Marketing Automation Software has become a standard for many Business to Business marketers to improve on their tracking and developing of their marketing email campaigns. There are many marketing automation software products out there, but don’t let the most expensive products fool you into thinking that it’s the best or that the cheapest is the worst.
Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Marketing Pilot, and HubSpot are five of the more popular marketing automation software products on the market. Marketo and Eloqua tend to charge from $20k – $30k+ annually, Pardot and Marketing Pilot $16k+ annually, and HubSpot is only a few thousand dollars, but can fluctuate based on the marketers usage. HubSpot is not considered the most robust product of the group, but is good for companies that have small budgets and want to take baby steps into improving their email campaigns, based on the target audience’s behavior at the company’s website. Tip, if you do choose HubSpot, remember, there will be a significant amount of work that will go into evolving into a more robust marketing automation software product later and HubSpot holds all of your data, not on your local servers, which may be difficult for later transitioning.
My recommendation is to evaluate each of these software products carefully, not just based on the budget, but what other features may be needed for long-term usage. Each of these products do integrate with a CRM product, such as a SalesForce.com, but some of the products do it better than the others with easy dashboard interfaces. Pardot seems to be the most intuitive of the products to learn quickly and for monitoring campaigns, as well as, customization of reports.
Which ever Marketing Automation Software product you choose, make sure to ask, prior to purchase, how do these products handle duplicate emails, since this is a big issue for Email Marketers.