Imagine your customers are fish. There are lots of fish in the sea, but only certain kinds that you want to eat — or, in this analogy, sell to. Marketing campaigns are the bait that brings the fish to your hook. Campaign management software by way of CRM tools with campaign management features is like a scientific research assistant that helps you study the fish, choose the right kind of bait, cast your line so it’ll land somewhere with a lot of fish and analyze what kinds of fish you caught and how to improve next time.

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Many companies turn to campaign management software to boost their marketing initiatives and attract more customers. But you wouldn’t want to jump into something head-first without conducting thorough research, right?

That’s what we’re here for!

What Is Campaign Management?

For most businesses, campaigns are now an indispensable marketing strategy to launch products or promote events. They help engage customers while increasing brand awareness. Campaign management is an all-encompassing process revolving around planning, execution, tracking and analysis of marketing initiatives. It helps persuade prospective buyers through multiple communication channels like emails, surveys, social media and websites.

A campaign management system (CMS) helps launch, schedule, coordinate and monitor multi-channel marketing campaigns. It enables companies to create and replicate several processes to run successful campaigns. While standalone solutions for campaign management exist, CRM platforms with campaign planning and optimization capabilities can also support all your marketing initiatives.

How Does CRM Help With Marketing Campaigns?

CRM embodies the phrase “knowledge is power.” It lets you tap into vast amounts of customer data for insights that help improve your sales and marketing efforts.

Incorporating a versatile CRM tool can be advantageous in many ways:

• You can get a 360-degree view of your target audience by accessing information stored in CRM’s centralized database.
• Leveraging customers’ buying habits and interests allows you to create targeted ads for customers in different funnel stages.
• Insights into recurring patterns and trends help you create more personalized and engaging campaigns.
• CRM software can measure several marketing metrics like revenue, ROI and campaign effectiveness.

Key Features

In this age of cut-throat competition, it’s challenging to establish brand recall or product awareness without a well-thought-out and personalized marketing campaign. With social media shortening customers’ attention span and adding to the digital noise people have to sift through, marketing efforts need to find unique ways to stand out.

Listed below are some basic features you should consider before investing in a content management solution:

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Content Marketing

Content marketing helps engage customers, increase traffic and generate leads for sustainable sales growth, making it an indispensable marketing tool. 78% of B2B marketers use content marketing to build loyalty with customers — precisely why campaign management solutions should include content marketing capabilities.

The module allows marketing teams to access a centralized asset repository with rules and functionalities to personalize and reuse multiple campaigns.

Analytics

Evaluating campaign progress and deriving key customer trends is critical to future success. Analytical modules help you gauge content performance and audience reception. You can use this data to create targeted campaigns for customer segments. Look for campaign management solutions that offer built-in analytical tools or integrate with leading analytics software.

Automation

Automate rudimentary tasks and set event-triggered actions for automatic asset deployment based on visitors’ activities. Some campaign management systems also come with a drip marketing feature to send automated emails to your contact lists at set intervals.

Campaign Optimization

Optimize marketing campaigns and maximize open and click-through rates through testing. A/B testing helps identify customer interests. You can use multivariate testing to evaluate ads, keywords and other campaign elements for fine-tuning.

Multi-Channel Capabilities

Recent experience economy trends dictate the significance of creating a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints. You can maintain a strong brand presence by providing a consistent experience whether a customer is switching from social media to phone to messaging or any other channel.

Research suggests that companies with multi-channel campaign strategies have a 494% higher order rate than single-channel campaigns. Campaign management software allows organizations to interact with clients and prospects via their preferred channels. You can run tailored campaigns across channels like Facebook, email and surveys for higher engagement.

Recommended Action

Continuous and relevant engagement with customers is one of the basic tenets of marketing campaigns. Recommended action or next best action is a customer-centric approach that considers a myriad of ways you can respond to specific customer actions and determine the “best” one.

You can use machine learning to make real-time decisions based on criteria you’ve set, such as customer requirements, interests, past behavior, campaign goals and more.

Segmentation

Market segmentation divides your client base into relevant groups based on age, income, location and buying behavior. This allows you to tailor your marketing content based on the audience’s varied interests. According to a report, subscriber segmentation is one of the top email marketing tactics deployed by businesses.

CRM capabilities make targeted messaging via categorizations a walk in the park. “How?” you might ask.

All the customer data tracked in the CRM enables you to analyze and predict recurring patterns. Marketers can extract client details from customer profiles to identify critical driving factors and send targeted messages on the customer’s preferred communication channel.

Project Management

While too many cooks may spoil the broth, the result would be quite different if all of them were on the same page. A bird’s eye view of your campaign’s timeline from initiation to deployment ensures transparency and collaboration between different teams.

Relevant parties receive automated notifications with every deadline extension or content modification, so they’re in the loop.

Templates

You don’t need to create campaigns from scratch every time. While every marketing initiative is different, they have some commonalities. Marketing campaign templates ensure you don’t waste your time and energy by repeating recurring processes while creating new campaigns.

Key Considerations

A robust marketing campaign management software simplifies campaign planning, facilitates multi-stage campaign creation and helps you achieve a positive ROI.

Undoubtedly, incorporating campaign management tools into your marketing arsenal comes with a host of benefits. However, unlike a kid in a toy store, it’s not wise to pick out the flashiest thing you see.

Before investing in a solution, there are several factors to keep in mind to get the better end of the deal:

• Do we need additional capabilities like lead management and multichannel marketing automation in our campaign management software?
• Does it offer a centralized repository?
• Is the solution easy for teams to adopt?
• Does it provide A/B and multivariate testing for campaign optimization?
• Does the system come with built-in analytics for market segmentation?
• Does the solution integrate with your existing marketing tools, such as email marketing, social media management and analytics?

Best Campaign Management Software

Campaign management tools can make your marketing efforts better, more targeted and more personalized. We broke down the top CRM solution providers based on their campaign design features to help you choose the right tool for your business. All CRMs help manage your customer relationships, but some are more specialized and offer niche features. For a detailed comparative analysis, consider checking out our Jumpstart Platform.

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Here is a comparison of the best CRM tools for campaign design:

Infor CloudSuite CRM

Infor CloudSuite CRM is a cloud-based system that offers flexible CRM marketing campaign management tools for managing contacts, information, marketing campaigns and other customer relationship features. It provides comprehensive functionalities for managing sales, marketing and customer service activities across the enterprise.

Users can create and execute custom campaigns for segmented groups. It supports multi-stage and multi-task campaigns with several marketing channels.

Automation engine on Infor CloudSuite CRM.

Top Benefits

• Centralized View: With a cloud environment, Infor CloudSuite CRM allows sales, marketing and support teams to coordinate. Users can view customer journeys across multiple touchpoints and share them across departments.
• Improved Customer Experience: The purpose-built CX suite ensures optimized customer interactions. Companies can integrate customer data to deliver consistent and personalized experiences across all channels.

Primary Features

• Omnichannel Campaign Management: Plan, organize and execute elaborate campaigns and customer strategies. Use advanced campaign workflows, customer targeting and email marketing capabilities to streamline your campaign efforts.
• Segmentation: The platform helps segregate customer data based on filters like hot and cold leads.
• AI-Powered Insights: Measure campaign effectiveness and employee productivity by leveraging behavioral and performance data. Extract aggregated talent data and benchmarking to make informed business decisions.

Limitations

• The interface isn’t user-friendly.
• The reporting module is unstructured.

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NetSuite CRM

NetSuite CRM allows you to create and execute effective campaigns to drive leads with integrated marketing automation software. It ensures that campaign messages get delivered timely to the target audience.

You can create, manage, track and analyze all marketing campaigns, including email, direct mail, events and multi-channel campaigns. Other capabilities include sales force automation, eCommerce, customer data management, partner relationship management, marketing analytics and more.

Marketing Automation on NetSuite CRM.

Top Benefits

• Optimized Customer Engagement: Boost conversion and retention rates by letting customers finish transactions, submit support queries, update profiles, manage orders and view order history via a self-service hub.
• Efficient Data Tracking: Gauge the health of your efforts by monitoring personalized KPIs, call volume, call resolution time and critical trends. You can access real-time, role-based dashboards to derive reports and analyze customer satisfaction.
• Personalizations: Segment data to create and deliver personalized, relevant campaigns to customers. You can also leverage segmentation capabilities to tailor content according to audience profiles.

Primary Features

• Campaign Planning: Build targeted, customized marketing campaigns based on response patterns, demographics and purchase trends. This feature helps analyze and coordinate campaign activities across multiple channels. Manage end-to-end email marketing campaigns with database management, email personalization and SPAM-compliant auto-unsubscribe functionalities.
• Web Forms: Create landing pages through a drag-and-drop interface. Capture leads from your website and automatically populate them in real time. A routing engine directs captured leads to sales reps.
• Reporting and Analytics: Gain real-time visibility into your business operations and finances across subsidiaries, departments and teams. You can monitor KPIs through pre-built, customizable reports and role-based dashboards. Get further details on our Jumpstart Platform.
• Marketing Automation: Automate time-consuming tasks and align campaigns with your sales teams. Companies can establish a framework to target, deliver and measure campaign effectiveness. You can also monitor and measure prospects’ activities and identify when a lead reaches the buyer-readiness stage by setting predefined criteria.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide native integrations with G Suite, Office 365, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
• No native live chat capability.
• Doesn’t support multiple logins from the same user simultaneously from different PCs.

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Dynamics 365 CRM

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM offers a host of customer-centric capabilities to streamline their marketing, sales and customer service processes. The campaigns module helps promote business and optimize engagement. You can dramatically improve segmentation and targeting, streamline campaigns and significantly increase lead conversion rate.

It helps organize marketing projects in the long term using email tracking and phone call integration.

Contact Management on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.

Top Benefits

• Comprehensive Customer View: With a single source of customer data, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM allows sales and marketing teams to deliver a consistent buying experience. Customer service teams can also access customer journeys across various touchpoints.
• Personalized Messaging: Segmentation capabilities help create tailored content and send it to the right audience. You can also use prospect data to customize landing pages.
• Content Optimization: Leverage metrics to know when contacts open emails, click on links or reply. Create email templates for timely responses.

Primary Features

• Campaign Support: Teams can define and monitor campaigns, budgets, tasks, activities and other collateral. Create records of campaign activities like emails and phone calls. Users can request activity summaries based on date, parent campaign and definition status.
• Campaign Builder: Use the visual building tool to set up and deliver campaigns. A drag-and-drop interface simplifies customer journey design. You can also set triggers based on predetermined rules, choose segmented groups, assign emails and more.
• Omnichannel Communication: Deliver consistent experiences across all digital and physical channels. Nurture leads through interactions on mobile, email, social media, in-person touchpoints and custom channels.
• Dashboard and Reporting: The system comes with role-based user and system dashboards for providing instant access to business metrics. You can run reports on a single campaign or compare multiple campaigns.
• AI-Powered Insights: Track KPIs through dashboards, charts and other visual tools. Analyze customer satisfaction levels, engagement patterns, support agent performance, incoming support topics and more through machine learning and BI tools. Leverage AI to enhance content delivery, increase engagement and orchestrate customer-led journeys in real time.

Limitations

• It requires exhaustive training to get up to speed.
• Low data storage limit.
• Doesn’t support SMS analytics, built-in caller, and call pop-up and tagging features.

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Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a customizable solution that enables businesses to plan, create and execute campaigns through online or offline mode. You can send emails using an email execution vendor through online mode. Offline marketing options include planning and hosting a conference, running print or radio advertisements, sending direct mail pieces or hosting web seminars.

It allows teams to plan campaigns by organizing them into grandparent, parent and child hierarchies. Users can get real-time customer information in one place, plus insights with dashboards and reports.

Marketing Insights on Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Top Benefits

• AI-Based Insights: Evaluate campaign effectiveness and make informed business decisions with Salesforce Einstein AI. It offers actionable insights by analyzing sales channel data and past deals, helping you predict outcomes. Moreover, you can automate workflows and other core processes.
• Personalizations: Interacting with customers in meaningful, engaging ways is a sure shot way to boost brand loyalty. The Salesforce Engage tool lets sales reps foster long-standing customer relationships by delivering personalized messages via mobile apps or desktops. Access to prospect history equips reps with contextual information for better engagement. Real-time alerts ensure optimal timing.
• Email Integration: Integrate Gmail or Outlook with Salesforce Sales Cloud for scheduled synchronization and easy access to customer information. Create new deals, log support requests, update pipeline data and view records from a centralized location.

Primary Features

• Contact Management: This feature facilitates easy collaboration and data tracking. It provides a 360-degree view of customer details, including communication records, activity history, social data and internal account discussions.
• Reports and Dashboards: Sales Cloud ensures quick data access to users across levels through drag-and-drop modules, group filters and visualization tools. You can create custom dashboards and reports with real-time data on KPIs, team performance and business health.
• Campaign Analytics: The platform allows users to organize campaigns into hierarchies. Teams can access stats for total responses, leads and contacts, won opportunities, value opportunities, and converted leads. Determine campaign effectiveness by running A/B tests.
• Multi-Channel Capabilities: Connect with your customers on both online and offline channels. Track customer behavior and trigger automated, personalized messages and offers when they’re on their preferred channel. Analyze interactions from multiple sources to derive key trends.
• Segmentation: Optimize engagement by creating segments based on profile data. Leverage drag-and-drop segmentation modules and filter tools to deliver relevant content to your subscriber list. Get more insights about this module on our Jumpstart Platform.
• Content Optimization: This feature helps build templates to deliver professional, engaging and mobile-optimized content. Populate email designs through content blocks. Use drag-and-drop functionality or HTML code and custom scripting language for personalized, real-time content.
• Social Engagement: Gather market intelligence for marketing, sales and service campaigns through your social accounts. It provides marketing insights by analyzing every comment and mention that your brand receives across all networks. You can monitor audience discussions, create topic profiles to identify upcoming trends, respond to social posts and provide customer support on digital channels.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer native templates.
• Doesn’t provide an on-premise solution.

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SAP Sales Cloud

SAP Sales Cloud is a comprehensive client management solution with built-in sales automation, marketing automation, customer support, help desk and channel management capabilities. The campaign management feature controls the complete marketing campaign process, including design, execution, coordination, optimization and monitoring.

Its marketing module helps develop, execute and manage effective marketing campaigns, and score and nurture leads. You can leverage enterprise-grade email marketing capabilities, including sophisticated campaign management, high-volume delivery and advanced targeting.

Geolocation Segmentation on SAP Sales Cloud.

Top Benefits

• Centralized Customer View: With SAP Sales Cloud, companies can leverage data from multiple channels for personalized interactions. Access information from CRM and ERP software and social media via a unified dashboard. Filter tools help conduct sentiment analysis and provide insights into customer journeys.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: Deliver 24/7 customer support across all channels via AI-powered chatbots. Customer service agents can access chat history for context and deliver personalized communication. Incorporate chat, email, video and phone calls for online shops by integrating with SAP Commerce Cloud.
• Business Insights: Analyze campaign performance, discover the highest-grossing marketing initiatives and monitor KPIs with out-of-the-box reports. Real-time metrics help marketers make in-campaign adjustments.

Primary Features

• Lead and Account-Based Marketing: Integrations with SAP Marketing Cloud provides visualization tools that display campaign budgets and costs in real time. Access intelligent scoring, profiling and geospatial data to know which accounts to focus on. Shared calendars facilitate easy coordination between teams.
• Audience Segmentation: Run targeted campaigns by segmenting contacts based on multiple criteria. Access geographical data and interests of various segments via a global map and tag cloud.
• Templates: SAP Sales Cloud provides reusable templates for text messages. Companies can use them to send personalized SMS to prospects.
• Customization: Incorporate brand-specific details like logo, colors and fonts on emails, landing pages and chat windows.

Limitations

• The email management module doesn’t include AI functionalities.
• No free trial is available.
• Customization costs run high.
• Document conversion is only possible with partner integrations.

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Pega CRM

Pega CRM is a complete campaign management CRM tool that provides live reporting and a mobile compatible platform that enables you to view reports as well as modify accounts on the go.

It offers end-to-end automation and real-time AI capabilities to drive insights around customer engagements. You can measure campaign performance, such as click-through in an email campaign.

Customer Decision Hub on Pega CRM.

Top Benefits

• Real-Time Insights: Pega CRM allows you to convert big data into actionable insights. It processes information like churn risk, lead scoring and more.
• Campaign Optimization: AI-powered capabilities let businesses strike while the iron is hot. You can create accurate campaign offers and deliver them at the appropriate time. It also improves paid search efforts to broaden brand awareness.
• Improved Customer Engagement: Anticipate customer needs to deliver highly personalized and relevant experiences. Ensure optimized interactions across all touchpoints by creating and managing engagement strategies.

Primary Features

• AI: Pega’s AI reads signals generated by customers to analyze their needs. It evaluates options in real time and selects the next best action, helping sales reps deliver personalized interactions. Ensure consistent experiences across inbound, outbound, owned and paid channels.
• Customer Service: An intelligent virtual assistant enables dynamic conversations on customers’ preferred communication methods. The self-service module allows customers to resolve issues on their own. You can configure, manage and test virtual assistants’ performance on all channels.

Limitations

• The UI isn’t user-friendly.
• No multilingual support.
• No API for integrations with third-party solutions.

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Sugar Sell

Sugar Sell is a powerful, AI-powered sales automation platform that helps build and sustain customer relationships. You can monitor key business metrics and turn client data into actionable insights. With collaborative selling, everyone on the team can be on the same page.

The platform simplifies campaign designing and tracking through the Sugar Campaign Wizard. It also gathers data to offer real-time activity updates and campaign analytics to track ROI.

Opportunity Management in Sugar Sell.

Top Benefits

• Centralized Database: Track and store sales rep activities like calls and meetings in a central location. Use filters and tags to access data.
• Integrations: Built on open-source applications, Sugar Sell integrates with various third-party systems. It also offers add-ons to streamline business processes.
• Social Engagement: View customer activities on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn via the activity streams module. You can also sync contacts, tasks and calendars from Gmail, Outlook and other IMAP mail servers.

Primary Features

• Reports and Dashboards: Assess your marketing campaigns’ effectiveness with customizable, real-time reports. Track campaign ROI by linking opportunities to specific initiatives. You can also analyze critical KPIs like budget, win rate, estimated revenue and channel.
• Campaign Planning: Sugar Sell helps streamline marketing initiatives. Businesses can use benchmarking to test various elements. You can also capture email metrics like bounce rate, open rate and click-through rate.
• Project Management: Tools like Gantt charts, task management and dashboards help manage campaigns and customer cases within the platform.
• Multichannel Marketing: Leverage inbound and outbound email marketing tools, social media management capabilities and predictive analytics to connect with customers across channels. You can create professional landing pages, forms and emails via drag-and-drop builders.
• AI and Analytics: Advanced analytics provides a bird’s-eye view of your company’s crucial metrics. Marketers can create multi-phase, targeted campaigns with lead-interest analysis. Send personalized emails and boost lead velocity through predictive lead scoring.

Limitations

• No AI in lead management.
• Reporting capabilities aren’t extensive.
• Doesn’t support email verification.

How We Choose Products

Our team of writers and analysts at SelectHub is committed to giving you the best recommendations based on our data. To make our list, products had to meet two criteria:

1. Closely match the topic
2. Earn a top-5 analyst score in our selection platform

Our analyst scores are based on an in-depth research process using primary and secondary sources. This includes SelectHub Analyst Briefings, direct communication with vendors, and reviewing materials such as user reviews, product brochures, specification sheets, case studies, user manuals, and technical documentation.

Our platform’s Scoring Engine processes the research and computes the analyst score. The score also factors in platform settings such as industry and company size.

Learn more about our research methodology and editorial standards

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Conclusion

Now you have a brief overview of the top-rated CRM campaign management tools. Hopefully, you feel more educated and empowered to make a decision and choose a CRM that will help you attract and catch the right kind of fish for your organization.

Choosing the right CRM solution for your business comes down to your individual needs. No two companies are alike, and the needs of a small business will vary from those of a mid-sized organization or an enterprise. Get our comparison report to make your choice easier.

Did we miss any CRM providers you think should be on this list of the best campaign management software? What system do you use for your CRM needs? Let us know in the comments.