Marketing automation is one of the most important processes you can set up for increased customer insight, more effective branding, and saving time on tedious tasks. In fact, the right cloud apps can be the difference between wasting hours on one email campaign and sending out several highly targeted emails to the right customers, resulting in repeat purchases and increased revenue.
Note: We’ve updated the list of marketing apps we recommend here!
The Marketing Apps You Need
Automation helps marketing professionals keep a close eye on the customer pipeline while reducing the error-prone and boring tasks such as manual data entry. Here is a list of the top tools that you can use to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.
Related: 5 Teams integrations that can help your marketing team thrive
1. SurveyMonkey
Online Surveys
www.surveymonkey.com
SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular online survey platforms with a free basic account, which allows up to 100 responses on ten questions. If you upgrade, the true marketing automation begins with access to statistical data and text analysis along with unlimited questions and response options. SurveyMonkey also provides different survey templates for both market and academic research and a built-in network to ensure millions of respondents quickly.
By automating the survey process, your company can gather market research from targeted audiences, quickly and painlessly collecting insights on potential customers. You can even more effectively automate with SurveyMonkey by integrating it with the other cloud apps in your workflow for automatic survey dispatching or tracking survey responses in your CRM.
2. MailChimp
Email Marketing
www.mailchimp.com
MailChimp is an email marketing service that makes newsletter and promotional design a breeze. Several marketing functions are built in to make it faster and easier for an email marketer such as automatic social network sharing, drag and drop design templates and a dashboard with your campaign stats. MailChimp provides great automation for online sellers by allowing you to segment your marketing list by customer preferences, behavior, and previous sales as well as an automatic calculation on the best time to send the email.
By collecting and presenting marketing best practices based on your previous campaigns, MailChimp saves you time and increases your efficiency and is especially ideal for smaller businesses or start ups based on ease of use and price point. One really cool workhack? Integrate your MailChimp with Slack so you can add new subscribers straight from the Slack chat console! You can do this using Workbot for Slack with this recipe.
Related: 5 powerful examples of workflow automation
3. Marketo
Email Marketing and More
www.marketo.com
Marketo is an email marketing tool that allows for some serious marketing automation. It’s a favorite for companies with sizeable eCommerce operations. Some other important marketing solutions that Marketo provides are lead management, consumer marketing, customer base marketing, and mobile marketing. Email marketing takes time and only tracks open rates. On the other hand, marketing automation helps to create lead scoring and analytics which helps to develop powerful marketing strategy. Connecting Shopify with Marketo will ensure amazing marketing insights, like the ability to evaluate your email campaigns by actual revenue made, not just clicks.
4. Google Sheets
Data Collection and Processing
https://www.google.com/sheets/about/
The Suite of Google Collaborative tools like Sheets, Docs, and Slides are a game changer for marketers who want an effective and free tool. Google Docs and Sheets function like Microsoft Word and Excel but with the added bonus of being a cloud-based app. That means simultaneous editing and collaboration as well as the ability to automate your data input using an integration tool like Workato.
For example, if you send out a contract using DocuSign or another online contract system, you can automatically record the contract’s status in Google Sheets with integration. You can also use Google sheets for automatic lead creation in your CRM or add a new subscriber to MailChimp or Marketo. Perhaps your SurveyMonkey survey or website form populates a Google Sheet. This Google Sheets and Salesforce integration automatically adds a new lead in Salesforce when a new entry is made in Google Sheets. Because Workato can check for duplicates and runs almost in real time, your CRM will always be up to date, leaving you free to grow your leads, focus on strategy, and more.
5. Eventbrite
Event Management
www.eventbrite.com
Events can be a vital marketing function for businesses and nonprofits of any size. Cloud based ticketing platforms like Eventbrite are vital for marketing automation. Not only does Eventbrite have it’s own network of engaged event goers to promote to, but it also streamlines ticket sales so you know how much you’ve sold in real time. The simple automation of gathering each attendee’s information, electronically collecting their money, and issuing tickets with unique barcodes saves the event planner a tremendous amount of stress.
The only things left to do are get the new leads (people who bought tickets) into your CRM and the money you made from ticket sales into your finance app. Integration can automate both of those processes for you so you don’t have to manually enter every attendee into your CRM. Want an even more powerful automation for event management? Let Eventbrite work together with Full Contact and Hubspot using this recipe.
Let Marketing Apps Work for You
Marketing automation combines multi-channel communication and inbound marketing in order to help you grow your business. The first step is choosing the right apps and taking advantage of the benefits they offer, we think the six above are pretty great! The second step, is integrating your workflow so that all of these apps can work together.
Marketing integration can be tricky for those who need more complex integration, such as a human workflow, high volumes of data, or duplicate control (which everyone needs!). Workato always checks for duplicates and is the only no-code platform with enterprise capabilities for SurveyMonkey and Eventbrite, a.k.a. really awesome and powerful integrations. Connect your marketing apps and the result is a beautiful marketing ecosystem – error free, no manual data entry, and zero coding to set up.
