You can't escape marketing automation if you're looking to scale your marketing efforts. Each organization sets different marketing automation targets. According to research, productivity optimization is the primary goal, followed by acquiring more leads, analyzing performance, and aligning marketing and sales. So what's yours?

Various marketing teams/individuals have their preferred marketing automation tools that align with their goals. Some appreciate the user-friendly interface of Constant Contact, while others favor the feature-rich capabilities of MailChimp. As an extremely flexible CMS, Drupal offers seamless integration with a wide variety of marketing automation platforms. Its open architecture ensures smooth data synchronization among email marketing software, CRM systems, and analytics tools.

In this article, we'll explore some of the most popular marketing automation Drupal modules designed to simplify every marketer's workflow.

Why You Can't Afford to Ignore Marketing Automation Tools

“Good marketing makes the company look smart; Great marketing makes the customers feel smart” - Joe Chernov (VP Marketing @ Pendo).

Great marketing requires more than just a physical team capable of manually managing your marketing workflows. It demands marketing automation tools to streamline lead nurturing and expedite your entire marketing process. Did you know that companies proficient in lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (ref)?

• Marketing Automation tools help convert raw leads into nourished and qualified marketing leads that are turned over to the sales team for further customer relation management. This applies to both B2B and B2C organizations.
• It helps track your prospective customer’s activities right from when they visit your website to reading your blogs or filling out a form.
• You can also schedule and track your marketing campaigns via email, social media, or any other communication.
• Prospective customers can be easily segmented into suitable mailing lists based on their interests or preferences and will receive/view only relevant content, thus giving you happier (also read ‘less annoyed’) leads.
• A ‘drip campaign’ (email campaign) can be scheduled depending on the right time and right interest shown by your leads that will help you stay on top of their minds thereby nurturing your leads.
• You will also be able to see the reports/analytics and analyze the success of your marketing campaigns.

Drupal Modules for Marketing Automation

Drupal is renowned not only for its robustness and scalability but also for its vast active community of contributors. Within the Drupal CMS, you'll discover numerous contributed marketing automation modules or plugins that are both free and user-friendly. However, they may not always offer as many features as third-party tools. Fortunately, there's an abundance of third-party marketing automation software available that seamlessly integrates with your Drupal website, providing a wider range of functionalities.

Webform

While the Webform module itself isn't a marketing automation tool, it serves as a crucial foundation for integrating Drupal with third-party marketing automation software. The Drupal Webform module is used to collect user data via forms. You can build forms like surveys, simple newsletter signup forms, or contact forms. This submitted data is then pushed to third-party marketing automation systems. In the latest Drupal versions (8+), Webforms have undergone significant enhancements, including an object-oriented API, source editing capabilities, new and improved form elements, extendable plugins, improved documentation, and more. Learn how to get started with Webforms in this brief tutorial.

HubSpot

HubSpot marketing automation is well-known for providing users with a wide range of inbound automation tools – Marketing hub, Sales hub, and Service hub. Each of them can function alone or all together. The HubSpot Drupal module integrates with Webform and the HubSpot API. Once a user enters their information via Drupal Webform, the records are sent to HubSpot’s lead management tool, where the leads can be tracked and nurtured.

MailChimp

MailChimp is a very popular email automation platform that does more than just send bulk emails. You can create custom campaigns, send and schedule automated emails based on certain predefined triggers, track and monitor customer behavior, personalize, generate reports, etc. The Drupal MailChimp module integrates your Drupal website with Mailchimp which will help in tracking and creating a list of website visitors. This list is sent to the MailChimp list from where email automation and other features can be accessed. You can also create signup forms, and campaigns and track activity from your Drupal website. Your visitors can also have control over which of your email lists they want to be on or off. Learn how to create targeted email campaigns using MailChimp and Drupal in this article.

Marketo MA

Marketo, now an Adobe company, is a very popular and widely used marketing automation tool that automates activities such as lead tracking and nurturing, personalization, analytics, advertisements, social marketing, automated campaigns, and more across multiple devices. The Market MA Drupal module helps you capture lead data during form submission and adds tracking capabilities to your Drupal website with the Marketo Munchkin tracking codes and API. It also integrates seamlessly with the Drupal Webform module. Learn how to synchronize your lead data from Marketo to Drupal in real time using Webhooks in this article.

Mautic

Mautic is the first open-source marketing automation platform and was recently acquired by Acquia. It allows for multi-channel communications and campaign management, visitor tracking, email marketing, content customization and personalization, etc. The best way to integrate Mautic with your Drupal website is with the Webform Mautic module. This module enables the addition of Mautic handlers to Webforms, facilitating data submission to Mautic lists. To effectively track website contacts, ensure the installation of the Mautic tracking code on your Drupal website.

Google Analytics

Did you know that Google Analytics was originally based on a web analytics service called Urchin, which Google acquired in 2005? Google Analytics is now the most widely used website analytics tool in the world today. No marketing automation is complete without analytics and GA does a great job at it. The extremely popular Google Analytics Drupal module (having over 200k downloads!) lets you add a web statistics tracking system to your website. It can track, monitor, and support domains, users, files, search systems, Adsense, custom code snippets, and a lot more. To generate reports for all your tracked data, you should install the Drupal module for Google Analytics Reports. Learn how to implement GA4 for a successful marketing strategy here.

Yoast

This Drupal module brings the power of your favorite Yoast tool directly into your Drupal environment. With the Real-time SEO for Drupal module, you don’t have to worry about missing keywords or exceeding text limits. It's an excellent tool for Drupal SEO, offering real-time page analysis of meta tags and alerts to rectify any missteps along the way. It provides a preview of how your page title and meta description will appear in Google search results. This module helps fasten and improve the SEO optimization process and thus acts as an effective marketing automation tool.

Other Popular Marketing Automation Drupal Modules

• Salesforce Suite - Integrates with Salesforce by synchronizing Drupal entities with Salesforce objects.
• ActiveCampaign - An integration between Drupal and the popular CRM tool - ActiveCampaign.
• Pardot - Adds Pardot web analytics integration to your Drupal website.
• OmniSend - Integrates with the OmniSend marketing automation tool that automates email marketing and more.
• AddToAny Share Buttons - An easy-to-use social media sharing button set to add to your website.

Final Thoughts

By integrating marketing automation tools with your Drupal website, you can efficiently convert leads into satisfied customers, boosting operational efficiency and accelerating revenue growth. At Specbee, our team of Drupal experts is proficient in seamlessly integrating your Drupal website with various third-party marketing automation tools. We provide a comprehensive range of Drupal services designed to enhance your business outcomes and drive success.