In marketing, it’s all about building and nurturing relationships with your customers. It works well if you can meet in real life. But what about if everything is shut down due to something like the pandemic in the past years? And what if you want to find new relationships at scale and nurture them?
If you want to level up your marketing, you need to automate tasks. You can use tech to automate your marketing tasks. Marketing automation services provide you with tools to automate routine operations like email marketing, social media automation, and ad campaigns. This helps you put your marketing on steroids as automation makes you more efficient and you can create more customised experiences for your audience.
Some marketing automation providers are more geared towards making you get the most out of your funnels but you have to add endless integrations such as Autopilot. Other providers go the other route and offer everything you need to capture new leads on your sites and then send them personalised messages.
Freshmarketer falls into the fullstack marketing automation category. It gives you all you need to
analyse, optimise and personalise your sites as well as capture visitor action and of course email marketing. It’s can be described as a complete customer acquisition system.
Pros and cons of Freshmarketer
Freshmarketer is the standalone marketing automation service in the Freshworks suite of customer experience ecosystem. Freshmarketer integrates seamlessly with Freshworks ecosystem. It gives you all the tools you expect from a marketing provider. And then some: You also get
- Journey builder
- Funnel analysis
- Heat maps
- Landing pages and forms
- CRM
- Multichannel messaging (Facebook, SMS, etc)
- And more
As you see, Freshmarketers wants to help marketers to discover new clients, improve marketing efficiency, analyse campaigns, and so deliver a more personalised customer experience at every touchpoint in their lifecycle.
As a hosted solution, Freshmarketer takes care of all the tech stuff such as maintenance and security. You subscribe to one of its plans and can access it via your browser.
Pros
- Easy to use even with a large feature set
- Free forever plan, although limited to only 100 marketing contacts
- Large feature set at a competitive price point
- Mature marketing automation feature
Cons
- It can be slow at times (since it’s based on Javascript)
- The pricing is based on the number of contacts you have; you may have to upgrade so that you can store more contacts
Who is Freshmarketer for?
Freshmarketer is a good place to start for marketers who want to execute, nay level up critical marketing tasks such as lead capturing, auto-responding, and lead nurturing and scoring.
It helps you and your marketing team through the entire customer’s lifecycle. It connects siloed teams so that they can see the same data and work together to achieve common objectives, from marketing to sales and customer service.
This means it gives you more than “just” email marketing. You also get workflows, sales sequences, cross-channel communication, and visibility into lead activity as well as other critical performance metrics.
How easy is Freshmarketer to use?
After your first login, you’re brought to the main page which also doubles as your activities dashboard.
With its large features set, you may find Freshmarketer a tad overwhelming at start. Nonetheless, Freshmarketer is well designed and clean. You’ll find a left side menu with its key features. If the icons seem a bit nondescript to you, you can just hover with the mouse over them and you’ll see what you can do.
The drag-and-drop builders to customise a landing page or an email are easy to use. All in all, it doesn’t have a steep learning curve, especially if you’re coming from another email service.
Key features
Freshmarketer unifies under one roof sales, marketing, and customer service features. This means you can track a customer across their entire lifecycle, giving cross-functional access and insights to marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
At its core, Freshmarketer gives you tools for email-based marketing campaigns. You first need to upload your leads into a database and then you create your email campaigns.
Lead and customer management
The basis for marketing automation has to be your contact management. You can input contacts individually, although that’s cumbersome and time-consuming. If you already got a list you can import them as a CSV or Excel file.
You can make lists for different target groups and they serve as a source of customer data for Journeys.
Email marketing
As you’d expect, for email campaigns, you get predesigned email templates along with a drag-and-drop editor to customise them.
Freshmarketer has prepared journey playbooks – email sequence templates. You can also create your own automations. You can add when an email is triggered and under what conditions with delays. In short, you can create any journey you can dream up with its intuitive drag-and-drop journey builder.
Of course, all of that is not helping you carry out your crucial marketing tasks without the all-important analytics and reporting.
Landing pages and signup forms
As a fullstack marketing automation, you also get tools for lead generation. It’s similar to email marketing: You get to choose from the template gallery and bank of form fields. Then, with the drag-and-drop editor, you add your content.
Other communication channels
You also get the same convenience and ease of use for building out your chat, WhatsApp, and SMS campaigns.
Freshmarketer integrations
Freshmarketer has a marketplace for third party integrations with services such as shopping carts (eg. Magento) or with accounting services such as Quickbooks. The marketplace is organised by category.
If you got coding capabilities or a developer at hand, you can also use its API and build your own integration. If not, you can use Zapier.
Support
You can contact support 24×5 through phone, chat, and email. Only the Enterprise plan gives you access to a dedicated account manager. If you got a question outside of business hours, you can always look up the extensive knowledge base.
Pricing
The more features you need and the more contacts you have, the higher your plan must be. Compared to its nearest competitors such as Hubspot Marketing Hub, Freshmarketer gives you a lot of bank for your buck.
Is Freshmarketer right for you?
Freshmarketer is a standalone email marketing automation within the ecosystem of Freshworks. It neatly ties in with the other tools for customer experience such as Freshdesk or Freshservice. This means, if you’re already using a Freshworks product, it’s a small step to also use Freshmarketer.
If you need marketing automation that also allows you to create customer journeys and landing page builder, Freshmarketer comes with competitive pricing. You can set up your campaigns and funnels without prior tech knowledge.
Original post here: Freshmarketer review – fullstack marketing automation
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