In this day and age it’s hard to imagine that there are still some organizations and individuals who see any kind of automation as an impediment rather than the benefit, which it obviously is. The expression “Marketing Automation” may seem somewhat intimidating however, the fact is an extensive understanding and specially the usage of Email marketing automation tools will not only amplify the efficiency of your marketing strategies but also increase the ROI of your business.

In this article we’re going to discuss about some of the best email marketing automation tools available in the market. Email marketing is still considered one of the best marketing strategies to nurture, engage and attract leads with your brand.

For those of you who still have doubts here are some statistics that might change your mind:

• According to Epsilon Email Institute, Automated email sequences have a 70.5% higher open rate and a 152% higher click-through rate than standard marketing messages.
• Automated emails are 133% more likely sent in relevance to a customer’s purchase cycle than those who send general correspondence – Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups

While selecting the email marketing automation tool best suited to meet with your business requirements, you have crucial elements like available budget, contact list size, integration and security.

Now the good thing is we are going to cover all of these for you right here, so let’s get started!!

1)     Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is one of the most elaborate marketing automation tools, which covers all aspects of online marketing not solely email marketing but let’s just focus on the automated email side of things for now.

Getting to those automation features is the arsenal of Infusionsoft services, due to the tool’s extensive feature set it might seem a bit complex at first but  once you get the hang of it, you’ll realize how extensively you can reach your leads and customers the inbound way.

First you need to do is set a new campaign and next step is to include some automation into that campaign. Once in Campaigns, you can choose from a number of ready-made workflows or you have the option to build your own from scratch.

Individual campaigns get triggered by an event and those triggers can be: web form submission, application of tags, products purchased, API calls etc.

When it comes to taking action based on those triggers, you can do the usual things, such as applying tags, sending contextual emails. Additionally, you can also add owners (members of your team) to specified communications with contacts, setting up appointments and letting Infusionsoft keep track of them, and more.

It is extremely useful in terms of how easily it integrates with in-house software like Cliniko to send appointment emails or nurturing patients for additional treatment.

Overall, This CRM really has it all when it comes to richness of features and numerous things you can do. It might be a bit pricey but Infusionsoft makes up for it with its excellent performance in email marketing campaigns.

2)     Zoho

The Zoho email marketing automation tools is specially designed for SMBs,  and the email marketing Campaigns automate all your processes related to email marketing, including email and mailing list management.

The CRM operates on the goal of providing the specified data at the right time. The system cis extremely useful in promoting user engagement using social campaigns on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Moreover it enables users to create effective subject lines and customize template designs while ensuring that the mailing list stays spam free. Zoho CRM services even lets you use templates of your own making by importing them to the platform.

Zoho’s integrated service desk extract data from all of your support channels – phone, email, live chat, and even survey responses so that it can analyze and respond to customer tickets from a single inbox.

3)  Active Campaign

While starting off, Active Campaign was an underdog in the email marketing world.

From then onwards, This CRM has undoubtedly built one of the best products for automated email marketing within the span of five years, bringing them ahead of the old market leaders like Mailchimp, Aweber, etc.

While this may come off as a bit out of the blue, but due to continuous and consistent optimization this automated email marketing tool has made its way to the top in terms of functionalities like deliverability rates, customer service, integrations and affordability.

As of now Active Campaign is being used by over 60,000 businesses, ranging from bloggers and startups to marketing teams at companies big and small.

4) MailChimp

To summarize MailChimp‘s marketing automation approach is by saying that they do indeed offer a large variety of automations that you can use, however almost all of them don’t go in depth.

Having said that, MailChimp’s mail marketing automation is great, but their methodology to automate communication is a bit shallow.

Here are all the things MailChimp lets you do:

• Sending onboarding sequences to new subscribers
• Occasional greeting emails with content of choice (like a coupon)
• Abandoned carts
• Nurture for purchases
• Contacting first-time clients
• Rewarding loyal customer

You get to use a variety of triggers such as “opened campaign” or “clicked campaign”, However, They do not have parallel sequences based on “if” clauses. And you can’t connect different sequences together easily.

Parallel sequences lets you send different emails as per the action taken by the user, it can be pretty useful even in terms of contextual communication.

On the plus side, you get a lot of ready-made automation in which MailChimp suggests specific triggers based on your objectives (like send a welcome series or nurturing the customers of specific actions from their end). These really speed things up quite a lot.

5) Hubspot

Hubspot IPO’d on the New York Stock Exchange in 2006, making it one of the first email marketing service providers to go public. Their software is being used by nearly 48,000 companies, most of them are small businesses.

Hubspot launched ‘inbound marketing’ and built an impressive CRM, email marketing automation, content management system and landing page builder all in one platform.

The CRM might seem somewhat complex and tries to achieve too much with none of it being done really well. However, the one great thing about having everything in one place is that Hubspot’s analytics are undoubtedly excellent. Want to see an email campaign’s conversion rate from leads captured last year? No problem. You can also send emails content that’s attractive and can be easily sent to target audiences.

What’s the verdict?

Frankly speaking, all these email marketing automation tools are great and most of them offer similar features and can be used for similar purposes. But the devil is in the details, though…

The interfaces vary from tool to tool, so is the general process of creating a workflow or automation.

To make the final decision we recommend that you consider your product or services as well as your business requirement, additional things to consider would be how you like the design or ease of use, or how affordable a given tool.

Luckily, you can try them all out for free. There’s either a free plan altogether or a free trial of some sort. Take advantage of that and experiment with at least a couple of these best email marketing automation tools first-hand before committing to one.

In case you have any questions regarding any of these email marketing automation tools, please feel free to contact us. We’ll try our very best to answer all your queries.

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