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The baseline of marketing automation is to have software and tools automate various marketing tasks and workflows. For example, tasks like SMS marketing, email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns are automated by marketers to improve efficiency.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation simplifies and shortens the marketing process seamlessly. As a result, communication and conversions happen a lot quicker. You can optimize your marketing efforts to drive targeted visitors to your website. This allows them to readily discover, consider, and even make purchases without leaving their homes. The strategy helps you effectively engage with all your customers and steer them successfully through your sales funnel.
Marketing automation helps simplify and makes your work easier, reduces wastage of time, and delivers in time. Marketing automation is a set of tools to bring marketing activities down to their most accessible simplicity. Marketing automation makes work easy because messages, ad campaigns, emails, and posts are sent automatically without independently sending each item.
9 Best Marketing Automation Tools For WordPress
1. MonkeyPesa CRM
MonkeyPesa CRM is an all-in-one business automation tool. From sales marketing, automation or customer support. With the devotion to helping Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), MonkeyPesa is a user-friendly tool. The pricing, features, analytics and easy-to-interpret dashboard make it ideal for you.
The CRM aids businesses in getting prospects, and insights, converts more leads to become customers and manages customers across several channels. At the same time, they go through the selling process.
The services offered include; Sales pipeline management which helps companies to sell faster and get more prospects into the business. The invoicing and billing system allows track time, generating invoices, Pro-forma invoices, quotes, and getting much more money faster. And the real estate system helps real estate companies to acquire property, landlord management, tenant and the necessary automation.
MonkeyPesa CRM Features:
Team collaboration
Contact management
Pipeline management
Data security
Insights, analytics and reports
Human Resource and payroll
Inventory and stores
Bulk SMS and emailing
Accessible Communication is a giant step toward maintaining good relationships with clients. Strong relationships generate more sales and support, improve client satisfaction, and can even reduce business expenses. MonkeyPesa is the perfect alternative to Salesforce.
A closed buyer is just as vital as a new lead. MonkeyPesa CRM allows you to create charges based on a prospect’s information, schedule calls for them at any point in time, take notes based on our interactions, and easily save and organize that data for future use. In a nutshell, you are moving a sales lead, or prospect from one stage of your sales funnel to the next.
The MonkeyPesa CRM allows you to add contacts manually or via a file upload. Because the goal is to have streamlined communication in the sales process, you do not have to open another platform to make calls with your clients and prospects. The dashboard enables calls. In addition, all these interactions are captured in case you need to make clarifications and references.
Social Media is a very relevant tool for sales and marketing today. Every passing day, there is a new social media channel your clients and prospects sign up for. MonkeyPesa provides a centralized location for all your social media interactions — tweets, posts, reels, videos, comments, replies, and Direct Messages.
2. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign caters to all business sizes with mega automation that integrates email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text. Over 70% of ActiveCampaign's customers use its 300+ integrations, including Shopify, Square, Facebook, and Salesforce. Pricing starts at $9 a month.
Why should you use ActiveCampaign?
Customizes sends based on parameters
Automates individualized experiences across all your customer touchpoints
Uses customer lifecycle to choose content, send time and delivery channel for each customer.
Keeps track of client's interests and behavior
Creates customized campaigns with minimal effort
ActiveCampaign Prices: Get’s started at just $9 per month for the basic plan, $49 per month for the Plus plan (unlocks CRM features, advanced integrations), $129 per month for Pro, $229 per month for Enterprise Plan.
ActiveCampaign easily combines and integrates with other software, applications and tools. These include; Microsoft, Shopify, Facebook, Salesforce and more. ActiveCampaign provides a perfect customer service experience that surpasses the traditional touchpoints for instance emails. The service software offers a personalized, high-touch experience for businesses however channels, additional teams, locations and customer segments.
ActiveCampaign eliminates silos between data sources, communication channels and teams. This aids businesses to scale their personal customer relationships via connected experiences that span the customer lifecycle. ActiveCampaigns’ customized experience helps businesses to computerize a truly personalized experience that is real so that clients can widen their relationships.
ActiveCampaign features include;
unlimited sending
sending newsletters
subscription forms
marketing automation
landing pages
Facebook custom audiences
lead and contact scoring
conversation
attribution reporting
predictive content with machine learning
custom domain
dedicated account rep and more.
3. Hubspot
This is one of the best CRM software tools that serve all businesses ranging from startups to large business ventures. In addition, Hubspot offers free tools for teams and best manages customers’ contacts well.
Hubspot CRM enables you to do many valuable things with your contact base, such as keeping all contact information (including internal notes) in a centralized place and automating different reminders.
Hubspot CRM is software built for marketing and sales companies that want to use proven techniques for ushering in new clients and customers, especially businesses that generate customers via online marketing and sales.
In your quest to identify a CRM perfect for your business, chances are high you have come across HubSpot free CRM. You can store up to a million contacts in your HubSpot database with the free CRM. Furthermore, an unlimited number of your team can access your database, Integration with Gmail and Outlook, Email and Meeting Scheduling, Capture, Store, and track sales leads.
Hubspot’s CRM is a tool that teams find friendly to use, and more so, it automates tasks the number of administrative tasks to concentrate on.
Hubspot CRM allows you to have access to sales performance reports and individual performance in real-time. This allows business managers to review and identify where there are potholes so that teams can lay strategies for achieving success where it has failed.
Hubspot has solutions for small, medium and big businesses. However, Hubspot works better for everyday business transactions since it is easy to use, captures customers, manages data, records calls and meetings, manages sales pipelines and also aids sales reps to monitor contacts with customers and deals. In addition, Hubspot aids managers to get an insight into the sales activities, marketing tools and activities.
Small businesses and startups commonly use Hubspot and medium companies but serve large enterprises as well. Hubspot provides a free trial version that supports small businesses and startups through their growth stages. Packages that can be accessed at a cost include; a starter package for $45 a month, a professional package for $450 a month, and a package for big enterprises goes for $1200 per month.
Hubspot is one of the CRM software commonly used by businesses in Rwanda. It has unique benefits it delivers to its users, such as; being easy to use, a free forever trial version, and cheap packages.
Hubspot features include;
Free CRM software
Free versions of sales Hub
Combination of Gmail
Outlook calendars, and Email
Deal stages
Pipeline and opportunity tracking
Website chats and bots
Email tracking
Reporting and tracking meetings
4. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. It is also the most popular eCommerce platform in the world. WooCommerce was acquired by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com's blog hosting service) in 2015.
There is a large number of addons and themes available for WooCommerce. They also have a passionate developer community behind them. Recently several hosting companies have started creating specialized WooCommerce hosting solutions.
You can automate everything a basic online store needs: product carts, different payment options, shipping options, tax calculations, and more. There’s also features to make your job on the inside easier, including Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Facebook integrations and a central store dashboard with key metrics.
Since WooThemes (the creators of WooCommerce) was acquired by Automattic in 2015, WooCommerce’s popularity has increased dramatically and is now known for powering 8% of all ecommerce websites online and 21% of the top 1 million sites.
Pros of Using WooCommerce
Here are some of the advantages of using WooCommerce as your WordPress eCommerce plugin:
1. Extensions and Themes – There are hundreds of extensions and themes available for WooCommerce, making it easy for you to add new features to your eCommerce site.
2. Supports Both Digital and Physical Goods – Supports digital downloads (ebooks, music, software, and more).
3. Complete Inventory Management – WooCommerce comes equipped with tools to easily manage your inventory or even assign it to a store manager.
4. Payment and Shipping Options – WooCommerce has built-in support for popular payment gateways, and you can add many other payment options using extensions. It can also calculate shipping and taxes.
5. Support and Documentation – There is excellent documentation available online for WooCommerce. Apart from documentation, there is a knowledge base, help desk, and community forums available.
Cons of Using WooCommerce
1. Too Many Options – WooCommerce is very easy to use, but the number of options available on the settings page can be quite intimidating for a new user.
2. Finding Addons – There are many add-ons available for WooCommerce; sometimes, users may not find the right add-on for the features they need.
3. Theme Support – WooCommerce works with any WordPress theme, but it is not always easy to set up or good-looking with all themes. You need a WooCommerce-ready theme to take full advantage of its features without too much hassle.
4. Scalability – As your store gets larger, you will need to move to a managed hosting provider like WP Engine to scale your WooCommerce store.
WooCommerce is the perfect choice for any eCommerce website. It has a large community of developers and users, many add-ons and themes, excellent support for multilingual websites, and the best free and paid support options.
5. Dynamics 365
Suitable for business intelligence, Microsoft dynamics offers software as a service (SaaS) for sales, marketing, and service functionality. Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you win more deals by building strong relationships between you and your customers.
This can increase productivity due to increased customer support, thus more revenue coming in. Microsoft has worked for several companies in a good number of enterprises, for example; those in the manufacturing industry, those in the financial industry, retail businesses, those in health care, automotive, government entities and many more. Dynamics 365 include; a customer data platform, sales, service, marketing, commerce, supply chain, human resource services, finance, project management, and many more.
It gives a free trial lasting for 30 days, and thereafter, you have to start paying for their monthly or yearly packages. Microsoft offers many features, and the only limitation could be money; the free trial has a few features, but paid versions have many features; some of its features include; customer insights, web API enhancements, activity sorting control, editable grids, and editable grids and so many other features.
To take a deeper look at their pricing, customer insights range from $1,000 to 1,500 per month. Customer's voice goes for $200 monthly; sales professionals range from $20 to $65; sales enterprises plan ranges from $20 to $95 per month, sales premium goes for $135, while Microsoft relationship sales plan goes for $162.
6. SharpSpring
This is the best marketing automation software good for lead nurturing, generation, contact and sales organization, and analytics. In addition, SharpSpring gives shopping cart combinations for ecommerce companies like Shopify or Magento, thus a chance to tailor content based on the particular interests of a buyer. Of course, this takes place with the help of dynamic emails and landing pages.
SharpSpring allows integration with Google Adwords and salesforce while API and Zapier combination supports clients in connecting with other available solutions. Their prices range from $400 to $800 monthly with a package that starts at $550 monthly, and you expect unlimited support, unlimited users, and many other features. A package of $850,000 monthly serves 10,000 contacts while $1,250 monthly goes for 20,000 contacts. SharpSpring uniquely offers packages for Enterprise companies and marketing agencies.
Read more: The Best WordPress Plugins For Your CRM
Sharpspring is an easy choice for the EngageBay alternative because; it is cheap. In addition, they offer a month-to-month contract, which gives more elasticity, has packages for both enterprises and marketing agencies, is easy to use, and has good CRM functionality.
7. Freshworks CRM
For the best features and top functionalities like lead monitoring, contact management, deal supervision, closing, and email administration. Freshworks is the best CRM to use as an alternative to EngageBay in this regard. Its event tracking features include; lead scoring and email monitoring, deploys sales territory management, super workflow automation, and supports web forms like blog subscription forms.
Freshworks is good for all kinds of firms that are small, large, and medium; in regards to prices, there is a free trial that lasts for 21 days while other packages include; Blossom for $12 a month, garden for $25 a month, estate for $49 a month and forest for $79 a month.
8. Getresponse
This has a good number of years in serving businesses, and, interestingly, most of them have been able to flourish, and that is what Getresponse does for your business. It aids you in getting started with email automation and offers tons of templates. In addition, it has landing pages to help get in touch with customers as well as funnels to do the nurturing and marketing. Getresponse can combine with the already used online tools like WordPress, PayPal, and WooCommerce and has a wide variety of marketing analytics and reporting features.
Why would we recommend Getresponse?
· Wide range of marketing and automation tools
· Good lead nurturing
· Eye-catching landing pages
· Combining with the leading apps
· Good and favorable for all kinds of companies
Getresponse prices are affordable, starting from $15 monthly, depending on your business needs. If your business needs are many, for example, wanting to reach out to 3000 customers, you will be required to have around $45 monthly; essential needs go for $69 monthly. Professional goes for $139 monthly, while advanced needs, inclusive of enterprise campaigns, go for $1199 monthly. Thus, Getresponse is price/pocket friendly and favors those with a small pocket but with several customers' needs and can help you find many more email marketing solutions, automation options, sales funnel, and landing pages.
9. Infusionsoft by Keap
One of the most stretchy and authoritative CRM that you can trust your small startup with is Infusion by Keap because it supports the growth of pipelines, check-up leads to see if they meet the criteria, does email marketing campaigns and automates tiresome tasks, for example, monitoring selling and marketing activities, putting customer conversations in one central place, keeps you updated and many more others.
It is, therefore, worth your investment. In addition, it has several marketing automation features, sends automated emails, stores client information, organizes leads, and keeps track of them.
InfusionSoft favors both small and large businesses, it offers a free trial version for Keap grow and pro; however, it has other packages to pay for; Keap Grow goes for $49 a month, Keap Pro gores for $99 a month, InfusionSoft goes for $199 a month.