Power Up Your Workflow with these 11 Best Marketing Automation Tools

Awesome marketing requires awesome tools, and this is true with both offline and online marketing strategies.

It may sound ideal and convenient with modern business models, but digital marketing actually entails a lot of work. There are many challenges that most businesses would encounter daily. The processes can be complex and too much for one person or even a marketing team to handle. The good thing is that all digital marketing channels can now be automated.

In this article, you will find out why now is the perfect time to utilize a more sophisticated, dynamic, and powerful way to execute a holistic digital marketing approach through marketing automation.

But first…

What is Marketing Automation

In a nutshell, marketing automation uses omni channel platforms to create, consolidate, and automate most marketing initiatives. It is a way to mechanize the repetitive processes in the marketing strategies. As a result of simplifying complex processes, the marketing team achieves efficiency, improves key performance indicators, and ultimately increases both ROI and leads of the business.

According to a study by Nucleus Research, marketing automation reduces the marketing overhead by 12.2%. It also increases the total sales productivity by up to 14.5%. These numbers indicate that marketing automation launches campaigns more effectively and allows marketers to conserve resources.

It affords you to focus on campaigns and tasks that matter the most, no matter how big or small your organization is. Overall, automation helps the company save time, money, and headcount.

When Should You Get a Marketing Automation Tool?

The end goal of any marketing effort is to make a sale. But prior to achieving this goal, you need to cover a lot more objectives to ensure a better customer experience. You have to offer educational and personalized content to get more organic traffic.

You are ready to get a marketing automation tool if you find it too taxing to do all the tasks entailed with digital marketing. This usually happens when:

1 . You are the only one, or you have a team of one person doing the marketing. You cannot rely on only yourself or a sole person to do everything from market research to designing and executing a marketing plan.

2 . You need to scale up on your marketing channel. It is crucial to have at least one channel that you find suitable and is working for your business. It will focus on your efforts and where automation solutions should be directed.

3 . You can afford a tool but not time. Time is really golden in any business, and it is easier to buy extra help through automation than do the impossible of adding more time in the typical 24-hour days.

A lot of businesses are leaning towards automation nowadays simply because it allows the team to create more and reap even bigger benefits.

10 Best Marketing Automation Tools For a More Effective Workflow

So basically, the benefits of marketing automation are centered towards saving precious resources, such as time and money. You can achieve this goal by finding the right tools for a specific purpose to increase your team’s efficiency.

Here are the tools that you need to yield the best results with any marketing program:

1. AI Writer

One of the many challenges of using digital marketing is that it demands fresh and unique content. You need to create engaging content so your audience will not be bored constantly. You have to keep up with the trends to stay relevant. AI Writer is a great tool for running out of new ideas for content. It makes creating unique content a breeze with its revolutionary features.

Key Features: AI Writer uses state-of-the-art technology to generate article drafts from headlines. It is an efficient way to get a solid base for writing since it already does the research and gives you a list of citations to verify all information in the article. It is like a personal assistant who will reword articles you want to re-publish. It even has an SEO-focused text editor to ensure that your article is enriched with SEO keywords.

Pricing: The Basic plan at $29 a month is great for managing up to two blogs and needs to generate up to 40 articles a month. The Standard plan at $59 per month is perfect for freelancers who usually produce up to 150 articles a month.  Businesses that demand up to 1000 articles a month will find the Power plan useful as it also allows up to 10 users, unlike the other two plans with only one user. All plans come with an AI text generator, SEO editor, text rewording, and API access and may be used for free during a trial period.  Yearly subscriptions also give you two free months for more savings!

2. Text Blaze

Automated emails look generic and impersonal. This is why you need to put extra effort into personalizing emails to give them a human feel. Text Blaze lets you do that without having to type different emails for each customer. This would also save you time creating and proofreading emails since it auto-corrects typing mistakes.

Key Features: This versatile app lets you speed type with ease using snippets or templates. To keep messages consistent, you can simplify emails using forms, dynamic formulas, and site integrations. Text Blaze can be utilized as the database of your emails, chats, and other communications, and everyone on the team can improve them on a shared folder.

Pricing: A starter version is available and free to use, but it would allow you to create only up to 20 snippets with a maximum of 2,500 each. The Pro plan is good if you create up to 1,000 snippets with 25,000 characters each. The Business plan is perfect for teams and small businesses who have to create up to 4,000 snippets with 50,000 characters each.

 3. Icons8 Mega Creator

What makes social media posts more engaging are the photos and graphics. This poses a problem for most marketers as it is not easy to create customized graphics and pictures unless you are a seasoned designer. Icons8 Mega Creator is the answer to this problem as it lets you create social media graphics that are unique and engaging.

Key Features: Mega Creator is a versatile tool to create astonishing designs according to your needs. It works as an in-house graphic design team wherein you can choose from its vast collection of photos, illustrations, icons, and templates to create stunning content for your social media profiles.

Pricing: The full set for all types of assets and full access to its features is $29. You can pay for individual asset types at $13-$19 or use only the Mega Creator for up to 100 assets a month at $29. You can also use the free plan, but formats are limited, and you can only download them in a lower resolution.

4. Slazzer

One of the crucial aspects of digital marketing is providing the audience with professional-looking product photos. Slazzer is an online background remover that will let you prepare images by removing backgrounds in an instant. It helps you save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent on manually editing photos.

Key Features: Aside from its powerful background removal tool, Slazzer also lets you add a new background and enhance the photo with its built-in photo editor. It is an all-in-one tool to get your images ready before uploading them on your site or social media pages.

Pricing: You can try Slazzer for free with two free credits and unlimited previews on the website. Prices will depend on the number of photos you want to edit every month. For example, if you usually have to edit 100 images per month, you will pay $13 for 100 credits or $0.13 per image. You get more savings for more credits, like when you subscribe for 50,000 credits at $1999 per month or only $0.04 per image.

5. Pixelied

Professional graphics can make bigger impacts in any digital marketing campaign. This is why it is a must for any marketer to consider automating the graphics creation process to ensure the best quality graphics at all times. Pixelied is a full suite of image editing tools that will let you have stunning graphics for any of your marketing needs every single time.

Key Features: You can do so much with Pixelied! It lets you edit photos and make them look professional in seconds. You can add many effects, backgrounds, enhancements, watermarks, and other editing needs in one place. It currently has more than 4000 premium templates, over 4 million stock photos and icons, plus 100 BG removal credits a month. It is the best way to customize your graphics to align with your branding.

 Pricing: You can use Pixelied for free but with limited features or pay one-time lifetime access of only $97.

6. Encharge

The reality is that email marketing is not done. It is still one of the most effective digital marketing solutions multinational companies use. It is a powerful solution but one that needs to be done with so much creativity and cleverness. Encharge is a smart way to automate your email campaigns. It analyzes what visitors do on your website and sends the most relevant emails to encourage them to buy or learn more about your products and services.

Key Features: Encharge has a visual flow builder to enhance the customer journey. Its email editor will let you design beautiful and mobile-ready emails that look professional. You can personalize your broadcast to send emails to all or only with a group of people. Aside from behavioral emails, you can also use them to send transactional emails, like payment receipts, to complete the whole customer journey.

Pricing: Encharge offers a free 14-day trial for its features. After this period, you can pay for monthly subscriptions that start from $49 for 0-2,000 subscribers to as much as $999 for up to 150,000 subscribers. All plans come with unlimited emails, broadcasts, flows, and users, along with the marketing automation features like flow builder, user segmentation, built-in templates, and more.

7. Missinglettr

A unified social media marketing strategy is the key to having more followers, traffic, and leads. You need to be organized when managing all your socials to do this. Missinglettr is a nifty solution that lets you create and schedule engaging posts for all your profiles.

Key Features: Missinglettr is a simple yet smart and powerful tool that will automate social media drip campaigns, curate content, create a social media calendar, and analyze your metrics.

Pricing:  Use Missinglettr with a free plan and get one workspace for one social profile and up to 50 scheduled posts. The most popular plan is the Solo at only $19 a month. It gives you access to 1 workspace and management, up to 3 socials, 500 scheduled posts, and one extra user. The Pro plan at $59a month increases the workspaces to 3 for up to 9 social profiles, 3,000 scheduled posts, ten curated posts per month, and unlimited users working on your account.

8. Filecamp

One of the challenges with digital marketing is managing all of your digital assets. Filecamp is one helpful tool for efficiently organizing all your assets to access them whenever needed for future campaigns.

Key Features: Among its many features, Filecamp gives you granular access to your assets so that you can choose whom to share them with. It has multiple themes for different folders to organize your branding assets. Quickly find files with its tagging feature. Rest assured that all your assets are secured with 24/7 surveillance and secure HTTPS protocol during file transfers.

Pricing: You can choose from Basic, Advanced, and Professional plans at $29, $59, and $89, respectively. All have enhanced features for easy management of digital assets and only differ in terms of storage, several users, and extra features. Each plan is also offered a free trial if you want to try out the premium features first.

9. Post Planner

There is so much to do when using social media for marketing. Aside from keeping the audience engaged, you also need to create unique content and continuously grow your following. With so many tasks to do, the only way to keep everything in order is by automating some of the processes to optimize interactions. Post Planner is an excellent solution for this purpose.

Key Features: Post Planner is basically a post scheduler. This means that you can use it to schedule posts and share content to widely-used social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. You can create a posting calendar, discover viral content, aggregate social media feeds into one stream, and get access to thousands of quotes and questions that are great conversation starters.

Pricing: Although all plans are offered on a 7-day trial, it will be best to subscribe to benefit from all of its features thoroughly. The Starter plan at only $5 a month lets you schedule up to 300 posts for three profiles at 12 posts per profile per day. At $19 per month, the Solo plan increases the scheduled posts to 1000 for up to 10 profiles and 18 posts per profile per day. The Business plan at $29 a month gives you scheduled posts of up to 5000 posts for 25 profiles at 24 posts per profile per day. The Business plan is also great for up to 4 users so everyone in the team can access its features.

10. Pixelixe

When it comes to business, looks do matter. With businesses and industries migrating to a more digital landscape and format, developers, and bloggers are forced to create content that may gain traction on social media and other digital mediums. Yet, adapting quickly to these conditions can be heavy for those indifferent to graphic design and have no clue how to create their banners, logos, and infographics. Enter Pixelixe, an online graphic design tool that allows users to create striking visuals with point-and-click simplicity regardless of their expertise.

Key Features: What makes Pixelixe the best choice for quick and efficient graphic designing? Here are some features at the disposal of users:

• Unlimited Storage. Pixelixe crosses out the worry of running out of places to put our documents and graphics with a bottomless vault for document safekeeping to maximize creators’ and users’ creative output.
• White-Label Editor. Being able to customize your graphic tool without inputting a single line of code is something that Pixelixe users will be able to experience. Just upload an image, choose a template, and have a blank document, and the work is done.
• Powerful APIs. Pixelixe boasts useful and authentic APIs that include Image automation, Image processing, and photo filters.
• Template Library. With over 2 million photos, 900 fonts, and 700 icons, the possibilities for design are as vast as your imagination needs it to be, with originality bound to be a quality found in your creations.

Pricing: For those who want to test Pixelixe, a free trial with 50 documents is available, and you may proceed with corresponding plans for different features(All include unlimited storage:

• Pixelixe Create. With a $9 per month pierce tag, this plan includes access to the template library, the graphic editor with crop, resize, rotate, and other options.
• Pixelixe Automate: At $49 per month, this includes the same features but with the bonus of 20,000 documents available to be automated each month, image generation from Spreadsheet, Design Set Builder, White-label integration, Image Automation API, and Image Processing API.
• Pixelixe Scale: Pay $99 per month, and unlock all features of Pixelixe but with an upgrade of automation of 60,000 documents each month.
• Pixelixe Enterprise: With a price of $249 per month, this plan gives you maximum output with over 300,000 documents to automize. Note: all plans include a 10-day trial.

11. Oktopost

B2B social media marketing has goals that can only be realized when you effectively market products and services to your business clients and prospects. A strategic approach to achieving these goals is by being efficient with your B2B social media management. Oktopost is one of the best solutions for this as it lets you manage, monitor, and measure all activities in your campaign in one place.

Key Features: Oktopost lets you plan, approve, and schedule posts, uncover industry trends by engaging with prospects, track and convert people that you interact with, and analyze the impact of your posts so that you can get meaningful business metrics that give maximum impact to your ROI.

Pricing: You need to contact Oktopost directly for subscription quotes since all of their services are tailored according to your business.

Takeaway

It is hard to ignore how marketing automation changes the game for marketers. Time is of the essence with any business, and marketing automation lets you afford time like no other. These tools are specifically programmed to get all digital marketing tasks done more efficiently and effectively. As a result, you have extra time to do everything else to improve the customer experience. Marketing automation, therefore, is a key component to achieving your business goals.

Author’s Bio:

Shelly Solis is the CEO of SaaSLauncher.com – SaaS Marketing Services, a digital marketing agency for SaaS businesses. She loves writing about technology, health, digital marketing, photography, and business.