Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools: Pros and Cons

As we have seen in “When did marketing become this complicated?“, marketing automation has been growing exponentially. These days, no marketer, from the more conservative to the most innovative one, should pass without automation technology. It helps to make our lives much easier in endless kinds of ways, in a variety of areas. Consequently, the market for marketing automation tools is absolutely submerged by all its offers! Some of them are to some extent limited, as they cover very specific marketing areas, while others are more complete, helping in the vast majority (if not all) marketers’ tasks. If you aim at looking more in-depth to the marketing automation market, I would recommend you to look it up at G2.com. This website gives you a very good idea of all the technologies in this field that exist out there. Today, G2 has already summed up 260 tools! So, quite a lot as you can see!

As a digital marketing consultant who sees businesses and marketing from a rather holistic point of view, I must admit I am no fan of having dozens of tools all segmented! Believe me, if you’re working with considerable loads of data (and even if you don’t do it yet), having tons of systems will make your life harder, not only from the integration point of view but also for its user-friendliness and adoption. Therefore, in this article, I will tell you about the five most complete and best automation tools I know: Pardot, Hubspot, Eloqua, Marketo, and ActiveCampaign. I’ll be impartial and will present to you both vantages and disadvantages of each one of them! So, go ahead, and get started!

Pardot:

Pardot is the marketing automation tool by Salesforce. It is primarily targeted at B2B companies, but its usage spreads beyond that rather easily. It is king at lead nurturing with email marketing, but some claim it still has room for improvements in other areas. So, let’s see in-depth its advantages and disadvantages!

Pros

• Highly complete: From email marketing to visitor tracking, lead scoring and grading, content templates, to social media scheduling, Pardot allows marketers to automate every area of their tasks. It is undoubtedly the most complete automation tool I know!
• Salesforce native integration: Pardot should be the only marketing automation tool to consider if you are using Salesforce, as their integration is a perfect fit, and synchronization is effortless. In fact, these days, Pardot is already embedded in Salesforce.
• Real-time alerts: Pardot allows marketers and sales reps to receive constant updates on the state of their leads and important information. This alerts can be customized to your own needs
• Tons of integrations: Pardot naturally integrates with tons of products, such as WordPress, and social media channels
• Engagement Studio: This is one of the tools that users appreciate the most, as it helps users build automated engagement programs that are automatically triggered by criteria and actions you define.
• Best in Class Email marketing: When it comes to email marketing, Pardot is king. It allows you to send personalized list emails, create templates, schedule emails, send one-to-one tracked emails, etc. Each and every email is always associated with a campaign!

Cons

• Reporting Limitations: Pardot reports are to some extent limited, so, what many users of this tool do instead, is using Salesforce reports which are highly complete.
• Hard to customize: As I was mentioning, Pardot can present you with some roadblocks if you try to customize a lot your marketing assets. If that’s the case, you may need to ask for the help of a developer, or a colleague with nice coding skills.
• Wide variety of features: While it is super nice that Pardot has tons of tools, it might just become confusing for people that are not so used to marketing automation to manage them all. Fortunately, Pardot counts on tons of online information on how to use, being the most well-known, Salesforce Help and Trailhead.
• Costly for small businesses: While I must admit Pardot is the best of class solution, it may not be the suitable tool for smaller companies, unless they are already preparing for expansion.

Marketo

Marketo is an automation tool with quite a history. It exists since 2011, and it was acquired by Adobe in 2016. I it well-known for its nurturing campaigns. Besides, it is considered very intuitive, yet its Ui/Ux is a bit outdated. Having said this, let’s look at its pros and cons!

Pros

• Tons of integrations: Marketo integrates with several tools and CRM, such as Salesforce
• Easy to use: Marketo is very intuitive and simple to use, with its modular design. Its setup is also pretty straightforward. Its modules include: marketing automation; consumer engagement marketing; real-time personalization; and marketing management.
• Engagement programs: Marketo’s engagement programs are very lead nurturing oriented, and are one of the best out there. Again super simple to create and to monitor
• Customization: Marketo allows for very custom solutions, which means you set up exactly what you want for your marketing strategy.

Cons

• Complicated pricing: When it comes to pricing, Marketo gets us a bit confused about its many packaging options and payment plans. Moreover, regardless of the pricing combination you’ve opted for, Marketo will always be one of the most expensive marketing automation tools out there.
• Complex set up: This ends up being the reverse of a highly customizable product. All the customization options demand knowledge, time, strong software, and analytical skills.
• Poor landing page and form builder: Marketo’s ability to create both forms and landing pages are not that great, and may be difficult to manage. So, many companies that use Marketo use third-party software for those purposes.
• Poor customer service: Since Marketo has grown quite rapidly, it customer support struggles to answer everyone properly and on time. Unfortunately, Marketo has a reputation for poor and inconsistent customer service.

Oracle Marketing Cloud

Oracle Marketing Cloud (or Oracle Eloqua, as it was known before and as I still prefer to say it) was built in 1999 and it has gained quite a good reputation out there! And you see how that goes, recognition for quality also means that you’ll probably pay more for it. Still, let’s see its vantages and disadvantages, shall we?

Pros

• Tons of integrations: Again, just like the above tools, Eloqua integrates with many platforms! It has made available over 100 integrations!
• Campaign Builder: Eloqua’s campaign builder is pretty intuitive to use, given its very well designed visual aspect! It is a rather powerful tool you’ll use and set-up pretty easily!
• Strong targeted communications: Eloqua is very strong when it comes to targeted communications. It covers tons of both online (from email to microsites, to instant messaging) and offline channels (from fax, to SMS, and voice messages). A really strong tool is HyperSite, which allows you to build personalized microsites using dynamic content.
• Good Reputation: As I just said, Eloqua really is considered one of the best marketing automation tools for enterprise businesses! It has built quite a reputation!
• Well-designed visual campaign builder: Oracle’s visual campaign builder is thought to be both intuitive and powerful to use.
• Insights: Their Insight tool is “one of the best,” according to one Oracle review, as it “gives us details about the success of our campaigns and also gives practical advice to improve our future campaigns!

Cons

• Pricing: Eloqua is expensive. It starts at $2,000 / month, so it may not be accessible to all. Plus, get ready to have to sign a long-term contract.
• Long implementation time: Eloqua is not a platform you can just implement at your company. So, if you decide to bet on it, get ready to spend some to configure it!
• Not so intuitive: At this point, I believe you do already perceived Eloqua as a very potent platform, which can do great things if it falls into the right hands. Yet, for non-expert users, Eloqua may not be as intuitive as other solutions and may require longer adoption times.
• Poor Google Adwords Integration: This is a rather unexpected con, but no, Eloqua does not track the ROI of your PPC. This is quite odd, since it allows for tons of integrations, and measuring PPC’s ROI has become a priority for many marketers.

HubSpot

HubSpot was founded in 2006 and is another good holistic marketing automation tool. It integrates solutions on marketing, sales, and service that allow for a complete view of your business. Some argue that given all the areas that the platform covers, it fails to go deeply into each one of the areas. Let’s take a look into Hubspot’s advantages and disadvantages then!

Pros

• User-friendly: Hubspot is one of the most intuitive marketing automation tools to use and navigate, even for the ones with little to no experience with digital marketing tools.
• CRM tool: Hubspot comes with a free CRM tool, that makes it easier to track pipeline and integrate all the data in one single place.
• Holistic approach: With Hubspot, you can keep every interaction’s information, from unknown visitors to customer contracts to client support in one single platform, without worrying about integrations.
• Security: HubSpot is one of the most secure marketing automation platforms out there, leveraging Amazon Web Services. Besides, updates on the software are done automatically, which also makes it safer.

Cons

• Tricky Pricing: Hubspot is nor an expensive marketing automation tool, and their starter plan costs as little as $50 per month. Yet (and here comes the con…) to truly make the most of the platform you will have to invest on higher-tier subscription
• Low Customization: Hubspot already comes with some templates for web pages and reports, but if you truly want to customize them, it won’t be so easy. Reports, email workflows, landing pages still have to be improved to suit companies aiming at tailor-made solutions.
• Poor reporting: Reports are complex assets, yet Hubspot is still pretty basic on those. They do make an effort to improve their reporting skills, so let’s see where they are heading!
• Limited Depth: So, as I mentioned before, Hubspot is relatively recent and still lacks some depth in certain areas. It doesn’t go into details and specifications as much as competitors. Yet, it just might be enough for simpler businesses.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is the last platform I will present in this marketing automation tools best-of list! It is an integrated email marketing, marketing automation, and small business CRM.
The strongest point of ActiveCampaign is its powerful and flexible marketing automation functionality. It’s one of the most comprehensive solutions on the market. Their deliverability is rated as one of the best in the market, as well.
This probably isn’t a good tool for beginners or those with low technical capabilities. It takes a bit more time and effort to learn, but when you do learn the platform, it’s pretty powerful.

Pros

• Easy to use – ActiveCampaign was a pioneer on the visual marketing automation builder. So, its user interface is super user-friendly. It requires basically no training to understand.
• Affordable – ActiveCampaign is one of the most affordable (good) marketing automation tools out there. Its price starts at just $9/month and it has no upfront setup fees.
• Automation split testing – With other automation tools, you can only A/B test a few assets, such as emails. With ActiveCampaign you can test entire sequences of assets.
• Machine learning – This is something in which ActiveCampaign has been working on. It now includes predictive sending, content, and win probabilities.

Cons

• Tricky pricing: Although ActiveCampaign is not expensive per se, only higher-priced plans feature lead scoring. So, since lead scoring is a pretty basic need for us marketers, be ready to pay more than expected at first sight for ActiveCampaign.
• CRM: ActiveCampaign does come with an in-built CRM. However, this CRM falls short when compared to other competitors, such as Salesforce.
• Reporting: Reporting in ActiveCampaign does get a little confusing. It provides us good insights on sales and conversions, but it is difficult to navigate those reports.
• Zapier is mandatory: If you want to integrate almost anything with ActiveCampaign, Zapier will be mandatory. It does allow multiple integrations once you have Zappier though.

So, have you decided already in which marketing automation tool you will be betting in the future?

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