What kind of tools qualify as Marketing Automation Tools? What is the need for marketing software in a Salesforce CMS? And what are your options for marketing automation tools when you have a Salesforce driven company? We are sure you all had these questions in your mind before you end up here. Marketing Automation tools can perform a lot of important tasks to optimize and satisfy the marketing needs of a company. Primarily, one should look for these four essential features in the marketing automation software - Email marketing, social media marketing, mobile messaging, and managing ads.

What does a Marketing Automation Software do?  

Lead Capture

Lead capture is a way to gain customer's information and what they are looking for by building a landing page, also known as lead capture page. The visitors are asked to enter their details and needs on the lead capture page in exchange for some offer or freebies. This whole process is automated with the help of the marketing automation tool.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring refers to accessing the behavior and engagement of a user that has spent some time browsing and downloading files from your website. This process determines if a prospect ready to go forward or still needs nurturing via email marketing, thus scoring a lead to the company.

Lead Nurturing

You don’t necessarily have to send weekly emails to your leads to nurture them. Automated lead nurturing through marketing software saves your time and effort by tracking the sent emails and their engagement to feed the relevant content to relevant leads properly.

Campaign Management

Automated campaign management takes care of accumulating and processing the data that needs to be out there for marketing and managing the lead nurture campaign.

Content Management

Managing your content across every campaign becomes convenient within the marketing automation platform. So you only need to upload the data, an image, or asset only once for content management systems to manage tagging and organizing of data across all formats and channels.

CRM Integration

Marketing automation platforms integrate with your CRM software and do the time-consuming work like sending a welcome message to new leads and tracking their engagement for you. So every time a new prospect signs up for your newsletter, the software starts gathering data on them and notify the sales team when those prospects are active on your website.

Analytics and reporting

When you automate your marketing process, you collect a huge amount of data. Have your marketing automation platform take care of the analytics for you, yielding insights and alerts to help you adjust ongoing campaigns and plan new ones more efficiently. If you integrate your marketing with CRM, it becomes easier to track ROI directly back to campaigns with the help of closed-loop marketing.

Best Marketing Automation tools to integrate into Salesforce CRM 

Salesforce is one of the biggest CRM software mainly because of its usability, app marketplace, and high customizability. That is the reason why some of the leading marketing automation tools that support integration with Salesforce. We are going to list out some other options with their robust features as well as the pros and cons of using them.

Pardot

                                                                 Source: Pardot                                                  

Pardot is a Salesforce owned marketing automation solution, so it integrates better with Salesforce CRM software in comparison with other tools. It is known to accelerate your engagement and sales through lead nurturing, lead scoring, CRM integration, mobile messaging, and email marketing. Some of its key features comprise of real-time sales reporting, ROI reporting, Integrating all campaigns and tasks on a single platform, and much more. 

 Pros

• Easy set-up and a lot of customization options are available.
• With the help of its click and drag interface, building workflow is convenient.
• Close integration with Salesforce.
• In-depth tracking of a hot lead and prospect. 

 Cons

• Unlike other competitors, It doesn’t offer a free trial.
• Offers yearly subscription, so there’s no option to cancel it after months of use.
• Features like A/B testing, email and building landing pages are only available to pro users.

Marketo Engage

                                                             Source: Marketo  

Marketo Engage is one of the earliest multifunctional platforms now owned by Adobe as a part of Adobe Experience Cloud. It is a total solution for lead management and B2B marketers who are looking to improve their customer’s experience. Not just marketers, it also provides few excellent tools for the sales team. Besides that, it offers real-time personalization across all the marketing channels and social platforms. It is for the companies who want to go one step further from basic marketing automation.

Pros

• Highly flexible and open-ended to use.
• It has the ability to utilize pre-installed templates.
• Offers web & mobile personalization and lets you track website visitors.
• Performs syncing of data between platforms every 5 minutes.
• Diverse pricing option to fit your company’s budget.

Cons

• Dated user interface and complicated setup process.
• Has a reputation for poor customer service.

Hubspot

                                                                   Source: Hubspot

Hubspot is widely used as an inbound marketing tool to seek out prospects that are looking online for business solutions. It can easily be integrated with salesforce to offer personalization of emails and data syncing. Streamlining content creation with its content management tool is easy and time-efficient. Its marketing tools can perform basic marketing functionalities such as converting, tracking and categorizing leads. Hubspot is ideal for a relatively small business that requires limited marketing tools and features for their marketing automation needs. 

Pros

• Intuitive user interface and structured way of providing lead details.
• Provides support for multiple teams, pipelines, and services.
• Inexpensive pricing plans billed on a monthly basis.
• Lets you contact your lead in several ways such as video chat, email, fax, text messaging, and phone calls. 

Cons

• Limited features and functionalities when compared to other marketing automation tools.
• Tons of configurations are required in the setup process.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

It is one of the leading marketing clouds in its domain, with a total market share of 24%. Salesforce Marketing Cloud lets you design, personalize, and optimize the customer's need and journey all in one platform. Different marketing tools that Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers to a company are journey builder tool, contact management tools, content management tools and various channels like email & mobile, and analytics builder.

Pros

• It provides a customer-driven approach to marketers.
• Built-in Salesforce Einstein AI in the workflow to predict customer's behavior.
• It is compatible with companies of all sizes in every industry. 

Cons

• A costly tool to implement.
• Complicated user interface.

Responsys

Responsys by Oracle is highly efficient and an industry-leading marketing tool for strengthening conversions and customer relationships. It lets marketers create a personalized cross-channel customer experience with ease and derives data from different sources and use that information to target a specific audience. The advantage of having Responsys over other marketing automation tools is that it provides certified email IP addresses to minimize interference from spam filters.

Pros

• Works really well with dynamic content. 
• Cross-Channel Orchestration. 
• Supports mobile in-app messaging.
• Powerful infrastructure.

Cons

• Lacks dedicated customer support.
• There is no universal keyword search capability to locate a specific item.

SharpSpring

                                                             Source: SharpSpring

SharpSpring is an affordable marketing automation tool and yet capable and powerful enough for small-medium businesses and marketing agencies. It is one of the most flexible platforms out there that offer behavioral email marketing, Salesforce CRM integration, landing page builders as well as support for various apps. Its visual workflow builder lets you develop custom automation to guide customers through the buying process. Considering how important email marketing is for a business, they provide you a library of email templates, drag and drop email builder, and content personalization to use.

Pros

• Cost-efficient for a team with a larger number.
• There's no limit on the number of users on any plans.
• Ability to track and analyze the entire journey of a lead with the help of lead tracking. 
• Provides customization in every feature, such as customized conversion forms, customized buyer personalities, reports, etc.

Cons

• Fails to satisfy the advanced needs of large businesses.
• Not ideal for non-marketers.

ActiveCampaign

If your main focus is marketing automation, then ActiveCampaign is your best bet as it is a powerful automation tool that lets you create virtually any automation you can imagine like triggered campaigns, marketing and sales follow up, dynamic email, and much more. It also helps the sales team follow-up process by seamlessly linking up with all your email marketing data. With its multi-channel marketing feature, it allows you to send SMS, personalized chat messages to website visitors, and control Facebook ad appearance.

Pros

• Highly powerful automation and easy to use.
• Choice and flexibility of template designs.
• It provides unlimited storage for data and images.
• Excellent lead tracking and lead reporting functionality.
• The starting price is reasonable for the features it is offering.

Cons

• The landing page editor is not available.
• It’s not a low maintenance beginner-friendly tool.
• There is no free plan for you to assess and determine if the tool is right for you.

Eloqua

Eloqua is another Oracle's marketing solution and a part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, a cloud-based platform for B2B and B2C marketers to help them target and track customers from multiple marketing channels. Marketers can easily create a buyer's journey of the buying cycle using the drag-and-drop interface feature. Since Oracle has partnered with over 500 vendors, it allows companies to integrate with any of the 700+ applications. Its sales enablement features let sales and marketing teams work in coordination to get new clients and gain profit from the revenue.

Pros

• Integration with over 700 applications.
• Easily create targeted campaigns across multiple channels.
• Sales and marketing alignment.
• Visual campaign builder feature.

Cons

• The implementation process is lengthy due to initial software customization. 
• Pricing starts at $2000 per month.

Marketing Automation at a glance

The automation tools we laid out for you are some of the fundamental ones as tons of other marketing automation software can be integrated into a Salesforce CRM. It all comes down to choosing the one that is suitable for your business purposes, your budget, and your technical expertise. With so many options out there, it's apparent to have difficulty in moving forward with one, while trying out multiple tools just to choose the one compatible with your business is not a practical or feasible option.  

That is where Evon Technologies comes into the picture,  as a Salesforce consulting company we will help you choose the right tool. Over a period of time, we have provided Salesforce development services in India to several small and large businesses to get their marketing strategy on track. Our experts at Evon help customers to fully optimize their Salesforce platform and customize it according to their marketing needs.

In this case, We will identify your business requirements, and based on that, help you implement the best marketing automation tool to give you the best bang for your buck. Reach us here to get the discussion started or if you have any queries.