Some marketing automation tools, like Marketo, have been around for ages, and others, like GetResponse, have evolved.

GetResponse began as an email marketing platform, but now offers a comprehensive all-in-one marketing tool that includes every feature a small business needs for a strong online presence.

If you’re looking to streamline, decrease costs and become more productive with better results, how do you choose the right tool?

This post answers your most pressing questions, and at its end, should provide a firm decision about which tool is best for your business goals.

What is Marketing Automation?

Online marketing involves repetitive tasks that require consistency. And there are so many of them, that to execute them all manually requires an exceptional amount of time and effort. And frustration.

Marketing automation tools cut down the need for extra personnel which saves time and expense.

And for the small business, where the owner is also the marketer, it increases productivity and the effectiveness of your efforts because much of the guesswork and manual tasks are done for you.

Consider the amount of tasks needed to be done in order to succeed at online marketing:

Image Credit: Virtual Business Solutions

The online marketer, at an absolute minimum, has to:

• Write, or hire someone else to write, blog posts and manage social media.
• Create email marketing content, design branding for emails, create email workflows and use analytics to track what’s working.
• Develop lead magnets to collect email subscribers.
• Develop landing pages to direct traffic.
• Focus on website search engine optimization to increase website traffic.

Performing these tasks manually is a full-time job in itself. Marketing automation cuts down work time dramatically.

What does GetResponse Offer?

GetResponse offers everything a small business needs to plan, attract, nurture, and improve sales for professional marketers.

We’ll analyze the GetResponse Pro package.

Plan Your Marketing Strategy

Surveys for Target Audience Research

It’s impossible to sell effectively when you don’t know how to speak the language of your target audience. GetResponse offers a method of conducting surveys to achieve any purpose, but one great way of using surveys is to get to know your audience well, which helps you sell better.

Email Automation Workflow Planner

GetResponse offers an email automation workflow planner. This eliminates the need to come up with a manual email marketing plan. Use conditions, actions, and filters to create a process that makes things work as you want them to work, and can be changed anytime. When you make a change to the workflow, it automatically makes the change in the actual email process.

Attract Your Target Audience

Webinar Software

Attract your target audience by offering webinars, which you can organize straight from the GetResponse dashboard. Designed specifically for marketing purposes, the tool takes the mystery right out of setting up webinars. It provides email webinar landing page templates, a chat feature, polls, image and file sharing, whiteboards and YouTube videos to more effectively engage attendees.

Landing Pages

Use proven-to-work, professional looking landing page templates to easily develop your own targeted sales pages to attract email subscribers.

Nurture Your List Subscribers

Email Auto Response and Templates

Since this is the backbone of online marketing, all marketing automation tools come standard with an email marketing functionality, together with an auto responder and email templates.

Improve Your Sales Results

Use Analytics to Make Improvements

GetResponse provides a method of finding out what’s going on with your email marketing efforts, and to find out how to improve for better results.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

Integrate your e-commerce store with GetResponse, and include shopping cart abandonment in workflows.

Website Traffic Tracking

Find out the behavior and track the entire customer journey on your website with the website traffic tracking feature. This allows you to institute improvements based on the trends you pick up.

Scoring, Segmentation, Tagging

With GetResponse, use scoring, segmentation and tagging to make your emails more effective and improve open rates. These three advanced features in email marketing help put subscribers in “groups” so that they only get the information they’re really interested in.

What does Marketo Offer?

Marketo is an advanced marketing automation platform for teams. It offers comprehensive solutions not only for online marketing initiatives, but also customer relationships and sales management integration.

We’ll list the features of the Marketo Spark package.

Attract Your Target Audience

Marketo doesn’t provide webinar software as a lead magnet, but allows for the integration of standalone providers for analytics purposes. You would need to pay an additional cost for a separate webinar service.

Landing pages

Build landing pages with a good variety of pre-designed templates.

Nurture Your List Subscribers

Email Auto Response and Templates

As do all marketing automation tools, Marketo features email auto response and provides email templates to choose from.

Improve Your Sales Results

Use Analytics to Make Improvements

Standard to all marketing automation tools, Marketo offers analytics so you can see what’s working and what needs improvement.

Scoring, Segmentation, Tagging

Improve the results of your email initiatives by using advanced scoring, segmentation, and tagging capabilities, so your subscribers only receive what they really want.

Get More Website Traffic

On-page SEO

Marketo guides your website on-page SEO, taking the guesswork and complexity out of search engine optimization.

Team Management

Marketing Calendar

Use Marketo’s online marketing calendar for teams to streamline and coordinate planning.

What are the major differences between the tools?

The greatest difference between GetResponse and Marketo is price. Marketo’s Spark package costs $895 per month, while GetResponse is $49 per month, and increases as your business grows.

GetResponse is more suitable for small businesses that are still growing, while Marketo is more suited to businesses who have evolved enough to enjoy a larger team of people.

Marketo allows for integrations of standalone software, while GetResponse includes the software in its Pro package.

GetResponse’s clients delight in the simplicity of the tool, while Marketo’s report that there is a learning curve when you first start using the software.

Features that Marketo boasts which GetResponse does not have:

• On-page SEO
• Marketing calendar
• Integration of 3rd party software for analytical purposes

Features GetResponse includes which Marketo lacks:

• Webinar software included in price
• Email automation workflow planner
• Shopping cart integration
• Web traffic tracking
• Online surveys

Conclusion

The marketing automation tool that’s right for your small business, should save time, expense, and enable your business vision.

The biggest difference between GetResponse and Marketo is the price difference; GetResponse is far more affordable for the small business. With Marketo, you’d still need to pay for external services that can be integrated into the dashboard.

The other key distinction is simplicity of use. GetResponse makes it easy and fun with bright colors and logical functionality, while Marketo is not as pretty or user-friendly.

At the end of the day, the deciding factor should be your budget, and what’s going to work to achieve your goals.