Product Reviews Software Useful Tips Windows

5 Useful Marketing & Sales Tools that Work with Windows

With a near 90 percent market share, Windows operating systems are by far the most widely used in the world. If you are a marketer, or eCommerce store, or your work in sales, there’s a very good chance you’ll use a Windows-based computer and/or Office 365 for much of your work.

Successful modern marketing requires extensive use of marketing tools to automate marketing workflows and deliver data-driven insights that ensure the right messages reach marketers’ target audiences. The same is true for sales—modern sales personnel have an abundance of excellent tools at their disposal to deliver the right solution to prospects and ensure conversions.

However, with so many different tools and apps available for both marketing and sales, it is tough to know which ones to choose to best support sales or marketing efforts.  In this post, you’ll learn about five really useful marketing and sales tools that are compatible with Windows systems.  

Eloqua

Eloqua is a powerful marketing automation solution provided by Oracle, and it’s compatible with web browsers running on Windows. Eloqua has superb support for Windows 7 users, with its official documentation highlighting Windows 7 as the best operating system for using this tool.

Use Case: Eloqua is suitable as an enterprise marketing automation solution, primarily for B2B marketers. More precisely, Eloqua helps marketers by:

  • Building a list of prospect and customer profile information (behaviors, activities, interests)
  • Automatically executing campaigns across online and offline channels
  • Providing reporting and analytics which allow marketers to measure their campaign performance and results

How It Works

Eloqua works on three fundamental levels:

  1. A database collects demographic information for prospects and customers, such as name, address, email, etc. The database also gathers behavioral information for such customers.
  2. There’s also an email marketing tool which sends emails to prospects automatically once certain conditions have been met (conditions set by marketing teams).
  3. The third component is a website monitor, which uses cookies to recognize visitors and record their behavior in the database.

Oracle Eloqua is a paid marketing tool, and its basic package costs $2,000 per month for ten marketing users. The standard package is best for larger enterprises with big marketing teams— it’s $4,000 per month for 50 marketing users.

Hubspot

Hubspot is an all-in-one inbound marketing software that helps to grow traffic, convert leads, and provide positive ROI for marketing efforts. The platform has a free package which provides limited features—business will likely use one of the paid options, which start at $200 per month for 100 contacts.

Use Cases: As an “all-in-one” marketing platform, Hubspot can help marketers by:

  • Identifying keywords that provide opportunities for conversions
  • Allowing marketers to view how competing companies rank for certain keywords
  • Providing the opportunity to upload and serve multiple versions of different CTAs to prospects, ending up with the CTA that leads to the most conversions

How It Works

Hubspot integrates with and is supported by Windows operating systems. In fact, Hubspot works through a web browser, so you don’t have to download any software. To use Hubspot, you migrate your existing website onto the Hubspot platform, where all Hubspot’s marketing tools are available in one place. You can then begin customizing your website and your marketing efforts using the browser-based Hubspot platform.

InfoFlo

InfoFlo is a CRM tool that allows businesses to manage contacts and business relationships all from a single platform. The InfoFlo pricing structure is based on a one-time payment of $99 per user and includes free upgrades for life.

Use Cases: InfoFlo is a powerful CRM solution which is ideal for enterprises of all sizes to complete tasks including:

  • Manage contacts and add custom fields to hold any type of data about those contacts
  • Manage entire projects using the included project management tool
  • Set up email campaigns that automatically send emails to relevant contacts

How It Works

InfoFlo is an on-premise client-server application, and it functions on systems running Windows. There’s also a plugin for Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an application used to manage and maintain customer relationships, and track both customer engagements and sales. This CRM solution functions as a server-client application, and it’s accessible via web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. There is also a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook accessibility.

Use Cases: Microsoft Dynamics has some really creative use cases, including:

  • You can identify customer buying patterns using purchase information captured by the software and use such data for predictive analyses, estimating the lifetime value of customers and other useful metrics.
  • Automated lead scoring, which allows sales teams to “laser focus” on the leads who are more likely to make a purchase in the near future.

How It Works

You can either launch Microsoft Dynamics CRM directly in a compatible browser, or by logging into Office 365 and choosing CRM from the application launcher. Several pricing plans are available for the service, with the best value plan costing $210 per user each month.

Lusha

Lusha is a useful lead enrichment tool that allows marketers and sales personnel to automatically expand business profiles. When accessing a prospect’s profile on social networks, Lusha can enrich the social profile with missing contact information, such as emails and direct phone numbers.

Use Cases:

  • Lusha helps to automate tedious research tasks for marketers and sales personnel, such as looking up company or individual details.
  • Lusha’s Chrome extension automatically grabs phone numbers, emails, and other valuable contact information on individuals and companies while browsing social network profiles such as LinkedIn.
  • Increase response rates by ensuring you contact the right people during sales or marketing campaigns.

How it Works

Lusha can grab contact details using a Chrome extension, which is usable on all Windows systems. Lusha also has many possible integrations with Windows software because of its compatibility with the Zapier integration tool. Zapier allows you to connect Lusha to software such as Microsoft Office, Insightly, Salesforce, and even popular database systems such as Oracle.

InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft is known as one of the more popular email marketing tools, but it’s also used for sales and customer relationship management (CRM). Pricing packages are straightforward, and costs vary from  $199 to $379 per month, with the more expensive plans offering eCommerce functionality and sales automation.

Use Cases: InfusonSoft is geared towards improving and automating marketing and sales tasks for small businesses. Since it is targeted at small businesses with 25 employees or fewer, the suite of uses isn’t as comprehensive as with other marketing tools, however, you can still do useful things, such as:

  • Use Lead Scores, a lead management metric that qualifies leads based on different criteria. Additionally, you can set up triggers for sending emails to customers with particular Lead Scores.
  • Plan and organize your day with the “My Day” dashboard, which logs contact information, manages tasks, and updates leads
  • Create email subscriber lists and set up email campaigns

How It works

InfusionSoft combines email marketing, CRM, and marketing automation into a single online system, accessible via web browsers on Windows systems. There’s also a plugin for Microsoft Outlook which allows you to sync email communications to InfusionSoft.

Closing Thoughts

Successful marketers understand how marketing tools can dramatically improve results and generally make many tasks a lot easier. Whether you opt for Hubspot, Eloqua, or any of the Windows-based tools mentioned in this article, they are all equally likely to deliver ROI when combined with smart marketing/sales strategies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *