Image Credit: G2 Crowd
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G2 Crowd’s newest marketing automation grid shows that tools targeting large enterprises aren’t necessarily the very best. In fact, marketing automation tools targeting small and medium businesses won the top honors.
The business software review site today released the ratings, based on more than 800 user reviews. G2 Crowd’s ”grid” measuring tool analyzes customer satisfaction ratings as well as social signals and public data to rank vendors as either leaders, contenders, niche players, or high performers.
We asked over 1,000 marketers about the best marketing automation systems.
The top five tools span the business size gamut. Hubspot, which came in first, is primarily used by medium-sized companies. Act-On, which placed second, primarily targets smaller and medium-sized non-tech businesses. And Marketo, Pardot (which is owned by Salesforce), and Eloqua (which is owned by Oracle), which placed third, fourth, and fifth respectively, primarily target larger enterprise customers.
According to G2 Crowd, Hubspot has the highest customer satisfaction ratings — which we’ve also seen in our surveys – with a 95 percent customer satisfaction rating. Act-on scored an 87 percent satisfaction rate, and Pardot, Marketo, and Eloqua also saw results in the 80s.
Interestingly, while Net-Results, Ontraport, and Salesfusion had slightly lower overall customer ratings, with scores in the 70-80 percent range, they joined the top systems in at least one category: Over 90 percent of their users said they would recommend their systems to others.
“Satisfaction rankings are generated from user reviews consisting of up to 71 questions, including ratings of features and functionality such as email marketing, online marketing, and lead management,” G2 Crowd said in a statement. “Market presence is calculated from vendor size, market share, and social impact.”
While G2′s grid is a useful measure of customer satisfaction, some enterprise solutions have yet to get enough reviews to be rated effectively.
For instance, Adobe’s Campaign, part of its marketing cloud, has received only 16 reviews so far, probably too few for G2 to be confident to rate it extremely high. Other enterprise solutions such as those provided by IBM and SAS are also not showing up in sufficient numbers to be ranked.
That’s something that will likely be rectified over time as more users of those systems discover and use G2 Crowd.
VentureBeat and marketing expert Dan Freeman are working on a Marketing Automation buyers report. Help us out by answering the survey, and we'll share the resulting data with you.