01Chicago’s ActiveCampaign raises $100M for an all-in-one marketing and sales automation platform
Marketing and sales automation — tools that leverage the advances and data of our digital age to better identify and then interact with customers — is big business, with the whole market expected to generate some $6.6 billion in revenues for related companies by 2025.
But “companies” is the operative word here: it’s a very fragmented space, with dozens of hopefuls covering different aspects of marketing and sales, each with its own unique approach. There is an alternative trend, though, and today a customer experience automation company called ActiveCampaign, catering not just to large enterprises but small and medium businesses too, has raised a large round of funding to build out its own one-stop-shop model. It includes the tools to run email and messaging-based marketing campaigns; marketing automation across sites and events; and sales and CRM.
The Chicago-based company is today announcing that it has closed a Series B of $100 million, money that it will use to invest in building out new technology and to expand internationally. The funding is being led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with PE firm Silversmith Capital Partners also participating.
ActiveCampaign is not your typical startup. It has been around since 2003, and this is only the second time that it has raised money — the first time was in 2016, a modest $20 million round from Silversmith. Fundraising is not the only thing that sets it apart: it’s also profitable and has been for years (one reason it hasn’t raised money), and it’s actually already quite large, with 90,000 customers in 161 countries.
Yet it’s something of a theme in the world of “startups” — meaning tech companies that are still privately owned and raising from VCs and related backers — particularly those that are B2B focused, that some of the more interesting and successfully bootstrapped of them at some point turn to VC and private equity when it comes to needing an extra boost to move beyond what has become its natural growth rate.
In the case of ActiveCampaign, it had a taste of what a little outside investment could do in the last few years: Jason VandeBoom, founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign, said that the company has seen its annual recurring revenues grow 6x since 2016 to $90 million, with employees booming from 65 to more than 550.
The company’s core proposition is that it provides a less fragmented approach to businesses interested in building in some digital marketing or sales tools into their outreach and then considering what to do next.
“What we are up against are a number of companies focused on a single slice of customer experience, either CRM or a customer success platform,” VandeBoom said. “We’re still at this point in the industry where the category is taking shape,” which spells a ripe opportunity for ActiveCampaign.
The need for what ActiveCampaign provides is a basic one: whether you are an online retailer or any business that wants to expand its audience or make sure to stay connected to the one you already have, you need tools to reach users, figure out what they want to see from you, and connect in a relevant way.
VandeBoom added while there are no specific plans for acquisitions that can be discussed now, the funding also gives the company “optionality” in terms of what it might do next.
Part of the company’s approach is to build technology in-house, but in the spirit of all-in-one platforms, its value also lies in how many other things its users can plug into using ActiveCampaign.
The company has some 260 technology partners and a “recipe library” with more than 250 automations already built, or users can build and customise themselves from more than 300 possible apps that can be integrated, including Shopify, Square, Facebook, Eventbrite, and Salesforce.
With this round, Martin Angert, Director at Susquehanna, is joining ActiveCampaign’s board of directors. His existing roles on the boards of Workfront, WhiteSource, XebiaLabs, and Allocadia speaks to interesting potential strategic partnerships for ActiveCampaign.
“ActiveCampaign and the CXA category have grown significantly and our investment in the series B reconfirms Silversmith’s commitment to ActiveCampaign’s future,” said Todd Maclean, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Silversmith Capital Partners, in a statement.
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By simply adopting marketing automation technology, a company can significantly free up a marketers time and enable them to focus on more important revenue building projects as these tools can help to automate numerous repetitive tasks such as emails, campaign management, website analysis and social media marketing.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing a significant part in bolstering marketing automation technology and helping to drive adoption of the technology among companies.
Marketers need to choose the right marketing automation tool that fits the size and spread of their brand.
In order to pick the most apt tool, marketers will need to keep in mind the usability, pricing, ease of integration, capabilities around email, social media, content, ecommerce, CRM and sales competencies, while choosing the right marketing automation software.
Users can easily edit, format and publish content and modify design
Integrates easily with SugarCRM, Netsuite, Salesforce and other platforms
Creates an email template, automates the subject line and content for each recipient.
Uses keywords to optimize blog posts and the landing pages
Support is available online and 24 X 7.
Marketo
Offers web-based email marketing platform
Provides lead generation
Automates marketing campaigns and engages the customer in a personalized manner
Identifies customers and increases revenue
Search Marketing
Online 24/7 support.
Pardot
Customers can build dynamic and comprehensive marketing campaigns
Has a customizable dashboard to track and measure campaigns
Helps to identify gaps in campaigns before it is launched
Email marketing campaigns: scheduled and Automated email sending facility.
Integrates easily with CRM platforms like Salesforce, SugarCRM, Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamic CRM
Oracle Eloqua
Sales Enablement features that allows sales and marketing teams to work together to gain new clients and garner more revenue
Measures performance of campaigns and other marketing efforts
Easily integrates with Oracle’s Business Intelligence tool for out-of-the-box standard reporting and dashboards
Collects aggregate profile and behavior data to manage and score leads without involving IT
ActiveCampaign
Automatically fetches contacts and adds new contacts from various platforms like CRM, ecommerce, etc.
Dynamic email content depending upon customer behavioral analysis, interests, social data, etc
Online support and live chat support is available but on-call support is unavailable.
SendinBlue
Offers a customizable lead scoring feature
Sends automated sales notification to the salesperson.
Has various marketing and sales features including drip marketing, segmentation, sales funnel, behavioral insights, and marketing insights
Act-On
Offers organic plug-ins with social media and social marketing tools
Features customizable lead scoring
The solution helps to identify the potential buyer and helps to increase sales by accelerating buyers through the sales funnel
Comes with an open API that enables to seamlessly tie in with any CRM system
Ontraport
Seamless integration with CRM, ecommerce, and marketing automation tools
Features a block-based editor for creating versatile landing pages
Can build an ecommerce page using the software tools and capabilities
Offes a visual campaigning performance reporting tool
Can tracks customer behavior in great detail across many parameters
Sends an unlimited automatic email, text using a tool with the correct user’s interest
AdRoll
Retargeting ads across devices and platforms
Offers optimization and conversion reporting
Customized budgeting platform
Features flexible segmentation and transparent analytics
Conclusion
Top 10 marketing automation tools every marketer must have
30-second summary:
The current marketing landscape can often defined as an unpredictable sector, where the customer is ever evolving.
Unfortunately, this only means that marketers have to spend a significant amount of time keeping up with news trends to entice the customer, rather than focusing on different ways to drive revenue.
How can marketers free up their time to focus on more important aspects, do you ask? Well, the answer lies in ‘automating’ or ‘marketing automation.’
By simply adopting marketing automation technology, a company can significantly free up a marketers time and enable them to focus on more important revenue building projects as these tools can help to automate numerous repetitive tasks such as emails, campaign management, website analysis and social media marketing.
The fact that companies and marketers are increasingly looking at adopting marketing automation software can be seen in Ultimate’s Marketing Automation July 2019 update, that stated that while over 51% of companies had already adopted marketing automation tools, more than half of B2B companies (58%) were also planning to adopt the technology.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are also playing a significant part in bolstering marketing automation technology and helping to drive adoption of the technology among companies.
In its first ever Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, Forrester had also predicted that the global spending on marketing automation tools will pass $25 billion by 2023, a 14% annual growth rate.
All of which is to say that if you as a marketer, are not using any marketing automation tools, then you should start to reconsider.
Marketers need to choose the right marketing automation tool that fits the size and spread of their brand.
In order to pick the most apt tool, marketers will need to keep in mind the usability, pricing, ease of integration, capabilities around email, social media, content, ecommerce, CRM and sales competencies, while choosing the right marketing automation software.
In this article, we have focused on the top 10 tools that marketers should definitely know about.
Hubspot
Perfect for: Content Marketing
Hubspot is currently one of the most popular marketing automation tools. Holding a marketshare of 30%, the inbound marketing and sales software provides web analytics, landing page, social media marketing, search engine optimization and content management.
The tool has been designed for small and medium-size businesses and enables them to launch marketing campaigns in a quick and effective manner.
Key Features:

Perfect for: Driving lead management
Marketo is a multi-functional cloud-based marketing automation software that enables businesses to drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing.
Designed for enterprises, the tool provides customer engagement marketing, real-time personalization to offer personalized messaging across marketing channels, and marketing management functionality, including budgeting tools and marketing calendars.
Key Features:

Perfect for: Marketing analytics
Pardot is a full-featured marketing automation tool that enables companies to streamline their marketing and sales teams by accelerate pipelines and drive sales through email marketing, lead generation, social marketing and provides sales intelligence.
Its customers also find the product easy to use and its interface effectively guides them to build campaigns.
Key Features:

Perfect for: Delivering personalized marketing campaigns
Oracle Eloqua is a cloud-based cross-channel marketing solution that primarily helps marketers to target customers and track them across all phases of the buying cycle.
Using this tool, marketers can plan automated campaigns while simultaneously personalizing them.
The tool is an effective personalization device that can be used across various channels like email, video, and mobile.
Key Features:

Perfect for: powerful email marketing campaigns
Boasting of numerous features and integrations, Activecampaign can often be described as a powerhouse email marketing software.
One of the key features of this tool is ‘automation’.
Not only does ActiveCampaigns provide autoresponders, but also automates a customer’s contacts, list management and its CRM system.
In addition, the tool also tracks website visits, various events of the customer and based on that it provides real-time analysis.
Key Features:

Perfect for: All types of email marketing
SendinBlue offers services such as email marketing, SMS campaign, and transactional emails.
It requires no specific skill to create email designs or templates.
The interface is so simple to use with a drag and drop facility and customized template gallery which helps to create a simple but unique email template.
This email template is supported by all types of mobile devices with any version.
There are various other features such as importing contacts from another platform, customized contact search, responsive email design, campaign reporting, trigger marketing email as per the user interest, etc.
LeadSquared
Perfect for: a turbocharged lead capturing engine
Launched in 2012, LeadSquared is a marketing automation tool that helps to drive leads effectively through a company’s sales funnels.
The tool effectively accelerates the lead capture process by capturing leads from various sources, such as, email, campaign and websites.
The tool can also build customizable responsive landing pages with landing page builder, thereby, easily capturing more leads.
LeadSquared also helps to boost sales as it automates lead assignment within sales team by predefining distribution rules.
Key Features:

Perfect for: Connecting inbound and outbound leads
Defined as a comprehensive marketing automation tool, Act-On primarily offers a complete suite of applications, including email marketing, website visitor tracking, lead management, social media management, reporting and analytics, as well as integrations with webinar and event planning.
To its customers, the tool also enables its customers to track and segment its visitors as per their behavior.
Key Features:

Perfect for: Visual marketing automation
Ontraport is often described as a full-featured email marketing platform that features extensive marketing automation capabilities and a built-in CRM for managing contacts.
Although, email marketing is the marketing automation tool’s core product, it also provides a full-lifecycle CRM system that uses visual maps to track the company’s interaction with its customers.
The tool tracks the customer as it moves along the funnel and tweaks certain details to maximize the conversions and provide a holistic view on what is working and what is not.
Not only does it automate marketing efforts, but also combines offline and online campaign to provide a fully integrated campaign strategy.
Key Features:

Perfect for: Automating ad campaigns
AdRoll is helpful for retargeting customers through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and the web.
With cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities as well as flexible segmentation, you can provide customized experiences that dramatically improve marketing efficiency.
Key features:
Although not an exhaustive list, the article has taken an in-depth look at some of the top marketing automation examples that are available in the market today and will help guide marketers to pick the right tool for their company.
03
What are three things that existing customers have asked for but the current platform doesn’t offer? Are those features on the roadmap for future versions? (If not, why not?)
What can the platform not do?
Does the platform offer email and landing page builders? If so, how flexible are they? Is HTML coding required?
Are there limits on the amount of data that can be stored, emails sent, forms created, rules built? If so, what are the costs associated with upgrades?
Does the platform offer a free (full) trial? What are the terms of use?
Is a contract required? What are the parameters of the contract? Month-to-month? Annual? Biannual?
What are the system’s security features? How does the platform protect data?
Does the platform allow us to easily add and remove users?
How long will it take to implement the new system?
Does the platform allow us to manage the full customer lifecycle (from unknown prospects to brand-loyal customers)? Or is it limited to only leads and prospects?
Is the platform optimized for mobile usage?
Questions To Ask When Evaluating Marketing Automation Tools
You’re on the hunt for a marketing automation tool?
Great! Not only have you made a fantastic decision for your business, but you’ve come to the right place for guidance through the process.
There are a number of options for automating the repetitive tasks that are involved in developing marketing campaigns and carrying out sales activities to both increase revenue and maximize efficiency, but it can be challenging to choose the marketing automation tools that are right for your business.
Marketing automation tools, such as Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, and Act-On, are all powerful support systems, but ultimately, choosing an automation tool comes down to what are the must-have elements for your business goals? Integration with a CRM? Native social media management? What else?
We encourage you to utilize platforms like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, Capterra, and/or Software Insider to see what others are saying and compare the various features by doing product comparisons—but once you’re at the decision-making stage, you need to do more in-depth Q&A.
Make sure you’re asking each vendor the same questions so you can later come back with an apples-to-apples comparison of all of the automation tools—take a look at our suggestions below before you invest in a brand-new marketing technology:
1. What sort of CRM integrations do you provide?
Unless your sales team and your marketing teams like operating in silos, the last thing you want is two sets of databases that do not integrate with one another.
If you use Salesforce or another CRM platform, you’ll want your marketing automation tool to seamlessly integrate with that platform, so be sure to ask about the specific CRM features available to determine if they will be right for your business.
2. Does the platform offer any additional integrations?
Integrations don’t stop with CRM. You’ll want to know how else these marketing automation platforms can integrate with other areas of your business.
For example, do you use GoToWebinar, SurveyMonkey, Shopify, WordPress, Zapier? Ask if these integrations are available and be prepared to decide what tools absolutely must integrate and what tools you can live without.
3. How does data flow in and out of the platform?
Programs integrating is completely meaningless if you can’t get a holistic picture of your combined data to inform decision-making.
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For example, you’ll want to be able to combine data from systems dedicated to CRM, SEO, CMS, and ERP in an easily accessible way via application program interfaces (APIs) or scheduled exports in common formats (such as .xls).
4. How customizable is the reporting module?
Believe it or not, weak reporting is still the Achilles heel of many otherwise great platforms—and being able to drill down data and export custom reports may be difficult to do.
Get into the nitty-gritty of just how far you can parcel data to get the reports that you need.
5. Can the platform measure success?
If your middle name isn’t Tracking, Reporting, or ROI, it should be because these are the measures of success for any—and we many any—marketing campaign. Your marketing automation tool should absolutely, without a doubt, be able to track, report, and measure your return on investment (ROI).
The days of measuring success by increased or decreased revenue are long gone. You’ll need to dig deeper. Perhaps revenue has increased—but which parameter of your marketing efforts had the biggest effect, and which had the least?
Effective marketing automation tools will have flexible, customizable dashboards and reports that will easily give you this information. Ask about what metrics they measure and be prepared with a list of what metrics you need and what you can live without.
6. Is migration from an old platform possible?
If you already have a marketing automation platform and are simply looking to upgrade, make sure to ask the new vendor about their migration plan and whether or not they have done a migration from your current system before.
You’ll want to have a clear understanding of what resources will be required (and at what additional cost) to ensure a successful migration. Also, pay attention to how many questions they ask about your specific setup. The right vendor will ask a lot of questions to ensure a successful migration.
Helpful Hint: Make sure to include your IT department, sales operations, and marketing department in this conversation. Their input will ensure you find the right platform to meet departmental goals.
7. How much money will the new system cost?
It’s easy for any vendor to throw out a price: $4,000 a year or $350 a month. But what about the hidden costs? These can include costs associated with overages, training, and implementation.
Be sure to get the full picture when vetting multiple vendors.
8. Does the vendor provide support?
It may seem like common sense that a new marketing automation provider would automatically include support with their services, but that’s not always the case. The last thing you want is a generic email address or 1-800 number to call if you run into problems. Be clear on what type of support the vendor provides. Ask specifically about telephone support—what hours they are available and any additional cost for utilizing those services.
Bonus: “In The Weeds” Questions
While we’ve gone a little in-depth on the highlights to ask as you’re vetting multiple vendors, here are some others to put on your list to dive a little deeper as you’ve narrowed your choices:
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- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
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