Have you ever thought about what makes some marketing software better than others?
Great creativity? Strong work ethic? Or maybe unmatchable creativity?
While all these factors certainly make some impact, it’s clear that they need to be completed by something that enhances them in the digital environment.
Of course, that “something” is technology.
Marketing software allows to automate and improve a wide variety of complex tasks such as market analysis, lead nurturing, data collection, campaign management, and many more others.
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It can dramatically decrease the amount of time required to achieve all these goals and help marketers yield more profit for their clients.
That’s why best-in-class marketers use technology more often than all others, according to The State of Marketing Technology 2016: Controlling the Chaos report from Aberdeen Group.
Accordingly, best-in-class marketers are much more likely to use a number of widely used marketing software suites, including content relationship management (CRM), video conferencing solutions, analytics & data visualization solutions, and others.
The best-performing marketers are also more likely to use emerging technology such as content marketing platforms, ad retargeting, event marketing, and others.
Not only do the best-in-class marketers use technology, they actually select the most effective solutions based on tests, experience, and reviews.
If you’re looking to find these solutions as well, beware: the abundance of tools available on the market today can make it very easy to get confused a little bit.
So let’s review the ways in which marketing software can enhance your marketing strategy and name the best solutions on the market so you know what works great.
The types of software we’re going to review here include:
Content Management System
Marketing Automation Software
Email Marketing Software
Analytics and Data Visualization Tools
Landing Page Optimization Software
And one more thing: all the tools mentioned in this article are either free or have free trials, so you’ll have an opportunity to test them.
Let’s go!
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Currently popular tools:
Hubspot CRM
Marketing software products. Zoho CRM
Insightly
Freshsales
What it’s used for:
Monitoring and tracking relationships with customers
Average ROI for CRM:
$8.71 for every $1 (Nucleus Research)
How CRM enhances marketing strategy:
Email Personalization with Contact Fields
CRM is an amazing tool that allows personalizing every email sent to customers without spending an extra effort. For example, it has so-called email tokens that let the user compose one generic email and include details based on the recipient.
Let’s suppose your generic email says something like this:
Hello [recipient name],
We hope you’re enjoining the summer in [recipient city]! To help you celebrate the upcoming season, we want to give you a 20 percent discount on selected products! Hope [last product purchased by the recipient] is serving you well!
Natalie from Company
Personalization tokens fill the blanks by retrieving the data from the CRM database and inserting it. As the result, every customer receives a personalized email, without even realizing that it’s a generic one.
Segment Leads and Customers
CRM provides a marketer with information that could be used to craft targeted emails. For example, it segments leads and customers based on age, gender, location, website behavior, industry, purchase history, and other factors.
In fact, 74 percent of CRM users reported that the system improved the access to customer data.
This information could be invaluable for you to attract interest to your brand; for example, if you’re opening a new store in a certain area, CRM can identify leads and customers who live within a 25-mile radius of the area to invite them.
Track Customer Relationships
CRM helps to answer questions related to customer interactions and ensure that you’re keeping track of them and moving them closer to purchasing.
Does a customer prefer a phone call to email? What is the next stage in the customer journey for this customer? What products does the customer prefer? What was the customer’s feedback on the last purchase? When was this customer contacted?
Marketing Automation Software
Currently popular tools:
Autopilot
ActiveCampaign
SendinBlue
Marketo
What it’s used for:
Automating marketing tasks while personalizing the approach to every customer
How marketing automation software enhances marketing strategy:
While providing a personalized experience for a list of people in your email database is easily manageable, doing it at scale is a different story. If a business has a large customer base and even larger lead base, ensuring relevant buyer experiences is a tough challenge.
However, it’s not something that marketing software can’t handle. For example, the tools mentioned above enable users to track the behavior of website visitors and later guide them to the ultimate goal (that’s purchase) by nurturing through email and other channels.
Based on the data collected by software, you can adjust your marketing strategy and improve personalization.
Here are the most common features of marketing automation tools that you can certainly benefit from:
Automation of multistep, multi-channel campaigns
Multi-channel marketing tailored to various devices
Retargeting of contacts based on their response
Tracking and engaging visitors who reached the landing page
Marketing campaign creation
Marketing campaign tracking
Contact management.
Email Marketing Software
Currently popular tools:
MailChimp
Constant Contact
GetResponse
ConvertKit
What it’s used for:
Lead nurturing
The next area of marketing software targets email, which is the most valuable channel for marketers. In fact, email produces up to $38 in ROI for every $1 spent, according to Campaign Monitor. This number is astounding because it beats social media and other popular lead nurturing channels.
Image Source: Campaign Monitor
How email marketing software enhances marketing strategy:
Emails editors and other software can help you to maximize your email marketing effort by allowing you to reach wider audiences, personalize communication, and get performance data.
Here are some of the email marketing software features that businesses use to improve their marketing strategy:
Obtaining data such as average open rate and average click rate. It helps to determine what emails are working and what require additional improvement.
Creating mobile-friendly email templates (68 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device, and the share is increasing)
Customization of emails with a business logo, images, and colors
A/B testing to compare which email version performs better (generate perfect subject lines, content, and text)
Easy creation of custom email (drag and drop features, tailored texts, action blocks)
Opportunity to guide recipients to the desired goal by using different personalized emails (welcome emails, promotion emails, inactivity emails, renewal emails, emails with personalized offers, and others).
Email marketing has a number of unique advantages that make it one of the best ways to enhance marketing strategy. For example, it remains an inexpensive method that delivers the highest ROI (which is something we aren’t used to seeing these days).
Next, emails can provide value to your leads and customers by supplying them with fresh, relevant, and useful information they can actually use. For example, professional essay writing services send out newsletters with helpful tips, news, and free tools for students in need to improve their academic writing skills.
Also, email software allows you to personalize your communication with the customer base and segment it in an effective and efficient way. For example, personalization of emails is something that is fairly difficult if done manually but is incredibly easy with email marketing software (i.e. changing “Hey” to “Hey Brian!”).
Moreover, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates than generic ones!
Next, by getting to know your customer base (content they open more, etc.), you can segment your marketing campaign and provide recipients with the content they really want to see.
Analytics and Data Visualization Tools
Currently Popular Tools:
What it’s used for:
Determining the performance of marketing strategies
How analytics and data visualization tools enhance marketing strategy:
They perform a number of important functions for marketers, including:
Creating heatmaps to help understand what website visitors want and care about
Providing conversion funnels to help find the biggest opportunities for improvement of your website
Providing feedback polls to assist businesses with understanding what both web and mobile visitors want
Recording activity of your website users so you know what pages are the most popular and how to optimize their experience
A/B testing of web pages so you can create a perfect layout with correct images, colors, and fonts.
As you can see these tools help to answer some of the most difficult questions marketers face: who are the people visiting your website? How are they interacting with the website? What are the most popular areas on the website?
Landing Page Optimization Software
Currently Popular Tools:
What it’s used for:
Test, analyze, and optimization of landing pages through visitor research and optimization roadmap
How landing page optimization software enhances marketing strategy:
With e-commerce booming these days, it’s easy to think that marketers have mastered the art of landing page optimization. However, the data suggests a different picture: according to Conversion Rate Optimization Report 2017, more digital marketers are dissatisfied with their conversion rates than satisfied.
As you can see from the image, only a depressing 1 percent of marketers were “very satisfied” with their conversion rates in 2017. To be among the best-performing marketers, you absolutely need to utilize landing page optimization tools.
By showing you the activity of website visitors and allowing you to test different versions of pages, they help to figure out which of your pages are the most popular, therefore, are performing best.
The bottom line
Professional marketers make sure that they deliver the best possible results, which is impossible without using marketing technology (which, as you can see, has gotten great).
So, feel free to experiment with different tools on the list above and see what works for you. You’ll see that undertaking such a holistic approach to improving your marketing strategy helps to focus on every important thing and ultimately achieve success.
Hope you’ll make a great choice!
