Many marketing departments use marketing automation software to handle their outbound marketing campaigns. You do not need a team of marketing experts, nor a huge marketing budget to bring your marketing strategy to the next level, all you need is the right marketing automation software.
In this article we will provide a complete overview of marketing automation software to hopefully answer any questions you have regarding this type of system.
Table of Contents
What is Marketing Automation Software?
What Does Marketing Automation Software Do?
How Much Does Marketing Automation Software Cost?
Best Marketing Automation Software
Marketing Automation Vs. Sales Force Automation
What is Marketing Automation Software?
Marketing Automation software is a tool that automates marketing activity including email marketing, sms marketing, social media marketing, and telemarketing.
Marketing Automation software can be either a cloud or on-premise system. In today's software market the majority of the new marketing automation tools are cloud based, and can be purchased month to month as a software as a service type product.
What Does Marketing Automation Software Do?
The primary purpose of marketing automation software is exactly like it sounds, to automate your organization's marketing activity. When it comes to marketing in 2021 email plays a vital role, and marketing automation software is great at it.
Email automation can be a great marketing strategy, whether it be drip campaigns, or targeted emails sent based on specific customer actions or time frames. Drip campaigns are a standard feature of marketing automation software. Drip campaigns are a series of emails that send to your customers or leads based on a specific timeframe. The timeframe can be something simple such as sending an email every 3 days, to more complex scenarios such as triggering the first email only after the customer has not been contacted in a certain amount of time.
Drip Campaigns can be as complex as needed with as many of conditions as necessary. There is a great benefit to taking advantage of drip campaigns with your marketing automation software. Have you ever noticed after contacting a large company or starting a free trial with a popular online service you begin to get routine emails from them? This is a drip campaign, and it is handled by their marketing automation software.
How Much Does Marketing Automation Software Cost?
Marketing Automation Software costs can vary widely based on the provider you choose. Solutions can range in cost between $20 per user per month to more than $200 per user per month. The larger more recognized marketing automation software solutions are usually priced at the high range, for example Salesforce's marketing solution is over $200 per user per month (billed annually!).
There are other CRM software solutions that offer marketing automation as part of their default feature set. One of these software solutions is Snapforce CRM, the cost starts at $12 per user per month and the marketing automation module is $8 per user per month.
Best Marketing Automation Software
Here are the best marketing automation tools available in 2021. I am very familiar with the different software in this market and after a lot of research here are my picks for the best marketing automation software.
Snapforce CRM
Snapforce is a cloud based CRM software product with a vast array of modules to choose from. The default feature set includes marketing automation and the pricing for Snapforce is only $12 per user per month. For an additional $8 per user per month you can add the Campaigns module which includes campaign management, email blasts, email tracking that lets you track which emails are opened, clicked on, or bounce.
The Campaigns module also includes up to 100,000 emails per month, which is by far the least expensive in the industry. They can provide the service at this cost because all of the email servers are maintained and serviced in house.
Salesforce Marketing
Salesforce is a cloud based CRM product that also offers another product which can be purchased on top of the CRM called Salesforce Marketing. It is marketed as a product for your marketing department, the idea is your sales team use the Salesforce CRM system and your marketing team use Salesforce marketing, and all of the data is fully integrated.
The downside is that the cost is extremely expensive. Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition starts at $150 per user per month (billed annually), monthly billing is no longer an option. Then if you also want Salesforce Marketing you must pay for that as well, which starts at $400 per month (billed annually). The Salesforce Marketing addon is not billed per user but per organization.
Hubspot Marketing
Hubspot Marketing is also a cloud based software, but does not include a CRM. Hubspot is known for their marketing software, marketing is what they do. Hubspot Enterprise costs $38,400 per year, they do not charge per user and only accept annual billing.
Hubspot Marketing's Enterprise edition allows for 10,000 contacts, if you need more than 10,000 they will charge extra.
Marketing Automation Vs. Sales Force Automation
Marketing Automation Software is similar to Sales Force Automation Software, as both provide functionality to automate the work of their respective departments. Sales Automation Software tries to automate the work of the sales department, and the individual sales reps, whereas Marketing Automation Software automates the work of the marketing department.
Sales Force Automation software helps sales reps close deals, guiding the deal from start to finish. Helping the sales rep continue to move the opportunity forward and continue pushing through the different stages of the opportunity lifecycle.