Your Pandemic MarTech Offer Guide
Xiaoyue Della Han and Jason Katz • May 26, 2020 • MarTech & Personalization, Paid Advertising & Digital Marketing, Revenue Operations
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has compelled marketers to rethink their strategies and the way they operate. MarTech companies are on the frontline to help marketers fight the impact of coronavirus. They have extended free trials, data trackers, remote communication toolkits, and grant programs to alleviate some of the marketers' COVID-19 financial distress and business difficulties.
In this article, we compiled COVID-19 related offers from MarTech companies across 14 categories: marketing attribution, business intelligence, customer data platform (CDP), customer relationship management (CRM), marketing suite, content creation, messaging, paid media, personalization, e-commerce, non-profit, creative suite, remote working, and telecommunication.
We categorized these COVID-19 related offers into two types – discounted offers and value-added COVID-19 response resources.
The discounted offers section includes:
A summary of free trials and discounts
A multifaceted analysis of savings potential:
Monthly-to-month saving for small businesses
Annual saving for small businesses
Annual saving for enterprise customers if available
Please Note: For small businesses, we use the minimum cost of the plan that is one-level above the starter or free plan, as a reference to calculate the savings. For enterprise customers, we use the minimum charge of the enterprise plan provided with the minimum number of users.
The value-added response resources include:
Grants opportunities
Expert advising services
Data trackers
Value-added tools and services for customers
Educational resources
With so many offers, what’s the best way to choose? The most obvious way of evaluating an offer is to calculate the monetary saving. Still, the ultimate purpose of applying an offer is to utilize the product and service to generate value for your business. Discount offer and free trials bring immediate financial benefits, but they may not necessarily grow the business as expected. We summarized five circumstances where discount offers could not be helpful. This is when marketers can turn to the value-added resources listed above to seek possible assistance.
Free trials are usually available to new users. Existing users are less likely to benefit.
Trials and discounts are mostly available to the basic plans which have restrictions on the number of users, scope of access to data, and the usage of services.
Trials do not include additional paid features, which will offset the saving from the plan.
The product category affects the value of an offer. Extended free access will be more valuable to lighter software since the tools can be implemented quickly and generate tangible benefits sooner. For dense applications, such as CRM and CDP, customers usually spend most of the free trial on the implementation stage or limited testing to support RFPs.
Furthermore, if the product category is irrelevant to your business, then it’s a non-starter.
We have done extensive research to create one of the largest directories of COVID-19 response offers for small businesses and enterprises. Furthermore, we did a thorough analysis to find the best offers. Our analysis factors in absolute discount value and goes further to consider product tier, feature strength, service, and discount percentage. The offers are organized into 14 MarTech categories so you can easily find the most relevant ones. Each offer entry includes:
MarTech company overview
COVID-19 response offer details including discounts, eligibility, available dates, and resources.
Monthly and annual savings for small business and enterprise.
Sign up links that guide you directly to the application page.
If you’d like to see the full analysis and list of offers, rankings, and details, you should see our complete guide. Download the MarTech COVID-19 Offers Guide to strengthen your business during this challenging COVID-19 pandemic.
Highlights by Category
The categories offering the most discounts and free trials include attribution, CRM, e-commerce, remote working, and telecom. Below is a deep dive by category, summarizing COVID-19 offers available and highlighting the most valuable ones.
Ecommerce
Brick-and-mortar businesses have slowed down dramatically. Moving online has become the dominant trend. Ecommerce companies offer free access to their platforms to help physical businesses transform online. Large e-commerce sites such as Shopify and Opencart extended their free trials for new customers from 14 days to 3 months during the pandemic.
Attribution
Attribution companies provide discounts to engage customers and analyze performance from aggregated marketing data. If you are new to digital marketing and paid media advertising, you can take advantage of the extended free trials on these tools and expert advising resources provided to promote your business online. Singular offers free access to its marketing analytics platform for 180 days, the most extended free trial of all attribution companies’ offers collected.
CRM
When you are expanding online, you might face challenges in keeping up with the lead flow, locating customer data, and delivering customer services. CRM systems address each of these challenges by organizing customer and prospect information and orchestrating workflows thereupon. Large CRM providers such as Salesforce, Hubspot , and Zoho provide free access and discounts for their CRM, sales, and marketing suites for at least 3 months. The pandemic creates a great chance for you to try these CRM systems over three months to more familiar and ask informed questions before you invest in the long-term.
Telecom and Remote Working
Telecom companies, especially those with video conferencing and collaboration features, dramatically extended free trials to increase their market share. Large companies like RingCentral offers free licenses access to its work from home program for 90 days. Vonage has Business Communications services free for 3 months, and Intermedia's AnyMeeting Pro is free through the end of 2020. Callifi introduced three budget-friendly packages for businesses to preserve the phone numbers and enhance remote operation quality. As work-from-home becomes the new norm during social distancing, these lengthy trials can cover your remote collaboration needs.
Customer Data Platform: Less Active
The customer data platforms are offering fewer free plans during COVID-19. We searched through 30 most influential customer data platform (CDP) providers, such as Blueconic, Tealium, CaliberMind, and BlueVenn. We found out with no surprise that most of these companies did not offer free trials or software. The reason is that a customer data platform usually takes 4-12 weeks to be implemented. Due to the long time horizon, a free trial will not be sufficient to help businesses react quickly to the changing environment. Fortunately, CDP providers, such as Amperity, do provide data trackers to help marketers generate consumer insights and marketing strategies.
Highlights by Best Value
Month-to-Month Plan
Traject*, the attribution software provider, has the best month-to-month offer. Traject extended free trials of its five primary digital marketing tools to two or three months, for new users and all levels of plans. Within all the services, Traject’s free trial on Grade.us, the online review management tool, can save marketers at most $400/month for the agency plan.
OneSignal’s 6 months free access to its starter plan is the second-best offer. OneSignal is a push notification platform. Users can save $99 per month, and 6 months free access is long enough for businesses to launch and run the tool in their operation.
* Please be aware that some anti-virus software like McAfee will serve warnings before loading Traject’s website.
Annual Plan
Salesforce Care’s social engagement solution has the best value in terms of annual saving. Salesforce Care is a unique solution built for COVID-19, which aggregated features and software to support businesses, partners, and communities. The social engagement solution offers free 90 days access to the social engagement software, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, which will save $12,000 per org per year*. The runner up is Traject’s Grade.us. On an annual basis, users can save $1,080 per year.
* An org represents a customer’s specific version of Salesforce and all of its corresponding data.
Enterprise Offer
The best enterprise offer is also Salesforce Care's 90-day free access to Social Studio. For the organizations that need to build social engagement, Salesforce Care is the plan. Oracle provides its free access to Workforce Health and Safety solution to current Human Capital Management Cloud (HCM) customers. The HCM plan requires at least 1,000 users to get involved. Therefore, at minimum, a business can save $24,000 per year.
The number of enterprise-level COVID-19 offers is significantly less those available for starter packages targeted to small businesses. MarTech companies are mainly focused on helping small businesses who have limited resources and simultaneously seeking new customers through free trials as well.
Conclusion
COVID-19 impacts millions of businesses. MarTech companies are making efforts to support them during this challenging period. MarTech companies are typically offering free access and value-added resources as their COVID-19 responses. Among the 14 MarTech categories we anaylzed, the most offers are concentrated in attribution, CRM, e-commerce, remote working, and telecom. Businesses can also take advantage of value-added resources such as funding opportunities and ad platform credits. Eligibility is friendly to small businesses and ones that directly fight the pandemic (e.g. healthcare).
To make the vast sea of offers easier to digest, we aggregated the COVID-19 response offers from 14 MarTech categories into one simple guide. You will find company introduction, offer details, prices and savings. More importantly, we provide the URLs directly to these offers so you can move quickly.
If you think the offers in this summary article are good, you should check out the full list, rankings, and details. Download the MarTech COVID-19 Offers Guide to strengthen your business during this challenging COVID-19 pandemic.