Wondering if you should be thinking about implementing a marketing automation tool?
If I said that you could easily double your revenue online with the right tool, would that get you to read this article?
If you’re marketing online and are not thinking about marketing automation, you’re losing out on revenue.
This article will help you make the decision over what type of tool you need and if you need one!
So… Ian… show me the money!
Why implement a marketing automation tool?
According to VB Insight, 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase. Marketo reports that 91% of those using marketing automation software say it is ‘very important’ to their marketing success. And 75% of companies using marketing automation see a return on their investment in just 12 months.
Once implemented, these tools save time and avoid repetitive tasks, they allow brands to carefully target their prospects, and improve customer engagement. What’s not to like?!
Some people wonder whether their business is at the right stage to start using one of these tools.
You are shouting at your email marketing tool most days because it won’t do the automation you need.
You like new tools and you want to splash out!
When you think of a marketing automation tool, you might think about tools like InfusionSoft and Marketo. But now, marketing automation functionality is creeping into email marketing tools such as MailChimp.
Using MailChimp, you can build marketing automation email sequences… So, is MailChimp a marketing automation tool or an email marketing tool?
There are various levels of automation available in marketing automation tools. The following stack shows the typical functionality you’d expect to find in a comprehensive marketing automation tool.
There are too many tools in this space to review everything so we’ve picked some of the most well known and popular ones.
There are many email marketing tools that are sneaking in some marketing automation functionality. When you move to a fully fledged marketing automation tool it’s quite complex, so it’s not for everyone.
As a stepping stone into marketing automation, you should use the functionality that is available as part of the tool or as an add-on to the tool.
MailChimp is an excellent email marketing tool with some really great functionality at a very competitive price. They have some simple automation you can set up to trigger events based on actions.
Send an email on particular events e.g. your subscribers’ birthdays.
AWeber is a popular tool amongst internet marketers but it has very limited marketing automation functionality. However, there is a tool called AWeber Pro Tools, which is developed by a different company and can be used to add marketing automation functionality to AWeber.
GetResponse – Email marketing veterans GetResponse recently launched a new marketing automation tools especially built for SMBs. With a super simple “drag and drop” functionality, GetResponse claim to be the easiest and most affordable marketing and email automation tool out there.
GetResponse provides: email marketing, landing pages, forms, inbox preview, some automation etc.
Reasonable pricing for good functionality.
Active Campaign Grow your business with marketing automation Free, $19 per month + $40 per month for additional modules.
Here’s some additional details on each of these tools.
Pricing Structure: Subscriber, emails and functionality. Getdrip branding is on $49 and $99 version. 75,000 email broadcasts and 12,500 subscribers for the $149 version.
Features: Reporting, split testing, broadcast, templates, custom redirect, GA integration, localization, lead scoring, web hooks, goal tracking, automation based on trigger events, team support, cross domain tracking, WordPress plugin for optin, integration to payment/landing page tools,dashboard reporting.
Summary: These guys understand that you need to provide customers with help building things like emails. That’s why they provide templates. Good functionality provided and fairly straight forward to use.
Features: Full email marketing tool, trigger based automation, realtime insights into campaigns, segmentation of emails, loads of integrations, GUI builder for automation, quite advanced automation based on website activity, CRM functionality.
Summary: This has far too many features/options and is too complex for a small business. I didn’t know where to start. They also cater for enterprise customers and this is where the problem is. They have built too much functionality to support the enterprise customer which has resulted in a system that is too complex for a small business.
What help do they provide? Get started free webinar. 30 minutes training session (not sure if it’s paid), Forum and community chat with slack. Dedicated rep with Enterprise.
Pricing Structure: Complicated pricing structure which changes depending on the modules you want and emails you send.
Features: Email marketing, marketing automation, eCommerce, sales CRM, affiliate, Helpdesk, Multi channel communication (e.g mobile text messaging etc), polls, questionnaires, split testing, API – My head is starting to hurt with all the features they have!!!
Summary: Poor UI, far too many features, dated looking website and application.
Features: Collect leads from website, track leads that visit website again, display details of any visitors, add contacts to CRM and track all activity, set up twitter feed for keyword monitoring, categorisation of contacts e.g. subscriber, lead etc, create conversion form, nice visual reporting, With Smart forms you can alter questions automatically based on what the same person answered on a previous website visit. They also provide interactive chat, keyword rank tracking, broadcasts with advanced segmentation etc.
Summary: I was very restricted to what I could do because I didn’t add the tracking code to the website. But it looks like it’s quite a simple UI.
Features: Broad range of optins (e.g. popup, slider), email broadcast, automation sequences, set up goals (e.g. link click), create email template – no help given, summary dashboard. Campaigns are either email, sequences or RSS – I assume RSS means campaigns are triggered based on new items in the RSS feed e.g. blog post.
Summary: Ok functionality but design could be better. Too many fields to fill out. Very expensive for the solution they provide.
Features: They have the following – email marketing, lead capture forms, lead scoring, lead nurturing, social media marketing – This appears as if it’s a module which enables your contacts to auto share your content.
Summary: Not impressed with the product, poor UI.
These are quite comprehensive functionality with a lot more complexity. They typically start at a higher price range.
Features: CRM, marketing automation, sales automation, storefronts and payments.
Summary: Powerful solution but very expensive. Make sure you have your consultant lined up because you’ll need them.
What help do they provide? Standard support but with more advanced help you’ll need to get out your cheque book.
Summary: The product is improving. Their recent addition for landing page creation (ontrapages) is quite good. Even though it is less complex than Infusionsoft it’s still a big jump from an email marketing tool and also a big jump in pricing.
What help do they provide? Help system, videos and their support team is very responsive. They also have a Facebook group.
Summary: Restricted on functionality as I need to install tracking code but from what I seen it looks good and worth investigating more.
Marketing is complicated and time consuming.
As you build your audience, online automation is essential… but you need to be at the right stage to implement it.
There are many companies paying expensive money for marketing automation tools and using them as a pure email marketing tool.