8 Of the Most Trusted and Proven Marketing Automation Platforms That Large Organizations Use

What is marketing automation platforms?

In 2020 marketing automation is booming! You must be thinking what exactly marketing automation is, right? Let me tell you… Marketing automation is a software that a company uses for targeting their loyal customers. This software is designed for automating all kinds of repetitive marketing tasks to get the best result. 

Nowadays, large organizations as well as small business owners leverage this marketing software to automate their emails, websites, e-commerce platforms, social media, and text messages. Statistics show that around 57% of businesses are currently using this technology and that this number will continue to grow.

In contrast with the past, every other business from technology to finance and from automobiles to food is making use of some kind of marketing automation software or tools to accelerate their business.

Role of an Automation Tool 

Do you know exactly why these businesses are continuously pouring their cash on these automation tools? You are right! Because the automation software helps companies cut down on their enormous marketing costs. In truth, as they turn to automation, they quickly find out they no longer need to hire lots of manpower, including bloggers, PR specialists, marketers, and other professionals to run their marketing campaigns. In addition, by buying marketing automation software, an organization can delegate tasks it carries out on a regular basis and, most importantly, effectively retarget and remarket to their customers.

How Does This Marketing Automation Platform Work?

In marketing, life has become far easier than it was a few years ago. You can now complete your work with just a single click. Your automated software will help you do it. It has specific modes that you can set according to your needs. Once you have done it, by shifting your marketing tasks to auto mode, you get an edge over other companies. And did you know what edge is? Ok, let me tell you. By turning your marketing tasks to automation, it gets really easy to capture and generate high-quality leads compared to traditional marketing methods. On the other hand, getting an edge over other business is about saving you valuable time. Besides, any automation system makes tasks easy for your marketing team and helps them efficiently convert those leads into high-quality sales. Boom!

In short, marketing automation software has greatly extended marketing campaigns, creating inbound marketing. In other words, it has enabled companies to target customers from pitching on other channels. It is from those channels that this or that customer automatically finds this company and reaches out to it.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Some of the inbound marketing tactics that marketers use to target their customers are email, Facebook, Instagram, automatic chat bots, affiliate marketing, & YouTube. You come across this experience every single day, when companies target you through sending automated emails or when on Facebook & Instagram pages you stumble on a company’s address, contact number, brand, and ads. There you go. When you repeatedly look at these, your brain gets a signal to take action. This is inbound marketing.

And this is the core reason why companies are eager to use marketing automation software. Indeed, with the help of these tools they will keep track of their customers’ engagement with their websites or emails. This is convenient because it lets businesses retarget and remarket their customers anywhere anytime. 

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

I believe that in this fast-changing world if business owners fail to leverage their marketing tasks and acclimatize with the trend of automating emails, websites, and social media, they will easily be kicked out from the tough competition in 2020 and beyond. If you agree with me, you must be excited and willing to know about really hot marketing automation platforms, right?

While there are so many of them in the marketplace today, I’ve picked out 8 of the most trusted and proven marketing automation platforms, used by large organizations use to excel at their marketing efforts. The list below contains all of them.  Let’s see how each can help you sort through your options. Once you do, you may start thinking of using the one that makes you feel satisfied with choosing the best marketing solution for your team.

Top 8 Marketing Automation Platforms

1.     Hubspot

2.     SendinBlue

3.     Ontraport

4.     ActiveCampaign

5.     Pardot

6.     Marketo

7.     Lead Squared

8.     InfusionSoft

Let’s discuss each of the best marketing automation platforms in greater detail.

1.    HubSpot Marketing Automation 

 Among these 8, HubSpot is the most popular and most result-driven marketing automation software out there. It is known for its inbound marketing platform that helps large & small organizations attract visitors, convert leads, and close high-end clients.

They have provided their services since 2006 and continue to do so.  Their products & services are mainly aimed at providing various tools for social media marketing, content management, search engine optimization, & web analytics.

HubSpot provides a full high growth suite for your marketing and sales tasks, and you can easily integrate chatbots for your websites, or you can set up an email autoresponder for your customer list. That’s easy, right?

You can take help to master the software from HubSpot, and they will guide you thoroughly. Once you’ve mastered it, you will find out that the creative possibilities are endless. HubSpot will help you lift your business to the next level. By utilizing the combination of its high growth suites, you will be able to automate your workflows beyond emails. You will scale fast because you will spend less time on repetitive tasks.

2. SendinBlue 

The second popular platform which businesses use for marketing automation is SendinBlue. This one emerged as a digital agency but ended up later as a quite powerful email marketing tool which, with time, transformed into well-known marketing automation software.

Some say that SendinBlue & Mail Chimp are two of the most selective and powerful tools for email marketing. SendinBlue is known for its automated email marketing software which helps companies establish strong relationships with their customers through providing SMS automation, email automation, and other marketing workflows.

Their portal is easy to use and has some advanced features such as Lead Scoring & Reporting so that you can effectively run SMS campaigns & email campaigns from SendinBlue.

3.    Ontraport

Another popular platform you should consider using is Ontraport. Business owners from all industries, including speakers, bloggers, coaches, B2B service providers, and many more have benefited from this platform.

It offers 4 plans: 

 Basic ($79/month)

Plus ($147/month) 

Pro ($297/month) and 

Enterprise ($497/month)

 What is good about Ontraport is that they give you the software in which you can integrate all your marketing campaigns in one place. You can then launch your automated marketing campaigns and all your lead generation pieces from emails to pages to popup forms.

 Some of the most popular areas Ontraport provides you with to excess are:

• Emails
• Landing Page
• SMS Text
• Forms
• Membership Sites

4.    ActiveCampaign

I love the Active Campaign!!! It is an email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM software platform for medium-sized businesses. They have provided their services since 2003 and are based in Chicago, Illinois.

You can build email newsletters and run various marketing and sales campaigns from their platform. Also, you can send targeted emails to each of your target customers individually.

ActiveCampaign's reporting feature helps you easily identify which of your emails are performing and which are not. It shows you a brief scenario as to which emails would convert and shows to you what to focus on so that you can split test and increase engagement and clicks, and ultimately convert leads to sales.

5.    Pardot

Pardot has been listed as the most innovative company by Forbes. It helps small to mid-sized B2B organizations increase their revenue by automating their marketing campaigns.

Perhaps you are using Campaign Monitor or Mail Chimp to send mass emails. Now, if this is the case, you will start loving Pardot once you find out its amazing features.

Essentially, it operates as a lead generation and nurturing system. Pardot offers email automation, targeted email campaigns, and lead management for B2B sales and marketing companies. Also, it helps organizations track and measure the effectiveness and gain insight into personalized content and user behavior. This feature leads businesses to extensively use the software of Pardot to leverage their sales and marketing tasks.

Some of the common marketing tasks Pardot automates are given below:

• Landing Page Marketing
• Website Tracking
•  SEO
•  Social Media Marketing
• Creating Reports to Track Performance
•   Management From Website
•  Lead Generation

In addition, the platform features analytics with marketing ROI tracking.

6.    Marketo

In 2006, Marketo was founded. I would say Marketo is more than just a tool because it’s so easy to use. You will feel that you have a playbook in hand for digital marketing success. Yes, you’ve heard it right.

It is used mostly by medium-sized businesses, and it offers many kinds of bundles focusing on:

• Mobile Marketing
• Consumer Marketing
• Lead Management
• Email Marketing
• Customer Base Marketing

Marketo’s CRM is, undoubtedly, well-integrated. It tracks all the engagements you get with your website as well as emails. In other words, if a visitor comes to visit your website and will download an image, Marketo's professionally automated software will track all those engagements. What’s more, it will show the data of the visitor, including his or her email address. Amazing, right?

In this way, market helps you retarget and remarket your prospects anytime and turn their likeability to converts.

7.    LeadSquared

LeadSquared is a lead conversion, marketing automation, and sales execution platform which helps small to mid-sized B2B & B2C businesses capture leads and turn them into high converting sales machines. The purpose behind LeadSquared is to enable marketers to increase the velocity and productivity of sales. Essentially, marketing automation software pushes leads faster down the sales funnel and helps in building a long-term relationship with the prospect.

What is LeadSquared’s most convenient feature? It helps you manage your entire database on its easy-to-use interface. It includes services like mobile CRM, marketing automation, and sales CRM. Thanks to this, LeadSquared helps businesses increase their closures, manage their pipeline, and boost their ROI. 

LeadSquared has a powerful CRM platform that guides sales and marketing teams about their actions so that they can keep track of their engagement easily…

All these things point to the fact that you should not neglect LeadSquared on your list.

8.    InfusionSoft

The last one I am going to discuss is InfusionSoft. This platform is known for providing its marketing automation services to all kinds of businesses. Businesses love to use InfusionSoft because their platform is easy to use, and it comes at a reasonably affordable cost.

Any company's sales and marketing efforts will get scaled up integrates the platform. Some of the promises InfusionSoft gives  are listed below:

• Attracting visitors to your website
• Converting these visitors to prospects
• Keeping track of visitors from the platform
• Converting leads into sales

InfusionSoft provides one of the most powerful sales & marketing automation kinds of software connecting e-commerce businesses to the comprehensive platform and satisfying all CRM and email needs of the involved enterprises. Importantly, their CRM stores every visitor click, purchase, and action even if it was done as part of a vast campaign. Besides, it effortlessly tells you which of your campaigns are performing best and how many engagements you keep getting. How does it help? You no longer  need to hesitate over how to improve your conversions and will be able to do it as soon as possible.

Final Words

Now you must be thinking which of these 8 marketing automation tools you should choose and what the benefits of your choice will be for your business, right?

If yes, I can help you here, too. First of all, ask yourself exactly what your requirements are. What I mean is whether you are considering the said platform because of its price because you really want to excel at your sales and marketing efforts to an extent that you’re willing to plough money into it. 

If affordability is your concern, then you should look for the platform which offers good services at a reasonable cost. You may do a small comparative research yourself, yet, if you need advice, I can recommend Ontraport. 

Want to know why? Because Ontraport gives you access to their 3 plans with affordable prices, and it comes into the top 5 on the list. The 1st plan on offer is the Basic plan ($79/month). The 2nd plan is the Plus plan ($147/month). Next goes the Pro Plan ($297/month). The 4th plan which Ontraport offers to their users is known as Enterprise ($497/month).

Yet, if you want to choose a platform which brings great customer satisfaction and remains the favorite of many big organizations because it definitely boosts sales conversions and lead generation, I’d recommend HubSpot to you. Indeed, with high levels of customer satisfaction and engagements, this marketing automation platform is at the top of the list wen one talks about mid to large-sized businesses.

Still, it is only my belief, and you don’t need to buy it since it is you that knows better where your business is currently at. 

Finally, you may want to know which  requirements you need to comply with to scale up your marketing efforts and which of these 8 proven marketing automation platforms will be the best fit for your business? In this case, research according to your needs, pick one powerful platform out of these 8, and integrate it into your marketing. What next? Watch the growth!