Marketing automation, a category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows,offers huge benefits. It can increase operational efficiency, grow revenue faster, shortening your sales cycle, improving your lead qualification and freeing up time to focus on more creative work, but it unfortunately also comes at a big cost.
This is because vendors managing marketing automation, base their pricing on the approximate value that the software can add to a business. One thus has to take into consideration what is affordable for your business’ specific need.
Hubspot was founded by Brian Halligan in Massachusetts in 2006 and was built up to its current 11,500 customers in more than 70 countries.
HubSpot identified a mismatch between how organisations are marketing and selling their offerings and the way that people actually want to shop and buy. They focus on pulling people in rather than just broadcasting information in the traditional way. HubSpot also differentiate themselves by building workflows around your marketing goals.
Infusionsoft was developed from eNovaSys, which was founded by Clate Mask in Arizona in 2001. The aim of the company was to revolutionise the way that small businesses grow through sales and marketing automation. Infusionsoft is currently used by almost 16,000 small businesses.
Infusionsoft promises to save time on reducing time spent on chasing dead ends and building relationships by automating the repetitive tasks. The system’s cloud-based software allows people to centralise customer interactions and daily activities in one place. Infusionsoft boasts email marketing capabilities (that can capture new leads), automate follow-up and turn them into customers, as well as lead scoring features (which identifies the hottest leads, enabling you to close sales faster, and custom segmentation, which allows you to create lists based on demographics, lead score and behaviour).
Product visionary and entrepreneur, Raghu Raghavan found Act-On in 2008. The system provides a cloud-based platform that enables small and medium-sized marketing teams to effectively acquire customers, build loyalty and expand their relationships with them through several advanced marketing automation capabilities.
Its core functions consist of email creation and delivery, social media campaign creation and management, webinar/event communications and management, website visitor tracking, advanced SEO for websites and marketing content, integration of SEO with blogs and CMS, Google AdWords integration, lead management, lead scoring and nurturing, out-of-box CRM integration, API access for third party integration and reporting.
Ontraport was founded in 2006 by entrepreneur Landon Ray, who is also the current CEO. Ontraport is an all-in-one marketing and business automation platform aimed to help entrepreneurs start, systemise, and scale small and mid-sized businesses.
The system allows you to create a personalised heads-up display of all your vital business stats on one screen, with an interface that allows you to add customisable metrics, set the reporting period, and stay up to date with your analytics. Ontraport allows you to track customer interactions, manage tasks automatically and score leads. You can also set triggers to perform various actions, like sending an email, direct-mail postcard, SMS message, scheduling a phone call or another automated action.
Phil Fernandez, co-founded Marketo in California in 2006. This engagement marketing platform was provided everything marketers need to succeed in this new era of engagement marketing.
These capabilities include targeted campaigns with lead-scoring, lead-nurturing and advanced workflow automation, cross channel engagement (including email, web, mobile, events, direct mail, and social media; integrated social marketing) and a unified marketing calendar that fuses campaign planning and execution in one place.
