Marketing automation platforms are aimed at automating and scaling routine marketing processes and further analysis of these efforts. Such software helps businesses nurture the leads by means of providing them with the suitable, personalized content and turning them from target prospects into ready-to-buy clients. An essential feature of CRM-oriented campaigns is that they can be designed, launched and executed in automatically without agents’ involvement.

Before you trigger a digital campaign, you need to select the best marketing automation software – the one that will satisfy all the requirements of your business and enable you to increase revenue with no additional expenses. It is important that the chosen solution entails a number of tools for the analysis of the company’s performance, management of business processes, etc. Before implementing a new platform, you should think about the main features your organization may need and make sure your best marketing automation software is user-friendly.

Let us, for example, have a look at bpm’online – a cloud-based platform, which provides companies with a variety of tools for successful lead management, maintaining of personalized communications with customers, and so on. The platform provides reps with a 360-degree customer view, a user-friendly email-marketing system, a multifunctional system-designer, etc. CRM-oriented tools of bpm’online are suitable for both medium and large businesses. You can read about this software on its official website. Here, you can also watch the advert video or try the demo version of the system.

Best Marketing Automation Software for B2B and B2C Businesses

When you sell certain products to other companies, operate in B2B sector, you should be ready that the buyers will pay special attention to higher price points and longer sales cycles. CRM-oriented platforms let businesses maintain personalized communication with all customers. Most marketing automation systems are designed for B2B selling cycles, but it doesn’t mean B2C companies have nothing to do with such software. Actually, there are some vendors focused on B2C prospects only. Besides, you can find a number of B2B-oriented solutions possessing B2C features, too.

Speaking about the difference between B2B and B2C companies, we should underline the following: for the B2B firms, the best marketing automation software is aimed at building good relationships with customers through the so-called “nurturing” programs. The major objective of such organizations is to help prospects understand the value of the goods and services offered over a given period of time. It is essential for B2B businesses to possess relevant content to share and develop suitable email campaigns to gain customers’ interest and turn them into ready-to buy prospects.

When selling products or services to other businesses, you should be prepared to face a larger prospect pool and a shorter trade cycle. For such buyers, the brand is much more important than any relationships. Therefore, the best marketing automation software for B2C businesses should be geared to e-commerce aspects – the rate of shopping cart abandonment, successfulness of bulk email campaigns, deliverability of segmentation, etc. The platforms of the kind are less concerned with nurturing and engagement with leads and prospects.

How to Integrate the Best Marketing Automation Software

Many businesses already have CRM systems. When buying a new platform they have to pay special attention to proper integration between the two solutions. If they cope with this task successfully, they’ll be able to use bi-directional functionality of their software, which is essential for making the most of the CRM-oriented solution and the automated marketing platform. For instance, the latter can be integrated with a website’s registration form: in this case, the data submitted by a new customer will be duplicated in the CRM system. Besides, if a company’s rep changes some information concerning the client, it will be synchronized with the marketing automation system. It is very important for successful marketing campaigns.

There are different degrees of integration between CRM and marketing automation platforms:

• The fields of these systems can be mapped manually or automatically.
• The best marketing automation software may be synchronized on a real-time basis.
• The number of fields you’ll have access to depends on the provider.

In some cases, it is difficult for companies to integrate their CRM solutions with the chosen marketing automation platforms. Therefore, it is important to select the right marketing automation system with regard to your CRM software.

For most outbound-focused businesses, the best way to qualify leads is to conduct webinars. This is why such companies should pay special attention to integration between the marketing software and the webinar system, so that all essential data could be moved automatically from one platform to the other. When webinar data has been transferred to the marketing automation tools, it becomes much easier for the company’s employees to track the attendees and predict their behavior in the future.