Who’s Who in Campaign Management Software Vendors

We have run several articles on marketing and sales automation software. Now it is time to perform a deep dive into some of our highest rated campaign management software. In this context, campaign management means that the software handles all aspects of the marketing campaign. Everything from Email to advanced data analytics capabilities.

We are going to take a look at the top 5 marketing campaign management software, according to our very own Crowd Reviews users.

Without further ado.

Top 5 Campaign Management Software Packages

Pardot: Pardot is a B2B marketing automation software suite produced by Salesforce. B2B means the software is focused on meeting the needs of marketers who attempt to sell products and services from one business to another – for those that aren’t hip to the lingo.  Pardot offers a number of cutting edge features, including:

• Email marketing so easy it’s effortless. The software helps you create email campaigns designed to convert and bring in leads or revenue. It minimizes the amount of effort needed to create professional emails quickly. It supports email scheduling and triggering so that you can control when information is sent, and to whom. It includes various auto responders for your forms and landing pages, as well. The email features support automatic segregation of the audience so you can tailor the message to the audience. Oh, and don’t forget the fact that it includes A/B split testing so you can fine tune your campaign.
• Lead generation support through a number of innovative features. Landing page design doesn’t have to be complicated, and Pardot understands this. They include features to build your landing pages for you with many customization options. These landing pages can be integrated with marketing and sales workflows quite easily. They have also included functionality to analyze keyword performance and social media engagement with your audience. Fancy!
• Streamline the lead management process. Not all leads are created equal! People are going to enter your funnel at different points, so it’s important to be able to tailor your marketing to their location. You don’t want to be pushing too hard on people who are just looking for some basic information. Of course, it also comes with the capability to automate many tasks, which is essential for efficient marketing.
• ROI reporting with advanced analytics capabilities. You can see ROI by campaign so that you know which activities are helping and which need fine tuning, or the chopping block. You can also see performance of your email so that you know what hooks the readers and what leaves them saying m’eh.

Pricing is, well, it’s a little steep. Pricing starts at $1,000 per month and ranges up to $3,000 per month. Payable annually.  Demos are available so you can decide if the software is right for you.

Hubspot: Hubspot is a global organization formed with the vision of streamlining the marketing process. Their mantra is to “solve for the customer”, which is probably what gives rise to their global presence.  They offer a comprehensive suite of features, including:

• Blogging software that makes creating compelling content easy. It features integrated SEO optimization and built in blog post blueprints. Their SEO solution is pretty handy in that it doesn’t require a separate plugin, as you do with many WordPress installations. It also includes subscriber list management features so you can blast your list with confidence.
• No marketing software would be complete without social media integration, and Hubspot is not an exception to this. They include features to figure out how many leads your social media efforts are producing. In addition, they provide a bird’s eye view where you can see a user’s entire history from page views to email opens and customer status.
• Email integration. Of course, you’re going to want to use email to communicate with your list. Hubspot has you covered here, too. It allows you to send targeted email, which allows you to increase click through rates by up to 300%. In addition you will find features for A/B split testing so you can figure out what works and what really needs to be tweaked.
• Landing page creation to help you streamline the process of capturing leads. It allows you to integrate forms and calls to action with a single click. This is critical for any successful marketing strategy, so this is a great feature for them to include in the software.
• Analytics functionality to take advantage of all that data. In the modern world we have access to monstrous amounts of data. Making sense of it can require a PhD, or at least some fancy software to do the heavy lifting for you. Hubspot includes some integrated analytics features that help generate insightful figures and graphs to let you know what is going on with your marketing campaign. This enables you to make the right decisions to know what the next winning move is going to be.

With respect to pricing, Hubspot is pretty reasonable. The basic package starts at $200 a month with a $600 onboarding fee. The pro account jumps up to $800 and enterprise level is $2400 a month. It’s worth mentioning that Hubspot has a free trial. That’s really handy when you are considering forking over such a large sum of money.

Instapage: Instapage is a little bit more specialized than the rest of the offerings here. In particular, Instapage focuses on landing page creation with the intent to increase your conversions. They feature a drag and drop interface that lets you build relatively complicated layouts with ease, and best of all, without having to write a single line of code. Did we mention that the pages are mobile responsive?

Since they are only supplying landing page software, they include the capability to seamlessly integrate with the rest of your software suite. They have the capability to integrate with over 20 other marketing tools, without having to dig into the API (i.e. you don’t have to code!).

Once you’re done with design they make deployment a snap. Do you have a GoDaddy webpage? No problem. Instapage allows you to easily publish your landing page to your GoDaddy hosted website. Of course, they also have integration with WordPress, which is the most popular CMS in existence.

Finally, they have A/B testing so you can track the behavior of your site visitors. Knowing which ads convert at the highest rate lets you pick the best landing page for your campaign. I don’t suppose I have to explain how awesome that is. Instapage can also track button clicks and form submissions, for an extra level of detail.

Considering that it is “just” a landing page creation and deployment system, Instapage has much more modest pricing than the above two software packages. Be prepared to pay from $29 to $79 a month for the basic or premium packages respectively. The professional package is priced in between at $55 a month. All of the plans include a wealth of other great features, such as mobile responsivity and drop in pixel tracking.

Adobe campaign: Adobe is a sort of household name in the computing world. It seems like this company does it all. It’s probably no surprise that they offer a marketing campaign management suite as well.  The list of features they offer is impressive:

• Campaign management across multiple channels. With an intuitive drag and drop interface you can manage each and every detail of your marketing campaign and receive real time feedback on performance. You can manage facets such as marketing content, marketing channels, scheduling, budgeting, and resource allocation.
• Integrated customer profiles allow you to bring together all the information you have on a client. This helps you personalize your marketing content to the individual, which naturally goes a long way towards converting a customer into a brand advocate.
• Adobe enables targeted segmentation of customers and prospects so that you can tailor your marketing efforts to each individual’s location in your sales funnel. You have access to demographics, preferences, and interests. This allows you to create a marketing campaign that stands out from the rest.
• Contextual email marketing is similar in that centralizes customer data and allows you to craft personalized emails. Oh, and of course it automates email delivery so that you can send out an appropriate email sequence.
• As with other software, Adobe includes a vast array of analytics and reporting functionality. This is probably the most critical function, as what good is marketing if you can’t gauge its effectiveness? It features complete visibility of every aspect of your campaign with a customizable dashboard, so you can see what is relevant to you. Calculating ROI and efficiency has never been easier.
• Perhaps my favorite feature is real time interaction management. It can be tricky to keep track of promotions, particularly when you are trying to tailor them to a segment of your market. Adobe solves this problem with their real time interaction management feature set. It allows you to automatically tailor offers to customers and deliver them across multiple channels.

Burrellesluce: This software is slightly different from the others in that it is focused on media outreach, monitoring, and reporting. This means that this software is great for public relations management as well. It allows you to effortlessly distribute a virtually infinite amount of traditional press releases and multimedia press kits to journalists and media outlets.

You can then measure effectiveness of your campaign with their comprehensive media monitoring services.  This includes print, online, social media and broadcast sources. In short, they are watching. Everything.

Finally, they allow you to measure the coverage you are getting with your campaign. Make sure that your work is being reported across all the channels you are targeting, so that no effort is wasted.

Conclusion

As you can see, the world of campaign management software is full of high quality offerings from many vendors. These were the top 5, according to our own list here at Crowd Reviews. We hope that this has been helpful to you marketing moguls out there. Stay tuned for that next article!

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Thomas Corbin

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