However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will help you determine the best enterprise-grade email marketing solutions that can fit your organization’s current needs—and available budgets.

First, however, let us discuss one of the most frequently asked questions:

What Qualifies An Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions From Ordinary Ones?

Before we begin our discussion for the best enterprise email marketing solution available in the market, here are some important criteria we used to differentiate between enterprise email marketing tools and mid-sized ones:

• Contact Database Capacity: Obviously, bigger enterprises engage to a lot more leads and prospects, that can often reach hundreds of thousands if not millions. We mainly look for email marketing solutions that are offering huge contact database/lead storage capacity and are reliable enough (in terms of processing power, bandwidth, and overall stability) to handle the size of the data.
• Deliverability: A very important aspect to consider for any email marketing software. There’s nothing worse than realizing that only half of the people in your email list are actually receiving the email. Different email marketing solutions might offer different approaches to maximizing the deliverability. For instance, some might automatically blacklist addresses that trigger a bounce, and some might be able to automatically sort the contacts based on open rate.
• Advanced Audience Segmentation: The large quantity of leads/prospects that are engaged by the enterprise will have different “readiness” level. One prospect, —or group of prospects— might be more ready to make a purchase than others, depending on many different factors from demographics data to different urgency. Thus, proper segmentation solutions to differentiate between these readiness levels are necessary, so the enterprise can properly implement hyper-targeted email campaigns for each.
• Analytics, Testing, and Reporting Tools: Enterprises rely on data, not gut feeling, and various analytics tools from A/B testing to heat mapping to the analytics of various engagement metrics are necessary for an enterprise environment. The email marketing solution must be able to deliver reliable and intuitive reporting so executives and managers in the enterprise can readily use and analyze the reported data.
• Flexible and Advanced Email Builder: Content and how we present it are still the main cores of email marketing. An email builder capable of dynamic content is required so we can better cater to the needs of different user segments (as discussed above), so it can dynamically adjust content depending on different segments (age, previously triggered actions, etc.) The more flexible the email builder is, with more advanced features, the better. However, ease of use is still an important factor to consider.
• Lead Scoring: With the quantity of generated leads, a lead scoring solution—or even better, automated lead scoring solution— is required so the enterprise can properly allocate time and resources only on prospects with the highest likelihood of converting. The email marketing solution should provide the ability to establish different scoring criteria according to the business’s preferences, needs, and goals.
• Integration: In an enterprise environment, it’s more common to have many different
• Customer Support:Reliability is a very important factor to consider, but no software will be 100% free of technical and non-technical issues. Reliable customer support—or even better, dedicated customer support—, is an important factor to consider when choosing between different enterprise-grade email marketing solutions.

Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Solutions 2025

1. HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot is certainly one of the most prominent names in the world of digital marketing today, especially thanks to its marketing blog and HubSpot academy, positioning HubSpot as the go-to resource for anything digital marketing.

First, it’s important to note that HubSpot offers five different “products”: CRM tool (which is free, forever), Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and finally, HubSpot CMS. 

It’s easy to mistake the HubSpot Marketing Hub as HubSpot’s enterprise email marketing solution due to its name. While the Marketing Hub does offer basic email marketing features and a little email automation, it’s the Sales Hub that actually offers a full-blown email marketing and automation service. 

It’s worth noting, however, that the email automation features are only available in the Professional and Enterprise plan, which will cost you at least $500/month and $1,200/month, respectively. Marketing Hub’s Professional Plan will cost you $800/month, so it’s important to consider that the Sales Hub is also more ‘affordable’. 

With that being said, there are three key highlights of HubSpot Sales Hub as an enterprise email marketing hub: 

• Ease of use: HubSpot is famous for its very intuitive, easy to use interface. A drag-and-drop visual email builder that is easy enough to learn even for absolute beginners.

• Integration: HubSpot offers a wide range of integrations with various third-party apps and integration with its own free HubSpot CRM. This is probably one of the main selling points of using any HubSpot products.

• Reliability: HubSpot offers a very stable ecosystem with trustworthy data, and you can control almost every aspect of your sales and marketing campaigns in just one single dashboard.

Conclusion: Not exactly the most affordable, and not exactly offering truly unique features. It’s the whole package that made HubSpot Sales Hub a really popular and powerful solution. Definitely worth it if you do have the budget.

Pricing: 

• • Free plan (similar to the HubSpot free CRM)
  • Starter, starts from $50/month
    • All features of the free CRM plan
    • Deal pipeline
    • Email tracking
    • Email scheduling
    • Meeting scheduling
    • Live chat
    • Ref productivity performance
  • Professional, starts from $500/month
    • All features of the Starter plan
    • Automation for deal stage, task, and lead rotation
    • Workflow extensions
    • Personalized video creation
    • Personalized quotes
    • Data organization (products, teams, currencies, etc.)
  • Enterprise, starts from $1,200 a month 
    • All features of the Professional plan
    • Automation playbooks
    • Call transcriptions
    • Predictive lead scoring
    • Calculated properties
    • Quote-based workflows
    • Electronic signature
    • Recurring revenue tracking and analytics
    • Team management features

2. Pardot

First things first, Pardot is even more expensive than HubSpot Sales Hub, with the most “affordable” plan starts from a whopping $1,250/month, and you’ll need to pay more if you have more than 10,000 contacts in your email database.

With that being said, what’s so special about Pardot? First, Pardot is not only an email marketing tool, but a full-fledged marketing automation tools covering various powerful features. 

For instance, there up to 50 automation workflow rules with the basic plan, lead scoring features, SEO analytics features, and even marketing attribution. 

Pardot is owned by SalesForce (possible affiliate),  one of—if not the—most prominent names in the sales CRM industry, so there’s no doubt about its overall quality. Also, obviously it also offers seamless integration with SalesForce. 

Highlight:

• Features: simply put, probably the richest, most advanced set of features available today.
• Customer Service: also one of the best. Very fast, responsive, and helpful, as expected for what you pay for the service. 
• Resources: with Pardot membership, you also get access to various resources from written guides to webinars to accessing certified consulting services.

Totally worth it if you do have the budget and also in need of a well-rounded digital marketing solution. If you only want a dedicated email marketing software however, HubSpot is arguably a more cost-efficient investment. 

Pricing: 

• • • Growth: starts from $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts
      • Basic automation features
      • Basic lead capturing features
      • 50 automation rules
      • Variable tags
      • Engagement features
      • Lead nurturing
      • Basic lead scoring
      • Basic analytics for 100 SEO keywords and 10 competitors
      • Basic data management
      • Basic marketing training and guides
      • Basic integrations
      • Basic domain setup
    • Plus: starts from $2,500/month for 10,000 contacts
      • All from the Growth plan
      • Advanced automation with dynamic content and 100 automation rules
      • Advanced lead scoring
      • Advanced analytics for 250 SEO keywords and 25 competitors
      • Multi-touch marketing attribution
      • Advanced integrations
      • Advanced marketing training and guides
    • Advanced: starts from $4,0000/month for 10,000 contacts
      • All from the Plus plan
      • Advanced data management for 100K calls per day and 10GB file hosting
      • Advanced analytics for 1,000 SEO keywords and 100 competitors
      • AI-assisted analytics and lead scoring
      • Advanced automation with 150 automation rules

3. Drip

Drip is a relatively new brand compared to others in this list, has only entered the email marketing solutions market in 2013. 

However, Drip quickly gained popularity as one of the market leaders, especially due to its rather unique focus to—as the name suggests—drip marketing or autoresponder. However, it also offers advanced workflow builder and workflow split testing.

All in all, Drip probably offers the richest, most advanced set of features compared to others in this list. For example, there’s the Event Tracking feature where we can easily segment different users by “tagging” them, giving us a more intuitive way to implement segmentation. For example, we can tag users who purchased a product during the last holiday season (so we can send a specialized campaign for the next holiday). 

Drip also offers a very intuitive Visual Workflow builder, where we can easily create an email marketing automation campaign with heavy personalizations. If necessary, we can also add specific personalized metrics for different subscribers.

The main philosophy behind Drip is to provide an easy to use email marketing automation and personalization. 

So, enterprises who are currently looking to implement email marketing automation, but don’t want it to be too technical, can look to Drip as an interesting option. 

Drip, however, isn’t exactly the cheapest option available, with subscription plan starting from $49/month for ‘only’ 2,500 contacts.

Drip’s key highlights:

• Automation Features: the best in this list regarding automation with a modern, unique approach to automation workflows and autoresponders.
• Event Segmentation:  a unique feature where you can easily create user segmentations by “tagging” them based on performed events. A very intuitive approach.
• Ease of Use: even with all the advanced and rather unique features, Drip is very easy to use with its sleek, very well-designed interface

Pricing: price is based on the number of contacts.

• • • Starting from $49/month for 0-2,500 contacts
    • $122/month for 2,500-5,000 contacts
    • $184/month for 5,000 to 10,000 contacts
    • $1740/month for up to 140,000 contacts, or call drip for more.

Conclusion: a unique enterprise email marketing solution designed for better automation and drip campaign. 

4. ActiveCampaign

After we’ve discussed two (really) expensive solutions for enterprise email marketing, this time we have a (very) affordable contender in ActiveCampaign.

The most affordable—Lite— plan starts from a mere $9/month, but you only get basic email marketing features and you can only store 500 email addresses. Since we are mainly talking about enterprise email agency, most probably the better investment is going to be the Professional plan ($129/month, 500 contacts), or at least the Plus plan ($49/month, 500 contacts). 

ActiveCampaign charge extras based on the number of contacts, for example, if you have 10,000 contacts, the Professional plan will cost you $270/month—still very affordable compared to the two options above.

While ActiveCampaign is a cost-efficient alternative, it still offers a pretty decent set of features, especially with the Professional and Enterprise plans. The catch? The user interface is fairly obsolete, and the email builder is not very intuitive compared to—for example— Hubspot.

Highlights of ActiveCampaign:

•  Not Intimidating Price: for enterprises who don’t want to make the jump to paying thousands of dollars each month in email marketing solution, ActiveCampaign is certainly an interesting alternative
• Great Automation Features: Automation workflows and sequences are really well-designed and very intuitive, you can easily build an automation workflow immediately
• Zapier Integration: while ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer any built-in integrations with third-party software, it can connect to 1500+ apps via Zapier integration.

Conclusion: a great option for enterprises looking for a cost-efficient email marketing software with a decent set of features. Great email automation tools included, especially considering its price.

Pricing:

• • • Lite: starts from $9/month for 500 contacts
      • Basic email marketing features only
    • Plus: starts from $49/month for 500 contacts
      • Everything from the Lite plan
      • CRM and sales automation
      • Lead scoring
      • Deep Data Integrations
      • SMS marketing
      • 1 on 1 training
      • Up to 25 users
      • Custom branding and user permissions
      • Conditional content
    • Professional: starts from $129/month for 500 contacts
      • Everything from the Plus plan
      • Site messaging
      • Marketing attribution tool
      • Predictive sending and win probability features
      • Split automation
      • Up to 50 users
    • Enterprise: starts from $229/month for 500 contacts
      • Everything from the Professional plan
      • Advanced, custom reporting
      • Custom domain
      • In-depth onboarding
      • Free design services, free social data, phone support, dedicated account representative
      • Uptime SLA
      • Unlimited users

5. Sendinblue

Similar to ActiveCampaign, SendinBlue is a relatively affordable email marketing solution, and there is even a free plan—that is actually free forever— for unlimited contacts. You are limited to just 300 emails per day, but that’s probably sufficient for enterprises who are not looking to get too heavy with their email marketing campaign.

The most expensive plan (outside the custom Enterprise plan) is ‘only’ $173/month, where you’ll get the ability to send 350,000 emails/month, email and management automation features, and bonus features (outside email marketing scope) like a landing page builder and chatbot, so it’s quite nice to have.

Also, the plans are not based on contacts/subscribers size, but on emails sent per month. This can be a decisive factor if you are an enterprise with a really big contact database since SendinBlue will be, — in most cases—, a more cost-efficient option. SendinBlue was originally designed for eCommerce (transaction-focused) emails, so there are a lot of useful eCommerce related options like transaction-focused autoresponders.

With all those features, SendinBlue is quite easy to use with a pretty comfortable learning curve. The catch? The interface is quite obsolete by today’s standard.

Highlights of SendinBlue:

• Affordability: a cost-efficient option and the plans are not limited to your number of subscribers. This might be an interesting selling point for enterprises with a huge email database.
• Integration: SendinBlue—for its price—, surprisingly includes a massive library of plugins and third-party integration with popular software and tools like OptinMonster, Magento, and WordPress among others.

Pricing:

• • Free: 300 emails/day, unlimited contacts
  • Lite: $25/month
    • 40,000 emails/month
    • No daily sending limit
  • Essential: $39/month
    • All features from Lite
    • 60,000 emails/month
    • Remove Sendinblue logo/brand
    • Advanced statistics
  • Premium: $66/month
    • All features from Essential
    • 120,000 emails/month ($173/month for 350,000 emails/month)
    • Facebook ads management
    • Landing page builder
    • Management automation
    • Chatbot
    • Multi-user access
  • Enterprise: custom-tailored plan

Conclusion: If you don’t mind the fairly outdated interface and the pricing model that limits you for email sending per month, SendinBlue is a great, cost-efficient enterprise email marketing solution.

6. ConstantContact

ConstantContact, although relatively unpopular compared to some others in this list, is actually one of the oldest email marketing software we have today, having been around since 1995.

In recent years, however, ConstantContact has grown rapidly in popularity as one of the most reliable email marketing services, including for the enterprise environment.

ConstantContact pricing is fairly simple, with only two different plans available: the basic Email plan starting from $20/month and the Email Plus plan—unlocking the automation features, among others—, starting from $45/month. Both of these prices are for 500 subscribers/contacts and will increase as your contact list grows. For example, if you have 10,000 contacts in your database, the Email Plus plan will cost you $125/month, and the Email plan will be $95/month, still fairly affordable.

A major selling point for ConstantContact is its interface, which is really modern-looking like today’s standard of minimalist, responsive-designed apps. However, it’s fairly basic in the features department, although it does offer all the necessary features for decent enterprise email marketing practices. 

Key highlights of ConstantContact:

• Deliverability: Out of the other platforms we have tested here, ConstantContact offers the highest deliverability rate of 97%. Also, fast delivery time and overall, very reliable.
• Interface: Modern-looking, minimalist and sleek interface. Very intuitive and easy to use.
• Affordability: Among the most affordable solutions we have tested, although it doesn’t really offer too many features.

Pricing (price based on the number of contacts, no credit card free-trial available):

• Email Plan (starts from $20/month for 500 contacts)

1. Unlimited sent emails
2. Basic Pop-up forms features
3. Basic Ecommerce features

• Email Plus Plan (starts from $45/month for 500 contacts)

1. Advanced eCommerce features
2. Customizable pop-up forms
3. Automated Email features
4. A/B Testing features
5. Dynamic Content

Conclusion: Some people value interface and design among other factors, and in such cases, ConstantContact is the best alternative in this list. Fairly affordable, but offers a relatively basic set of features and relatively basic integrations.

Email Marketing Best Practices and FAQ

Email marketing is, on the one hand, a very effective marketing channel with the highest ROI. Yet, on the other hand, executing effective email marketing can be quite difficult with all the saturation and competition.

It’s important to actually have an email marketing plan, and execute the strategy flawlessly so that your email(s) won’t end up in the dreaded spam folder.

Below, we will discuss some important things when planning and executing your email marketing strategy.

Elements of a Successful Marketing/Promotional Email

Content body:  often called “copy”. The body of your email, the core of your message. Should focus on only one topic, and should be consistent with your brand message and identity. 

CTA: since this is a marketing email with the intention to convert in one way or another, call-to-action (CTA) is very important. It should be well-placed and should be designed to stand out. The offer tied to the CTA must be relevant to the email’s content.

Images/photos/infographics/video/gifs: you can use any kind of media in an email nowadays. The main principles are that it should load properly and quickly on all devices, engaging (immediately eye-catching), and relevant. 

Timing: it’s about sending the right message to the right people at the right time. It will vary depending on your audience, so you must conduct proper research to find the best possible timing for your ideal audience. 

Personalization: as mentioned, it’s about sending the right message to specific people. Email personalization today is more than using the receiver’s first name in the subject line. With various AI tools and platforms available today, we have more ways to hyper personalize our emails. 

Mobile-friendliness/responsiveness: more than half of all business emails today are opened on mobile devices. Your email should be optimized for any devices, and the best way to achieve this is to adopt a mobile-responsive design (or use an email builder that supports responsive templates). 

Email Personalization Basics

The key to successful email personalization is to really understand your (ideal) audience: their behaviors, their needs, and their pain points. 

Why is personalization important? 

Simply put, our email inboxes are getting saturated with each and every year. Studies suggested that an average office employee receives more than 120 emails each day. How many of them are actually opened? How many went straight to the spam folder? 

According to campaign monitor, emails with personalized subject lines have a 26% higher open rate, while personalized message (body) can improve click-through rate from a mere 0.4% to 2.1%, 5 times higher. 

As briefly mentioned above, various tools and solutions have now allowed us to bring more hyper-personalizations to our emails beyond simply using the email receiver’s first name in the subject line and in email greetings.

Here are some personalizations you can implement:

• Include location-specific or time-specific information when appropriate, i.e. unique holidays in some countries/regions
• Send content according to the prospect’s current stage in the marketing funnel, for example, by sending a specific email to people who recently abandoned a shopping cart or have consumed a specific content
• Including relevant and personal events in the email (i.e. a trending movie or tv series, etc.)
• End your emails with a personal signature with a human’s name. Very simple and very important, yet often overlooked.
• Relevant call-to-action that is interesting and valuable for the specific reader

What Is Email Segmentation

Segmentation, in a nutshell, is dividing your (large) email list or database into smaller “segments”.

We can use many different approaches to segment our email list, for example, based on demographics data (unique interests or characteristics), based on their stage in the marketing/sales funnel, and so on.

Email segmentation is closely tied to personalization (discussed above), and the main idea behind it is that different email receivers will have a different level of “readiness” to convert into actual customers—which should be your end goal. 

For example, a free trial or discount offer might be effective for the audience who already recognize their own problems/pain points and started to recognize that your brand is a possible solution. However, it might not be as effective for customers who don’t even know what their actual problem is. 

So, we put them into different segments and send different personalized emails to each segment accordingly. 

The better we can target—and segment— our ideal customers, the better we can build trust and credibility with each segment, and thus the higher the chance to convert them.

How Can We Segment our Email List

The most efficient approach in segmenting our email list is to create several different opt-in (sign-up) forms with different lead magnets, specifically tailored according to each stage of the buyer’s journey or marketing funnel.

Also, various email marketing solutions (including the ones we’ve reviewed above) offer the feature to segment your email database based on demographic data and/or behavioral data such as:

1. Stage in the marketing funnel (might be called differently with different platforms. Hubspot, for example, used the term “lifecycle stage”.
2. Geographical location—might dictate different holidays, regional events, etc. that we can use in personalizations.
3. Industry/niche they work in, especially for B2B businesses.
4. Previous engagements with your brand—i.e. If they have bought your product in the past during the holiday season, so you can target them with a personalized message this next holiday season.
5. Specific job title/role in a company. Again, particularly useful in B2B email marketing.
6. Preferred language.

There are, however, no set rules on how we should segment our email list, and you can certainly as many different categories and segments as you want. There is only one rule: each segment must be as exclusive as possible so you cant hit them with a more targeted personalization. 

Implementing Marketing Automation

Automation is how we can use both segmentation and personalization to good use, in order to maximize the results of our email marketing campaign. 

Remember that the main idea of email marketing comprises of three things:

1. Sending email to the right people (segmentation)
2. With the right message (personalization)
3. At the best possible time (automation)

Nowadays, various email marketing software or platform can help us in implementing automation—including the ones we’ve reviewed in this guide—, but in practice, there are several different approaches to implement email automation:

• Email Autoresponders/Drip Campaign

As the name suggests, the autoresponder works by sending “response” to a specific audience who has triggered a specific action and then sends follow-up messages on a regular interval until another action is triggered. 

For example, when someone downloads your ebook lead magnet, the autoresponder will send a custom-tailored, personalized “response” automatically. 

The autoresponder approaches require us to prepare a set of different emails according to these different “triggers”, these emails are often referred to as drip emails, and thus autoresponder campaign is often called “drip campaign” or “drip marketing”. We can then decide on a schedule to define how far apart these emails are going to be sent—- every few days, every week, etc. —

The main benefit of an autoresponder campaign is that when you’ve set it up properly, you can basically forget it and let the campaign work automatically, just as intended. You only need to update the drip campaign periodically when you need to add or change the triggers—or the responding messages.

• Automation Workflows

We can think of email workflows as an “enhanced” autoresponder. While autoresponder can only send messages at a regular interval until the receiver took a certain action (or unsubscribe from your list), workflows can execute different actions based on different yes/no criteria.

There are two key elements of email automation workflow: 

• The goal(s), that is, the desired action of the user after a specific step on the workflow
• Criteria: the action that would qualify a user for a specific workflow (yes), or another workflow then the action is not taken (no).

So, workflows—as opposed to autoresponders—-, can change the course of action depending on the actions taken by the user. For example, the workflow can send a different email for a user who’ve abandoned the cart the 2nd time than another user who’ve just abandoned the cart for the very first time.

Remember that the more accurate and personalized your sent email is, the higher the chance of conversions. 

Email marketing solutions that offer workflow functionalities tend to be more expensive, but generally will provide justified, additional value compared to those offering traditional autoresponders. 

End Words: Our Final Choice(s)

The six enterprise email marketing solutions we have tested above are very different from each other, and each of them offers their own unique set of features and selling points.

With that being said, choosing just one between them as our ultimate recommendation is going to be very difficult.

However, for the sake of this guide, here are our final recommendations:

• Best For Automation: Drip

With automation and personalization being very important in today’s very saturated email marketing environment, Drip offers the best features in those aspects with advanced and unique automation builders and advanced event-based segmentation. 

• Best All-In-One: HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot is still the best choice if you already possess an existing ecosystem of marketing/sales tools with its huge library of third-party integration (and integration with HubSpot’s other products). If you are looking for seamless integration, overall ease of use, and great set of features, HubSpot is your best bet.

• Best Affordable Choice: SendinBlue

We covered several affordable options in this list, but SendinBlue offers more flexibility in its prices because you are not charged a higher price based on yo ur contact size. A decent set of features, and quite reliable. 

The post Top 6 Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

If you’re currently trying to handle all of that data manually, you likely know it doesn’t always end well. Inefficiencies creep in, mistakes happen, and suddenly, your to-do list feels endless.

Now, while marketing automation is growing among businesses — with 91% of professionals saying they feel their current marketing automation strategy is either best-in-class or at least somewhat successful — only 10% of customer journeys are fully automated. That’s a massive gap (and an even bigger opportunity) just waiting to be tackled.

By automating repetitive tasks, you can ditch the manual slog, focus on marketing strategies that actually move the needle, and finally give your ROI the love it deserves. 

Our guide will show you exactly how to do that and share some winning marketing automation workflows to help streamline operations, boost engagement, and hit those big goals with ease. 

Let’s get started!

What’s workflow automation?

Workflow automation uses technology to simplify and streamline the steps involved in a process.  

Take document workflow automation as an example. Tools like DocuSign automatically notify each person when it’s their turn to sign a contract, keeping the process moving smoothly. Or if you’re trying to manage an enterprise application inventory, automation tools can track and manage software usage, updates, and compliance.

Implementing automation in these areas not only boosts efficiency but also plays a role in technology risk mitigation by ensuring security, compliance, and consistent performance.

What is a marketing automation workflow?

Marketing automation is all about using tech to take those boring, repetitive tasks off your plate. This is often achieved through triggers and conditional business rules that set specific actions in motion.

A marketing automation workflow is basically a detailed, step-by-step guide outlining how automation takes place throughout a typical marketing process, like onboarding a new user or re-engaging one. 

These workflows organize individual automated tasks into a sequence of steps, making your marketing campaigns smoother and more effective. 

Let’s look at an example. Imagine you work for a graphic design agency using a white-label graphic design tool to offer custom branding services. Your workflow could look something like this:

1. A potential client downloads a free resource (triggering the workflow).
2. They’re then immediately sent a personalized welcome email introducing your brilliant graphic design services.
3. If they click on a link in that email, they’ll get a follow-up offering a free demo of your white-label graphic design tool.
4. Then, if they book that demo, an automated reminder email is sent a day before the scheduled session.

This kind of automation saves you a ton of time while also keeping your clients engaged and moving down the marketing funnel with minimal effort on your part.

Creating a marketing automation workflow

Marketing automation sounds awesome, but we get it; some people find the tech side a little intimidating. Don’t worry, though! We’ve got your back, and we’ll break it down, covering the key elements of a solid marketing automation workflow so you can get started with confidence.

Trigger

A trigger is basically the green light for your tech to move to the next step. It’s usually a user action (like clicking a link or making a purchase) or even a period of silence (like not interacting with an email). Either way, it tells your system, “Hey, it’s time for the next move!”

For example, in a security architecture setup, a trigger could be when a user downloads your free guide. This action might prompt the system to send a follow-up email with more information about the software’s security features, moving them further down the funnel.

Actions

Think of actions as the “then” to your trigger’s “if.” Once the trigger happens, the action is what your system does next. 

For example, let’s say a user clicks on a link in your email (the trigger). Based on this, you could use a clickstream data example to track their behavior. The action could be sending them a targeted follow-up email with specific product recommendations or a discount offer based on the pages they visited after clicking the link.

Conditions 

If your parents were anything like ours, you’d often hear things like, “If you finish all your veggies, then you can have dessert.” Well, that’s pretty much how conditions work in marketing automation too. 

They’re like the fine print in your marketing automation — certain criteria that must be met before the system takes the next action. 

For example, let’s say you set up an automation where the trigger is a customer completing a purchase. The action could be sending them a discount code for their next order, but only if their initial purchase was over $20. 

In this case, the customer needs to meet that condition before they get the follow-up action.

Time controls 

Time controls (also called flow controls, FYI) are your way of setting the clock for your marketing automation tasks. 

These are the tools that determine when exactly an action will be carried out after a trigger happens. So, instead of firing off a response immediately, time controls allow you to schedule it, whether it’s just a few minutes later or even days (or weeks) down the line.

Say a potential client downloads an eBook about tech solutions (the trigger). After a set amount of time — say, three days — you could use a time control to send them a follow-up blog post titled “What is a monolithic application?”. 

This delay allows you to nurture the lead and provide more value at just the right moment.

5 marketing workflow automations 

You know how to build a marketing automation workflow now — yay! But what about putting it all into action? Let’s break it down with five examples of marketing automation workflows to give you some much-needed inspo. 

1. Welcome workflow

First impressions are everything, right? Regardless of whether you’re selling a product or offering a service, that initial connection can set the tone for your entire customer relationship. That’s why having a welcome workflow is really needed. 

It’s a series of engaging welcome emails, and they can make a huge difference to how your new subscribers feel about your brand.

If you’ve got more customer data on your subscribers (like their interests, location, or browsing behavior), you can segment your welcome email workflows and tailor your messages even more to match their needs, creating a more personalized experience right out of the gate. 

TIP: Welcome emails boast a much higher open rate than your average marketing emails, 68.6% in 2022 and 83.63% this year, to be exact! 

With numbers like that, it’s a great opportunity to slip in some useful info or key details you want your audience to know right from the start.

2. Onboarding workflow 

How you onboard a new customer can make all the difference in whether or not they stick around for the long haul. 

But don’t just take our word for it. A recent study found that 55.1% of businesses are focused on automating and standardizing the implementation process in 2025, recognizing how crucial a smooth onboarding experience is for customer retention and experience. 

While your welcome emails set the stage for a great first impression, the onboarding workflow guarantees that the relationship stays strong. This workflow typically happens after someone makes a purchase or starts using your product, guiding them through the next steps in a way that makes them feel supported and engaged. 

For example, you might include a quick-start guide or video tutorial first to help them get up and running while a follow-up email could give your customers additional tips or FAQs to prevent any confusion. 

The goal here is to help them see the full value of your product or service so they’re more likely to stick around and become repeat customers. 

3. Re-engage workflow

Let’s face it, not every lead or customer stays engaged forever, but that doesn’t mean they’re lost. You can create a trigger based on how many days have passed since they last interacted with your emails or even how many emails they’ve received but haven’t opened.

Once the trigger’s activated, your system can start sending targeted messages designed to reach and reactivate those inactive users. 

So, you could send a friendly email using an email marketing tool telling your customers that you miss them and send them a discount code or offer them a helpful vlog that’ll re-spark their interest. 

You could even ask for feedback about why they’ve disengaged, making them feel heard and valued. 

The key is to craft messaging that feels personal and compelling so they’re motivated to come back and re-engage with your brand. Because 81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience, tailoring your message can make a big impact.

4. Renewal or upselling workflow

Once your customer has bought their first product from you or you’ve carried out a service for them, your work isn’t done. Nope, it’s time to keep them loyal, engaged, and coming back for more. 

A renewal or upselling workflow is perfect for this, helping you retain customers and maximize the value of each relationship. The best part about this is that customer retention is more affordable than customer acquisition, so investing in keeping your existing customers happy is a win-win.

This workflow starts when it’s time for customers to renew or upgrade a subscription or purchase a replacement product. 

For example, if your customer bought a smartphone from you a year ago, and now you’ve released a newer, next-gen phone, you can trigger an upsell offering them the latest model, highlighting the new features and improvements that make it worth upgrading. 

Or if a customer’s subscription is nearing its end, an automated reminder with a special offer can encourage them to renew early. 

1. Abandoned Cart Workflows

Ever heard the saying, “Don’t leave money on the table”? Well, abandoned cart workflows are here to make sure you don’t. 

These clever workflows rescue sales that might otherwise slip away by reminding customers of the items they’ve left behind and tempting them back with sweet incentives or limited-time offers.

With this type of automation, you can craft persuasive emails that gently nudge your customers to finish their purchase, addressing any lingering hesitations they might have along the way.

Suppose you’re shopping on an online store, adding a few stylish pieces to your cart but then getting distracted before checking out. 

Shortly after, you receive a friendly reminder email about the items still sitting in your cart, along with an offer of free shipping if you complete the purchase within the next 24 hours.

Tempted by the deal, you return to your cart and proceed to checkout, grabbing the limited-time offer. And just like that, you’ve completed a purchase you almost forgot about, thanks to a well-timed email.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, our complete guide on marketing automation workflows, packed with everything you need to know to build your own at your company. We’ve broken down the exact components and even shared some of the most popular ones used by companies around the globe. 

Now, while we absolutely recommend implementing the five we’ve included, don’t stop there. There are so many marketing workflows that can be implemented, and we’ve really just touched the surface. 

Once you’ve introduced the basics, here’s a few more ideas to keep the momentum going:

• Post-purchase follow-up workflow: After someone buys from you, send a thank-you note, gather feedback, or recommend complementary products based on their purchase.
• Event reminder workflow: If you’re hosting a webinar, virtual event, or an in-person gathering, sending timely reminders can boost attendance. 
• VIP customer workflow: Reward your loyal customers. After a certain amount of purchases or engagement, trigger an automated workflow that sends exclusive discounts, early access to sales, or personalized product recommendations.

That’s it from us marketers. Happy automating!

The post How to Build Marketing Automation Workflows for Seamless Campaign Management appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The lines between the two are now (very) blurred, and with all the available channels, new tactics, and the increasing number of personnel, the need to streamline all these marketing and sales processes in one single app/solution is now more important than ever.

This is where HubSpot gained its popularity as a platform that simplifies and takes care of the whole business process in one single dashboard.

More About HubSpot

Let us first discuss HubSpot as the benchmark in this guide.

The name HubSpot has been really dominant in the digital marketing niche for the past decade. Every digital marketer out there knows about HubSpot and probably has attended the famous HubSpot academy or at least registered for its webinar at one point or another.

HubSpot is especially successful due to the popularity of its blog and various other resources, making it the go-to site when you want to learn about digital marketing. In short, HubSpot practically invented and established the inbound marketing practice.

Behind its (very) strong online presence, Hubspot is a company selling various marketing and sales tools, but it’s especially well-known for the HubSpot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and HubSpot CRM.

In practice, the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, integrated with the CRM, combined as an all-in-one digital marketing automation solution where we can automate various touchpoints from the first time a website visitor is attracted to your site, to the lead generation process, and the lead nurturing process until they are finally ready for purchase.

It’s difficult to discuss Hubspot as a platform in its entirety, so let’s instead discuss the three different solutions on their own.

The HubSpot CRM

We can get the basic HubSpot CRM for totally free, while the advanced CRM is included with HubSpot Sales Hub (more on this below).

In fact, HubSpot offers a free version of its tools for all categories (CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service). We will briefly discuss them in their respective sections below.

Hubspot Free CRM tool provides a solution to manage all the necessary tasks associated with sales and marketing in one single dashboard, where the sales/marketing representative can easily view various data of the sales/marketing funnel such as:

• Contact information
• Website activity of the said contact
• Records of every company in your sales database (for B2B sales), you can view all engagement and transaction details in a single dashboard
• Storage, management, and analytics/reporting of data related to deals/opportunities
• Storage, management, and analytics/reporting of sales/marketing activities

Acquiring new customers is certainly not an easy task to fulfill, and will involve many different activities that might overlap with each other. Let’s take a look at all the different activities:

• Searching for leads/prospects
• Qualifying leads
• Keep track of all the different opportunities, prospects, and deals at all the different stages (lost opportunities, some that might need further nurturing, won deals, etc.)
• Keep track of internal activities (meetings, develop strategies, appointments with prospects, etc.)

The free Hubspot CRM can help in managing and organizing these activities in a single intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard. For being a free tool, the attention to details given by HubSpot CRM is simply amazing, tracking every single interaction with any prospect and/or customer, and present the information in an easy to follow interface.

Pricing: totally free, enhanced CRM included in HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub

It’s important to note that Hubspot Sales Hub is significantly more affordable than the Marketing Hub (which we will discuss below). Part of the reason is that HubSpot is indeed more well-known as a marketing brand, and arguably the Hubspot Marketing Hub does offer an overall richer set of features—as we’ll learn further below.

HubSpot Sales Hub essentially covers features and solutions to encourage sales conversions. The basic—Starter—plan offers features like deal pipeline and basic email tracking/scheduling for lead nurturing purposes.

However, it’s only with the Professional plan (starts from a whopping $800/month) that we’ll get sales automation features like lead rotation and sales tasks automation.

There are three main highlights of the HubSpot Sales Hub:

• The intuitive interface: all of HubSpot tools are very easy to use with its sleek interfaces

• Rich set of features: all controlled within a single dashboard so you can manage and monitor everything in one place

• Integration: HubSpot Sales can integrate seamlessly with various platforms like SalesForce, Google Calendar, Slack, LinkedIn Sales Navigation, and of course, HubSpot CRM.

All in all, HubSpot Sales Hub is a really nice solution with jam-packed features designed to improve sales conversions, especially when combined with HubSpot CRM.

Pricing:

• Free plan (similar to the free CRM tool discussed above)
• Starter, starts from $50/month
  • All features of the free CRM plan
  • Deal pipeline
  • Email tracking
  • Email scheduling
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Live chat
  • Ref productivity performance
• Professional, starts from $500/month
  • All features of the Starter plan
  • Automation for deal stage, task, and lead rotation
  • Workflow extensions
  • Personalized video creation
  • Personalized quotes
  • Data organization (products, teams, currencies, etc.)
• Enterprise, starts from $1,200 a month
  • All features of the Professional plan
  • Automation playbooks
  • Call transcriptions
  • Predictive lead scoring
  • Calculated properties
  • Quote-based workflows
  • Electronic signature
  • Recurring revenue tracking and analytics
  • Team management features

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is probably the most popular solution in HubSpot’s arsenal and is essentially a suite of many different marketing tools covering various marketing channels from content marketing to lead generation/lead capture to email marketing, among others.

An important thing to note: HubSpot Marketing Hub’s starter plan used to cost $200+/month, but HubSpot has since adjusted the price to $50/month, exactly the same price as the Sales Hub’s Starter Plan.

Meaning, there’s simply no better time to invest in HubSpot Marketing if you like the package offered by the Starter plan, that mainly includes lead capture/generation and lead management features, such as:

• Ad management
• Live Chat & Chat Bot
• Opt-in forms
• List segmentation
• Track your prospect’s website activity
• Email marketing features
• Ad retargeting

As with HubSpot’s Sales Hub, however, the marketing automation features are locked behind the paywall of the Professional plan, which starts from $800/month (as mentioned, more expensive than the Sales Hub). It’s worth noting, however, that the Professional Plan used to cost a whopping $12,000+/month, so again, there’s no better time to invest in HubSpot Marketing.

The Marketing Hub can also assess the current “health” of your website—including and especially SEO performance—, a crucial aspect of any online brand, monitor social engagements, and interactions across many different platforms, tracks customer interaction, and so on, all in a single dashboard.

As with HubSpot Sales Hub, one of the key highlights here is HubSpot’s excellent third-party integration with various tools and solutions. Arguably this is even more important than in Sales Hub since, with the (arguably) richer features of the Marketing Hub, we can build a powerful ecosystem of marketing solutions with HubSpot Marketing as the foundation.

Pricing:

• Starter Plan: Starts at $50/month
  • Ad management
  • Email marketing features
  • Lead capture features
  • Live chat and Chat Bot
• Professional Plan: Starts at $800/month
  • Marketing automation
  • Smart content creation tools
  • SEO tools
  • A/B testing
  • Landing page & CTA builders
  • Video hosting and management tools
• Enterprise Plan: Starts at $3,200/month
  • Hierarchical team management features
  • Single sign in
  • Customizable sales funnels
  • Filtered analytics and views

Reasons To Look For HubSpot Alternatives

Above, we have discussed the three different solutions offered by Hubspot, and as we can see, all three (even the free CRM tool) are very reliable and easy to use. Both the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub offer really good sets of features, among the best available in the market today.

So, why do people look for HubSpot alternatives, despite all the good things it offers?

The thing is, HubSpot does have a major downside: it’s (very) expensive and most small and even medium-sized businesses simply can’t afford HubSpot.

Yes, HubSpot does offer fairly decent free tools and very affordable Starter plans for both the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub—for just $50/month—, but the most important features (sales and marketing automation features), are locked between the Professional plans ($500/month for Sales Hub and $800/month for the Marketing Hub).

The thing is, if we only want automation there are plenty of alternatives that are significantly more affordable. In fact, there are more affordable solutions for any features offered by HubSpot.

What made HubSpot really good as a solution is the whole package, but not all of us need all those features. If, for example, we only need sales automation, then we can look elsewhere for a more affordable HubSpot alternative.

It is, however, worth noting that HubSpot apparently understood this issue and has since adjusted its price significantly. The Marketing Professional plan, as mentioned above, used to cost more than $12,000/month.

To summarize, in general, there are two main reasons in looking for HubSpot alternatives:

• You are looking for a more affordable alternative according to your marketing needs and available budget
• You are looking for a different set of features (or just one or two specific features)

When reviewing all the different solutions in search of the best HubSpot alternatives below, these two factors will be our main considerations.

Best HubSpot Alternatives

As we have discussed, HubSpot is a brand with various solutions/software in its product line, from CRM to Marketing Hub to Service Hub and CMS.

Thus, when looking for these HubSpot alternatives, we won’t (or rather, can’t) look for a single product that can replace all of those solutions, but instead, we’ll focus on five different categories with four different HubSpot alternatives:

• Best of HubSpot CRM Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Marketing Hub Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Sales Hub Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot All-In-One Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Alternatives on a Budget

Best of HubSpot CRM Alternatives

Winner: Salesforce Essentials

Salesforce Essentials is simply one of the most popular CRM platforms available today. In fact, on their website, Salesforce claimed that they are indeed the #1 CRM named by International Data Corporation (IDC).

First, we have to consider that HubSpot’s CRM is free, while Salesforce essentials will actually cost you $25/month. So the main question is whether the difference in price is justified as a HubSpot CRM alternative.

For instance, you get automation features with Salesforce Essentials, which you only get from HubSpot by spending at least $500/month. Another key highlight of why Salesforce’s solutions are so good is the mobile app (for both iOS and Android), that offers real-time data and custom reports. With Salesforce Essentials, you simply get everything offered by HubSpot CRM, and more.

With that being said, if you only need a CRM tool and don’t want to spend on marketing automation solutions or conversion optimization tools, Salesforce Essentials is probably your best possible investment.

As a side note, although we mainly recommend the Essentials plan, there are more premium plans offered by Salesforce CRM with extra sets of features. We listed them in the pricing section below.

Pricing:

• Essentials: $25/month/user (annual billing)
  • Emails and meetings tracking automation
  • Manage and track leads, accounts, and opportunities
  • Guided onboarding and setup
  • Support and integration across email, chat. Phone, and social channels
  • Customer self-service and automation to save time
• Professional: $75/month/user (annual billing)
  • Manage the entire sales cycle
  • Track sales leads, opportunities, and customer cases
  • Manage marketing campaigns, orders/opportunities, contracts
  • Real-time insights
  • Accurate sales forecasts
• Enterprise: $150/month/user (annual billing)
  • Automate business processes with workflow and automated approvals
  • Custom-tailored record type
  • Integrate with any system using Salesforce web services API
  • Manage complex sales territories
  • Check how sales deals have progressed with deal trending
• Unlimited: $300/month/user (annual billing)
  • Unlimited online training
  • Over 100 admin services
  • 24/7 toll-free support
  • Unlimited custom apps, custom objects, custom tabs
  • Sandboxes for development and testing

Runner-Up: PipeDrive Essential

PipeDrive is another popular CRM tool, and one of its key highlights is the fact that it’s more affordable than Salesforce, with the Essential plan only costs $12.50/month/user, half what Salesforce offers.

With its affordable price, PipeDrive offers a decent set of features, especially with its intuitive, easy to use interface. With PipeDrive, you can easily track your leads/prospects and monitor various metrics in one single interface, so you can have a clear overview of the sales funnel.

A really useful feature of PipeDrive is the fact that we can easily switch between modules, and turn these modules on and off according to your preferences and needs. With this, we can create a customized interface that can suit our exact needs.

Another reason to chose PipeDrive as your HubSpot CRM alternative is when your business serves international customers, as PipeDrive currently supports 13 currencies, so you can have an easier time analyzing revenue.

Pricing:

• Essential: $12.50/user/month (billed annually)
  • Customizable pipelines
  • Contact and org management
  • Deal management
  • Data import/export
  • Custom fields
  • Sales assist
  • Email inbox linked to contacts and deals
  • Sales and activity dashboard
• Advanced: $24.90/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Essential plan
  • Non-branded web forms
  • Contact Data enrichment
  • Real-time matching inboxes
  • Tracking Email Open rate and CTR
  • Custom user and admin permissions
  • Customizable email and task automation
• Professional: $49.90/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Advanced plan
  • One-click call and call tracking
  • Meeting scheduling (unlimited)
  • Email distribution list
  • Multiple customizable dashboards
  • Sales management app
  • Team management solutions
  • Revenue forecasting
• Enterprise: $99.00/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Professional plan
  • Dedicated account manager and customer service
  • Extra custom-tailored features to suit your business’s needs
  • Enhanced security to protect data and business revenue
  • Flexibility in team management and user permissions

Best of HubSpot Marketing Hub Alternatives

Winner: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a marketing solution that is more geared towards email marketing, and one of its key highlights is the (very) affordable Lite plan, that starts from just $9/month—significantly more affordable than HubSpot.

If you are solely looking for an email marketing automation solution—which is the most common function people look for in a marketing software/hub—, ActiveCampaign is a very good and cost-efficient choice.

If you want email automation (together with CRM and sales automation), you can get it from the relatively affordable ActiveCampaign Plus plan, which starts from a mere $49/month (remember that we only get automation from HubSpot with $800/month). We also get a nice set of advanced features like lead scoring tools and Deep Data integrations.

All in all, we’d really recommend the ActiveCampaign Plus plan as a cost-efficient alternative for HubSpot marketing.

Pricing:

• Lite: starts from $9/month for 500 contacts
  • Basic email marketing features only
• Plus: starts from $49/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Lite plan
  • CRM and sales automation
  • Lead scoring
  • Deep Data Integrations
  • SMS marketing
  • 1 on 1 training
  • Up to 25 users
  • Custom branding and user permissions
  • Conditional content
• Professional: starts from $129/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Plus plan
  • Site messaging
  • Marketing attribution tool
  • Predictive sending and win probability features
  • Split automation
  • Up to 50 users
• Enterprise: starts from $229/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Professional plan
  • Advanced, custom reporting
  • Custom domain
  • In-depth onboarding
  • Free design services, free social data, phone support, dedicated account representative
  • Uptime SLA
  • Unlimited users

Runner-Up: Pardot

Pardot is a marketing software solution owned by Salesforce, which we have discussed above as our recommended alternative for HubSpot CRM. With the big name of Salesforce, we can obviously expect quality from Pardot, and indeed Pardot is a very powerful marketing suite and is a worthy alternative for HubSpot Marketing Hub.

The catch, however, is that Pardot is a very expensive solution—even more, expensive than HubSpot—, with its most ‘affordable’ plan starts from $1,250/month.

With the package of features offered, however, even the basic “Growth” plan of Pardot is a more powerful marketing suite than HubSpot Marketing’s Professional plan.

If you do have the budget, Pardot is definitely a worthy Hubspot marketing alternative, with a very intuitive interface/dashboard and advanced set of features.

Pricing:

• Growth: starts from $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts
  • Basic automation features
  • Basic lead capturing features
  • Basic lead scoring
  • Basic analytics for 100 SEO keywords and 10 competitors
  • Variable tags
  • Engagement features
  • 50 automation rules
  • Lead nurturing
  • Basic integrations
  • Basic data management
  • Basic marketing training and guides
  • Basic domain setup
• Plus: starts from $2,500/month for 10,000 contacts
  • All from the Growth plan
  • Multi-touch marketing attribution
  • Advanced automation with dynamic content and 100 automation rules
  • Advanced integrations
  • Advanced analytics for 250 SEO keywords and 25 competitors
  • Advanced lead scoring
  • Advanced marketing training and guides
• Advanced: starts from $4,0000/month for 10,000 contacts
  • All from the Plus plan
  • Advanced automation with 150 automation rules
  • AI-assisted analytics and lead scoring
  • Advanced analytics for 1,000 SEO keywords and 100 competitors
  • Advanced data management for 100K calls per day and 10GB file hosting

Best of HubSpot Sales Hub Alternatives

Winner: Ontraport

Ontraport is an all-in-one sales, marketing, and CRM suite that mainly focuses on email and drip marketing as a nurturing-conversion tool.

As a HubSpot sales alternative, Ontraport basically covers everything from email—as mentioned—, content creation (blog, video marketing, etc.), CRM database, landing page builder, social media scheduler, and of course, automation even with the basic plan.

One of the key highlights of Ontraport is its affordability—considering its rich features—, starting at ‘only’ $79/month for 1,000 contacts. With that price, you get several unique features not offered by HubSpot such as customizable metrics to suit your business completely.

Also, Ontraport offers a very flexible block-based visual editor, that you can easily navigate to build landing pages, opt-in forms, and email newsletter—so you don’t have to switch between different builders each time.

A very versatile, highly customizable alternative for HubSpot Sales Hub that is also cost-efficient.

Pricing:

• Basic: $79/month
  • 1,000 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 1 user
• Plus: $147/month
  • 2,500 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 2 users
• Pro: $297/month
  • Free account setup
  • 10,000 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 3 users
• Enterprise: $498/month
  • Free account setup
  • Dedicated account manager
  • 20,000+ contacts
  • 200,000 emails/months
  • 5 users

Runner-Up: Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)

Infusionsoft is known as one of the oldest marketing automation platform available, and back in the mid-2010s or so was highly regarded as the best solution available—much like HubSpot today—. Infusionsoft has since changed rebranded itself into Keap, but the name Infusionsoft is still retained as its premium plan’s name (see at the pricing section below).

With that being said, one of Keap’s key highlights is its very reliable, integrated CMS system, and while being (slightly) more expensive than Ontraport, still very affordable compared to HubSpot marketing. You get access to marketing automation features and the ability to track recurring revenue— a rare feature in this price range—, for just $149/month (as of today, November 2019, there’s an ongoing special offer by Keap so this Pro plan will only cost you $44/month. Affiliate )

Very intuitive, easy-to-use (although a little obsolete) interface, but quite robust in functionalities with different sections in its interface (CRM, eCommerce Marketing, Admin, Pipeline, etc.)

Pipeline is Keap’s lead management tool that helps users manage deals and opportunities in a single dashboard, much like what HubSpot offers, and there’s also a lead scoring/lead management tool called Lead Scores that is highly customizable according to your needs.

A well-rounded platform, slightly more expensive than Ontraport but well-worth the price.

Pricing: (all plans for 500 contacts and 1 user)

• Grow: $49/month
  • CRM
  • Segmentation
  • Tracking and managing appointments
  • Phone line and text messaging for US iPhone
  • Manage quotes, invoices, and payments
  • Data migration
• Pro: $149/month
  • All features from the Grow plan
  • Marketing Automation
  • Recurring payment tracking
  • Landing page builder
  • Sales Pipeline automation
  • Smart forms, internal forms
• Infusionsoft: $199/month
  • All features from the Pro plan
  • Lead scoring tool
  • Company records storing and tracking
  • Analytics and reporting

Best of HubSpot All-In-One Alternatives

Winner: Aritic PinPoint

Aritic PinPoint is a really well-rounded marketing solution offering features that are on par with what’s offered by HubSpot Marketing Hub but with a significantly more affordable price tag.

For instance, with the most affordable Lite plan starting at ‘just’ $59/month, we already get marketing automation—which will cost you at least $800/month from HubSpot Marketing—. Aritic PinPoint offers automation tools not only for email marketing, but also for social media posts, SMS, and push notifications, among others. All of them are useful in the different stages of marketing and sales funnels.

In the analytics and lead scoring aspects, Aritic PinPoint is also pretty decent, and can effectively track your lead profiling and lead behavior—paired with multi-channel, cross-channel, and omnichannel campaign— to nurture these leads.

PinPoint also offers unique features not offered by HubSpot like in-app messaging, double opt-in customization, live workflow view, video campaign manager, helpdesk, native integration for SMS campaign, and so on.

It doesn’t offer as many third-party integrations as HubSpot, but is more cost-efficient across all plans. A worthy contender, and one of the best HubSpot alternatives available today.

Pricing:

• Lite: $59/month
  • Marketing automation
  • Deal-based CRM
  • Sales Pipeline
  • 10x Free emails per contact
  • Push Notification Campaign
  • Lead Capture Forms
  • List Segmentation
  • Lead Scoring
  • Manage Email Campaigns
  • Send Newsletter
  • On-page Widgets
  • Responsive Landing Pages
  • Website tracking
  • Integrations
  • 1 Free User
• Starter: $219/month
  • All features from Lite
  • Multi-channel Drips
  • SMS campaigns (Powered by Twilio)d
  • Engagement scoring
  • 1 on 1 SMS (Powered by Twilio)
  • Social Monitoring
  • Contact Marketing Stages
  • Marketing Messages
  • Read Mailbox
  • Lead source Analytics
  • Advanced Email Analytics
  • Facebook Custom Audience Sync
  • Lead Enrichment Integration
  • Marketing Asset Management
  • 2 Users Free
• Professional: $249/month
  • Marketing Messages
  • Progressive Profiling
  • Dynamic Content
  • Tasks & reminders
  • Dynamic Email Campaigns
  • Facebook Lead Ads Integration
  • Twitter Lead Ads Integration
  • Advance Campaign Analytics
  • Team Management
  • Kiosk Mode
  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Custom dashboard
  • Custom reports
  • Chat support during office hour
  • 5 Users Free
• Enterprise: custom-tailored plan, call for pricing

Best of HubSpot Affordable Alternatives

Winner: SendinBlue

SendinBlue is more popularly known as an affordable but powerful email marketing tool, but in recent years has expanded its software as not only a full-fledged marketing automation solution but also a proper CRM and sales software.

One of the key highlights of SendinBlue is—quite obviously—, its affordability, with the automation features and all of its advanced features like chatbot functionalities and landing page builder tools are available for just $66/month. Keep in mind, that with HubSpot we only get automation with its Professional plan, starting from a whopping $800/month or $500/month for the HubSpot Sales.

Sendinblue—as mentioned—, originated from a conversion-focused email marketing tool, so you will find a lot of useful features geared towards transaction-based emails like various autoresponders and eCommerce email templates.

Overall, very easy to use although the interface looks a little bit outdated by today’s standard. There are also various third-party integrations and plugins that can enable Sendinblue to work with popular platforms like WordPress or Optinmonster

Pricing:

• Free: 300 emails/day, unlimited contacts
• Lite: $25/month
  • 40,000 emails/month
  • No daily sending limit
• Essential: $39/month
  • All features from Lite
  • 60,000 emails/month
  • Remove Sendinblue logo/brand
  • Advanced statistics
• Premium: $66/month
  • All features from Essential
  • 120,000 emails/month ($173/month for 350,000 emails/month)
  • Facebook ads management
  • Landing page builder
  • Management automation
  • Chatbot
  • Multi-user access
• Enterprise: Contact for price, custom-tailored according to your needs

How We Made Our Choices

Above, we have discussed how we reviewed and test HubSpot alternatives based on 5 different categories:

• 1. Alternatives for HubSpot CRM
  2. Alternatives for HubSpot Marketing Hub
  3. Alternatives for HubSpot Sales Hub
  4. Best all-around HubSpot alternative (that covers CRM, sales and marketing features)
  5. Best HubSpot alternative in a budget

For each category, we’ve reviewed all the different tools, solutions, and software using different criteria according to the purpose/function of the category. Below, we will discuss them one by one.

Choosing HubSpot CRM alternatives

There are several key considerations in choosing the best CRM tools to replace the free HubSpot CRM tool:

• Affordability: Since HubSpot CRM is already a free tool, we only consider alternatives that are also free, or at least very affordable—affordable being less than $50 per month.
• Value: For paid but affordable solutions, the tools must provide at least a slightly better set of features than the free HubSpot CRM. If it’s a free tool, then the offered features must be comparable to HubSpot.
• Unique Proposition: Whether the software/solution offers a unique feature not offered by HubSpot CRM.

Choosing HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives

HubSpot Marketing Hub is certainly one of the best marketing automation software available in the market today. It doesn’t really offer truly unique functions or features not available anywhere else, but there are three main highlights of HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• The intuitive interface that is very easy to use
• Reliable and easy to setup marketing automation features
• Well-designed analytics and reports that you can monitor in one single dashboard

With those point being said, here are our main criteria in choosing the best alternatives for HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• Marketing Automation: one of the major downsides of Hubspot Marketing Hub is that the marketing automation solutions are only available on the Professional plan or above. Meaning, it’s locked behind a $800/month paywall. We’re looking for alternatives that can provide a comparable automation features at a lower price.
• Affordability vs Price: Hubspot Marketing is certainly one of the easiest to use marketing hubs available in the market with its intuitive dashboard where we can see everything in one place, but it’s also one of the most expensive. We’re looking for solutions that can fight toe to toe—feature-wise— while being more affordable, or tools that are simply better in terms of functionality.
• Unique Features: Even with all the good things surrounding HubSpot marketing, it’s certainly not a perfect product with rooms for improvement. We are looking for solutions that simply provide unique value propositions outside what HubSpot currently offers.

Choosing HubSpot Sales Hub alternatives

While arguably HubSpot Sales Hub isn’t as popular as the Marketing Hub or the free CRM tool, it’s still a popular conversion-optimization tool especially due to its intuitive interface, great third-party integrations with popular software—as expected from HubSpot ecosystem—, and its rich set of features and analytics reporting we can access from just one, intuitive dashboard.

With that being said, here are our main concerns in looking for the best alternative for HubSpot Sales Hub:

• Affordability VS Value:  although the HubSpot Sales Hub is (significantly) more affordable than the Marketing Hub, it’s still quite expensive compared to many similar solutions. We are looking for tools that can provide similar features as HubSpot Sales Hub while offering ing a more affordable plan.
• Integration: a sales conversion tool typically can’t perform on its own and will need to integrate at least with a CRM and a marketing platform. Third-party integrations will be one of our main considerations here.
• Unique Features: arguably the Sales Hub is the least unique compared to HubSpot Marketing Hub. We are looking for solutions that provide a more complete set of features, or really unique and valuable conversion optimization tool.

For the last two categories: Best All-In-One Hubspot Alternative, and Best Affordable HubSpot Alternative, our criteria are fairly straightforward:

For All-In-One HubSpot Alternative, we are looking for a solution that can be a direct replacement to the whole HubSpot ecosystem (CRM+Marketing+Sales Hubs) feature/function-wise— while considering cost-efficiency.

For the Affordable HubSpot Alternative, our main concern is obviously affordability, but the solution(s) must also provide a valuable set of features, at least comparable to HubSpot’s starter plans.

End Words

Let’s be honest, all of the HubSpot alternatives we have discussed above—and even HubSpot itself, are all really good platforms offering their own unique values and amazing sets of features.

In most cases, the best approach to look for marketing, CRM, or sales solution (or all of them in a single agency management software like Function Point) is to first figure out the needs of your organization, speak to a digital marketing consultant or SEO expert and pick the most cost-efficient option that provides the features you currently need.

The post 8 Best Hubspot Alternatives You Should Switch To appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, what are the changes that you need to keep track of in order to be able to utilize them to achieve maximum effectivity for your digital marketing campaigns?

Chatbots For Customer Service

When a business experiences a spike in customer traffic, it can become wildly unmanageable for your customer service department. It’s at this point when chatbots become a vital tool in maintaining your operations. They are great ways to automate your replies and to spread information, but they are limited in the sense that it’s easy to distinguish an actual person from a chatbot through conversations. Artificial intelligence is going to significantly enhance how chatbots interact with customers and may even eventually replace their human counterparts completely.

Voice Search Will Become The Norm

It would seem that consumers didn’t know they wanted to be able to give hands-free commands until the advent of smart speakers. Smart assistants have become very popular and this trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Artificial intelligence will allow search engines to consider the context through which a particular search query is made and to return results that are significantly more relevant to the user.

Predictive Analysis

Because artificial intelligence will be able to process huge amounts of data and to interpret them accordingly, their application in predictive analytics cannot be understated. This will provide marketers with insight as to what strategies would be most effective for their campaign. After all, there’s not going to be much of a point in knowing the most effective marketing tactics if you don’t have an accurate idea of how they’re going to affect your overall campaign. This will also help business owners make better decisions that lead to faster growth as well as quicker return of investment. It can even be used to target a very specific market niche while minimizing risk.

Improved User Experience

Some of the hallmarks of a great user experience include personalized interactions and messages, as well as seamless website performance. Self-optimizing websites may even become commonplace once artificial intelligence is integrated into web design. When a user is greeted with a seamless experience, they are more likely to spend more time on your website. The longer they spend on your website, the more likely they’re going to convert. Not only this, but consider the fact that ads, too, will be personalized, which means that an individual is more than likely going to get an ad that they already have an interest in, which means that they are more likely to view the ad and even make a purchase.

But, that isn’t the true extent of how much personalization is going to be able to alter the digital marketing space. Think of how the very concept of cookie-cutter solutions is going to be made obsolete by the ability of artificial intelligence to tailor a user’s experience according to the things that the user finds relevant.

But even as there are a plethora of advantages that artificial intelligence can bring to the table, there are also potential limitations that we, as digital marketers, should prepare for. This is a crucial detail because artificial intelligence is just like any other tool that we’ve been able to create. It is merely a means to help us become more productive and more accurate and it is not intended to replace us. So, with that in mind, these are a few limitations of artificial intelligence that you need to account for:

Job Displacement

There has always been a looming fear of artificial intelligence and robots taking over our jobs. After all, it’s a well-known fact that artificial intelligence is leagues more capable at processing data than even the most brilliant people. You need only to look at how artificial intelligence can easily beat the very best people in chess consistently to see how, in terms of raw data processing and logic, we are painfully outmatched.

However, the fears are over-exaggerated. While it’s true that some workers are indeed going to be displaced from their jobs in favor of the more efficient and more accurate machines, this is going to allow them to focus on more complex and more dynamic problems. Humans are still needed for decision making tasks.

Cost

Another obvious limitation of artificial intelligence that could potentially dissuade companies from making use of it is that because it’s a new technology, it’s going to be very costly to integrate into your current model. You also have to consider that the demand for this technology will also cause those who are proficient in machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to charge higher for their skills, especially when you consider that the demand for their skills is also going to be much higher. With technology constantly changing, AI needs to keep up which also means upgrade expenses.

Over-Dependence On Data

Even when the differences between humans and artificial intelligence in terms of computing power, accuracy, and speed are incomparable in favor of the latter, there are some tasks that still require human input in order to initiate. A good example of this is while you can indeed automate a lot of tasks that are repetitive, there are times when unique problems arise.

Because artificial intelligence is so heavily dependent on the data that it is able to gather, it cannot make a decision when the data is incomplete. This in itself is a problem because of the fact that when it does become mainstream, there will be a lot of things it still needs to learn in order for it to become a potent tool. Human programmers will still be needed to lay down the foundations for the data that machines are going to base their decisions on, there will be no room for intuition and innovation and thus, artificial intelligence cannot extrapolate a conclusion from missing data.

Lack Of Human Touch

While there are a handful of scenarios where the lack of a human touch might even be considered a big advantage, as is the case in productivity where emotions are best left behind, in digital marketing, you are in the business of creating connections with an audience and so,the human touch is a very important component of your interactions. This is especially true with customer service, where empathy and the ability to adjust your responses according to the tone of the person you’re speaking with is crucial.

Inability To Be Creative

Another limitation that you need to account for the inability of artificial intelligence to be creative. With that said, you cannot rely on artificial intelligence to create any form of art that will appeal to your audience. This is also due in large part to the fact that machines lack the human touch. One of the most defining traits that we, humans, have, is that we are not only able to express our thoughts and emotions, but we are also able to inspire emotions in other people. Empathy is our greatest tool as digital marketers, as it enables us to rally people to the cause that we are putting forth. It allows for a collective effort, whether it’s in putting out an article that explains why people need a certain product you’re offering, or when it’s about how your organization is trying to bring about awareness and change to a certain aspect of society. Understanding what the audience wants is something that machines cannot do.

Machines cannot be programmed (yet) to display or even mimic emotions and that is their biggest limitation as well as our bigger advantage over machines. It is also the biggest reason why you shouldn’t be too worried about machines stealing our jobs, especially when there are so many things that humans can do that machines cannot.

While it’s true that these are merely things to expect, there are a few companies such as AI Data Innovations that are working to find ways to integrate artificial intelligence in numerous scenarios. This particular company specializes in the data gathering and data processing aspects of artificial intelligence. This information is vital because it’s going to allow you to get an upper hand on your competition if you’re able to make use of the technology before they do. After all, being able to utilize the latest technology properly is one of the hallmarks of a true marketer and judging by how the advent of artificial intelligence is inevitable, we might as well make adjustments for it.

The post Artificial Intelligence Will Change The Digital Marketing Landscape — Here’s Why You Should Prepare For It appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will share the blueprint of developing a recurring revenue model where you can automate your marketing. Let us begin by discussing the benefits of the recurring revenue business model.

The Advantages of Recurring Revenue Business Model

In the past decade or so, one of the most interesting shifts in the business world is the rise -and success- of subscription-based business model, which we often call the “recurring revenue” business model. Yet, the recurring revenue business model is not solely about subscription, as there are many different models that can produce the recurring revenue.

Here are some of the best advantages of the recurring revenue model.

Predictable Revenue Stream

With a recurring revenue model where customers will need to pay a fee monthly or annually for using a product or service, we can easily predict our monthly revenue.

Having a predictable, and especially measurable monthly/annual revenue has many benefits on its own. For starters, you can notice immediately when there’s something wrong or when you are not seeing any growth. This way, you can evaluate and adjust your strategy if necessary.

Scalability

Another key benefit of the recurring revenue model is the amazing scalability, and so it is easier to achieve growth. When a customer is locked in into the recurring revenue via subscriptions and monthly payments, you wouldn’t need to spend your time -and resources- to retain customers.Meaning, you can put your resources into acquiring new customers and only managing your churn rate when necessary.

Minimize Churn, Maximize Loyalty

We have briefly discussed churn rate and customer retention above, and with a recurring revenue model, it is significantly easier to manage retention and brand loyalty. This is mainly because with a monthly payment or subscription, the purchase -the hardest part of running any business- has been made on a monthly/annual basis. So, all the business has to do to maintain or increase retention is to keep the customers happy and engaged. Compare this with a regular business model where a customer can so easily switch to your competitor’s product every month, and you will need to keep convincing them.

Maximizing Revenue and Profit

Also, a recurring revenue model will allow you to more frequently reach out to customers, because they know they are tied to your service/product, and won’t be annoyed when receiving another promotional email. This way, you will have a higher open/click-through rate on your email marketing, where you can update your customers with new product features, or even offering up-sell.

By offering your existing customers add-ons, new features, expansions, and even new products/services, you can generate higher revenue and profit.

Now, we’ve learned the key advantages of the recurring revenue model, and especially why you should adopt the business model. For the rest of this guide, we will discuss the key steps to build a recurring revenue business and automate your marketing processes. Let us begin.

Step 1: Choosing The Right Product

Not every product can be sold in a revenue-recurring business model. Yet, contrary to popular beliefs, your options are not solely limited to tech-based products and especially SAAS (Software as a Service) products. There are many different products across many different industries, and here are a few examples:

• In the F&B industry, you can start a daily food box delivery business where clients pay a monthly fee
• Property rental is actually a form of recurring-revenue business,probably the oldest one in the world. Billboard advertising leasing alo belongs to this category
• Similarly, leasing vehicles and equipment belongs to this business model
• Laundry all-in service (pickup, wash, delivery) where your clients pay a monthly fee
• Supplying regular office consumables (i.e. printer ink) in a contract-based relationship
• Supplying raw food materials or beverages to restaurants

Those above are just a few examples to give you an idea. As long as you can charge the client with a monthly fee or subscription, the product is viable. Now, obviously there’s two different approaches you can take for this step: producing your own product/service, or reselling from vendors. If you do have the available resources, obviously manufacturing your own will generate a higher profit margin in general.

Producing your products can have many different approaches and unique strategies on its own, so we won’t discuss it here. Instead, here we will discuss some key principles when you decide to resell your products:

• Test many different vendors: make sure they are reliable with their delivery, quality control, etc. Make sure you can stand behind the product and build a brand around it. Don’t be hasty when choosing your vendors. Remember, it can make or break your business

• Have a plan B: have at least two different vendors unless it’s absolutely impossible (your vendor is an exclusive manufacturer of the product). There will always be cases where your vendor wouldn’t be able to deliver on time, or when you have an order overload and would need a second supplier. Always have a plan b and even plan c and d whenever possible.

• Dropship when possible: dropshipping has many benefits. It eliminates your needs for a warehouse (at least, a big one), it saves your time and resources, and especially, eliminates your need for a big capital.

• Cost efficiency: in the end, we want to make profit in this business, and we need to make sure we get the best possible COGS (cost of goods sold) to ensure maximum profit.

Step 2: Getting Your Foot In The Door

Now that you’ve decided on a product, it’s time to finally build the infrastructure of your business. This can be an extremely simple of overly complicated process, depending on many factors. Yet, here are some key areas you should focus on:

• Branding: develop a brand according to the chosen product in the previous step. There are several elements here from design to core messages to packaging among others. Check out these huge list of branding examples compiled by HubSpot.

• Write your business plan: having a clear business plan will help especially when the going gets tough. So, don’t neglect this seemingly unimportant step. Check out this guide by Bplans to help you.

• Legalize your business: do the legal aspect of your business early so you won’t have to worry about this later. The process might vary depending on your area, so double check with your local lawyer/small business association if necessary.

• Finance your business: figure out how you are going to finance the business. The money can come from your personal savings, loan from friends and family, getting an investor, and other means. Plan your finances well, as it will be the backbone of your business in the long run

• Building your team: your business is only as strong as your team’s weakest member. So, whether you will need a partner, employee, or outsource to a freelancer, do this step carefully. Check out this guide by Entrepreneur.com on building a startup team.

• Find a location: you might or might not need a physical location depending on your product choice, budget and overall business strategy. Keep in mind that renting a space can be a major expense.

• Build your website: developing a website is now easier (and cheaper) than ever, and there are many tools to assist you in the process. By having your own website, you have more control of your online presence and are not dependent of third-party solutions.

• Choose an ecommerce platform: most likely in this business model, your main platform to sell your product will be your ecommerce. There are many different platforms available today in various price ranges. So, choose one according to your needs and available budget.

• Social media channels: register your social media accounts based on your branding.

As we have mentioned, there might be other areas you will need to focus on in this step depending on your industry. Double check everything, as your infrastructure will play a huge part in your chance of success.

Step 3: Determine Your Pricing Model

While pricing strategy is very important for any business, it is arguably even more important in a recurring revenue model. Why? Because instead of a one-time purchase, your customer must commit to a relatively long term deal, which is also relatively more expensive in value. Second, with the subscription-based model, the pricing strategy will obviously be more complicated compared to “ordinary” businesses.

While there can be many different pricing tactics in a revenue recurring model, they will usually boil down to four big categories:

1.Tiered Pricing

In this pricing model, there are several different “tiers” of pricing where users get more when they choose to pay more. This pricing strategy is generally ideal, but not limited to usage-based services. For example, a cloud storage service like DropBox might charge 10$ monthly for 10GB storage, $20 for 20GB, and so on. On the other hand, a healthy food box business might have a more affordable menu option for $200/month, a more expensive menu for $300 monthly, and so on. For usage-based services, usually penalties/higher rates are billed when users exceed the monthly usage limit.

2.Unlimited Plan

In this pricing strategy, users can use the service or order the products as much as they want after paying a specific fee. This pricing strategy can be applied for any products/services, but is generally more appealing for a usage-based services like cloud storage or phone’s data plan. This pricing model is usually used in combination with other models, and especially the tiered pricing model. Balancing the value between the limited and unlimited prices will be the key to success in this pricing strategy.

3. Freemium

The term freemium rose in popularity around a decade ago with various internet-based products and services. Here, you essentially offer the product for free, while customers have the option to pay for the “premium” version of the product with more features. Another version of this model is to give free-trials, where you offer a specific period where customers can try the product/service for free.

4. Installment/Flexible Payment

This pricing strategy is used in combination with other models. Typically in a recurring revenue business, customers can have a more affordable price if they opt to pay for 12-months of more in advance instead of just a month. To further make this option more interesting, we can offer them a flexible payment options or installments, where they can pay for 4-months or 6-months first in advance. This pricing model can also work if you are a contract-based supplier. For example, if you are a meat supplier for a restaurant, you can let the restaurant pay every quarter instead of monthly.

As mentioned, these are not the only available pricing strategies for revenue recurring businesses. Be creative with your pricing options, and the key here is how you can make the price interesting enough for customers while maintaining profit.

Step 4: Scaling Your Model

Above, we have mentioned how one of the key advantages of the recurring revenue business model is its scalability. In any industry, the market leader always have an almost unfair advantage, which is especially true in the tech-related businesses. So, it is very important to plan your scaling strategies ahead and aim to achieve as much growth as you can, to be the market leader as soon as possible.

But, how can we actually scale the business? Again, there can be many different strategies, but there are generally two approaches you can take: to acquire more customers, or to get more revenue from your existing customers.

Acquiring More Customers

While there can be many different strategies to acquire more customers, it will boil down to just three:

• Generating More Leads

You can’t have new customers when you don’t have new prospects (or leads). So, to scale effectively, you will need to have working lead generation devices. We will discuss this more in the next steps, but check out this guide by Optinmonster listing a lot of creative lead generation methods.

• Have More Sales Team

Having more (proper) salespeople in your team will generally result in more sales. Yet, won’t having more people in your team results in a higher overhead and less profit? The higher overhead is correct, and this is why many revenue recurring businesses offer a cheaper price for customers who are willing to pay upfront (for 12-months, usually). Yet, it doesn’t necessarily result in less profit, as each performing salespeople can bring more than one customers, resulting in exponential rise in revenue.

• Customer Advocacy/Referral Marketing

Arguably the best way to achieve scalability is when your customers turn into your advocates and promote your products for essentially free. This is the dream of all businesses, but it is obviously easier than done. In essence, you will need  to have your product went viral or be a market leader before you can achieve exponential growth from advocacy.

To tackle this issue, we can do referral marketing instead, which is offering incentives to your customers and even non-customers to be your referral marketers. The key of a successful referral marketing is the amount of your incentives: give too much, and your risk the quality of your referrals. Yet, offering too little, and you might not get any referral marketers.

Step 4: Setting Up Marketing and Sales Funnels

Customers won’t generally buy your product/service immediately after they have been introduced to it. Instead, they typically follow a process we know as buyer’s journey.

This is why, we should develop our marketing and sales strategies based on this buyer’s journey, by creating a model we know as marketing funnel and sales funnel. We call them “funnels” because with each step, generally we have less prospects, and so if we put these steps into a diagram, we will see a funnel shape.

Typically, the bottom of the marketing funnel is also the top of the sales funnel: marketing generates interests (leads), and then it’s the job of the sales team to finalize the deal. Different businesses and products will have different sales process, and thus different funnel. However, generally we can divide the marketing and sales funnel into three big stages: the top, the middle, and the bottom, each with their own different goals.

Top of The Funnel

The goal here is to attract new prospects, or technically, generate leads. This stage of the funnel is mainly about making your business known, and so that the targeted audience can be aware that your company/brand/product exists.

It is important to note that your audience in this stage is generally not ready to purchase your product/service.So, your main job here is to showcase credibility and authority as an expert in your niche/industry, to also show that you have a reliable product.

In practice, activities in this stage of the funnel can be a  new audience who stumbled upon your content after a Google search, or someone who clicked on your banner ad while browsing.

Middle of The Funnel

More often than not, we give too much focus on the top and the bottom stages of the funnel and neglect the middle one. Yet, this stage is actually very important, as this is where you build relationship and trust so that those that are already aware of your brand can then be interested. In short, this middle stage of the funnel is about nurturing leads until they are ready to purchase.

So, this stage is all about amplifying your credibility and authority which you have built on the previous stage. Also, in this stage you should qualify (link to lead qualification) and nurture your leads.

Bottom of The Funnel

The audience that stayed in this stage already has an adequate level of trust with your brands, and so here your main goal is to convert these prospects into purchasing customers.

Here’s the catch: even when people are already convinced with your product/brand and is ready for a purchase, they won’t buy immediately when there’s no urgency. This is why many marketers often use limited time offer or similar tactics to build urgency in this stage.

So, what you’ll need to do in this step is to break down the processes and strategies you will have for each funnel stage, which will be necessary for the next step. Simulate different funnel possibilities, for example, a prospect might stumble upon your content from a Google search (the top of the funnel), nurtured through email marketing (middle), and finally converts after attending a webinar (bottom). Trial and error different funnel scenarios, and optimize on the most effective one(s).

Check out this guide by Teachable to help you further in building your marketing funnel.

Step 6: Developing A Marketing Strategy

Now that you have known how your marketing/sales funnel will shape, and the key processes that should be addressed, we can work with B2B marketing expert and consultant to develop a proper marketing strategy according to the funnel.

As we have discussed above, since there are three primary stages to the funnel, we can also divide the marketing activities into three big groups:

1. Lead Generation

Here, the purpose of the marketing activities is to attract as much prospects as possible. While there can be many different approaches, the strategies will boil down into two: first, attracting leads by reaching out to potential prospects through advertising, paid social media marketing, events, cold calling and other similar “outbound” activities. We call this “outbound” or traditional marketing. Next is allowing ourselves to “be found” by customers, mainly by consistently publishing valuable contents that are relevant to our customers. This way, we get “inbound” leads that come to our business instead of us to them, and so we call this inbound marketing.

Common tactics in this category are:

• Content marketing: by regularly publishing valuable contents, you can establish your position as the industry expert, and thus gain customers’ trusts.

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization works hand in hand with content marketing, especially written content. The main way people consume content is through a Google search, and with SEO experts you can give your content visibility.

• Influencer marketing: essentially, getting influencers of your industry to promote your brand. In this saturated marketplace, this tactic is very valuable.

• Advertising (including paid social media): always effective, but can be extremely expensive not managed well. The key here is to balance

• Referral marketing: getting people to market your product/service in exchange for an incentive.

Obviously, there can be many other lead generation tactics you can try. Check out this guide by Marketo to help you further.

2. Lead Nurturing

As the name suggests, in this category our activities should focus on nurturing the prospects until they are ready to buy the product. There are two main aspects to lead nurturing: qualifying (scoring) leads, and content marketing. Content marketing here serves two purposes: educating your prospects with the benefits of your product, and to maintain your relationship with the prospect.

Qualifying Leads

Although at first glance, having as many leads as we can to work with can be a great thing, the thing is, we only have a finite amount of resources and especially time. This is why qualifying your leads is very important: we only need to nurture those with the highest chance of converting. Yet, how can we determine that? Lead qualifying can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and there can be many different frameworks to utilize. You might want to check out this guide by HubSpot to learn further, but here are the key aspects to consider:

1. Fit

How the prospect will fit to your business according to demographics. You can use the infamous BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Time) to assess this aspect: can the prospect afford your product? Do they have the authority to make the purchase decision? Can you answer their specific need/problem? What is their timeline to fix their problem or increase their life quality?

2. Interest

You can track various behaviour to determine the prospect’s interest by using various analytics tools like Google Analytics or KISSMetrics. If the prospect spent a lot of time on your site and engage a lot with your social media channels, for example, this prospect is interested enough.

3. Behavior

Further examining the prospect’s behavior can show whether they are looking to purchase, or just researching for information. For example, prospects that are only consuming blog posts should have a lower score compared to those who registered for a free trial or attend an event/webinar.

4. Time

How ready is the prospect to purchase the product, and where are they currently on the marketing and sales funnel? Analyze behaviors and align them with the top, middle, and bottom stage of your funnel.

Content Marketing

Above, we have mentioned how content marketing is a very important aspect of the lead generation activities. Yet, it is also highly essential in this lead nurturing stage, showing its importance in any marketing strategy and at every stage of the marketing funnel.

In this saturated and highly advanced marketplace where customers are now highly resistant to advertising, content marketing is now the primary voice of any brands online. It attracts, engages, and educates your audience until they are ready to buy. There can be many different applications of content marketing as a lead nurturing device, but here are the primary ones:

Email and Content Marketing

Even with all the new platforms and technologies, email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your prospects and customers. In fact, email marketing still has the highest ROI of over 4,000% compared to other marketing channels. Why, it’s simple, because studies apparently suggested that 73% of consumers prefer emails over other channels, especially to receive promotional messages.

On-Site Content Marketing

Your brand website is your storefront, it’s where your prospects ultimately will judge whether they can trust you or not. Content marketing on your website primarily comes in three different forms: your blog, where you can update it regularly with fresh content pieces, your highly-targeted landing pages, primarily as a showcase that you are an expert in your industry, and a centralized resource center where people can find any information related to your product and/or your industry.

Social Media Content Marketing

Social media content strategy can be a pretty broad subject, and we probably won’t give it much justice here. The key here is to find the right social media platform(s) where your ideal audience are primarily active, and present these audience with the right content type according to the platform. Check out this guide by Curata to learn further about this subject.

3. Conversion-Focused Marketing

In the past, the job of the marketing team stopped in the lead nurturing and even in the lead generation stage, while conversion was primarily the job of the sales team. Nowadays, however, the lines between marketing and sales are increasingly blurred.

The ultimate goal of your marketing strategy, after all, is to drive more sales, and here are the key marketing tactics in this category:

• Content marketing: yes, content marketing is also here. Your content pieces will be the ones educating customers about your product, and where you can establish yourself as a trustworthy brand in front of the customers
• Email marketing: as mentioned, email marketing still has the highest ROI over other channels. Keep the content short, to the point, and consider giving interesting offers
• Advertising: one of the most effective ways to drive more conversions is by investing on high-quality ads paired with conversion-focused landing pages
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Bottom Line

A recurring revenue business certainly has many benefits over the traditional models, especially since we can accurately predict our monthly/annual revenue. Remember, however, that the key to success in recurring revenue model is still similar to other businesses: providing value and answer your customer’s problems.

Many recurring revenue businesses made the mistake of too aggressively pushing products (that are often low-quality) and pressuring their customers with scammy sales funnels, and yet still complain when their business doesn’t grow. So, the secret here is to manufacture and/or resell high-quality and reliable products that can bring value to your customers.

The post How To Automate Your Marketing: Building a Recurring-Revenue Business appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.