If you’re like most sales professionals, you are always on the lookout for new and better ways to streamline your processes and close more sales. Marketing automation tools are a great way to do just that – and there are plenty of options out there to choose from. In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to some of the best marketing automation tools on the market today. But before we dive in too deep, let’s first understand what marketing automation means.

What is a Marketing Automation Tool?

Marketing automation tools refer to various software tools that use specific algorithms and pre-programmed actions to handle marketing tasks – like lead scoring, email marketing, and list segmentation – without requiring direct input from the marketer. A marketing automation tool works by collecting data about customer activity and preferences through your website, landing pages, or blog. It then uses this information to anticipate your customers’ needs and send them the right offers at the correct times. With these tools, you can also track emails open rates easily which is an important task that was difficult to do before the introduction of marketing automation software.

8 Best Marketing Automation Tools for Every Sales Team

1. MailChimp

Every thriving business has an email list of potential and past customers obtained from others. However, sending emails one by one is almost impossible unless you have a very large mailing team. However, with mail chimp, you do not have to have a lot of manpower to send emails. MailChimp allows users to create product announcements, creative newsletters, and emails. And that’s not all; you can automate this tool to send emails at a specific time or send emails based on certain triggers from the persons interacting with your business. For example, if someone abandons a cart.

2. Salesflow.io

Salesflow.io is an excellent marketing automation solution that enables you to track leads, generate targeted lists of leads, and send relevant content to them with ease, especially on LinkedIn. As a LinkedIn automation tool, Salesflow works by building and managing prospect lists, identifying sales opportunities, and sending out personalized drip emails to keep leads engaged. That way, it becomes easy for sales teams to identify and communicate with potential customers so they can grow their network and increase brand awareness.

3. EngageBay

EngageBay is one of the most startup and small business-friendly marketing tools available. It was designed in 2017 by Sreedher Ambati as an alternative for HubSpot for startups and businesses on a low budget. EngageBay is an all-in-one tool that features CRM and sales and marketing automation. Other aspects for your business where this application can help automate include prospect tracking, email personalization, customer segmentation, building workflows, and predictive lead scoring. EngageBay comes in different plans allowing a business person to start with the basic option as a startup can easily upgrade to a higher plan without replacing their existing software, ensuring continuity.

4. Hootsuite

Social media is the source of a significant portion of business for most organizations. However, social media marketing campaigns can get complicated, thanks to the many platforms you have to run your campaigns. Hootsuite offers a solution for all social media campaigns by combining all social media engagements with your audience in one place. This ensures that you spot customer complaints early and do damage control before a situation gets out of hand. Hootsuite also allows users to schedule posts on all social media platforms without any human intervention. All you will need is to create posts, create a schedule and leave the rest to Hootsuite, which posts your content even past your work hours.

5. Marketo

If you’re looking for an enterprise-level marketing automation solution, Marketo is the tool for you. This software solution provides marketing teams with the resources and education to execute successful marketing campaigns across email, social media, mobile and direct mail. Marketo works by allowing sales teams to leverage built-in intelligence and rich behavioral data to identify and engage the right customers. In other words, the tool allows you to track your visitors’ behavior on your site to ensure you are engaging potential customers. Better still, this marketing automation tool can help you easily build scalable, automated marketing campaigns and track how your efforts and channels impact revenue.

6. HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot is a great marketing automation suite if you are looking to automate your email marketing campaigns. The automation tool helps you send the right emails by allowing you to choose from dozens of actions, conditions, or triggers so your emails can get to the right leads at the right time. Besides email marketing, HubSpot can help you build landing pages, optimize your blog for search engines and social sharing, send drip emails to leads and monitor all of your activities in a single analytics dashboard.

7. Eloqua

Another email marketing automation tool you will want to consider if you are on the market for an excellent email marketing solution is Eloqua. The Oracle-owned B2B marketing automation solution will help you create personalized emails and schedule to send them when customers are most likely to open them. Besides email marketing, Eloqua is a good tool to help you create adaptive campaigns, expand engagement with SMS messaging, and simplify the management of your campaigns by automating repetitive manual tasks.

8. Salesforce Pardot

Another premium marketing automation tool you will want to consider for your B2B business is the Salesforce Pardot. One of the main reasons you may consider this tool is its lead scoring and nurturing capabilities. Salesforce Pardot will help you identify who is of interest to your company and interested in the products or services you offer so you can tell who to pay attention to and who to ignore. That way, it will become easier for your team to generate more meaningful leads, increase sales, and close deals.

9. Social Champ

Since social media has become the core of marketing strategy, each business needs a robust management tool like Social Champ. It is an all-in-one social media management tool with automation support for multiple platforms. The tool allows you to schedule posts in bulk for your social media platforms and provides you with an organized social media calendar.  You can organize incoming messages with Social Inbox, generate reports, track analytics, simplify, and automate the content creation process with Social Champ. With so many features, platforms, and integrations onboard, this tool is eventually the most helpful one to manage all your socials!

10. Salesmate 

Salesmate is a unified customer journey platform that helps the sales and marketing team to enhance the customer experience and increase revenue. It provides cutting-edge automation technologies that can assist your team in planning and implementing effective campaigns.

Marketing automation, workflow automation, sales automation, lead generation, email automation, integrated calling, and text messaging are just a few powerful features of Salesmate CRM. Additionally, features like web forms, live chat, and a meeting planner allow you to collect leads.

A/B testing emails to gauge success, scoring leads to determine which are most important, and creating various automated journeys based on various circumstances are all possible with marketing automation CRM.

Conclusion

Now that you know some of the best marketing automation tools, there’s no reason why you should not get started with one of these great solutions and see how your sales team benefits. However, be sure to extend your search beyond this post when choosing a marketing automation tool to ensure that you get the right solution for your specific needs.