Best marketing automation tools [top 10 list]

I think that marketing automation is awesome. I mentioned this in one of my earlier posts on Digital Marketing for SAAS, but there, I mentioned the entire toolset. Here I want to focus only on marketing automation. It’s a system of tools and mechanisms that assist in automating ongoing communications with customers and, at the same time, maintain the delivery of a high degree of personalized content. This ensures the subscribers receive tailored content they simply want to read. With such a level of sophistication, obviously, you would want the best marketing automation tools that are out there.

Who should use email marketing automation? This is a very common question asked by the marketers. Any business with an online presence can automate its promotions and can reach its sales potential by sending the right offer to the right person at the right time. Excellent email marketing automation systems provide dedicated integrations with CRM platforms and e-commerce by sharing APIs. The marketers who are using these tools say that the biggest advantage of automation is saving time, increasing customer engagement, timely communication, and increasing opportunities.

It is obvious there is no one-size-fits-all email marketing automation tool. The best tool for you will be one that will meet your business needs, budget, the size of your list, which type of integration you need and much more.

Kick off your digital marketing career with best marketing automation tools

There are a lot of options available in the market for email marketing automation. If you do the research, it will help you choose good beginner as well as advanced tools.

Years ago when I was first starting out in my digital marketing career, I didn’t know how to use autoresponders. Whenever I asked a marketing consultant to give advice on online marketing, they will always recommend using autoresponders. Though these email marketing tools have been around for a while, many marketers are still missing out on this robust marketing strategy and have not rolled them in their marketing mix. Remember, it is a highly effective technique for winning sales. It is easy, automatic, and is one of the best returns on a marketing venture you will ever get. Therefore it is necessary to familiarize ourselves on how to use autoresponders and begin our journey.

Autoresponders are marketing tools that automatically send messages to people who are interested in your business. Autoresponders send emails automatically to your mailing list (subscribers) at time-intervals that you pre-select. The process starts when someone subscribes to your general email list. You can also create separate lists for those who are interested in particular content, for example, white papers. There are many benefits of this effective marketing tool.

How to use autoresponders and what are the top benefits:

• It saves you marketing dollars and gets a better return on investment
• It facilitates continuous marketing without hiring any resource
• Regular communication creates repeat sales
• Direct more subscribers to your website or blog
• Excellent branding with all the emails
• Get measurable results
• Never miss the opportunity to follow any single customer
• Build trust with your prospects and customers

How to use an autoresponder

When you use autoresponders properly, you can automate a lot of important activities. Let’s say you would like to customize your messages to suit specific sections of your mailing list, no problem! To send out autoresponders, you have to use web applications or tools like GetResponse, MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact and more. These are all dedicated web tools for hosting mailing lists and sending autoresponders.

A roundup of the top 10 best marketing automation tools

Here we will discuss the 10 most popular or best marketing automation tools that we picked in 2018.

Email marketing automation

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is one of the most affordable and easy-to-use tools. Small to medium-sized businesses will find the most feature-packed tools. The striking thing about ActiveCampaign is that it has its own CRM system for managing leads. To summarize, it is a one-stop platform for handling small business sales and marketing. It also allows you to build automation campaigns for different segments of your list. On top of this, you can also add conditional content to emails so that you can tailor the information you have collected on your leads/ subscribers.

GetResponse

GetResponse is a user-friendly platform, and your lists can be imported in seconds. They have more than 500 mobile-optimized templates. They make it easy for beginners to create professional-looking newsletters and autoresponders. Advanced users have done A/B testing very well. With this, you can easily split-test the body content, subject line, sender name, or even the time of the day. Their API and customer service is also good. In a nutshell, they have put a lot of things into important things that matter a lot.

MailChimp

MailChimp has a well-designed user interface and powerful functionality. Their campaign builder makes building campaigns a breeze, and even for a complete beginner, importing and exporting lists is quite easy. They are the only email marketing service to offer 100% free accounts. This email marketing automation tool has a huge variety of integrations. You can easily connect to LeadPages, Instapage, Facebook, Hubspot, WordPress, and more because Mailchimp will integrate with them.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is mainly designed for bloggers and constitutes a wide range of tools that help bloggers build their lists and promote their content. One of its advantages is a well-structured administration and simple automation features. ConvertKit has a dedicated section for designing email campaigns around web courses. This is really an invaluable feature for bloggers and information marketers. It was founded by Nathan Barry, author of The App Design Handbook, and several others. Also, ConvertKit is part of the open data movement, and you can see their revenue numbers publicly.

Aweber

Aweber is a cost-effective and easy-to-use email marketing automation platform. If you are more advanced in email marketing, you will enjoy the good features of Aweber. It has a feature by the name of split testing that helps you send different variations of a campaign to different segments of your list. This lets you compare your engagement rates. They provide autoresponders,  RSS-to-email, and several third-party integrations. One of their useful integration is with WordPress. It helps you add email signup forms to your website in a single click. This is hands down one of the best marketing automation tools.

10 best marketing automation tools

Infusionsoft

Though expensive, Infusionsoft is a full sales and marketing automation tool. It is a full CRM system that really makes sense for those whose business revolves around selling products on the Internet. Infusionsoft is also a good choice if you are running a business with at least turn-up of $150K per year. If you are a beginner and have just started with email marketing, this platform is not for you.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing automation tool with great features. They offer every customer a coach to help with any problem or queries they have. It is a great one-stop automation tool for those marketers who want to grow their customer base.

SendinBlue

SendinBlue holds the reputation of being one of the most trustworthy email services. If you are looking for an automation tool that combines transactional email with email marketing, SendinBlue is the right option for you.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a popular email marketing automation tool. They have a beautiful drag-and-drop email builder that allows you to use professionally designed templates and make them your own. The other features include drag-and-drop segmentation, A/B testing, and tracking.

HubSpot

HubSpot permits you to create personalized automated email workflows that will give good results. This email marketing automation platform ranks on the top in customer satisfaction. This platform is also leading in regards to attracting more visitors and leads to your website.

Email marketing automation

How do you make the most of marketing automation tools?

Hope you enjoyed reading the above post on best marketing automation tools. If we have missed your preferred platforms, let us know about them in the comment sections below. If you are using any of these services here, we would love to hear if you are doing any type of lead scoring or predictive marketing we would love to hear from you as well.

In this technology-driven world, almost every business relies on email marketing. Every company uses the Internet and emails for their marketing needs. Although email marketing is very helpful and effective, it can also have adverse effects if not handled properly. To get more from your email marketing campaign, you need to practice the best email marketing practices. The worst problem or hurdle a new email marketer generally faces in today’s time is email blacklists. Automatically considering an email as spam is a major issue often encountered in email marketing campaigns. As we all know, email blacklists are lists having some criteria to determine an email to be spam sent by any e-mailer, domain, or dedicated IP address. Several of these blacklists can be created by anyone receiving and processing the emails. Along with this, not getting notified about these blacklists is also a big problem for email marketers, as it impacts their marketing a lot.

To make a successful email marketing campaign, you need to identify and encounter email blacklisting and other online threats. This will help in reducing their risks and impacts.

Here are a few tips for making your email marketing successful

• Deliverability
  The worst thing that can happen to an email is for it to not be delivered to the recipient because of being tagged as spam. Several legitimate emails are also flagged as spam, resulting in no delivery to the client or recipient. So the first step in a successful email campaign is having a good deliverability ratio. You should be careful while selecting an email marketing service provider and make sure that it is not blacklisted. A blacklisted email service provider can never provide you a good deliverability ratio. Also, make sure that you don’t use a blacklisted domain name.
• Can-Spam complaint
  Make sure your email newsletter is CAN-SPAM compliant. Having a double opt-in subscription is highly recommended for a successful email marketing campaign. This gives your subscribers an easy option to unsubscribe anytime from your email newsletter, whenever they wish. However, CAN-SPAM law requires a physical postal address from the email publishers to assure your subscribers that you are a legitimate company.
• Provide both versions of text formats
  Although HTML newspapers have more benefits than plain text format email newsletters, it is necessary to send both formats to subscribers to choose from. Each format is preferred by different people for different reasons. HTML newsletters are better and are more beneficial than plain text newsletters, but due to security reasons, some people neglect to receive them. Some people use malicious scripts in HTML newsletters, mostly used for financial fraud attempts.
• The content and sender field
  For a successful email campaign, it is very important to use one specific name in all your emails instead of using different names. Different names generally reduce the open rate. So be specific and use either company’s name or a personal name. After the sender’s name, content or the subject field is the second most important factor to decide the success of an email marketing campaign. The subject or content that you send should be engaging, attractive, and concise to make a better impact on the receiver.
• Segmentation and personalization
  Segmentation and personalization are the most important part of an email marketing campaign. For a successful email marketing campaign, it is very necessary to create a good segmentation for your email newsletter. Personalization too is important in the content or subject field. For a better open ratio, more marketers tend to use the subscriber’s first name in the subject line.
• Timing plays a major role
  Timing plays a great role in deciding whether your email will be checked or not. The best time to send the emails usually lies in the middle of the week. Tuesday to Thursday act as the favorable days and timing for making a successful email marketing campaign. However, it is nowhere written that the rest of the days can’t be utilized to make the same result. Another thing that needs to be decided and monitored is the frequency of emails. They also play an important role in deciding the impacts of the emails delivered. However, deciding the frequency as per your content and subject can give the best outcome.

How to measure the impact?

Last but not least, after following all the necessary and important ways to run a marketing campaign, how do you decide if a campaign worked effectively for you or not? Tracking and receiving the open rate, deliverability rate, etc., can help you decide the success of your email marketing campaigns. With the help of different email tracking software, you can easily get these counts and decide what you did right and where you were lacking.

So, keep the above-mentioned tips in mind to reduce the impact of several online threats. They will help you experience a positive change in your email marketing campaigns.