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HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot is a leading growth platform. Over 52,000 total customers in more than 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. Marketing H...Read more about HubSpot Marketing Hub

4.5 (5865 reviews)

4 recommendations

emfluence Marketing Platform

emfluence Marketing Platform is a cloud-based marketing solution that offers tools to create, track and run online marketing campaigns. Key features include email marketing, form and landing page builders, calendars, social media ...Read more about emfluence Marketing Platform

No reviews yet

4 recommendations

Creatio CRM

Creatio is a global vendor of a no-code platform to automate workflows and CRM with a maximum degree of freedom. Creatio offering includes a no-code platform (Studio Creatio), CRM applications (Marketing, Sales and Service), indus...Read more about Creatio CRM

4.8 (118 reviews)

3 recommendations

Net-Results

Net-Results is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for small, midsize and large businesses. Primary features include lead management, lead scoring, marketing list management, email builder, social media management, insight...Read more about Net-Results

4.6 (33 reviews)

3 recommendations

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Pinpointe

PinPointe is a cloud-based email marketing tool that helps small, midsize and large enterprises across various industry verticals to create, distribute, analyze and manage their email marketing campaigns. PinPointe allows us...Read more about Pinpointe

4.7 (55 reviews)

2 recommendations

Robly

Robly is a cloud-based email management solution designed for businesses of all sizes. Key features include retargeting campaigns, testing, pop-ups and reporting. If emails aren’t opened by customers, Robly can re-send emails...Read more about Robly

4.6 (412 reviews)

1 recommendations

ActiveDEMAND

ActiveDEMAND is a cloud-based marketing automation solution that caters to marketing agencies and helps them to create and manage their marketing campaigns. The solution includes marketing automation functionalities for small busi...Read more about ActiveDEMAND

4.2 (79 reviews)

1 recommendations

IMPGO

Integrated Marketing Portal (IMP) by Cosmos Communications is a marketing solution serving large companies in industries including accounting, agriculture, education, energy, insurance, manufacturing, non-profit, retail, telecommu...Read more about IMPGO

4.2 (5 reviews)

1 recommendations

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a web-based marketing automation service with millions of users worldwide. The application allows users to share newsletters on various social networks and track customer engagements. The application provides tools to...Read more about Mailchimp

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a cloud-based business management platform that caters to businesses of all sizes. It offers sales and marketing automation tools with helpdesk, analytics and customer support functions. Zoho CRM helps users respo...Read more about Zoho CRM

Constant Contact

Constant Contact delivers for small businesses with tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Whether it's driving sales, growing a customer base or engaging an audience, Constant Contact aims to help users build strong con...Read more about Constant Contact

Wrike

Wrike is a cloud-based project management platform for teams of 20+ that is suitable for both large enterprises and SMBs. It supports remote work for various teams. This solution comes with Gantt charts, calendars, workload view f...Read more about Wrike

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must-have platform for intelligent marketing automation. Customers from over 170 countries depend on ActiveCampaign’s mix of pre-built automations and integrations (in...Read more about ActiveCampaign

Semrush

Semrush is a leading online visibility management software-as-a-service platform. With over 55 products, tools and add-ons across online visibility management, including tools for search, content, social media and market research...Read more about Semrush

MailerLite

MailerLite is a cloud-based email marketing solution. Key features include campaign reporting, email automation, subscriber list management and result tracking. The solution helps users to design email campaigns in the form o...Read more about MailerLite

Brevo

Brevo is a cloud-based email marketing tool suited for organizations of all sizes. It offers marketing automation, email campaigns, transactional emails and SMS messages functionalities within a suite. Brevo allows users to crea...Read more about Brevo

Systeme.io

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps businesses create and launch sales funnels, affiliate programs, email marketing campaigns, online courses, blogs, and websites. Marketers can utilize the platform to automa...Read more about Systeme.io

Keap

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is a cloud-based sales and marketing solution that offers customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and e-commerce functionalities in one suite. Keap helps small businesses across v...Read more about Keap

Marketing 360

Marketing 360 is a cloud-based marketing platform suited for entrepreneurs as well as small and midsize businesses. This solution allows organizations to run social media advertising campaigns, conduct search engine optimization (...Read more about Marketing 360

Intercom

Intercom is the only complete Customer Service solution that provides a seamless customer experience across automation and human support, delivering increased customer satisfaction while reducing costs. We're building a future whe...Read more about Intercom

Buyers Guide

Last Updated: November 21, 2023

Marketing automation is a very active segment of the CRM software market. Not only are new vendors entering the market, but existing market leaders are constantly innovating and delivering new product updates. Today, the majority of solutions can be split into business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) solutions. The two groupings are very different and so are their functional needs.

Businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B) firms have longer sales cycles and engage in more relationship building activities. Businesses that sell to consumers (B2C) rely more on brand and high-volume direct outreach efforts. This overview aims to improve understanding of how marketing software applications work and provide an update on trends every buyer should know.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

What Is Marketing Automation Software?

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Benefits and Potential Issues

Market Trends to Understand

The Vendor Landscape

What Is Marketing Automation Software?

Henry Procter is credited with saying, “I know I waste half of my advertising dollars. I just wish that I knew which half.” This is precisely the question that this software answers. It assists firms in developing, executing and tracking campaigns. Media buying and planning applications help with planning advertising campaigns involving traditional and digital media. Managers use these systems to automate workflows, manage collateral, track prospect behavior and qualify leads before they are passed to sales.

B2B systems have sophisticated lead generation and lead management capabilities. For example, lead scoring functions score leads based on:

  • Demographics

    • Geography

    • Industry

    • Size

  • Behavior

  • Website activity

  • Responses to campaigns

The resulting scores ensure that the sales department only receives qualified leads that are close to making a purchase. For leads that are not ready to buy, marketing tracking software provides campaign management, which helps marketers to foster the relationship through techniques such as drip and “stay in touch” campaigns. 

B2C systems tend to manage vast databases of customer data—often millions of records. These systems have sophisticated tools for analyzing and segmenting customers into different categories of buyers. Markets can then execute specific campaigns, or “treatments” for each segment. Campaigns are typically designed to elicit a direct response, such as returning to a website to make a purchase. Alternatively, campaigns may feed a target prospect list into a call center systems for telesales outreach. 

MA software also provides companies with advanced reporting and analytics tools to measure the performance of initiatives. This allows managers to see which campaigns and channels are driving leads, along with the costs and revenue of those initiatives. In the end, this helps organizations decide how to better allocate resources.

What Type of Buyer Are You?

We believe that most buyers segment into the following four categories:

B2C enterprise buyer. These buyers work for firms that market to consumers. With millions of prospects and huge volumes of data, they need sophisticated analytics and segmentation tools to define, select and reach members of their target markets.

B2B enterprise buyer. These buyers work for firms that market to other businesses, and engage in longer sales cycles. They are primarily seeking capabilities that help them nurture relationships with prospects. Lead nurturing, lead scoring, sales force automation (SFA) and sales coordination and enablement tools are all critical for optimal performance.

CRM suite buyer. These buyers have less sophisticated requirements, but value integration with their other customer relationship management (CRM) programs. They are typically content to trade feature depth for native integration with CRM, SFA and other applications. 

Email emphasis buyer. These buyers work for small businesses that want to engage in more sophisticated email outreach, but are not ready to deploy enterprise-class MA. Marketing campaign management software buyers are primarily focused on managing a database of contacts and executing regular email campaigns.

Benefits and Potential Issues

Buyers who successfully implement a MA system should expect to realize the following benefits:

Identify and qualify more leads. MA allows firms to better target potential customers, quickly qualify leads, and send them to the appropriate sales rep.

Improved sales coordination. MA helps firms better coordinate inter-team activity. For example, a firm can promote a single product and track the effectiveness by looking at the number of qualified leads generated and comparing that to the number of leads converted to sales.

More effective campaigns. MA lets firms measure their campaigns and adjust those campaigns based on what they learn. 

Decrease costs. The savings per dollar shows up in several ways. Two of the most important are number of the employees in the department and the dollars spent on outside support. 

Issues with MA software often results from unrealistic expectations and poor implementations. For example, this software cannot make a bad service or product into a good service or product. If the collateral is bad or misses the point, MA will simply deliver a bad message more efficiently. Finally, if the wrong target market is selected, effective delivery to that target market will not help the bottom line.

Market Trends to Understand

There are a number of market trends that buyers should understand, including:

Software as a Service (SaaS). In the MA market, SaaS is less of a trend than it is the dominant model for deploying software. Buyers will find that the majority of solutions—with the exception of some high-end B2C solutions—are delivered through the online marketing software model where the system is hosted by the software vendor and accessed over the Internet by user. A benefit of Web-based email marketing software is increased accessibility. They can be accessed on multiple devices and from any operating system, whether you're a Mac or PC. Interested in learning more about email marketing software? Check out our catalogue and buyers' guide specific to this category here.

Social media. Social networking gives managers a new channel. Firms tweet coupons to customers and post special offers to friends on Facebook. Advertising videos are successful if they go viral on YouTube. MA is embracing all of this. Social networking integration will drive the next generation of MA.

Use of two-dimensional barcodes. Two-dimensional (2D) bar codes are seen more and more often on print ads, bill boards, bus stop benches and even as tattoos. Customers can use smart phones as code readers to get information about a product or service immediately on their mobile browser. Current solutions can use 2D bar codes with third-party solutions, but new versions will have built in support.

MA vendor consolidation. Large ERP and CRM vendors will acquire some firms, while some niche providers will combine to remain competitive. IBM and Terradata both made significant acquisitions by picking up Unica and Aprimo, respectively. Oracle purchased the assets of Market2Lead. Buyers should expect to see more M&A activity going forward. 

The Vendor Landscape

This type of buyer...

Should evaluate these systems

B2C enterprise buyer

Aprimo (Terradata), Unica (IBM)

B2B enterprise buyer

Eloqua, InfusionSoft, Marketo, Manticore, Pardot, Genoo

CRM suite buyer

Oracle CRM, SAP, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Email emphasis buyer

Alsamarketing, Constant Contact, InfusionSoft, Vertical Response

To see additional reviews and comparisons, visit MA Software Guide.