Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools and Software in 2021

In a time when speed and efficiency mean everything, marketing automation has become the need of every business. Marketing automation helps businesses to organize, automate, and track their marketing workflows and increase the efficiency of the sales funnel. Marketing Automation tools are used extensively in both B2B and B2C businesses and help them automate their email marketing, social media marketing online-campaign and lead generation processes.

Marketing automation and CRM tools go hand-in-hand are usually used as a combination to achieve better marketing efficiency and accelerate marketing efforts. While marketing automation tools help in making marketing processes easier and faster, CRM tools work towards offering a focused and personalized touch to customers.

Common Marketing Automation Features

Based on their features, marketing automation can be classified into these five categories:

1. Email marketing automation

Email marketing is one of the most popular marketing techniques. It allows businesses to target a mass audience and channel it to lead generation. Email marketing is also used to collect customer feedback, and updating them with the latest offers and products. Using e-mail marketing automation, you can send emails to prospects that visit your website and show some form of engagement. Email automation tools can be tuned to automatically send a cold email to the masses or target a segmented group and boost lead generation.

2. Lead nurturing

Finding a lead and understanding their browsing behavior can help in providing more focused product recommendations. This can lead to a higher chance of converting them to paying customers. Marketing automation tools can help you in tracking the activities of customers visiting your site and understand their behavior to approach them accordingly. Advanced automation tools can then be used to further provide customized notifications, categorize them and rate them based on their buying probability.

3. Social media automation

In today’s time, building a strong social media presence is vital to attract leads and build a relationship with customers. But managing several social media platforms, planning marketing approaches, and interacting with customers can be daunting tasks for marketing teams. Social media automation can take care of all planning and implementation processes of social media marketing. Social media automation can further be used to engage with customers for one-on-one interactions using chatbots.

4. Analytics and reporting

Marketing automation tools can have an advantageous role in tracking the performance of marketing campaigns and advertising and can help in planning for further strategies accordingly. Advanced marketing tools can also help in collecting critical customer data which can be used to improve customer experience and ensure retention.

5. SEO, and paid media advertising

Social media marketing tools help in running SEO and digital media advertising through a centralized system and manage paid social media campaigns and ads effectively. Having a centralized system can help in personalizing marketing approaches and run account-based marketing.

Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools

Here are some of the top marketing automation tools available for small and large enterprises :

1. Salesforce

Salesforce is a well-known name among marketing automation tools. Pardot is a Salesforce marketing automation tool built on a CRM platform. It helps businesses streamline their marketing efforts and sales approaches. By bringing marketing automation tools and CRM on a single platform, businesses enjoy the seamless experience of managing and executing the entire business lifecycle efficiently.

Key features of Pardot:

1 . It offers personalized campaigns that can be scaled easily and lead to powerful lead generation

2. By combining marketing automation tools with CRM, Pardot has aligned sales with marketing. This ensures that there are no disconnections between teams.

3. Pardot offers real-time engagement alerts and helps businesses keep track of active leads and engage with them further.

4. Pardot supports in-depth analytics and reporting and helps businesses identify what’s working and what’s not in their marketing approaches.

2. LIKE.TG

LIKE.TG is a CRM based marketing automation tool that is based on WhatsApp and allows enterprises to manage and execute marketing and sales processes through the messaging app. Businesses can use the platform on any device and target a large number of customers through a platform they are familiar with. WhatsApp is the most widely used social platform and has the highest message open rate. Through LIKE.TG, businesses can approach leads on a personal level and offer customized services and boost customer experience.

Key features of LIKE.TG:

1 . LIKE.TG provides cloud document storage which keeps all your essential documents and data safe.

2. The internal Chat Integration feature of LIKE.TG allows marketing admin to run multiple WhatsApp accounts simultaneously and integrate chats between different departments or processes on the same tool.

3. Marketing Automation Integration through LIKE.TG allows businesses to run marketing campaigns, share advertisements and product updates, and carry out CRM processes using the same tool.

4. The best feature of LIKE.TG is that it can run entirely on mobile and makes it easy for marketers to manage customer notifications on the go. This also allows businesses to provide services in real-time.

5. LIKE.TG also works as a task management tool and can help big enterprises manage tasks between teams and keep all processes in sync.

3. AMOcrm

AMOcrm is a marketing automation tool that works across multiple messaging platforms. AMOcrm lets you converse through messengers, emails, and calls from a single app. It provides businesses a robust CRM platform to connect with their customers on a personal level. AMOcrm is a cloud-based platform and provides businesses a secure and easy to use API to manage their daily tasks.

Key features of AMOcrm:

1 . AMOcrm allows contacts management by assigning tags which makes it easy to differentiate among contacts.

2. AMOcrm offers task management features that make it easy for marketing teams to coordinate with each other.

3. To make managing large contact lists on messaging apps, AMOcrm includes an import/and export feature. Through this feature marketing person can add multiple contacts across various messaging platforms easily.

4. The biggest advantage of using messaging platforms is that it makes lead management easy and effective. AMOcrm helps businesses approach leads on a personal level and convert leads into customers.

4. ZOHO

ZOHO MarketingHub is a marketing automation software that brings e-mail marketing, marketing automation, and phone integration under the same roof. ZOHO solutions help businesses to understand their customer behavior better through in-depth analytics and streamline marketing approaches accordingly.

Key features of ZOHO MarketingHub:

1 . Autoresponders feature of ZOHO helps in scheduling various marketing activities such as social media posts, e-mails, and replies to customer responses. These scheduled tasks can be automatically executed without human intervention.

2. Multi-channel marketing helps businesses to reach out to their customers on multiple channels simultaneously.

3. In large organizations, workflow management can be an issue. ZOHO MarketingHub helps by providing a visual dashboard to keep track of all workflows.

4. BI-based analytics helps in understanding customers’ web behavior more closely and curate personalized marketing messages for each of its customers.

5. Verloop.io

Verloop.io is a customer support automation platform that helps improve customer experience and generate leads from landing pages. It also provides customer support on websites and messaging platforms through AI-based messaging bots. Verloop.io aims at improving customer engagement across various platforms generate more leads on landing pages.

Key features of Verloop.io

1. App integration feature allows businesses to manage multiple marketing channels effortlessly.
2. Verloop.io helps in targeted e-mailing and improve e-mail marketing effectiveness.
3. One of the biggest advantages of using Verloop.io in enterprises is that it provides a team inbox feature. This allows multiple teams to communicate among themselves easily.
4. Verloop.io enables pop-up chat windows on websites to encourage customer engagement and help businesses improve customer experience.

Benefits of using Marketing automation tools

Here are some of the primary benefits of using marketing automation tools and softwares in an organization.

Lower operating costs

Automation takes care of all repetitive manual tasks and makes computers responsible for them. This reduces the role of humans while improving speed and efficiency in processes. Computers complete triggered actions efficiently; they can send a set email in response to form fill, alert a team member to a change in lead status, or send social posts at a scheduled time. With the reduced role of humans and more efficient processes, businesses can earn better ROI and reduce operating costs.

More data

Marketing automation systems produce granular, customer-focused data that can help teams segment customers, build better nurture campaigns, and close more sales. All of this new data can be analyzed right in the marketing automation tool or fed into business intelligence (BI) software to view its impact on the company’s overall ROI.

Analytics and reporting

The best marketing automation software includes analytics and reporting features that track and illuminate your campaigns. Using these features can help your team build better campaigns with more personalization and better customer targeting. While BI software brings together data from all across the company, marketing automation analytics focuses on marketing and sales campaigns, giving you better insights and preparing your company for growth.

Centralized marketing tool

Marketing automation software can provide centralizing control over email, content marketing, contact forms and downloads, social media, and even direct mail and traditional media channels. This depends on the scope and price of the software, so check feature lists carefully before you buy to make sure you don’t pay for features you won’t use.

Improved ROI

Expect marketing automation software to increase your team’s efficiency, bring in more qualified leads, and target the perfect customers at the right time. These improvements should increase your overall revenue.

Digital Marketing is an ever-evolving marketing technique and varies significantly based on the type of business or organization. Marketing automation tools such as Salesforce, ZOHO, AMOcrm, and Verloop.io are best suited for medium to large organizations whereas LIKE.TG can find its use in small as well as large organizations as it is a WhatsApp based tool. Get to know more about it here.