Any marketer worth their salt knows the key marketing channels to adopt in order to increase brand awareness and generate sales leads – and they all start and end online! The list of digital marketing options is endless: - websites, landing pages, emails, social media, ads, content, PR, events, affiliate schemes … and the list goes on (and on, and on)!
With 5 billion people worldwide using the internet today, that’s 63% of the world’s total population (Datareportal); so, if you want to make sure your sales funnel is constantly being filled – SaaS (Software as a Service) is where it’s at. Put simply, the potential customer base is HUGE.
The fact that new SaaS products for marketers are being released almost daily demonstrates their value in saving marketers huge amounts of time, and driving rapid sales growth for businesses. With 76% of companies reporting the use of automation in 2021 (Hubspot) we’d all be forgiven for asking, “how do we know which ones to spend our time investigating and testing, and how do we know if they will really improve our results”?
In this blog we take a look at 7 of our favourite marketing automation tools, which have been tried and tested by the Dux team, to make sure they do just what they have promised to. They include:
1. Dux-Soup
2. Make (formerly Integromat)
3. Woodpecker
4. Outbound
5. Markettailor
6. Pribox
7. Hubspot
To put a bit of context around all of this before we leap into the detail, let’s remind ourselves about the benefits of marketing automation, what to look for in a marketing SaaS product and the importance of results.
The benefits of marketing automation
Automation tools are there to scan activity and automate workflows. They are not there to strategize and make decisions for you – this bit still needs the knowledge, experience and input of human assessment and analysis, in order to gain continual improvement and to avoid damaging your brand.
Marketing automation tools are however, there to help you increase your conversion rates, and scale your led gen activity. They do this by providing you with time and cost savings, bringing efficiency to your business workflows and outreach processes, so your time is spent where it’s most needed; identifying the right strategy for your business, and creating the new automation scenarios that fulfill this.
Don’t have the time or resources to implement marketing automation tools yourself? Why not consider hiring freelance marketers to get your automation tools and processes up and running for you?
What to look for in a marketing SaaS product
So, what should be the most important criteria, in selecting your preferred SaaS product? Obviously, automation is key, but in addition you should expect a successful SaaS to provide you with:
- Improved conversion rates
- The ability to scale activity
- Significant time savings
- Quantifiable cost savings
- Workflow efficiencies
Of course, with any investment - time or money, it’s important to be able to measure the results, so make sure you choose automation tools where the results are clear and you have the ability to test your results, assess the outcomes and adapt your approach.
The tools we’ve identified below meet all of these criteria. If your current tool doesn’t and you’re looking for an independent appraisal on the products available today, or you’re new to marketing automation, then keep on reading to discover which tools could make a big difference to your business.
So, let’s take a deep dive and start with Dux-Soup.
Use it for
Accelerate your business growth using LinkedIn. With Dux-Soup you can create personalized LinkedIn outreach campaigns, managing the volume and interval of messaging you send. Automate multiple concurrent campaigns to carefully segmented audiences for increased personalization and results, and integrate all of this with your CRM for the ultimate, streamlined sales and marketing strategy.
What will you achieve using Dux-Soup?
Dux-Soup provides users with the capability to automate activities that would otherwise be hugely labour-intensive, such as finding and connecting with potential leads, and managing campaign activity. The default automation settings mimic ‘general’ human behaviour in terms of time taken to perform activities and the speed at which functions are completed, which ensures you are using LinkedIn safely.
Our products give you the opportunity to communicate with prospects via LinkedIn, allowing users to personalize connection messages, endorse skills and send personalized direct messages too. The Campaign Management capability is unrivalled and provides users with the facility to run multiple concurrent drip campaigns, where the user selects the number and desired delay between the messages, halting the sequence if a prospect responds, so you can choose to switch to manual comms if applicable or re-enrol the prospect at a relevant point in the sequence.
Progress Tracking
Our awesome Funnel Flow facility comes free with the Dux-Soup Turbo plan and is the perfect way to track and analyze your activity. The analytics tracking tool helps you to identify the campaigns, message content and sequences that are delivering optimum results for your business, allowing you to optimize your campaign activity to ensure continued success.
Price Point
Dux-Soup operates as an extension of your browser and offers a free 14-day trial for new users to get started, with 3 different user packages thereafter: Starter, Pro and Turbo.
- Our Starter version, is our free forever option, giving you the ability to find LinkedIn prospects and visit profiles.
- Our Pro package allows you to upload and download prospect lists, engage using auto connect and messaging features and filter your lists by tags for more targeted prospecting.
- The Turbo plan is perfect for more advanced lead generation. Turbo enables you to simultaneously run and monitor multiple drip campaigns to different prospecting lists, connect LinkedIn with your CRM and manage your LinkedIn lead funnel for conversion optimization.
In addition, Dux-Soup also caters for different user types: Individuals, Teams and Agencies.
Individual Pricing Plan
Working alone? This is the plan to help you scale your lead generation activity and start automating those labor-intensive tasks, so you can put your focus on to converting your leads, to sales.
For teams in excess of 1 person, the team plan allows your teams multi-seat visibility and management of your LinkedIn automation activities.
When you buy 15+ Pro licences, or 5+ Turbo licence, you are automatically enrolled onto our High Flyer Customer Success programme, which gives you priority support, account management, free accelerator calls and access to the Dux High Flyer user group and online sessions.
The agency plan is perfect for multi-seat agency visibility and management of your LinkedIn sales and marketing strategy; 30+ for Pro, and10+ for Turbo.
As an Agency licence holder, you are automatically enrolled onto our High Flyer Customer Success program, which gives you priority support, account management, free accelerator calls and access to our High Flyer user group and interactive online sessions.
What the reviews say
With a host of satisfied users, reaping the benefits of Dux-Soup, we’d rather let our users speak for themselves …
Take a look at our LinkedIn automation success stories, to see how our users have used Dux-Soup to achieve their business goals, or click on the below titles to see how these Dux users powered up their lead gen to maximum effect using Dux-Soup:
- Agency doubles its turnover in 2 years with the help of Dux-Soup
- From 0 to 349 meetings in just 3 months with Dux-Soup
- Dux-Soup reduces the time I need to spend on LinkedIn by as much as 80%
Why we love Dux-Soup
I mean clearly, we are biased, but with good reason!!
With Dux-Soup, you can effortlessly scale your lead gen to triple your LinkedIn leads and double your ROI, and over 70,000 of our users agree. If that isn’t reason enough to love Dux-Soup, I’m not sure what is!
Dux-Soup releases around 4 updates a month in response to LinkedIn’s changing algorithms, new feature releases and requests from users via the feedback page on our website where users can add and vote on feature requests. All of this makes Dux-Soup one of the most proactive tools on the market. Our list of Dux-Soup integrations is ever-growing too, which currently includes: Hubspot, Pipedrive, Woodpecker, Zapier, Make, LeadFuze and Zymplify, making your outreach efforts even more effortless.
In addition to the tool itself, Dux-Soup provides users with a regular and comprehensive program of webinars, video tutorials, blog releases and access to a live knowledge base via the Dux-Soup Support pages - all to help answer many of those frequently asked questions. Our awesome support team are always on hand via our Facebook user-group pages too, brimming with tips galore, and giving users the opportunity to share growth hacking tips and tricks. All of this means you get around the clock support, wherever you are in the world, even when you are sleeping!
Use it for
Make allows you to create, build and automate your own workflows by connecting any number of apps using a no-code visual builder.
What you will achieve
Whether you’re an SME, or huge corporation, Make lets you build a visual workflow to automate anything from sending lead data into your CRM to launching scheduled email marketing campaigns and notifying team members about updates in documentation or tasks.
You can choose from thousands of apps to streamline and standardize your business processes and automate data flow to complement and underpin your marketing strategy.
Make allows you to streamline and standardize your business processes and automate data flow, running easily repeatable scenarios in the background, so you are able to focus on the more labor-intensive, strategic activities in the latter stages of the sales funnel. It’s all about saving time by cutting out those manual data processes.
Create, test, edit and publish integrated workflows at the touch of a button by simply dragging and dropping the desired apps to automate your workflows.
Its simplistic approach means that you can connect multiple apps to generate any number of workflows to cover a multitude of scenarios. You can choose from thousands of their ready-made integrations or connect to a public API using Make’s HTTP app if your chosen workflow isn’t currently available.
You can even allocate permissions for each of your scenarios, to allow you to collaborate with your teams and customers.
Progress tracking
Once you have built your scenario, watch it run in real-time, or schedule it to run as and when needed – your data is always available.
Price Point
Make offers 5 packages, including a ‘Free Forever’ version. The free version provides you with:
- No-code workflow builder
- 1000+ apps
- Custom apps
- Unlimited users
- Two-factor authentication
- Parallel scenario execution
- Real-time execution monitoring
Their most popular plan starts at $18.82 per month. Make also offers an Enterprise plan with higher grade features and support.
What the reviews say
“Knowledge of APIs and an understanding of other forms of authentication may be required to connect certain apps, and some users report that it’s quite a steep learning curve to get things up and running.
However, there’s no simpler way to manage and integrate multiple apps to provide your teams with full end to end visibility and control over the entire your sales and marketing workflow.
The user groups and support functions are super-helpful, so it won’t take long to get up to speed or find the answer that you’re looking for.”
Why Dux-Soup loves Make
There’s no denying that for most, Make provides a very user-friendly interface, and with an ever-growing number of apps to choose from, as far as multi-app, no-code, automated workflows go; Make is leading the way.
You can integrate Make with Dux-Soup Turbo for seamless management of your leads.
For more information about how to use Make with Dux-Soup, take a look at the Dux-Soup Integrations page and check out our recent webinar for all the lowdown on how to automate LinkedIn lead gen workflows using Make and Dux-Soup.
Use it for
Woodpecker is a B2B marketing automation tool, that helps to generate leads using cold email campaigns. The tool enables you to personalize emails that can be sent at scale directly from your inbox, mimicking human behaviour.
What you will achieve
As a B2B marketer, the tool allows you to create email sequences, which are personalized for your target audience, and provides you with the capability to A/B test messaging to find the version with the highest open rate.
The ‘warm-up and recovery’ feature which is available in the basic package, allows you to warm-up an email address, a whole domain or to choose the recovery mode to restore the reputation of an email address that has shown some deliverability issues.
Woodpecker integrates with all email providers and keeps all email comms within the same thread for ease of follow-up, ensuring the sequence stop if a prospect replies, so you can ‘personally’ step in.
In 2023, Woodpecker launched a direct integration with Dux-Soup meaning that you can even include LinkedIn outreach activities (connection requests, profile visits) in your workflow. How cool is that? Check out the Dux-Soup & Woodpecker workshop that shows you how this works.
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The tool also integrates with a number of other tools to help provide a more seamless approach to managing your outreach, including:
Progress tracking
You can easily track progress which covers open, click-through and response rates, and it even categorizes the response in terms of level of interest.
Price Point
Woodpecker provides 3 pricing plans and offers a free trial that lasts for 7-days or allows you to send 50 cold emails.
The basic package provides a few deliverability-oriented features including built-in contact list verification in real-time, deliverability monitoring and Bounce Shield.
What the reviews say
“You can’t use Woodpecker to help you compile your list of prospects, so you will need to find an alternative way of doing this (LinkedIn can obviously help here), and there have been requests for improved reporting functions.
We however love Woodpecker’s automated email campaign tool and isa really user-friendly platform with a very quick-to-respond, and helpful support team.”
You can also integrate Woodpecker with Dux-Soup to help you to build your prospecting lists automatically from LinkedIn for your targeted campaigns.
Why Dux-Soup loves Woodpecker
Part of the appeal of Woodpecker is its simplicity. You can plugin your email, from any email provider, in just seconds. Using a simple interface, you’re able to include follow-ups in your outreach sequence, add conditions to customize your messaging based on the prospect’s behavior, or add copy variations for A/B testing.
If you’re a lead generation agency, there’s also a special version of the product called Woodpecker Agency, where you can manage multiple client accounts from a single dashboard, making the whole process much slicker.
Use it for
Outbound is a B2B sales intelligence and data enrichment platform that helps you find accurate information about leads and prospects easily.
What you will achieve
Outbound’s biggest strength is in its data enrichment capability. The tool allows you to create custom lists of potential clients based on your preferred criteria, such as the industry they work in, their location or role, and deliver enriched, accurate data from across 200 million brands and 400 million contacts, globally.
Once you have selected the accounts which interest you, automate your outreach strategy to key decision makers within those accounts and use Outbound’s email builder to create and customize your own templates.
Track engagement rates, detect bounced emails and refine and/or save the email templates that bring in the optimum results and engagement stats.
Progress Tracking
The platform provides you with a live Dashboard for access to real-time stats and graphical data on all of your campaigns, so you can keep track of all your activity and never miss out on a new opportunity!
Price point
Outbound offer 4 pricing options.
The ‘Always Free’ plan allows you to start boosting your sales without breaking the bank. Outbound operate a ‘credit’ system, so you are charged 1 credit per contact purchased and 1 credit per email found and verified. The free version includes 200 email credits p/m. The great thing is even with the free version they don’t charge credits for other features such as sending campaigns or selecting and assigning accounts.
What the reviews say
The tool has only received a small number of reviews to date, and whilst there is little to no use-case material, showcasing how existing clients are transforming their businesses using Outbound, customer feedback seems very positive.
“The Content Hub contains blogs and ‘How To’ guides as well as a number of outreach templates, which can be useful, however it’s likely you will want to produce your own versions, which better support your business’s outreach strategy and style. “
Overall, users have commented that the quality of the data is high, helping teams to connect with multiple contacts within target accounts and it’s a great tool for fast, simple outreach campaigns.
Why Dux-Soup loves Outbound
Outbound integrates with a small number of email providers and CRM platforms, however if their existing integrations don’t meet your needs, they are happy to build an integration to suit your purpose, if you get in touch with them before the start of your contract, which is great to know.
Use it for
Markettailor helps B2B marketers create personalized websites without code. The tool identifies companies visiting your website and shows each visitor more relevant content, based on data such as industry and revenue.
What you will achieve
B2B companies that personalize their site can expect to see 50-150% increases in key conversions. Coupled with this, the ease and simplicity with which you can update your existing website, and you have a very compelling argument for using this tool.
Typically, customers segment themselves according to a number of key factors. The best way to get your business noticed is to align your personalization towards their business by focusing on the following:
The simplest way to personalize your site is by creating rule-based segmentation, or uploading your list of prospects. You then personalize the content and A/B test everything that is sent, to identify what provides you with the optimum success rate.
To do all of this, you simply update your existing website using Markettailor’s visual editor and quickly and easily make changes to content, such as:
- Text
- Images
- Calls to Action
- Use Cases
- References
You can also integrate Markettailor with your other marketing automation tools such as Hubspot, Pipedrive and Google Analytics. Integrating your CRM allows you to calculate revenue estimates, so you know where to focus your personalization efforts. This means you can use any data in your CRM to personalize content on your site.
Progress tracking
Markettailor provides inbuilt conversion tracking, which means that you’re able to see the impact of each personalization in comparison with your ‘old’ website, so you can keep tweaking with your A/B testing until you’re happy you’ve achieved the best version of your site, for the segment you’re reaching out to.
Price point
The aptly named ‘Freemium’ plan, provides you with all the basic functionality to get started, albeit, with a limit on the number of inbound and outbound visitors. Once your quota for the month has been reached, visits will be frozen until the start of the next month. They also offer a more personalized plan.
What the reviews say
Although Markettailor doesn’t have a large number of reviews as yet, those who have commented have been particularly impressed with the ease at which the tool can be set up and the speed at which users are seeing an increase in conversions and ROI.
Users have requested more examples of ways they can personalize their website, with hints and tips on how to go about doing it, however Markettailor’s playbooks, blogs and knowledge base are constantly being updated, so if there’s nothing that hits the right button this month, there’s sure to be next month.
What is handy is that Markettailor provide access to their development roadmap so users can see what features are up and coming, and when they are due for release.
Why Dux-Soup loves Markettailor
The tool works with any existing website without the need for any additional setup, which makes the process really simple. CRM data can also be used to create Account Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns, where each prospect is sent a personalized link that can be embedded into email marketing campaigns, directing customers to a personalized landing page.
Use it for
Pribox is an automated email warm up tool, which helps to make sure your email marketing reaches the priority mailboxes your campaigns are intended for, and not your prospects’ spam folder. Use Pribox to improve B2B email deliverability and raise your email domain’s reputation.
What you will achieve
Pribox optimizes sender reputation and warms up your email, IP and domain to improve email deliverability rates and help you to bypass the spam filter. All of this activity means that your emails land in the priority mailbox of those you are trying to reach, which increases the chances of your messaging being opened and read.
You still manage your own inbox (no clever robot-type personal assistants here), but Pribox balance your own email activity to ensure your email deliverability remains high.
Progress tracking
The dashboard provides you with the ability to monitor activity and understand the strength of your business domain in the marketplace.
Price point
There are 4 pricing options.
Choose the Tester version which is free and you get permanent access to the analytics dashboard, domain reputation tracking, monitor spam rate monitoring and support via chat and email.
What the reviews say
Although there are currently a limited number of reviews, feedback is that the tool is easy to use and performs as promised. The ‘warmup email’ content which is generated from the AI, is clever and relevant to the end user, which makes positive engagement much more likely.
Why Dux-Soup loves Pribox
The User Interface (UI) is easy to use and the dashboard makes it easy to add new prospects. As spam filters are constantly evolving to make sure that unknown domains and email traffic are diverted away from a prospects’ priority inbox, it’s great to see a tool out there, which is constantly evolving to make sure your email marketing strategy can stay on track, by bypass the spam folders, and getting your messaging where it needs to be. This is certainly one to watch as we’re confident they’re going to grow pretty rapidly.
Use it for
Hubspot’s CRM platform offers a suite of tools to help you manage customer relationships and support users across a number of ‘Hubs’: Marketing, Sales, Content Management and Customer Service.
Here we focus on the Marketing Hub, a platform which allows B2Busers to manage personalized, inbound marketing campaigns at scale. Better still, connect Hubspot to LinkedIn using Dux-Soup and you can run your LinkedIn campaigns from Hubspot whilst enriching your CRM data.
What you will achieve
Simply put, Hubspot’s Marketing platform focuses on 3 core principles:
- Attract attention
- Convert more leads
- Report and Customize
Attract attention by creating the content your users are looking for. Manage social media ads directly from Hubspot and build your search authority with optimized content. Monitor and prioritize social media interactions, as well as using Hubspot to host and manage media files to embed in your social media posts.
Convert more leads by using Hubspot to help you build better landing pages and mobile-optimized templates. Manage campaigns at scale and run personalized A/B testing to improve click through rates. Hubspot’s integrated, automated workflows help you to save time whilst scaling your marketing efforts, building and nurturing relationships through to conversion. Hubspot is also great for collaborative working amongst sales and marketing teams.
Report and Customize is summarized in the next section ’Progress tracking’.
Progress Tracking
Hubspot provides a custom reporting tool to enable you to track and analyse your workflows in one simple database. Here you can build dashboards to share insights with your teams, segment prospects and track progress against deals and targets.
Price point
The Marketing Hub plans increase from $45 p/m for the Starter plan, to $800 p/m for the Professional plan and $3,200 p/m for the Enterprise plan, meaning it can get quite costly.
The good news is that not only do they offer 14-day free trials for their 2 most expensive plans, Hubspot also offers a free forever version which includes:
- Email marketing
- Forms
- Landing pages
- Live chat
- Facebook, Google & LinkedIn ads
- Contact management
What the reviews say
Whilst some users comment that the reporting tool needs further development and the design functionality needs to allow for more bespoke adjustments, overall, HubSpot is deemed to have an intuitive UI and be a great platform to use for inbound marketing, and cross team sales activity.
The volume of existing integrations makes managing the end-to-end marketing funnel a much simpler process, and the ability to manage social media posts from within Hubspot is a really neat feature.
Why Dux-Soup loves Hubspot
Hubspot provides a great suite of tools which work seamlessly to help you manage your lead generation activity and customer data. To strengthen the solution even further, with a Dux-Soup Turbo license, you can access the LinkedIn Hubspot integration, creating a seamless connection between LinkedIn and Hubspot.
With the Dux-Soup Hubspot integration, you can create and enrich prospect data, create timeline events for LinkedIn messages and run automated LinkedIn LinkedIn campaigns from Hubspot whilst enriching your CRM data too – win win!
You can learn more about the Dux-Soup integration with Hubspot, on our website.
In summary
With SaaS services forecasted to reach $176.6 billion in end-user spending in 2022, maintaining its lead as the largest public cloud services market segment (Gartner), it’s no wonder thatwe are seeing such a vast growth in SaaS start-ups. Hopefully this blog has provided some enlightenment within the minefield that is marketing automation.
One thing is for certain; automation gives you much needed time back, so your manual efforts can be put to use exactly where it’s needed- on that all important close.
(All pricing was correct at the time of publishing – August 2022).
