You are no walkover when it comes to designing and running successful marketing campaigns. Yet, they constantly overwhelm you, and the constant juggling back and forth makes you wish you had better ways of managing them that put you back in charge.
Welcome to the world of marketing campaign management tools, where almost everything you read about promises to help you better plan, execute, optimize, and manage your marketing campaigns.
However, be forewarned — not all of them are created equal. Many may not suit your needs, and some may even be contraindicated.
If you have little to no idea what to look for in a good campaign management tool that could save your ‘marketing’ bacon, you’re looking at the right guide.
Read on to discover our curated list of the ultimate campaign management tools that were created to help you get more ROI from your marketing man-hours.
Why Do You Need a Campaign Management Tool?
Unraveling a better way of doing things could double or triple your productivity and results, that’s where the campaign management tool steps in and helps with it.
A robust campaign management system that’s just right for your business can help you:
- Organize successful marketing campaigns faster and better;
- Save time & minimize effort;
- Maximize results from marketing activities;
- Track performance;
- Automate more efficiently; and
- Optimize more effectively!
Everything from emails, SMS, paid search campaigns, online advertising, influencer campaigns, CRM, SEO, and more could be executed better, faster, and cost-effectively with the right project management tool.
Let’s find one for you!
The 5 Best Campaign Management Software
To keep it simple, the best campaign management tools below have been segregated based on the core functionality they bring to your marketing campaigns – emails & SMS, Google PPC, CRM tools, multiple channels ad management, and SEO.
1. Sender — Email & SMS Campaign Management Software
One of the most common uses of a campaign management tool is to manage your email and SMS communications with prospects and customers. But what if you could do all that and more and do it with deadly ease and surprising affordability?
Sender is an all-in-one email and marketing campaign management and automation tool that helps you get more sales and squeeze more revenue and profits through the power of email & SMS campaigns done right.
- No-frills, user-friendly dashboard;
- Full-automation capabilities for email & SMS;
- Exceptional deliverability.
Design and schedule professional-looking email & newsletter campaigns in minutes with the help of readily customizable email templates.
Segment your users into different groups and send high-converting targeted messages to these groups for maximum impact.
Compose simple yet powerful text messages to share internal communication with customers or promotional messages with prospects.
Sender’s ability to support both on-demand broadcast campaigns and triggered automated promotions with equal ease ensures that all of your business revenue opportunities are maximized.
Set up all of your email and SMS communication through automation to ease your marketing efforts. Trigger and automate a variety of communication scenarios, such as welcome emails to nurture new signups, cart sequences for abandoning visitors, triggered emails for opted-in prospects, birthday campaigns, and more.
Sender also helps provide detailed Live and historical analytics to help track the performance of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize and improvize them.
Sender’s Key Features
As you’ve probably guessed by now, Sender is more than just another campaign management tool. Instead, it’s a complete marketing automation suite to fill in all gaps in your business’s marketing requirements.
Its major standout features worth mentioning include:
- On-demand broadcast campaigns;
- Fully-automated campaigns;
- High inbox deliverability;
- Personalization & advanced segmentation capabilities;
- Free popups & forms;
- Incredible, no-brainer free plan.
Sender Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to set up and use | ‘Sender’ branding in the Free plan |
| 24/7 livechat support | No support for Affiliate marketing |
| 15,000 emails/mo to 2,500 contacts with Free Forever plan |
Sender Plans & Pricing
| Free Forever plan | Standard plan (from $8/mo) | Professional plan (from $29) |
| 2,500 contacts | 2,500 contacts | 2,500 contacts |
| 15,000 emails/mo | 30,000 emails/mo | 30,000 emails/mo |
| Unlimited popups & forms | Unlimited popups & forms | Unlimited email automation |
| Unlimited email automation | Unlimited email automation | Unlimited email & SMS automation |
| SMS messaging | Countdown timers | |
| No Sender branding | Survey, feedback blocks |
Suppose you are looking for a cost-effective way of emailing and text messaging your customers and prospects, using a super-easy platform to operate daily and offers excellent LIVE chat support (should you need it). In that case, Sender could be one great choice to make.
2. Wordstream — PPC Campaign Management Platform
WordStream is an online advertising campaign management tool that allows businesses to set up, manage and optimize their Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads campaigns from a single dashboard quickly and efficiently.
- PPC & paid social ads campaign management;
- Free keyword research tool;
- Google AdWords performance grader.
WordStream helps you actively manage all your paid campaigns across disparate platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter from one homogeneous, user-friendly dashboard.
The 20-Minute Work Week is one of WordStream’s most popular features. This tool provides tailored recommendations based on account data. As a result, you can make changes to your campaigns in 20 minutes or less without wading through voluminous and often irrelevant data.
Its free Google AdWords Performance Grader tool studies the strengths and weaknesses of your AdWords account and provides a personalized report to identify areas for improvement quickly and easily.
WordStream offers a local pay-per-click tracking feature that lets you track your local campaigns and their performance in close detail.
WordStream’s Key Features
Given the wide range of utility marketing tools it offers for free, it would be safe to say that WordStream is a feature-rich platform.
Some of its top features that deserve a word:
- Paid ads management for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter;
- Google AdWords & Bing Ads campaigns management;
- Free Google AdWords performance grader;
- Free landing page grader;
- Free SEO & PPC keyword tools.
WordStream Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Intuitive, user-friendly platform | Relatively expensive plans |
| Simplified and streamlined paid ads campaigns | Lack of support for SEO features |
| Powerful insights and suggestions | Limited integrations |
WordStream Plans & Pricing
WordStream offers you a free 7-day trial. Post this trial; its paid plans vary depending on the number of campaigns and keywords you need to manage. These are offered in the form of customized quotes to interviewed prospects.
WordStream Advisor also provides a premier consulting service and a managed services program, where a dedicated account manager fully manages your PPC account and campaigns for you. These services are provided at an additional cost.
If you’re looking for better ways to streamline and optimize your paid advertisements ecosystem that’s spread out across multiple social and search platforms, consider giving WordStream’s powerful capabilities a serious try and be prepared to be pleasantly surprised!
3. Salesforce — Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solution
Salesforce CRM is a customer relationship management platform that helps businesses record, manage, nurture, and grow customer and prospect interactions and relationships meaningfully and profitably, aided by advanced technology.
- World’s No 1 AI-powered CRM;
- 150,000+ clients;
- The operating system of your business.
Salesforce CRM allows businesses to record, store, manage, and organize all of their customer information in one central location, which helps streamline their marketing, sales, and customer support efforts.
To help you execute your business processes more efficiently, Salesforce CRM supports prebuilt workflows that automate several business processes scenarios, such as lead management, sales forecasting, and more. Businesses use these workflows to streamline their processes, saving time, effort, and focus.
Salesforce allows you to segment and target your contacts based on demographics, behavior, and interests. This leads to laser-focused marketing and sales campaigns that carry a higher probability of success.
Furthermore, the platform provides various features to help you manage your sales processes, with premium features such as lead scoring, sales forecasting, & pipeline management.
Last but not least, developers can use an open-source option to customize Salesforce in accordance with highly specific business integration needs in terms of existing tools and systems and tying everything up together.
Salesforce’s Key Features
Given the scale at which Salesforce operates, its feature list is a bottomless well of capabilities. Let’s list the top ones that most businesses understand and go for:
- Sales automation;
- Marketing automation;
- Collaboration capabilities;
- Account and contact management;
- Lead, pipeline, and forecast management
- Workflow rules & automation;
- Customizable dashboards and reports.
Salesforce Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Mature, proven operating system for business | Expensive for smaller businesses and projects |
| Various features | Too many integrations can slow down the system |
Salesforce Plans & Pricing
To meet the needs of different businesses, Salesforce CRM offers a variety of pricing plans. Salesforce CRM’s pricing is based on a subscription model, and it offers four main plans:
| Essentials ($25 user/mo) | Professional ($75 user/mo) | Enterprise ($150 user/mo) | Unlimited ($300 user/mo) |
| Account management | What’s in Essentials plan | What’s in Professional plan | What’s in Enterprise plan |
| Contact management | Pipeline & Forecast management | Workflow & approval automation | Sales engagement & insights |
| Lead management | |||
| Opportunity management |
All said and done, if you’re looking for a campaign management tool that helps you manage and grow your customer relationships and you are not looking to compromise even an inch along the way on quality or scale, Salesforce is your only option.
4. Adobe Experience — Multichannel Marketing Campaign Management System
Adobe Experience is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that aims to help medium to enterprise-level businesses plan, manage and execute personalized omnichannel marketing campaigns in a way that improves customer engagement, retention, and overall revenue.
- All-in-one marketing automation
- Customer journey personalization, analytics, and optimizer
- Predictive customer behavior through AI
The platform leverages the power of machine learning, real-time data, and advanced analytics to understand customers, personalize interactions with them, and optimize their buying journeys based on behavior, preferences, and history.
You can manage customer interactions and campaigns across various media, including but not limited to web, mobile, email, and social media.
Adobe Experience helps businesses plan their marketing campaigns better through features and tools such as creating campaign calendars, setting budgets, and defining target audiences.
Create granular customer and prospect segments that allow you to deliver highly personalized experiences that result in targeted, high-converting campaigns.
Design customer journeys across multiple channels that create unique buying experiences for the prospects as they traverse your sales funnel only to become die-hard loyal fans of your products and services.
Manage and maintain your content in one central location, including creating, editing, and publishing it across various channels such as email, socials, and web pages.
Adobe Experience’s Key Features
Adobe Experience provides the perfect foundation to empower and enrich the next generation of customer experiences through best-in-class tools for insights, engagement, audience handling, omnichannel management, and optimization.
Among its most notable features include:
- Email management – dynamic content, personalization, automation & more.
- Cross-channel campaign management, including emails, SMS, push notifications, and more;
- Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP) & customer journey analytics;
- Data collection, management, unification & visualization;
- Data privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA);
- Ready and rich integration through data connectors and APIs.
Adobe Experience Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Advanced capabilities | Harder to use daily |
| One streamlined interface | Expensive |
| Instantly scalable | Paid expert help is needed to set up |
Adobe Experience Plans & Pricing
Adobe Experience offers custom, quote-based plans, and pricing options to meet the needs of businesses of different sizes and industries.
The pricing is based on the number of unique monthly visitors and tailored to each customer’s needs. Businesses can also choose from pricing models such as subscription, perpetual, and consumption-based pricing.
5. Ahrefs — SEO Campaign Management Software
Ahrefs is a robust Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign management tool that enables businesses to improve their search engine rankings on Google and Bing.
- Industry-leading keyword database;
- Brand mentions monitoring;
- SERP rank tracking.
Businesses can uncover a virtually unlimited goldmine of information about their competitors, including the organic keywords they rank for, their backlink strategies and sources, and the PPC keywords they are investing in.
With over 11 billion keywords and 400 billion indexed web pages, Ahrefs has one of the world’s largest and most up-to-date keywords and indexed pages databases. This ensures maximum data accuracy for businesses that can base their SEO strategies with complete peace of mind.
Use the website audit feature to identify and fix technical issues hurting your website or blog’s search engine rankings.
Furthermore, businesses can find new link-building opportunities, monitor the health of their website’s backlinks, and identify any bad links, thus helping them improve their website’s search engine rankings.
Businesses are also equipped with tools for local SEO optimization, including tracking local rankings, identifying local keywords, and analyzing competitors’ rich snippets data. This helps them improve their local search rankings and gain insights into their competitors’ performance.
Ahrefs’ Key Features
Ahrefs offers an amazing array of features, all aimed at ensuring that you get found on Google’s organic search first, be it the web or local search.
Its main features include:
- SERP rank tracking;
- Domain analysis;
- Backlink analysis;
- Keywords explorer;
- Site audit;
- Content gap analysis;
- Broken links explorer;
- Brand mentions.
Ahref Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Up-to-date and comprehensive database | Expensive to afford |
| Strong local SEO support | Reporting limits can seem absurd and restrictive |
| Fast & easy, in-depth competitor analysis |
Ahrefs Plans & Pricing
By their own admission, Ahrefs has been crawling and indexing the web since 2010, gathering and organizing nearly petabytes of information. Fairly enough, they don’t offer a free plan; a paid one is the only way to access these massive insights.
| Lite plan ($99/mo) | Standard plan ($199/mo) | Advanced plan ($399/mo) | Enterprise plan ($999/mo) |
| Basic features only | Basic + advanced features | Includes what’s in the Standard plan | Includes what’s in the Advanced plan |
| 6 months of history | 2 years of history | Unlimited history | |
| Advanced features | Advanced features |
When it comes to all things SEO, very few major players offer nearly perfect ecosystems to their subscribers, and Ahrefs is one of them.
Looking for a near-perfect SEO campaign management tool that can help you get more ‘free traffic’ from Google and have the stomach to afford a heavy budget? Ahrefs is what you should go for with your eyes closed.
Conclusion & Takeaways
Choosing the right marketing campaign management platform can help improve efficiencies across the board, help you see better results, and boost the overall ROI of your marketing efforts through data-driven decision-making.
However, every business is unique, and so is the relationship it enjoys with your choice of a campaign management tool. Therefore, when choosing the right campaign management tool, you’ll want to consider:
- Function: What do you spend the most time on that you wish you could do better and faster?
- Integration: What systems and processes do you already have and use that could use a little help with being tied down together?
- Complexity and scale: Do you want your campaign management system to be user-friendly or feature-rich? Do you want it to help you accommodate your business’s current needs and grow with it?
- Learning curve: Are you going to spend half your life learning how to operate a piece of software that’s actually (and ironically) supposed to make your life easier? What LIVE customer support options and resources exist to help you along the way?
- Affordability & Pricing: Can you afford the campaign management tool this month? How about if you paid for it in the form of a yearly subscription? Would that pinch? Can your business take this hit?
May your marketing campaigns flourish through the power of technology applied right!
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