Marketing Software is a collection of web systems and applications that help businesses expand their outreach with profitable and engaging campaigns. There are many types of marketing programs, but most of them are designed for campaign management and resource optimization, and offer features such as data collection, branding, event scheduling, content distribution, and lead nurturing and converting. Show more The most advanced marketing products will also come with a handy analytical suite for you to generate accurate reports. To see how marketing systems work, check our frontrunner HubSpot Marketing Hub and other popular apps in this category.Show less
In order to create this list of best Marketing Software for B2C we have researched different tools currently available on the market, analyzing their features, how easy are they are to learn, client service, available integrations and mobile support with our exclusive SmartScoreTM rating system. This ranking has been prepared by Louie Andre, our B2B authority dedicated to the Marketing Software for B2C category.
With a wide range of B2C marketing software solutions to choose from, it is easy to get overwhelmed with the nitty-gritty details during your product discovery research. This guide aims to help you zero in on the marketing software features that you need and shortlist the products you think best fits your requirements. The guide introduces you to the basics of marketing software, its core features and benefits, the top products in the market today, and much more. Once you get your bearing, you can further your reading, starting with this top 10 marketing software compilation.
A key part of your product discovery is using the free trial offered by vendors. They are often commitment-free and will not require credit card information. After reading this guide, using the products of your choice firsthand should help you funnel your list further to the top marketing software of your liking. A free trial often gives you access to all features, including premium ones for a limited period. As you discover these features, take down notes to compare similar features and highlight the unique functionalities of each software. You can also refer to our list of top marketing software here to speed up your research. These products have scored the highest in our proprietary SmartScore and Customer Satisfaction Rating, which aggregate the insights of our team of expert reviewers and feedback from hundreds of user reviews found online: HubSpot Marketing, monday.com, Maropost Marketing Cloud, MailerLite, Mayple and Marketing Creatio.
Most B2C marketing software solutions are planned around the needs of small businesses, medium-size businesses, and large enterprises. In that way, they scale to your growing needs. Be sure to subscribe to a plan that fits your current business size, as to avoid paying for unused features or missing out on powerful ones. Typically, this is how a growing business scales the plans:
Large enterprises require an expansive feature set and unique solutions to industry-specific cases. While subscription plans for small and midsize businesses often only involve straightforward scaling of features—for example, more users, more projects, higher storage—B2C marketing software enterprise needs a custom plan, hence vendors will require a price quote to determine the enterprise’s exact needs.
Beyond the standard scaling of features, enterprise marketing software plans may include advanced tools such as a wider array of ad types, multiple domain traffic monitoring, an extensive dashboard and a range of custom objects and API integrations, the last being crucial to companies with built-in or legacy systems that need integrating with a paid plan.
Other premium marketing software features to look for are enterprise-scale automation, advanced reporting and analytics, multilevel permission rules, and tailored customer support. These are actual features you will find in the marketing software examples below.
For more marketing software examples and to see how they differ from each other, visit our guide on the top 15 marketing solutions.
B2C marketing platforms should be no different from any other marketing software. It is a broad category that encompasses any software aimed at helping you carry out your marketing efforts, including administrative and management.
You can classify the types of marketing software in different ways, namely:
By functional focus
By business size
By deployment
Take note, these classifications are not always clear-cut. In many instances, a software product has all the characteristics of all types because it can scale and adapt to different use cases.
Modern marketing software should have the core features that will allow you to automate workflows, manage leads and launch email campaigns, and it should integrate seamlessly with key business apps like CRM, accounting, productivity tools, and analytics. Other advanced features like A/B testing, AI-powered tools and insights & analytics are useful, so do consider them.
Marketing software offers a wide array of benefits such as streamlining your marketing processes, helping you focus on strategic planning and ensuring all marketing-related data and activities are consolidated in one place. Here are the top benefits to consider:
Streamlining marketing workflow. Marketing software automates mundane, repetitive tasks, speeding up your processes and ensuring that tasks are moved to the next step. Managers and staff are freed from time-consuming tasks that do not add to the bottom line.
More time on strategy. Marketing software gives you more time to focus on strategic planning and creative thinking. With automation, you can focus on high-level tasks and, abetted by insights generated by software, you can make smarter decisions even in real time.
Nurture high-level leads. Marketing software also helps you sort high-value leads from the rest. In this way, you can focus your efforts and budget on prospects with the best chances of delivering an ROI.
Sales insights. With data on campaigns, customer interactions, contact details, and other marketing-related activities consolidated in one system, a modern marketing software can help you generate insights quickly and with accuracy. You can pull out reports on lead volume rate, win-loss rate, conversion rate, etc. over a specified period. Many solutions also allow you to measure campaign KPIs and share actionable insights.
Email marketing. Marketing software usually features a built-in email marketing tool. This allows you to launch low-cost, measurable campaigns, re-engage customers or prospects, target audience segments with personal messaging and, with the right strategy, drive conversion rates. An A/B testing feature helps you build on your email marketing successes and best practices.
Social marketing. Some marketing software plans feature a social media marketing tool to help you engage prospects on popular social channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The feature helps you to reach out to where your potential customers are and drive them to your landing page. A marketing software with this feature also helps you to integrate your social media campaigns seamlessly with your PPC, email and other online campaigns, ensuring consistent brand messaging and omnichannel presence.
More companies will turn to marketing software as it delivers the critical tools to meet more complex, hyper-personalized customer expectations. Here are the latest developments related to marketing software.
Marketing software is not without the disadvantages, both valid and unfounded. These are the common issues you should expect when subscribing to a plan:
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Picking a suitable SaaS solution from the numerous good quality platforms out there can be a hard task. To assist you, we have prepared this quick primer. Find out if the SaaS provider offers the following benefits:
Reduced Cost: Most SaaS systems are pay as you go, and you don’t have to worry about added investments for system maintenance or IT resources, upfront licensing fees, or in-house IT staff.
Fast Set-up Time and Minimized Risk: You should be able to deploy the SaaS system quickly and easily. Make use of the free trial to learn if the app fits your needs. If you pick a wrong solution, you can bail out easily with minimum losses.
Customization and Integration: Choose a provider that offers a wide choice of software packages and modules. You should be able to pay only for the features you use to meet the current needs of your company.
Security and Control: The system should offer robust security. Choose a provider whose databanks are more secure than those in your office to maximize the advantages.
The Infrastructure: The provider should provide the required infrastructure so that you need not host anything in-house or require the assistance of internal IT resources.
Web Access: Your staff members should be able to access data anywhere, anytime. To assist them be productive on the go, choose a vendor that offers mobile apps that are compatible with popular operating systems.
Consider all the six important factors mentioned above to select the best system for your needs.
HubSpot Marketing tops our list of B2C marketing software solutions for its comprehensive feature set that you can scale from small business to enterprise. Companies in retail will find it flexible to their requirements and adaptive to their workflow as they expand their customer base. Notably, HubSpot Marketing integrates with HubSpot’s popular sales, CRM and support apps, giving you a solid sales & marketing tech stack that helps you engage prospects throughout their customer lifecycle.
The software allows you to focus on high-level leads and funnel them down to conversion. As all relevant data and activities are consolidated in one place, you can engage prospects with hyper-personalized messages at every buyer’s journey stage and towards a win.
An omnichannel solution, HubSpot Marketing helps you track your marketing campaigns across your social media, email, landing pages and blogs and maintain consistent brand messaging. It also helps you segment messages to target specific audiences. With its marketing analytics, you get to make smarter decisions or discover opportunities buried in your data.
HubSpot Marketing is free for a limited feature set. Paid monthly subscriptions start at $45.
The benefits of marketing software revolve around automating marketing workflow, sorting high-value leads and funneling them down to the sales pipeline and launching email campaigns.
With automation, marketing software can help streamline repetitive and cumbersome tasks such as moving leads and deals to the next stage once requirements are met, adding contact details to prospects, sorting campaign results and more. Rule-based triggers and, in some cases, machine learning, allow you to set automation in ways that are meaningful to your process.
In general, marketing software will help you scrape top-of-the-funnel leads off your campaigns or websites, and nurture them with personalized messages and offers until they are ready to be handed over to sales.
As a campaign tool, marketing software helps you A/B test email campaigns, build landing pages and create autoresponders that match segments with the right messaging.
Similarly, leveraging consolidated data from customer-related transactions and engagement, marketing software can run analytics on multiple KPIs to generate insights, not just information. You get multiple perspectives on your marketing activities and customer behavior, helping you make smarter decisions or personalize brand messaging.
As an integrated system for your sales and customer service processes, marketing software gives you a solid CRM tech stack to engage prospects all the way to conversion.
The features of B2C marketing platforms vary per vendor, but, in general, they should have marketing automation, lead management, email marketing and campaign management.
Advanced plans may also include tools for social marketing, landing page builder and PPC management. The latest marketing software products leverage AI and machine learning, which level up automation and lead scoring with predictive analytics.
Aside from the core feature set and add-ons, marketing software should integrate with your sales, CRM and helpdesk software. This way, you can consolidate all customer-related data from the touchpoint to transaction.
monday.com is one of the easiest marketing software. It is designed to adapt to different use cases including handling marketing and creative projects. They include tracking campaigns, planning events, managing brand communications, addressing creative requests, conducting email marketing and more.
It also delivers insights into your marketing efforts, enabling you to measure your marketing efforts with pinpoint accuracy. You can generate broad-based reports like ROI, campaign value and net value, which helps you in strategic planning.
Likewise, it lets you automate workflows like notifications, deadline alerts and final approvals. Creatives will find it easier to collaborate using monday.com as a single source of truth and collaborative space to keep track of annotations, vesioning and, generally, their outputs.
An added bonus, you can use monday.com for your other projects outside of marketing, for instance, task management, talent recruitment and I.T. ticket resolution.
HubSpot Marketing has a free plan ideal for small businesses or any company that’s just starting out. The free plan has the essential tools to help jumpstart your online marketing campaigns, including 5 active lists for segmentation, a lightweight form builder, 2,000 emails per month (branded), ad management, limited Facebook Messenger integration, limited ad retargeting and email reply tracking.
Not only that, the HubSpot Academy offers free marketing tools and courses on how to get, nurture and manage customer relationships.
What makes HubSpot Marketing an appealing free plan is that it scales to robust enterprise features, allowing you to expand its capabilities to meet your growing requirements.
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