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Ranking Method

We rank lot's of different digital marketing software into top 10 tables so you can easily compare what's readily available in the marketplace. Please note that all software that make it into our top 10 comparison tables are what we already consider worthwhile out of many more applications in that particular niche.

 

We rank marketing software according to 6 major categories as shown below;

 (not in order of importance)

1.) Relevance to Category

We create different categories for different niche software products but also within the same niche. For example within the email marketing software niche we have several different categories. To illustrate an example, we have a category "Best Mass Email Service" which ranks software according to the relevance of sending out large amounts of email, hence pricing is a major factor in this category.

 

However in the "Best Email Automation Software" category we've ranked the same software from the mass email category in a different order due to the emphasis on ranking product vendors who offer the best automation features. This is an important factor in our rankings as the products must closely match the category description.

2.) Vendor Reputation

Another very important ranking category is the reputation and credibility of the vendor. As digital marketers we often integrate many different marketing software products closely into our businesses and we need to be assured that our 3rd party partners are going to be around in a year, 3 or 5 years from now if we're going to rely upon them. Just because there's a new kid on the block with cheap prices it doesn't mean we go rush into partnering with them until they're proven their value and reputation, and this often takes years to build.

 

We use a number of different measures to determine reputation and credibility. We look at how long the company has been in business, whether they have a real physical address and phone number, the quality of their website and product, their domain alexa ranking, the number of referring domains, the general consensus of customer reviews, their social presence, the size of their website, their support options and other methods of determining their likelihood of delivering value over the long term.

3.) Ease of Use

A big focus for us is finding marketing software that anybody can use. The vast majority of applications that we compare and review are cloud based SaaS web applications that anybody can cheaply and freely use. We prefer software that is very quick to sign up and start using. We steer away from traditional "enterprise" software as it's typically clunky and has a steep learning curve, most companies that require you to contact them for a demo fall in this category.

 

The applications we review are suited towards solo marketers, small businesses or digital marketers working at small-medium enterprises. The vast majority require no programming or coding experience in order to use and mostly have drag n drop functionality along with intuitive interfaces. Luckily for us digital marketers there has been a significant focus on improving user experience within web applications in recent years and it's now easier and cheaper than ever to start an online business or promote your physical business using online strategies.

4.) Functionality

When reviewing marketing software our researchers sign up and use the software where possible and take screenshots from inside the application so you can get a good idea for the feel and simplicity of each particular platform. Most of the products we review are cloud based SaaS applications that anybody can easily and cheaply signup and begin using immediately.

 

We dedicate a section in each review to specifically list the features for each application, we list these in bold bullet points for ease of reference. This is often the largest part of our review in word length, our researchers specifically look for what functions and features a particular marketing app can perform that could make it unique from other vendors in the market.

5.) Pricing

No matter how user friendly and functional a marketing software may be it's not worth infinite. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. Everything is relative to the price you pay, and there is a positive correlation with our top ranking software titles and the pricing of those respective products.

 

We believe this adds to the competitiveness of the market as to become a true market leader the respective company has to offer the most value for the lowest price possible whilst still growing a strong profitable company that's going to be around for many years to come.

6.) Partner Program Strength

This website doesn't accept payment directly from any product vendor in order to rank high in our top 10 tables, unfortunately that can't be said for the majority of other software comparison review websites out there, often the top "pick" in each niche is whatever vendor paid the most to be there. This website also doesn't show any traditional banner advertisements or other forms of display advertising either.

 

This website is free to use and to keep it that way we use affiliate links when mentioning a company or product. What this means is if you visit a product vendor website after clicking on the "Visit Site" button in our comparison and review pages then subsequently make a purchase from that website, the vendor may pay us a fixed dollar commission or share with us a percentage of your ongoing revenue. This has no effect on the price you pay for the marketing software product in question, it's just the vendor rewarding us for sending them a customer instead of having to pay for advertising themselves.

 

Whilst we do our best to pay attention to the above 5 ranking categories, the strength of the product vendor's affiliate program does influence our rankings as we incur many expenses in running this website, including, but not limited too, paying for; researchers to review products, writers to create content, commercial images, domain and hosting costs, web monitoring, graphics, advertising, email hosting, taxes and the webmaster wages. We encourage vendors to recognize the true potential of making websites like us material partners with good commissions since affiliate referrals is often the highest returning traffic source for software vendors. In many niches we cover, we often find the market leader is the one with the strongest referral program, which we don't believe to be a co-incidence.

 

Thank you for using Top10MarketingSoftware, we greatly appreciate your patronage!

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