From managing your to-do list to tracking your daily fitness routine, technology has allowed us to quickly automate and manage many parts of day-to-day life. And for marketers, the wide range of marketing automation tools now available can help you make your job simpler than ever before.
As Hubspot explains, “implementing a marketing automation system won’t make your job irrelevant, it will just make you more effective. It will free up some of your time, while not compromising the authenticity of the content you’re producing. And it will help you reach your goals faster.”
From helping you nurture leads to managing your emails, when used correctly, marketing automation tools can completely transform your marketing results. Here are four of the best marketing automation tools on the market today.
Driftbot
If you’re reading this article on our website, then you probably see the Drift icon in the lower right of the screen. Drift is what we use for live chat. There are tons of live chat and customer engagement tools out there, but we keep coming back to Drift, just because it’s so simple to use.
One of the coolest features of Drift is their automated bot, aptly named Driftbot. Here’s how the folks are Drift explain it:
Driftbot is your intelligent sales assistant. Think of Driftbot like your sales assistant — working 24/7 for your sales teams to qualify leads and book meetings. Make your BDR team more efficient by letting the Driftbot identify, qualify, and connect with your leads first using Replies.
Pretty cool, yeah? By using a tool like Driftbot, you can quickly route messages to the right channels, automate responses to your most common questions, and so much more.
I recently interviewed Drift’s director of marketing, David Gerhardt, on the Growth Marketing Toolbox podcast, and among other things, we discussed Driftbot. Check it out here.
Zapier
Another one of my favorite tools for automating marketing tasks is Zapier. This is a Swiss army knife for marketers.
Zapier lets you connect pretty much any marketing, sales, or productivity tools together to create “zaps.” So for instance, if you want to automatically add new email subscribers to a Google sheet, there’s a zap for that. Or if you want to send live chat conversations to Slack, there’s a zap for that.
Around the office, we use that line quite a bit; “When in doubt, there’s a zap for that.”
For more on Zapier, check out a podcast interview I did with Carlin Sack from the Zapier team, where we cover the platform in detail. You’ll find it right here.
Quuu
Are you still curating content the old fashioned way, sorting through hundreds of articles per day to find the hidden gems? If so, stop! There’s a better approach.
The folks over at Quuu have created an awesome tool for automatically curating social media content to your Buffer or HubSpot feeds.
How does it work? So glad you asked!
Basically, you select specific interests from a list of over 300 categories, then you choose how many articles per day you’d like Quuu to send to your social profiles, and then you let them handle the rest.
If you want to manually review every post before it is shared, there’s an option to do that, or you can just sit back and let it run automatically.
Of course, use Quuu in moderation. Don’t let curated content be the only thing you share on your social channels. Be sure to engage, respond to questions, and ask some questions of your own on a regular basis.
If used properly, Quuu can save you time by finding high-quality content that is relevant to your specific audience.
If you want to learn more about Quuu, check out episode 39 of the podcast, where I interview the founders. Here’s the link.
ActiveCampaign
Lastly, we can’t talk about automation without mentioning a dedicated marketing automation platform. For me, the one I recommend is ActiveCampaign.
If you’ve downloaded my free ebook–50 Growth Marketing Tools–then you’ve seen ActiveCampaign in action, because that’s how I instantly deliver the ebook to your inbox. And if you haven’t downloaded it yet, what are you waiting for!? Grab a copy today, will ya? 😎
Anyway, ActiveCampaign is a full marketing automation suite. From sending automated email campaigns, to creating complex automations with “if/then” logic, to even sending automated SMS messages, if you can think of it, you can probably get it to work with ActiveCampaign.
And they’re always coming out with new features, which is awesome.
If you’re still on the fence about choosing the right marketing automation platform for your business (or maybe you still aren’t sure what marketing automation even does), check out episode 70 of the podcast, where I break it all down. You can listen to it right here.
Conclusion
As impressive as these marketing automation tools are, what’s even more impressive is that they’re only the tip of the iceberg! There are so many more great tools available that can help you become a more efficient marketer.
Whether you use marketing automation tools so you can spend less time working on emails or to ensure that no sales lead slips through the cracks, using these and other marketing automation tools will help you improve your time management and work more effectively so you can see more growth than ever before.
If there’s a tool that you’ve had a lot of success with, please feel free to mention it below or on Twitter. I’d love to hear about it!
Awesome, I’m using all 4 tools 🙂
I think these tools are just wonderful. I’m not using driftbot yet however… just using the chat
Hi Jean-Christophe, that’s awesome to hear. Yeah, check out Driftbot for sure!
Great article. I’m definitely going to be checking out Quuu.
Thanks Bobby. Hope you find Quuu useful. It can be a huge time-saver.
What are your thoughts on Drip vs ActiveCampaign?
Hi Damien,
Both are solid tools, but personally, I find ActiveCampaign to be more robust, with more flexibility, advanced features, direct integrations, and a more active support community. Also, their CRM feature helps it stand out in the space. And I like that they are always coming out with new features, pretty much every month.
If you don’t need all those bells and whistles, Drip would be a good choice. In fact, if ActiveCampaign didn’t exist, it would probably be what I’m using. It really just depends on which features you need the most.
Thanks for sharing Nicholas! Haven’t tried any of these. Sounds very promising. Which of those do you suggest for newbies?
It really depends on your needs, Emmerey. I’d say if you don’t already have an email automation tool in place, ActiveCampaign (or a similar platform) is a must. Marketing automation is a cornerstone of digital marketing activity these days. My business couldn’t run without it.
Thanks Nicholas! Will check it out 🙂
Hey, this is an pretty interesting list of automated tools. I myself being a professional marketer have used some automated marketing tools before but they were not as useful as I thought them to be. But these tools looks promising and I will surely try them out. Thanks for this post.
Another tool that’s become pretty essential for me is MixMax. MixMax is an email marketing tool geared more toward sending emails to individuals rather than bulk email to a large list of subscribers.
I’ve used it to help me schedule interviews and manage PR outreach for my business. It also has a really cool follow up feature that allows me to schedule a reminder to send a follow up message after a couple of days.
Joe
Great article.