Feature Comparison

Marketing automation software is a marketer’s best friend. It takes the tedious tasks of marketing and automates them. Instead of setting up emails and manually following up with customers, you can design sophisticated, automatic email flows that guide a customer through their journey. Instead of building out landing pages individually, MA software lets you do it in a few simple clicks.

These apps come loaded with other important features. Here’s just a few:

• Blogging tools
• SEO optimization tools
• Social listening features
• Reporting and analytics
• CRM integrations
• Google AdWords integration

And much more.In the MA space, there are a few major competitors who dominate the leaderboards: HubSpot and Keap are among them.

HubSpot is famous for popularizing the tried and true “inbound” marketing automation technique. They built their automated marketing solution with inbound marketing features (such as blogging and SEO) in-mind.

Keap, on the other hand, is a tool that builds itself around inbound techniques but offers a few other marketing goodies, such as campaign follow-ups and visitor reports, to make your day-to-day a little more sophisticated and data-rich.

Filtering

Filtering is recognized as a key feature in any marketing automation platform worth its salt by SelectHub’s analysts. Filtering isn’t what you probably think, however. It’s the important act of taking your opt-in leads and analyzing them, assigning tags and variables to them, and then sending them through relevant customer experiences (otherwise known as your campaigns).

A single action can trigger filtering in Keap. For example, let’s say a user comes to your website, signs in and starts shopping around. If they fill up their cart and then abandon it, that could put them into a relevant filter, helping you, the marketer, send them important deals and other incentives to convert and follow through on their purchase.

HubSpot, on the other hand, takes a more analytical approach. It looks at opted-in leads, correlated with behaviors. What this does is allow the marketer to find mismatches in their filters, ensuring that no customer is underserved by your follow-up marketing campaign.

Both these products perform admirably, so we had to end this in a tie. They’re going to perform almost identically to one another, meaning you’re going to get a precise filtering experience regardless of which product you choose. One is more analytical, and the other is a little more basic — but both are good.

Automation

Automation is the heart and soul of a marketing automation program. After all, what is an MA app without the ability to handle the tedium and tasks behind the business of marketing?

Keap and HubSpot have always served small businesses. Their pricing models are set up in such a way that many small business owners with little to spend can enter the market and get a dedicated piece of marketing software for their business at a fair price. This is what makes them such popular choices.

Their automation features don’t always reflect their price-tiers, either. Both do their best to go above and beyond what you might expect from a traditional marketing automation product at a low price point.

Both provide:

• Contact databases
• Contact activity timelines
• Custom fields
• Segmentation
• Lead scoring
• Lead routing
• Lead attribution

Compare HubSpot and Infusionsoft Against Your Needs

In reviewing HubSpot, our analysts noted that it allows you to build automated workflows from buyer personas from scratch or from templates based around user behavior, interests and goals. It’s intuitive and easy to automate campaigns around the customer, making HubSpot an excellent choice.

Keap performs admirably against HubSpot in our analysis. It’s got most of HubSpot’s automated features like email marketing, website management and CRM integrations. It automates the tedious business processes involved in these things — blog updating, SEO optimizations, data collection, email segmentation and scheduling — and helps you generate and nurture leads. But it’s missing some critical features, like advanced social media management and scheduling, that HubSpot packages in their platform.

So in this case, we’re going to have to award the point to HubSpot. It’s just more feature-rich in its automation suite, taking more burden off the marketer.

Visitor Analytics

If you think marketing automation is about automating the marketing process only, then you’d be wrong. But it’s okay. That’s why we’re writing these articles.

A powerful feature of marketing automation software is its analytics suite — the ability to track and monitor users as they complete their journey across your marketing channels. Tracking users and then turning their experiences into meaningful data points can help enrich and inform your entire marketing process. It enables you to locate pain points or places where the customer is underserved. It can also help you identify victories, like high conversion rates, and then dissect them so you can capitalize on them.

But maybe you already know that analytics are good for your business. So how do the two products compare, ultimately?

HubSpot offers the option to track landing page visitors, visitors from emails, blog posts and social media. You can also create a list of contacts and customers via this information and incorporate it into your CRM, or start the automated campaign process and nurture those potential customers.

In the battle that is Infusionsoft vs HubSpot (Keap), we need to give HubSpot’s worthy rival a shot. And we’re not surprised it scored so well. Our analysts scored the product higher than HubSpot in the realms of visitor tracking, lead-to-close tracking and robust web analytics.

So naturally, we gave the point over to Keap. Its reporting and analytics features are, in every sense of the word, robust. We can’t cover them all here (read our comparison report linked below if you want the full run-down), so we’ll give you a short taste.

Keap’s analytics and reporting suite allows you to:

• Track marketing efforts and generate reports
• Track sales efforts and generate reports
• Track orders and billing and generate reports
• Track administrative duties and generate reports

So its abilities extend far beyond just marketing activities, making it a clear winner in this category.

Marketing Campaigns

When a visitor hits your site and follows up on one of your CTAs, you typically enroll them in one of your marketing campaigns to nurture them. You’d call this visitor a lead, and the act of putting them through a campaign is called “nurturing” — one of the most important things you can do for your marketing efforts. According to Wordstream, “Lead generation, sales and lead nurturing are the top three organizational objectives for content marketers.”

When you’ve got automated marketing software, this whole process can happen without you ever having to get involved, saving you time and money, according to this infographic from impactbnd.com, 78% of marketers say that their marketing automation solution helps them increase revenue, and those numbers are corroborated by a Venue Harbour report that says 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years.

But crafting that campaign beforehand is the important part. How do HubSpot and Keap assist you in creating that dedicated messaging campaign? Let’s crack open these eggs and see if the yolks are any good.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Keap

Keap has a great campaign builder that allows users to create a follow-up campaign from a single action, profile or contact, which can be especially useful in the digital age when visitors will touch upon your website for just a mere moment. Our analysts gave Keap’s Infusionsoft a perfect score in its campaign creation tools. Tools like its automated texting, pre-written emails and customized templates make setting up a campaign intuitive and easy.

HubSpot

A titan in the marketing-technology space, HubSpot offers an integrated campaign builder that can contain many sequences and steps of actions. Or, you can enact delays and trickle out information, content, and nurture the lead at a pace that best suits them. The actions you can perform range from email marketing campaigns to in-app alerts. Some additional campaign features from HubSpot include:

• Budget tracking
• Channel-contribution tracking
• Dynamic field
• Landing page creator
• Lead segmentation
• Dynamic content builder

Who Offers Better Campaign Features?

It was a hard-fought battle to decide which tool offers better campaign features, but in the end, we had to give the point over to Keap. Its tools offer power, performance and operate on a single point of contact (or multiple; it’s really up to you).

Social Engagement

Social media is a vital communication channel for marketers, especially as it pertains to these small business marketing automation tools. Why? Because SMBs (small-medium businesses) are flocking to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other services in droves so they can leverage the platform for their marketing efforts. A report by Social Media Examiner says that 96% of SMBs use social media as part of their marketing strategy.

Engaging customers on social media can look like a lot of things: targeted advertisements, social listening, scheduled posting and more. If you’re a small to medium-sized business and you’re looking at investing in marketing automation, you will want to have a robust social engagement solution.

Let’s start with Keap. The app lets you monitor social media feeds for mentions or brand engagement, schedule posts, tweets and other content — in very simple ways. That’s not to say that Keap is a bad solution, not by any means. If you’re looking for a simple product that gets the job done, it’s worth looking into Keap.

HubSpot, on the other hand, offers a more well-rounded toolset with unique features that trounce Keap. With HubSpot, you can create targeted lists of high-value prospects for you to monitor in social media. You can also get email alerts when your high-value prospects mention your brand or a certain keyword on Twitter. This is all in addition to the standard suite of social engagement tools like scheduling and content creation.

Naturally, we gave the point to HubSpot here. It’s got everything that Keap has — the simplicity — and the complexity. So you can take advantage of the same standard features that everyone has, but you can also leverage advanced features (monitoring and high-value targets) to gain a competitive edge.

An Infusionsoft dashboard

Sales-Lead Conversion

The job of marketing is to work with sales to nurture leads to close. Sometimes marketing stays with the lead (a person who appears ready to buy based on set criteria) right up until close. But other times, marketing will pass off that person to sales and wipe their hands clean. A sales-lead conversion means that marketing will pass off the customer’s details to sales at an appropriate time — but “an appropriate time” will vary based on several factors. It all depends on your business model.

Before marketing automation tools hit the scene (around 1992 with Unica), all the work that goes into converting a lead into a sales-ready customer was done manually. And that’s a lot of work! We’re talking about landing page optimization, blog post creation, CTA creation/tracking and more. All the information gathered from those interactions needs to be organized and then sent off to sales. Automated tools make this process about 100 times easier. Marketers, in a  Venture Harbour study, said that the biggest benefit of their tools is that they save time. And if they’re putting their time over profits, you know there’s some merit to what they have to say.

Compare HubSpot and Infusionsoft Against Your Needs

Does Keap save you time? Sure! It provides professional, branded landing pages for better conversion and campaign optimizations. Your landing page is the first place your customers go after following up on your call-to-action, so Keap makes it easy to customize and optimize them with no developer input. You can even do A/B testing within the application itself.

HubSpot provides a bevy of content tools that not only work in tandem with its other platform features, but they also help you attract new visitors. Tools like landing page builders and CTA optimizers help generate leads and keep them interested.

HubSpot takes the cake for Sales-Lead conversion. Not only are their tools top-notch, they’ve also got their own built-in CRM that’s integrated tightly with their CTAs and marketing automation platform. The whole thing just works — and it works well.

Collaboration

As they say, teamwork makes the dream work. In most enterprises, marketing can’t be done by a single person effectively. Automation doesn’t mean you can just fire your whole team. The entire process of marketing really should be called “Marketing-Sales” since the two work so closely together (we call it “Smarketing” in this article).

Smarketing tools should facilitate interactions between sales and marketing to improve campaign performance/conversion rates, as well as improve engagement and opportunity management.

With HubSpot, you have access to campaigns with context that allow users to learn about the lead within the scope of the campaign and the branching paths that the lead can take after that. It’ll put them into the most relevant sequence for them and keep it personalized all the way through. Sales, of course, has access to this information, as well as any data or touchpoints fed through HubSpot’s CRM.

Keap does much of the same thing as HubSpot does. It organizes contacts, turns leads into customers and personalizes their journey all with the power of automation. It’s a boon for sales and marketing regardless of which one you pick.

This one ended in a tie between the two products. They offer almost the same functionality regardless of the platform. Your choice will ultimately boil down to specific needs in your business, as well as other factors not covered in this guide. If you want to read about those other factors, we’ve got a free comparison report you can check out by clicking the button below.

Who Won?

After rounds and rounds of analysis, we think we’re finally ready to announce a verdict in the HubSpot vs Infusionsoft by Keap cage match. The two titans of their industry went blow-for-blow in a seven-round battle where we compared their various features and facets, choosing a victor after each skirmish. Let’s go over that before we launch into the verdict.

• Filtering – Tie
• Automation – HubSpot
• Visitor Analytics – Keap
• Marketing Campaigns – Keap
• Social Engagement – HubSpot
• Sales-Lead Conversions –  HubSpot
• Collaboration – Tie

And the winner, based on all of this, is… HubSpot!

HubSpot is a value-centered product with a lot of marketing firepower behind it. Its tools are top-notch for automation, which it handles with awe-inspiring precision. After all, what is marketing automation without the automation? Where social engagement and sales-lead conversions are concerned, HubSpot also comes out on top.

But don’t count out Keap just yet, because this was a close fight. Keap does a great job with their analytics and reporting package. You can analyze and report on just about anything with Keap, meaning you’re getting quality data to help inform your campaigns. And speaking of campaigns, Keap has a great campaign creator that allows you to follow-up on a lead from a single point of action.

We had two ties — filtering and collaboration — which signals to us one thing: that you need to think long and hard about your choice in marketing automation software. While HubSpot might be a more comprehensive product, it may not be the right product for your specific business. That’s why we always recommend checking out our requirements templates and then following up with our comparison report below.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Do you use a marketing automation product already in your business? Which one? Let us know in the comments below!

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