The first thing to note is that every business is different and every business has varying needs. Your business model has a huge bearing on which tools you want to choose. However, the below marketing stack is what I believe is the ultimate set of tools you will need to build an effective foundation to be successful in terms of value for money and performance. These tools used in conjunction with each other is what I would use if I was asked what applications I would use for a startup business.
Hubspot
The most important part of your business is of course, your customer. In terms of your business, you want to have a customer relationship management (CRM) system that has:
- Security to keep your data safe,
- User interface that is intuitive to make your job easier and fast,
- Integration with other web applications,
- Scalablility,
- Affordability,
- Real-time information on any contact in your organisation,
- Contact alerts,
- Community and support forums,
- Key metric conversion and goal setting,
- Real-time reporting and analytics.
Hubspot is by far the best place to start for a B2B or B2C business model when deciding what CRM to use. The best part is, it is free (when you start off). Competitor CRM’s on the market can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and offer the same services. Another benefit of Hubspot is that it allows you to integrate with other CRMs for example, Salesforce which is beneficial if you are considering making the switch.
Mailchimp
Email marketing is critical to any marketing team’s success and is the best ROI tool you can use. When looking for what email service provider to use, dont just look for a batch email sending service but one that includes at a core level, these 4 things:
- Connected to a contact database (CRM)
- Ability to analyse the success of your email sends (reports)
- Ability to send automated emails based on user activity (1:1 customer journeys)
- Have a landing page and form functionality for generating new leads
At the core level, Mailchimp is at the forefront of sending better email. Not only do they have a beautiful interface and outstanding user experience (with various cool animations and quirks) but it performs better than any email marketing apps I have used. Sending email with Mailchimp is so easy to integrate with all of your marketing channels, one being of course, Hubspot. Mailchimp and Hubspot have flexible and transparent pricing models which make them the ultimate 1 2 leading punch.
Campaign Monitor
For your more custom email journey campaigns and automation, I use Campaign monitor. Campaign Monitor gives your user a 1:1 customer experience incorporating multiple channels such as email, mobile, social and web. Email marketing journeys help marketers discover bottlenecks in marketing strategies with real-time analytics and conversions.
EDMdesigner
In order to have professional, responsive and beautiful emails, you need to have the right applications to build them. EDMdesigner has an easy to use interface that allows you to build excellent EDMs, fast. There is a function to export the HTML code then edit them in a text editor like Dreamweaver if you with to do some extra coding, for example merge tags for personalisation (For example “hello *|FNAME|*” is a merge tag for mail chimp to populate an email with the accounts first name). You can preview how the EDM might look on a desktop, tablet and mobile device. I was one of the first premium members for EDMdesigner so I have seen there process over the years and they get better and better.
Litmus
A good looking email isn’t the end of the job. If it looks great, nice work! But that doesn’t necessarily mean it will look good in every email client. I wrote a post about Functional Email Design where you can find more in depth information into the email testing process. Litmus ensures your email will look how it should on every device (mobile, tablet, desktop) across every email client (Apple, Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo being the more popular clients) and their various legacy versions (Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, Outlook 2007, etc).
Unbounce
Unbounce is a lead generation landing page builder with a/b testing. I did a write up about Data Driven Design and how unbounce is a really effective marketing tool to have to convert leads. When a lead click on an EDM or clicks an SEM advertisement, the user is expected to see a similarly branded and designed landing page with relevant information. On unbounce you can compare and analyse different landing pages through a/b testing to see which pages are going to provide the highest conversion rate for your campaign. This insight provides are higher probability for lead conversion and in turn a higher rate of ROI.
Twilio
I have used a range of SMS providers, some that were ‘built for’ a larger marketing platform I was using and they simply don’t work. In my experience, the standalone SMS website are far greater then some kind of SMS attachment onto an existing digital marketing platform. It goes down to how important SMS is for your marketing strategy as it is in my opinion an added extra touch that isn’t essential but can help. Twilio stands out from other SMS providers because you just don’t see any problems compared to other providers. Twilio offers a range of pricing packages for your needs.
Slack
As a bonus tool, I have used Slack instant messenger in the past for internal communication. This limits the need for so much emailing and makes the team much more efficient. You can easily share files and messages instantly to a direct contact or create various project channels if you are working in a team or specific campaign. It was a really handy tool for our marketing team to share information between managers, designers and developers to execute campaigns much faster than email.
To wrap it up
The major drawcard for these tools is first and foremost, their performance, innovation and support. Secondly and potentially more important for some, is that they are affordable. Startup businesses with a limited marketing budget could implement this digital marketing toolset above and get away with paying next to nothing. That is why these products are leaders in their field because they give businesses a chance to see their potential on ROI. As your business gets bigger, you will incur higher fees across each marketing tool, so for a company with roughly 10,000 contacts, you would pay approximately 15-25k per year in total across everything. Now compare that with Salesforce’s pricing and it gets expensive very quickly as it is per user per month ($245/month/user (mid range package), 500 users for 12 months = $1,470,000 per year). So to put things into perspective, that amount is for just the Salesforce CRM. That does not include Landing pages, Email Marketing, SMS, EDM builder, EDM testing or Email journey automation. In saying that, Salesforce is a very custom CRM org and can be tailored in a lot of very intricate ways to suit a specific business model, so if you have the money, it is the best CRM to use for when the time comes.