As a marketer at the helm of activities, we need to wear a lot of hats to keep our company’s marketing ROI scaling. We write, reach out to, and connect with our target audiences. We know their pain points. But while solving theirs, we find our own. This gets tricky more often. What if there is a way to simplify and automate the activities? So that we and our teams can focus time and attention on efforts that drive revenue. The key for businesses lies is finding tools that can automate many components of marketing at once.
Below are the five revolutionary platforms automate processes to make marketers’ lives super easy :
1.Marketo
Marketo is an all-in-one automation tool that covers any channel and every engagement. It has been incorporated into Adobe’s enterprise cloud after its acquisition by Adobe. Marketo comprises a full suite of tools on email marketing, social marketing, budget management, lead nurturing, website personalization and more. It is quite convenient for you to link up existing tools with Marketo via the Marketo marketplace. Marketo is a suitable option for larger marketing operations.
But, on the flip side, despite being customizable, it’s set-up process is highly complex. The platform has earned a bad market reputation on account of inconsistent customer service.
2. moLotus
It is one of its kind mobile advertising platforms that transforms and automates the entire marketing process. It automates all aspects of your customer-relationship management via mobile. You can run fully automated reward, loyalty, and referral campaigns with highly personalized & interactive options like name, greeting, reward, and multiple type call to action. The noteworthy feature is that it does not need any app and data to deliver the advertiser message. The messages directly go to the mobile inbox of your customer.
It seamlessly integrates your customer database system with the campaigns. moLotus Automation API allows systems - CRMs, Transactional, Customer Service to trigger any interaction with customers. This platform is quite efficient, easy to use and cost-effective.
3. Zapier
It is an online automation tool that connects various apps and services. You can connect two or more apps without coding or relying on developers to automate repetitive tasks and integration. This lets anyone build interactions with just a few clicks to automate Twitter, Hubspot, MailChimp, and more. A Zap - Zapier’s word for an integration - is an automated workflow that connects your apps and services together. Each Zap consists of a trigger and actions. When Zap is turned on, it runs the action steps every time the trigger event occurs.
Zapier is well suited if a high volume of data has to be moved between various applications. Although Zapier was designed to be easy to use, it is quite difficult to learn. While setting up Zaps, you occasionally get errors. Zapier itself admits that updating the existing records can be challenging.
4. Drip
This is a well-acclaimed automation tool that is focused on eCommerce businesses. One of Drip‘s many strengths is email automation. It can help you out with building emails, automation workflows, and targeted email campaigns. The platform has a robust analytics dashboard reflecting exactly how your marketing strategies are going. Drip gives you insight into what your customers are perusing, clicking, and craving. With e-commerce CRM features that let you tag and identify every action, you can see the whole story behind every unique customer.
It takes a while to learn how to use all the features, specifically the rules, workflows, tags and custom fields. One can get confused between campaigns and workflows and when to use which. The email templates are somewhat basic not holding much value.
5. HubSpot
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is fundamentally different from others. Its focus on inbound marketing is unparalleled. Hubspot offers the added benefit of the Sales and Service Hubs, which implies that your team can work together across departments in a better way. It is quite useful for small business owners with little or no coding ability. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Hubspot is the extent to which it invests in educating customers via a blog. The blog is an exceptional place for you to learn online marketing. Hubspot has everything in one place making it very convenient for you to use.
However, the HubSpot interface changes frequently, sometimes making it difficult to navigate through the menus and find what you are looking for. It lacks the ability to customize the mobile version of an email without affecting the desktop version.