Marketing Automation Matures: HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and Mailchimp

Marketing automation used to mean a single autoresponder firing the same email to everyone on a list. It has become something considerably more capable, and the money moving through the category tells you the market agrees. The interesting question for a small business in 2015 is not which platform is most powerful. It is which one you will still be using in three years, and whether you have the process to justify any of them.

The category consolidated fast

A quick history is useful here, because it explains why the vendor landscape looks the way it does and why some of these tools feel bolted onto a CRM. In October 2012 ExactTarget acquired Pardot for $95.2 million. Nine months later, on June 4, 2013, Salesforce announced it was acquiring ExactTarget for roughly $2.5 billion at $33.75 per share, taking Pardot with it. Marketo went public in 2013, raising about $78 million, and HubSpot followed to the public markets in 2014.

That sequence matters to a buyer. When a platform is acquired to fill a gap in a larger suite, its roadmap starts serving the suite. Integration with the parent CRM improves; independence and pricing flexibility usually do not. If you are choosing a tool now, you are also choosing a corporate strategy you have no influence over.

What modern automation actually does

• Triggers messages from behavior rather than a calendar: what someone viewed, downloaded, abandoned, or ignored.
• Scores leads against a model so sales spends its hours on the people closest to buying.
• Nurtures contacts over weeks with branching sequences that adapt to what each person does.
• Unifies email, forms, and website activity into one record per contact, which is the part that is genuinely hard to build yourself.

The fourth item is the real product. Sending scheduled email is close to a commodity. Knowing that this specific person read the pricing page twice this week, opened the last three emails, and works at a company matching your best customers is what changes a sales conversation.

The platforms worth knowing

Most automation failures are process failures

The pattern is consistent enough to predict. A company buys a platform, spends months on implementation, builds two workflows, and then the person who understood it leaves. What remains is an expensive email tool sending a welcome message. The software did not fail. There was never a documented process for it to automate.

Automation amplifies whatever you already have. If your customer journey is undefined, automation makes the confusion faster and more consistent. If your data is dirty, it sends the wrong message to more people than a human ever could. Neither of those is a reason to avoid it, but both are reasons to do the unglamorous work first.

1. Write down the actual journey, including the steps currently handled by someone remembering to do them.
2. Pick the single highest-value sequence and build only that. For most businesses it is the welcome sequence or a straightforward lead follow-up.
3. Clean the data before migrating it. Importing a decade of unsegmented contacts into a new platform imports the problem too.
4. Agree between sales and marketing what a qualified lead means, in writing, before configuring lead scoring. Scoring encodes a definition, so an unresolved disagreement becomes an automated one.
5. Name an owner who is responsible for the system, and document it well enough that their departure is survivable.

Valon Badivuku

Digital Strategist

Valon Badivuku is a Digital Strategist at ThisCom, helping brands get seen and become visible online through strategies that turn attention into lasting growth.

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