflow, and manages various tasks like posting ads, website management, email, and SMS messaging.

Using automation tools can boost an organization's efficiency, revenue intake, and enhance customer engagement. It uses advanced AI technology to predict the users’ behavior and send them emails and other ads as per their activity.

Why is marketing automation essential?

Using a marketing automation tool is one’s own decision, but the industries that have been using this software and the ones that have picked it up lately have seen significant changes in various sectors like marketing, sales, and onboarding.

Marketing automation is laced with functionalities that help organizations upsell by performing lead generation and nurturing.

Lead generation is the process of attracting new potential clients with the utter motive of eventually converting them into one of their faithful customers.

Lead nurturing is the process of working with the existing clients and directing them to make a purchase. Nurturing the existing clients increases their potential for making a purchase.

Lead scoring, followed by optimization, helps the organization segregate those clients which can credit a large amount compared to those who would generate a lesser amount.

One of the biggest reasons why one should pick up marketing automation software is that it saves a lot of time. Employees can use that extra time to channel leads effectively and make strategic advancements like creating engaging content and analyzing the data that would generate even more revenue.

Marketers can use functionalities like integration, which would help customers to cross-sell their services, thereby liberating them from the hassles of visiting each channel explicitly and then marketing their stuff.

Who uses marketing automation tools?

Organizations with immense online footprints use marketing automation software. But among them, tech companies stand still at the vertex of all the potential clients. They have a huge amount of data that they must deal with on an everyday basis. For them, automation is no less than a boon.

Apart from the tech industry, B2B, B2C, and healthcare organizations are also adopting marketing automation software at a frequent pace. The industry is estimated to reach US$ 7,981.6 million by 2027. According to a report from Invesp, “80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software, and 77% had an increase in conversions.”

Some of the popular B2B industries include:

• Software and internet companies
• Telecommunication companies
• IT companies
• Financial services companies

Some of the popular B2C industries include:

• Retail and e-commerce businesses
• Manufacturing companies
• Real estate companies

How to pick the best marketing automation platform?

Getting muddled while choosing the right marketing tool is a genuine issue that most organizations face. So, let’s investigate this issue and try to figure out how one can choose the ideal marketing automation tool? Here are some pointers that would help you choose the appropriate marketing automation tool.

• The one thing that the user must keep records of should be their requirements before anything. If your needs are not fulfilled, then it’s all scrap. You should always choose software that meets all your requirements and is able to abide by your personalized changes.
• Do in-depth research on this topic, streamline the features that you want your software to be laced with, and then select the appropriate one.
• Choose the one that provides good support functionality.

ROI functionalities of marketing automation

Users should be aware of the functionalities that would help them get the most out of the software they’d be buying. Here’s the list of features that a good marketing automation tool must possess:

• Automated Email Marketing: Sending emails to potential clients, welcoming emails, and automated follow-ups.
• Lead Scoring and Nurturing: Lead scoring ranks the leads based upon users’ likelihood, thereby providing upsales. And lead nurturing refers to sending personalized content so that they move forward from potential clients to successful customers.
• Segmentation: Segregates your audience as per their activity and then sends them customized messages and offers.
• Behavioral Targeting: Takes users’ data into consideration and processes ads and campaigns accordingly.
• A/B Testing: Ability to test various types of emails, webpages, and more to figure out which platform is performing better than the other.
• Integration: Ability to merge functionalities of separate platforms, hence allowing the users to use those features which might not natively be present in their default software.
• Visitor Tracking: A way of deducing who's viewing your website and how long they have stayed on a particular webpage.
• Social Media Automation: A branch of social media marketing that uses tools to automate repetitive tasks, enhancing efficiency and ensuring consistent online visibility, particularly on social media platforms, like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
• Personalized Recommendations: Facilitates customers with personalized content based on their past activities.
• Analytics and Reporting: A feature that allows you to visualize your data into eye-catching dashboards and reports.

Factors to consider before buying marketing automation services

Marketing automation is a diverse field. One can easily get overwhelmed and lose track of what one is supposed to do. To align the features with needs, here are some of the factors that one must keep in mind before making a purchase:

• Figure out the audience’s requirements and then choose software that has those functionalities.
• Look for the standard features like email marketing, forms creation, lead nurturing, segmentation, creating landing pages and reports, and make sure that at least these features are present in the chosen software.
• Pick the one that is easy to use and comprehend.
• Choose software that allows notifications and triggering systems.
• Social media is one of those places from where one can generate maximum traffic, so make sure that the software that you’re picking is laced with social media automation.

Pros of using marketing automation software

Here are some of the benefits of using marketing automation software:

• High Conversion Rate: Using marketing automation software, an organization can get an increased sales rate and nurture leads via the sales funnel.
• Increased Productivity: By automating all the boring tasks, individuals get a lot of free time to do something more productive and progressive.
• Building Personalized Journeys: Software gathers the information, combines it, and then makes a customized pathway for each customer.
• Better Reporting System: Collecting users’ data, salespeople can make strategies and present them in such a way that it becomes visually appealing, i.e., easy to grasp.

What’s trending in the world of marketing automation?

In this modern era, it is important that you keep yourself updated with all the advancements that are happening in your domain of interest. Here’s an update about the marketing automation industry:

• As the AI industry is booming day by day, it is important for almost every industry around the globe to tag along and improvise themselves. The scenario is the same in the marketing automation industry. It is working on automating its personalization, predictive analytics, and smart recommendations.
• They are working on enriching their abilities to manage campaigns across numerous channels, thereby ensuring a smooth customer journey.
• The marketing automation industry is working on building more secure and thick walls, thereby making it difficult for crackers to get into the system and thereby hamper the information.