In these days, marketing automation is common in businesses. Marketing automation software can change complete business process from marketing, sales to customer service, if used properly. Selection of software depends upon the requirements and priorities of business. As it can directly affect on company budget selection of marketing software is a crucial decision for any company. These marketing tools help to achieve inbound marketing goals by simplifying complete sales and marketing process. Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot are some famous names in the market. Marketo established in 2006 and it was named the 78th fastest growing business by Inc. magazine in 2012. Pardot was established in 2007 and it was named the 172nd fastest growing business by Inc. magazine in 2012. Eloqua established in 1999 has more than 100000 users around the world.
Let’s discuss their features which can directly affect inbound marketing result.
Platform functionality
Common features set of marketing automation tools are email marketing, landing pages, lead management, CRM integration, social marketing and analytics and marketing which plays an important role to achieve inbound marketing goal.
1) Email marketing
Marketo has the facility to design emails with a visual drag and drop interface which helps to build high quality designs. Email can be sent on the basis of actions, timing or a series of predefined steps. Content can be changed dynamically to fit specific situations via filters and rules settings. This allows to include with email, a social component with the Forward to a Friend feature.
Pardot has WYSIWYG email design interface and it provides 36 pre-built template designs. Email can be sent on the basis of actions, time intervals or a range of other parameters and can include auto responders. One of the distinct features of Pardot is an integrated spam analysis and rendering engine which shows how the email will look in the leading programs and browsers. It also helps in getting maximum inbox leading delivery.
Eloqua has a deep email functionality with excellent email delivery and reporting. It has well design email platform having multiple templates to choose from and customize while using a very simple user interface.
2) Landing Page
In Marketo landing pages are very easy to build and deploy with the help of drag and drop interface & predesigned templates. Landing pages can be easily converted into Facebook pages and can be enriched with text, images and calls to action. A/B testing is easy with Marketo.
Pardot offers pre-defined templates and a visual drag and drop landing page builder, progressive profiling, dynamic content personalization. It has one unique feature that it is able to block the input of both invalid email addresses and free email addresses on landing page forms. This feature is really helpful to get high quality leads.
Eloqua also has the same features like Marketo and Pardot such as, well designed templates, dynamic content, drag and drop images, powerful form customization, etc. Along with this it has unique feature named as “Microsites”. It allows you to create content driven, personalized landing page according to prospect’s specification. This is useful when a single landing page is not enough to attract prospects.
3) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration
Marketo offers native integration, which allows bi-directional data syncing. This is useful to keep both the sales and marketing team up-to-date of any changes triggered by either team. Which helps for accurate tracking of prospect’s progress through the sales pipeline. It also offers integration with other CRM platforms such Oracle, Netsuite and SugarCRM.
Pardot offers integration with Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Salesforce and SugarCRM. One of the unique feature of Pardot is it offers developers API (application programming interface) to connect other third party CRM platforms.
Eloqua does not have its own CRM but it has “integration studio” which natively syncs with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle CRM on demand.
4) Lead Management
Lead management is the ability of different marketing tools to nurture leads through various stages of the sales process.
Marketo has the ability to score leads based on an unlimited factor such as demographics, sales rep input, prospect behavior, product-specific scoring, etc.
Pardot divides the lead management process in two components as “Lead Grade” and “Lead score”. The lead grade is focused on the demographic factors such as company size, prospect title and industry, while the lead score focused on prospect activities.
Eloqua use “Co-Dynamic Lead Scoring” technology for lead management. It focused on lead quality factors such as budget, authority, timeline, need, lead response, lead activity and behavior. It allows to run multiple scoring models simultaneously, which helps to get different lead scoring modules for various locations, product lines etc.
5) Social marketing
Marketo provides social media application in three areas as social sharing (focus on prospect sharing behavior and social profile to build database), social engagement (focus to encourage prospects to share content or videos on your website) and social promotion (plan different offers and campaign).
Padrot provides facility of social posting that connects with users social accounts which allows for posting to those accounts with custom bit.ly pro urls. This allows tracking of Twitter messages, likes and comments.
Eloqua offers “Social Suite” which is the hub of their social media marketing. It is the collection of apps which is mainly categorized into social apps, social data apps, social reports and dashboard.
6) Analytics and Reporting
For any organization, analysis of overall performance is very important. It is essential to keep track of certain key factors as
How the efforts of marketing and sales team moved the prospects to customers?
What are the frequently visited web pages?
Who are the potential buyers?
How did they come to your site?
How did they respond to your offers and campaign?
How much time they spend on your website and in which section?
This process is the core of inbound and content marketing. A selection of marketing automation tools can be entirely depend on this process. Effective analysis and reporting can give huge returns to company in short duration.
Marketo offers certain key features for analysis and reporting such as-
A library of standard reports which shows email and landing page performance, web activity and lead performance.
Campaign performance report with customizable metrics.
Influence reports to show the impact of marketing campaigns.
Revenue modeling capability that review the sales and marketing process.
Pardot offers certain key features for analysis and reporting such as-
Users can create custom reporting with the help of the GoodData visual interface.
A user can schedule the report frequency and distribution on the basis of metrics.
It also offers a connector to Google analytics, which provides the review of marketing performance at both individual and campaign levels.
It includes an ROI calculator to show cost per lead, cost per sale and data.
Eloqua offers following four main features-
Eloqua Discover for Salesfoce shows potential, most engaged prospects and accounts to increase lead generation.
Eloqua Profiler shows the prospect online activity and behavior.
Eloqua Engage allows sales professionals to customize, send and track pre-built email templates from the CRM, ipad or web.
Web Visit Alerts in the form of emails are generated, which is sent directly to sales when potential prospects visit your website. It also provides other visitor details such as time spend on website, pages visited, search terms, etc.
These features definitely helpful for companies in the selection of inbound marketing tools. But apart from this one most important factor is cost of software which depends upon budget and can affect the selection process of marketing software.
Image Credit: pi.pardot.com, marketo.com, logo-kid.com
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