Modern marketing, as we know it, is what we get when businesses explore corners of both technology and marketing to answer two of most commonly asked questions: “How to promote products and services across a variety of platforms with limited time and resources?” and “How to efficiently spend money while performing these tasks?”
The answer to these questions gave birth to a concept of marketing automation, a way for marketers to reach out to people through a number of continually increasing media channels.
Although the idea of marketing automation was conceived in the early 90’s, it wasn’t until the middle of the 2000s that the marketing automation industry started taking shape. In the past few years, it became a $1.62 billion industry from $225 million industry garnering over 142,700 users worldwide.
In this blog, we will discuss some of the best marketing automation plugins one should consider for their business needs in 2021. Before delving into the discussion of marketing automation plugins, let’s see what it really is.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using several tools, plugins, or add-ons to automate iterative tasks related to marketing such as emails, forms, site tracking and lead scoring amongst others. This helps any organization save time and costs, and provide intuitive exposure to the customers.
In most marketing departments, team members need to perform the same task each day, such as sending out emails, publishing content on social media platforms, websites, tracking users’ behavior across the site, executing ad campaigns, and many more.
Selecting the right plugin can be a daunting task, especially for someone who isn’t much familiar with marketing platforms.
Here are the best marketing automation plugins that will help you analyze and design your business automation’s conceptual framework.
myCred Email Digest
myCred email digest helps users to produce and send content via email using various user groups. The users can periodically send email notifications. You can also include and exclude some user groups based on the roles, badges, and ranks. An email digest’s sole purpose is to help companies transform the brand identity to acquire the subscribers’ attention-span to boost the incoming and external traffic on your site. Build a good relationship with the customers and represent the current product information. The overall exercise helps the companies for improved sales results and generates an enormous number of leads. An email digest is an aspect of email marketing strategy, and it entirely depends on the categories of the business. In this way, information can be dispersed daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.
Features
myCred email digest allows you to install and use this plugin on a specific website or multisite installation. Users can have 1 year of free updates, and support is also included.
- Sends Periodic Emails – Sends email according to the periodical arrangement, i.e., daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually
- Set Criteria of Emails – Enables users to send emails according to the user role, badges, or ranks
- Customized CSS – Users can customize the style elements of your email template
- Test Execution – Users can send test emails before setting up the template
- Built-in template tags – Users can use the pre-defined template tags
- Custom template tags – Users can insert myCred reference tags in the email
- User template tags – Enables users to make use of myCred user based tags in the email.
- Email logs – The user can find the entire record of the sent emails.
- myCred WooCommerce Plus
myCred WooCommerce plus add-on helps users award points to your WooCommerce store users via the myCred points management system. The most notable aspect of this add-on is that it’ll instantly award coupons to the users whenever they achieve a high badge or rank successfully.
myCred WooCommerce Plus is also compatible with WooCommerce Subscriptions that enable users to pay recurring payments to buy subscription-based services & products, i.e., physical or virtual, from your WooCommerce store using their myCred points. Now, users can also buy from subscription-driven products and services via myCred points.
Features
- Award Coupons – It automates how the admin can allocate the discounted coupons to its users whenever they achieve a high rank or badge.
- Secures and Restrict Products – Capable of restricting products based on user badges and ranks.
- Maintains Point History – Users can view multiple point-based history logs via their my account page.
- Allows Partial Payments – Users can make partial payments using their point balances or WooCommerce coupons.
- Ponts are Converted into Coupons – Users can easily convert their points into a fixed amount of coupon as per their needs.
- Displays rewards – highlights product purchase points awards on a single product, cart, and checkout page.
- Allows Referral Rewards – Enable users to award points to referred users and referrers on successful product purchase accomplishment via a referral link.
- Generating & Sharing Links – Enables users to generate and share their referral links on social media platforms, email platforms, and many more.
- Referral Cookie – Enables cookie expiry to restrict. After the cookie has expired, no points can be awarded to users.
- Referral Logs – Logs are produced to record referral purchase points for being mutually tangible to referrers and referred users.
- Provides Rewards on the total cart – Provides rewards to the users on points on total carts
- Customized Messages – Displays customized reward points messages on cart or checkout page
- Provides Multiple Point Types – Awards users with multiple points types
- Compatibility with WooCommerce Subscription – Enables users to purchase subscription products and services using myCred points on a WooCommerce store.
Spin Wheel for WooCommerce
Spin Wheel for WooCommerce is a WooCommerce extension that enables the user to convert their visitors into potential customers by incorporating a “wheel of fortune” into your site. By using this marketing tool is used to retain customers and increase sales providing discounts rapidly and engagingly. The store owners will be able to use this product to retain their potential customers to increase their sales via giving away discounts in an engaging manner. This plugin is similar to a fortune wheel, which slides on the pre-defined triggers. An enormous amount of customers must be logged in to play the wheel and win a discount code.
Features
- Displays Pop-Up Window – The pop-up window displays a spin wheel at the screen’s top right corner. The different events can trigger this pop-up.
- Unrestricted Wheel Slices – Add or remove wheel slices and decide what prizes you want to display inside each slice.
- Completely Customizable – Spin Wheel is entirely customizable – users can edit everything from the wheel’s color to the text message.
- Instant Preview – The admin can preview the changes implemented to the wheel before making it live.
- Display Wheel Stats – Showcases your spin wheel’s essential analytical data based on its use – appearances, spins, and provided discounts.
- Tailored WooCommerce Coupons – The wheel can automatically generate coupons for the customers after winning and sending them on their subscribed email address.
- Free Downloads – You can easily link the wheel to free eBooks or any other PDF in the form of gifts to your customers.
- Completely Responsive – The plugin’s overall functionality is designed for all screen sizes and handheld devices.
- YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
YITH wishlist is one of the most intuitive and popular tools in an eCommerce shop. It enables users to see anything they want, and they can easily add it to a list to remember for later use. The visitors can most likely return to your site later and purchase certain items, and they can even send their wishlist to other people to purchase things for them. YITH’s WooCommerce Wishlist plugins can be installed and setup and provide all the relevant functionality required to retain potential customers.
Features
- Enables users to select a page for your wishlist
- Users can select where to show the shortcode ‘Add to wishlist.’
- Displays the ‘remove from wishlist’ button when the product is on the wishlist
- Modifies columns that can be displayed in the wishlist table
- Supports product variation, i.e., if the user selects a particular color or size and then adds it to the wishlist, the complete details will be instantly saved.
- Displays the wishlist created by the logged-in customers (Premium Version)
- Displays a list of versatile products that can be easily inserted into the wishlists (Premium Version)
- It shows the ‘Ask for an estimate’ button that enables customers to send the content on their wishlist to the admin and receive a quotation
- Adds optional notes to the request quote
- Enables or Disables the wishlist features for the unlogged users
- Shows a notice to unlogged users and invites them to log in to take advantage of the overall wishlists functionalities
- Users can easily drag and drop products to arrange them in a particular order in their wishlist
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a powerful marketing automation tool out there that provides you with integrated email marketing and small-scale business systems. It constitutes a versatile amount of robust and standardized marketing automation features, and it is classified as one of the most comprehensive tools for this entire purpose.
Although it’s an advanced tool or plugin, it might not be considered the best option for a beginner level user or people who have a certain level of technical awareness. However, it has a perceptual learning curve, the overall results you’ll receive with this marketing automation platform will undoubtedly be worth investing the time and cost.
Features
- ActiveCampaign forms to your WordPress site – Gather leads and contact information with ActiveCampaign forms, then users can push that data instantly to your ActiveCampaign CRM. Users can trigger a welcome email series to follow up with contacts in their most intuitive and engaging manner, right after their subscription.
- Tracks the contacts’ activities on your WordPress site – Users have to use the site tracking to explore the products, services, and information they’re interested in then automates the personalized follow-up emails in the ActiveCampaign. Users can see every step of your customer success story and ensures that each contact is easily synchronized and conversed.
- Implement Live Chat to your WordPress site – The conversion live chat tool can capture leads and build contacts instantly on your site – then you can keep the ongoing conversion flawlessly within the email. Users can easily connect on your chat, email details needed to the contact record you have in ActiveCampaign, make all the experience of sales and support information you need in a specific place, and give your customers a positive exposure.
Today, marketing automation is an essential aspect for every business, and the soul essence is to focus on growing your business and stop wasting their time on repetitive tasks. Hence, the afore-mentioned plugins are driving an enormous amount of revenue via automating the marketing tactics to improve user-engagement and privacy metrics.
Bio:
Anas Dilshad is a Digital Marketing Expert at wpexperts.io. I like to spend my time reading books, and it develops my knowledge on various topics. It also helps me in connecting with the digital world. I love to create content on WordPress and WooCommerce to convert my experience into blogging.