Our Favorite Marketing Automation Tools
Each and every year, new marketing automation tools become available to the marketing community that help us scale our marketing efforts in more efficient ways. This is great for marketers and digital agencies like IMPRiNT that know which tools to use or have the time to test each tool to find out which are most [cost] effective. That being said, the introduction of scalable SaaS solutions over the past decade has made the space quite crowded, so we wanted to take a moment to share some of our favorite marketing automation tools that we use to help you connect with the best vendors.
A graph of one of our SEO case studies, Genetecist Inc. Using our marketing automation tool SEMRush
1. Measurement - Google Analytics
As a wise man once said, "Anything that can be measured can be improved." We always start off with Google Analytics. This may be no surprise to you, but this great free tool is a must for anyone looking to improve their rankings in SEO, PPC, or just to simply understand what's happening with their own website.
A screenshot of our dashbard on a marketing automation tool called Klaviyo
2. Email Automation - Klaviyo
Over the years, we've used plenty of email marketing automation tools and platforms. Mailchimp is a great low cost solution. But after recently setting up a few campaigns with Klaviyo, we are REALLY impressed with their marketing automation tools and the returns their email automation are creating for our clients. One of our clients saw a 50% increase in email response and spending with new drip campaigns and shopping cart abandonment emails. If you can afford their scalable pricing model, it's sure to be one of the best email marketing automation tools to use, that is until someone does it similarly for a lower cost.
An example of a email sign up pop up we made using a marketing automation tool. We designed this for one of our customers BeeKeeper's Natural's
3. Email Capture - Privy & Convertful
There are no shortage of email pop up capture widgets out there in the ether, especially in the Wordpress plugins shop, but these two take the cake in our book. They both have very easy to set up pop up designers and both are good to go at a very low cost out of the box. We ended up going with Convertful on a number of client campaigns, because of their ease of use in integrating the Facebook tracking pixel on campaigns. Our media buying agency partner for one campaign wanted to see how many emails their ads captured. We don't blame them... anything to justify the price of an ad spend helps keep the client happy. ;)
A screenshot of the dashboard of a marketing automation tool we use called convertful
4. Digital Ad Buys - Facebook Ads
Facebook has spent tens of millions of dollars on it's ad delivery network, and it shows. No other tool out there is as robust, and allows for so much hyper granular interest based targeting. It's a real gem for an advertising company and for businesses of all sizes out there. That doesn't mean it's always right for everyone, but we can help you figure out whether or not it's right for you. But if your company is visual or has products/services that match well with certain audience segments or interest groups, you can really create a lot of value for your business on this marketing automation platform. Be sure to A/B test multiple creatives and copy to get the best ROAS. The more you iterate, the better. After spending over $500k on this platform, we highly advise that you seek professional help so that you do not waste money. This is one area where businesses usually save from day one by going with us or hiring a professional.
a screenshot of the dashboard of one of the marketing automation tools we use called facebook ads
5. SEO - SEMRush
As far as marketing tools go, few are as important as SEMRush. We've been signed up with SEMRush for a few years now, and have used it with all of our SEO clients. We've tried a number of other platforms like SEOMOZ, SERPS, etc. but none have compared to the breadth and depth of SEMRush at as good of a price. They have great prospecting tools for finding websites to build quality backlinks with, a really slick interface for tracking keywords and easy to export PDF options for reporting. SEMRush has been a great addition to our suite of tools that we use and they've also created a lot of value for us in the time that it now saves us to report and create more value for our clients. Hats off to the dev team over there.
If you want to continue reading up on marketing automation read our blog post on our favorite email marketing platforms.
That's just a few of the tools we use on a daily basis and will touch base soon regarding other tricks up our sleeve for increasing the bottom line.
Until next time!