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Best Marketing Automation Tools: 24 Options to Use

Marketing is important to your business.

Just call me Captain Obvious.

But you can’t spend all of your time marketing. What if there was a way to simplify marketing processes? Or even automate those repetitive tasks altogether?

With the best marketing automation software, you can do just that. Take a free trial with one of my top recommendations to start automating your marketing campaigns right now:

1. Constant Contact – Best all-around marketing automation software
2. Sendinblue – Best for email, chat, and SMS marketing automation
3. EngageBay – Best for sales, customer service, and marketing automation
4. ActiveCampaign – Best for B2C marketing automation
5. Freshworks CRM – Best for E-commerce
6. HubSpot – Best for centralizing your tech stack
7. Acoustic – Best for enterprise multi-channel marketing automation
8. Act-On – Best for marketing agencies
9. Pardot by Salesforce – Best for B2B companies

Or perhaps you want to find out more before you make a decision. My full-length reviews below go through the strengths and weaknesses of all my top picks. Marketing automation is a huge part of my business. I have strong opinions about what works and when to use it. But what if you want to see what’s out there beyond these top names in the niche?

In this post, I’ll briefly explain what marketing automation is and then recommend more than 20 of the best marketing automation tools for you to try out. Learn how this stuff works by trying it out; simple as that. First, let’s cover what marketing automation in general can do for your business.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the act of using software and technology to create and implement applications to automate repetitive tasks, such as email marketing, ad campaigns, tracking, and much more.

For example, brands could create an automatic lead generation funnel that gathers an email address, sends a recorded demo, then invites the prospect to schedule a live demo.

Marketing automation is not a nice-to-have strategy you can ignore — it’s the standard.

If you want to compete, you need to be using marketing automation.

The good news? Marketing automation can save you time and money, and improve your marketing efficiency.

Now, on to the best marketing automation tools.

1. Let Constant Contact Deliver Powerful Emails Simply and Easily

Modern marketing doesn’t happen on one channel. It’s happening all over the internet on various devices, all at once.

There are many multi-channel solutions for marketing automation, but Constant Contact takes the cake for most businesses that need an easy way to join email and social media efforts.

With its unified dashboard, Constant Contact lets anyone—from beginners to advanced marketers—easily stay on top of both marketing fronts.

The platform’s intensely customizable emailer lets you build welcome sequences, drip campaigns, and any other sort of automated email campaign and segment messaging with individual sequences that are based on what you know about your contacts.

Whether you’ve gathered crucial info about your list of members manually or use Constant Contact’s custom form builder to capture it on your landing pages, you can set up individual email sequence tracks based on virtually any data point.

Thus, you can send one welcome sequence to VP-level subscribers, another one for folks in sales, and another for marketers. And that’s just based on job title. You could thin slice on anything from where they live to their favorite beer.

Make it as granular and intricate as you’d like. Set long-tail, automated campaigns for each track and let Constant Contact do the hard work for you over weeks or months. All you have to do is look at the reports and keep a finger on the pulse.

But that’s not all. You can also push new social posts and reply to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn from the same place you set up automated email sequences and drip campaigns.

Schedule out social posts for the next month or quarter and then sync that messaging up with your email campaigns.

Here’s how both features can work together:

Set up a series of social media posts about the big game, then have unique email sequences for folks on the East Coast rooting for one team and then a separate one for the West Coast dwellers rooting for the other.

That’s just a super simple example—with Constant Contact, you can make these nested, unified marketing campaigns as intricate and complex as you’d like.

Social monitoring, messaging, and posting are available on Constant Contact’s plans. But its most useful email features come in the Standard plan. In it, you can set up automated behavioral and welcome sequences, plus include dynamic content in your emails.

The Standard package from Constant Contact starts at $35/month for up to 500 subscribers, with the price scaling upward alongside the number of additional contacts you need.

If you just want unified email and marketing without all the advanced automation, you can still get that with the Lite plan. That’ll run you $12/month for up to 500 contacts.

Unify your social and email campaigns by getting started with Constant Contact.

2. Gain Opportunities on Abandoned Carts and After Purchase with Sendinblue

Sendinblue’s powerful automation features will help you seal up the holes that allow opportunities to fall through the cracks.

Stay connected with customers using email, text messaging, or live chat directly on your website. Once you set it up, you won’t need many agents or reps with all the work Sendinblue does behind the scenes.

For a lot of folks, their eight prebuilt automated workflows will be enough.

There are two in particular that are great for e-commerce store owners. One is triggered by a completed purchase and the other by an abandoned cart.

In either case, Sendinblue does the hard work and sets up the first and last actions in the three-step automation: the trigger event (either a successful checkout or a visitor leaving with items in their cart) and the action (sending them a message).

Then you take over. You’ll determine the delay between the trigger event and the action, and create the follow-up emails. That could be anything from a promo code to complete their purchase, personalized reminders about the product they’re interested in, or a satisfaction survey, to name a few examples.

In minutes, you can set up automated workflows to generate sales from situations you may not have been able to capitalize on before.

With the depth available in Sendinblue’s email features, you can craft the perfect message to take advantage of any moment.

Personalize content based on who your audience are, what they considered purchasing, or where they clicked. Then embed unique offers, tweak the email’s design, and schedule sending based on when it will be most effective. You can even A/B test options to gather data on the smartest way to wield these automations.

Not afraid of getting your hands dirty? That’s great—the custom automation builder opens up a world of different ways to construct trigger and action sequences. You can even have multiple entry points feeding into one action or get really granular with qualifying conditions to make sure each action is tailored to proper audience segments.

Sendinblue offers automation capabilities on all of their pricing plans. With the free forever and Lite (starting at $25/month) packages, you will be limited to targeting up to 2,000 of your contacts in your automated workflows.

Upgrade to either Premium (starting at $65/month) or the custom-priced Enterprise plans to get unlimited use of Sendinblue’s marketing automations. From there, it’s pay-as-you-go style pricing to increase the number of emails or SMS messages you send.

You don’t have to resign to chalking up every abandoned cart as a loss or thinking of each purchase as the end of the sales journey. Sendinblue’s automations can help you seize on missed opportunities that boost your revenue today.

3. Integrate Sales, Marketing, And Support With Engagebay

EngageBay knows sales, marketing, and support can’t exist in silos. For a business trying to grow, post-sale engagement is every bit as crucial as getting to a sale in the first place.

With EngageBay, all of your key customer-facing teams can use the same software. This is more efficient for your company and provides a seamless experience to customers. In other words, everything you learn about existing customers can be leveraged in the quest to grow your audience.

EngageBay’s automation tools can start having an impact the moment a prospect expresses interest and joins your list. From there, through your sales funnel and beyond the purchase, you can automate many of the routine touchpoints, nurturing, warming up, and more.

With all that information and interaction gathered, your support reps are well-prepared to handle anything your customers can throw at them with ease and grace.

That’s big, especially if your service team handles more than troubleshooting issues.

Maybe your service team also provides continuing customer training (something common in B2B SaaS) or often puts on their sales hats to handle adding services or upgrades.

With all of EngageBay’s automation tools capturing each customer’s entire journey, your support team is never without context or key information, so they can keep impressing the people who buy from you.

EngageBay does have a free option. They have a free-forever package that lacks the automation tools, but allows you to get used to the platform and dashboard.

You’ll need at least the Growth plan for the full array of EngageBay’s marketing automation features. That can cost as little as $42.99 per user per month if you pay for two years upfront. That can handle up to 10,000 contacts and 25,000 branded emails per month.

Paying for a single year at checkout raises the monthly per-user rate to $45.99. If you want to pay month-to-month, you’re looking at $49.99 per user per month.

Need more contacts? Upgrade to Pro for $84.99 per user/month (for a two-year commitment) to have no limits on the number of contacts, plus get double the monthly emails that Growth offers and more advanced features.

Bring together sales, marketing, and support, and provide them with the same useful automation tools by signing up with EngageBay today.

4. Hyperfocus on B2C Automation With ActiveCampaign

If you are looking for marketing automation specifically in the B2C space, ActiveCampaign is a very compelling option.

It’s a super affordable tool that includes numerous automation features for leads anywhere in your funnel. You’ll be able to cut down on busywork instantly, reaching more people at the same time.

Best of all, you’ll be able to connect with customers anywhere. ActiveCampaign offers omnichannel automation, including instant messaging and SMS, live chat, and Facebook.

So, you’re not limited to just email marketing automation with ActiveCampaign.

Their most popular features cover leads at every point in the funnel, including:

Engage – Automation maps, site tracking, and subscription forms.

Nurture – List segmenting, dynamic/predictive content, and event tracking.

Convert – Contact and lead scoring, split actions, and win probabilities.

Support – Predictive sending, SMS, A/B split testing, and e-commerce.

You can also set up numerous types of emails like autoresponders, targeted or triggered emails, broadcasts, scheduled emails, and automated funnels.

On top of that, you can design those emails using their intuitive drag-and-drop designer, or start from one of their 25+ pre-made mobile-responsive design templates.

Whether you’re just getting started or interested in scaling and optimizing your email marketing strategy, ActiveCampaign is an excellent choice. They offer everything you need to capture, nurture, and close leads at scale.

ActiveCampaign offers four plans, with the price of each starting at:

Lite — $29 per month with up to three users

Plus — $49 per month with up to 25 users

Professional — $149 per month with up to 50 users

Enterprise — customized pricing

Each tier includes more advanced features, and pricing is based on the size of your list, starting with up to 500 contacts.

So, keep in mind that you will have to pay more than the prices above as your list grows.

5. Automate All Things E-commerce With Freshworks CRM

Freshmarketer is part of the Freshworks family of products. I highly recommend it to people that want to automate their e-commerce marketing. Freshmarketer comes packed with all the tools you need to attract customers, understand their needs, and drive conversions.

Keep in touch with customers via email, live chat, SMS, and WhatsApp. Build out personalized customer journeys and stay organized wherever the conversation happens.

From awareness to retention, you get all the automation features you need to gain more leads, turn those leads into customers, and keep those customers around for life. Best of all, you accomplish this while doing less work with better results.

You don’t need any technical skills or a dedicated support team to get started, and it takes about a minute to get up and running.

You also get access to features like:

• Email campaigns and contact management
• Visual drag-and-drop customer journey builder
• Website, form, and offline event tracking
• Conversion rate optimization tools
• A/B and split testing
• Advanced personalization
• Dynamic heat maps
• Audience segmentation
• Real-time funnel analytics

In addition, the software seamlessly integrates with Freshworks’ other tools, so it’s an excellent choice if you currently use or plan to use any of their business software. It also integrates with WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and other popular e-commerce platforms.

You can try Freshmarketer on their limited free forever plan or a 21-day free trial of their paid plans, which are incredibly affordable and accessible for businesses of all sizes. However, they limit the number of contacts you have, so keep that in mind.

Freshworks also offers Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plans for their sales and marketing platform, Freshsales Suite. Plans for Freshsales Suite start at $15/month for 1,000 active contacts.

6. Generate Leads, Close Seals, and Manage Your Pipeline on Auto-Pilot With HubSpot

If you’re looking to cut down the number of tools you use for marketing automation, take a look at HubSpot, which lets you supercharge your sales, customer service, and marketing processes in a single platform.

It goes beyond automating your business processes. Integrate and optimize different departments in one centralized location, streamlining your entire business’s workflow.

Teams don’t have to jump from software to software to get the information they need, and you can automate the data transfer process from one team to the next.

HubSpot has a shining reputation in this field. Their marketing automation capabilities are powerful, with fine granular control.

Set up a drip campaign (or multiple) as complex as you like with delays, triggers, dependencies, and more. You can let email follow-ups and campaigns run automatically with no fear.

Beyond email, automations within HubSpot can apply to contact and client organization, team notifications, lead qualification, data management, and much more.

All your workflows benefit from the HubSpot platform’s clean visual interface. See how all the disparate parts of your marketing department and campaigns can link and work together, while you find new ways to take advantage of automation through visualizing unique team and action connections.

No matter how complex your sales journey or pipeline, HubSpot has the tools and features to not only add useful automation, but improve every part of the customer lifecycle.

And, by using one of HubSpot’s suites, you also get access to essential features like:

• Blog post and SEO planning
• Ad tracking and management
• Social media management
• AI-powered live chat
• Forms and landing pages
• Revenue attribution reporting
• A/B split testing

HubSpot offers basic features, like emails, landing pages, forms, and live chat capabilities for unlimited users absolutely free. So, you can try the platform without spending a penny.

Alternatively, you can sign up for a free demo to see their advanced features in action.

The Starter Suite (sales, marketing, CRM, and customer service) starts at $50 per month for two users and up to 1,000 contacts, making it extremely affordable for most businesses. You can add another 1,000 contacts for $50 per month, and additional users cost $25 per month.

However, remember you can only access HubSpot’s Starter version of their Marketing Hub. So you’re going to be somewhat limited in automation capability. Some features you’ll only be able to use so many times per month; others are missing entirely.

The heavy-duty plans above Starter cost a good bit more, but remove those restrictions if you need everything HubSpot offers by way of automation:

• Professional — $1,780.01 per month ($1,600 per month if you pay annually)
• Enterprise — $4,999 per month for everything HubSpot has to offer

Professional starts with 2,000 contacts, and you can add contacts in increments of 5,000 for $250 per month. Enterprise starts with 10,000 contacts, and it’s only $100 per additional 10,000 contacts.

There’s also the ability to build your own bespoke HubSpot product bundle. You can set how many features you want for each Hub.

If you want to go heavy on marketing automation, but don’t need as much for sales, customer service, or operations, make your own bundle that includes the Enterprise tier of Marketing Hub but Starter tiers for the rest.

Plus, if you’re a current member or alumni of HubSpot’s approved incubator, accelerator, or Venture Capital partners with a round of Series A funding under your belt, you can get up to 90% off your first year.

7. Master Multi-channel Automation With Acoustic

Acoustic offers a wide range of marketing automation solutions for multi-channel marketers.

It’s an excellent option if you’re managing large-volume campaigns that have a lot of moving parts.

You can use it for email campaigns, social media, SMS, push notifications, print ads, mobile apps, and every possible touchpoint where your audience lives.

Some of the top features of Acoustic include:

• AI-recommended triggers
• Split testing
• Customer journey mapping
• Budgeting tools
• Lookalike audiences
• One-to-one ads
• Advanced personalization

You’ll also have access to a powerful drag-and-drop campaign builder, which helps simplify even the most complex campaigns. Your marketing data can also be monitored with advanced reporting and analytics.

I really like the fact that Acoustic has an active community where you find quick answers to your questions. They even have self-help videos and other learning tools to help you get the most out of the software.

If you’re just looking for a super basic marketing automation solution, Acoustic probably isn’t for you. Smaller businesses running single-channel campaigns will likely find the features overwhelming.

Pricing isn’t publicly available, so you’ll need to schedule a consultation to learn more.

8. Let Act-On Seamlessly Nurture Inbound and Outbound Leads

As a marketing agency, you handle marketing campaigns for several clients (if not hundreds of them) at any given time. As such, you need marketing automation software with the ability to manage everything, including your own marketing campaigns, in one place.

Act-On offers the perfect solution.

Their scalable software features unique child and parent campaign capabilities, meaning you can easily manage and handle all of your client accounts from a single Act-On login.

Plus, you can completely brand and customize everything to deliver custom reports to clients in just a few clicks.

With Act-On, you can learn more about your clients’ audiences to personalize and tailor their message to match. Not only does this make their life easier, but it also means your team can work less to produce better results.

When you sign up, you get access to powerful marketing features, including:

• Automated engagement programs
• Website and landing page tracking
• Customer/prospect scoring
• Behavior and demographic segmentation
• Pre-built email, form, and landing page templates
• Interactive reporting dashboards

Plus, you can build custom real-time analytic dashboards for internal and external use, so you and your clients always know what’s happening.

On top of this, you can use this information to improve customer ROI, build better technology stacks, and optimize entire marketing campaigns on behalf of your clients. From lead gathering and nurturing to transferring contact information to sales, you’re in good hands.

The great thing about Act-On is that you pay for what you use. The professional package starts at $900 per month for 2,500 active contacts, three marketing users, and 50 users in sales. You’ll get 30,000 API calls per day.

Enterprise pricing is offered on a personalized basis, and you’ll need to get in touch to find out more.

9. Supercharge Your Marketing Analytics Automatically With Pardot by Salesforce

As a B2B business, you market to other companies, which presents a unique set of marketing challenges. As such, you need a marketing automation tool built for the job.

Pardot exists to help B2B companies build relationships and turn those relationships into revenue. You get a suite of tools perfectly designed for this mission, so you can accommodate an extended buying process and manage complex pipelines.

Plus, it’s a fantastic marketing automation software built around Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM. So you know you’re in good hands.

From lead generation to sales alignment, the software offers a wide range of features, including:

• Dynamic content and data-based personalization
• Lead-nurturing email automations
• Prospect and lead scoring
• Visual multi-part automation creator
• Advanced segmentation
• Landing page builder
• Smart forms + drag and drop builder
• Social media scheduling, profiling, and analytics
• Lead activity tracking
• Campaign performance reporting
• Lifecycle and funnel reporting
• Pardot Einstein for lead and behavior scoring

Furthermore, over 2.8+ million worldwide users rely on Pardot for their marketing automation needs, making it one of the most popular platforms on this list.

Pardot is on the expensive side, so it’s best suited for larger businesses. Paid plans include:

• Growth — $1,250/month for up to 10,000 contacts and basic features
• Plus — $2,500/month for up to 10,000 contacts with deeper automation + analytics
• Advanced — $4,000/month for up to 10,000 contacts with AI and all features
• Premium — $15,000/month for up to 75,000 contacts with supercharge features

It also offers a few add-ons that come free in the Premium plan. Those add-ons include Salesforce Engage ($50/user per month), Analytics Plus ($3,000/month), and Engagement History ($300/year).

All plans and add-ons are billed on an annual basis.

Oh, and one last thing: Pardot is pronounced par-dot. The “t” is not silent.

10. Use Customer.io to Automate Timely Emails

If you’re like most B2B and B2C companies, email marketing isn’t the only outreach tool in your arsenal. SMS, push notifications, and in-app messages play a role as well—and that’s why a tool like Customer.io is so important.

Customer.io lets you send targeted messages to your customers across all of these channels, personalized and segmented based on user behavior and customer data.

Basically, it makes personalized messages simple.

The marketing possibilities are almost endless. Use Customer.io to:

• Collect feedback
• Upsell
• Cross-sell
• Onboard new customers
• Renew existing customers
• Nurture leads

Other features include A/B testing, conversion tracking, customer profiles, and in-context conversations.

Pricing starts at $100 per month for unlimited emails, SMS, tracking, and technical support. Their Premium plan costs significantly more but includes all the basic features plus a dedicated customer service rep, onboarding, HIPAA compliance, and premium tech support. You’ll need to request a demo for a quote.

11. Use AdRoll to Automate Ad Campaigns

Customer acquisition is vital for e-commerce brands and usually takes the form of several paid advertising channels like social media and display ads. Managing all of these channels individually can be tricky, but that’s where AdRoll saves the day.

AdRoll offers e-commerce store owners a single platform through which they can launch and manage display ads, social media ads, and email campaigns.

Your ads no longer have to be one-dimensional and try to appeal to everyone. With cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities and flexible segmentation, you can provide customized experiences that dramatically improve marketing efficiency.

Key features include retargeting across devices and platforms, dynamic LiquidAds, flexible segmentation, transparent analytics, and expert optimization and conversion reporting.

AdRoll pricing is based on the number of visitors to your site. It’s just $36 per month for 1,000 visitors, $135 for 10,000, $225 for 15,000, and $315 for 30,000+.

12. Automatically Engage and Grow Your Following on Instagram with InstaChamp by MobileMonkey

Are you drowning in DMs? Need to automate part of your social media workflow? Then you need to know about InstaChamp, the world’s first Meta-approved social automation tool by MobileMonkey.

InstaChamp is a powerful Instagram automation tool that lets you automate everything, from replying to comments, stories, and even direct messaging. It’s perfect for busy marketers looking to get back more time in their day through automation.

And don’t forget the power of automation to grow your audience, your brand affinity, and your conversions from hot engagement channels like Instagram.

MobileMonkey Instagram marketing tools let you automate:

• Replies to DMs
• DM replies to Story Mentions
• DM replies to post comments

And if you really want to make your Instagram marketing funnel run on autopilot, set up drip campaigns to automate follow-up messages to anyone who engages with your brand. Send anyone who comments on your posts or mentions you in their stories a thank you, a reward, a link to enter a competition, or any message you like.

Best of all, these Instagram DM automations are 100% Instagram-approved because MobileMonkey is one of the only official partners for Facebook and Instagram marketing automation.

Instachamp Platinum usually costs $19 per month, but it’s currently being offered at a discount rate of $9.95 per month.

13. Automatically Nurture Leads With Marketo Engage

If your enterprise is serious about marketing automation, you’ll want to consider Marketo Engage, one of the largest and most comprehensive marketing automation platforms on the planet.

It’s the complete tool, whether you work in marketing or sales and has a whole range of use cases on top of marketing automation, including:

• Account-based marketing
• Lead management
• Email marketing
• Multi-touch attribution

No wonder Gartner has named Adobe a market leader in automation for the past 11 years straight.

Size and comprehensiveness are defining features when it comes to Marketo Engage. That makes it perfect if you want to personalize the user experience across multiple touchpoints. It also is an ideal fit if you want to share marketing platforms between sales and marketing.

Size also means it’s not the cheapest platform on this list. In fact, Adobe doesn’t display pricing on its site, so you’ll need to get in touch to find out more.

14. Automate Inbound Call Analytics with Invoca

Do your sales and marketing efforts revolve around phone calls? Maybe you work with a sales team at an enterprise B2B company or have an e-commerce store with an active telephone support team. If so, Invoca is the marketing automation platform for you.

Invoca is powered by a smart conversation intelligence platform that lets you enhance every customer interaction, whether before or after the purchase.

Features include keyword call-tracking, phone surveys, caller-profile data, reverse lookup, conversation analytics, in-call scoring, geolocation routing, voice broadcasts, SMS, and more.

Keyword call tracking is a game-changer for voice interactions. Otherwise, you have no way of tracking that kind of data over the phone unless you’re manually recording calls and playing them back later. Even then, you’d have to manually track how those customers reacted after hearing certain keywords.

Better still, you can use Invoca to automatically score how your reps handle each call on a range of pre-defined criteria.

Unfortunately, they don’t publish their pricing. So you’ll have to get in touch with them to get a quote.

15. Deliver Personalized Campaigns Across Multiple Channels With Oracle Eloqua

Oracle’s B2B cross-channel marketing solution Oracle Eloqua lets marketers plan automated campaigns while simultaneously personalizing them.

The platform is built for B2B enterprise-level businesses, and comes with all of the features you’d expect from such a platform. These include:

• Campaign creation
• Segmentation and targeting
• Lead management
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Measurement and reporting
• AI capabilities

Like many of the enterprise-level tools in this list, Oracle does not publish pricing on its website. You’ll need to request a demo to find out more.

16. Automate the Customer Journey With LeadSquared

Do you want to save some cash and combine your CRM and marketing automation platform into the same tool? Then LeadSquared is the answer.

However, that doesn’t mean LeadSquared is light when it comes to marketing automation features. This tool will capture leads from inbound email, online campaigns, phone calls, your website, chat, and more. Then use LeadSquared’s Workflow Builder to create the perfect campaign.

As you’d expect from a CRM tool, integrations are a key part of LeadSquared’s offering. The platform integrates with almost every tool you use, including WhatsApp, Twitter, Shopify, Livechat, Zoom, Gmail, and more.

LeadSquared offers a free trial, and pricing for automation plans starts out at $400 for the basic package (10,000 contacts). The standard package (20,000 contacts) costs $1200, and the enterprise package (200,000 contacts) costs $2500.

17. Get CRM, Sales, and Marketing Tools Automated Together with Keap

Keap is another all-in-one CRM and marketing automation tool. Its CRM is a market leader, but its marketing automation system is not to be ignored — especially if you want the ease of keeping as many marketing and sales functions as possible in the same platform.

Keap makes it simple to create a new sales or marketing strategy and execute it so that you can capture and close sales more quickly.

Save time by automating repetitive tasks like follow-ups, billing, contact management, and payments with a this-then-that workflow.

If you want to get advanced, use Keap’s Advanced Automations builder to build automated marketing processes from scratch. You can integrate third-party apps into these workflows to save even more time.

Pricing starts at $149 for their Pro plan and $199 for their Max plan. You get 1500 contacts with Pro and 2000 contacts with Max as standard.

18. Attract, Capture, and Streamline Leads With Sugar Market

Do you want to cut the guesswork out of your marketing efforts? How about seeing how much you are really contributing to your company’s revenue goals? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then Sugar Market could be the marketing automation platform for you.

The truth is that 70 percent of the buying cycle is complete before the customer contacts sales. Sugar Market helps businesses build revenue funnels by creating custom digital conversations that marketing and sales representatives can use to convert customers.

But acquiring any old customers isn’t good enough. That’s why Sugar Market has predictive lead scoring that accurately predicts the likelihood of each lead converting.

That’s on top of all the other features you’d expect from a marketing automation system, like:

• Cross-channel engagement
• Integrations
• Analytics and reporting

Pricing depends on the number of contacts you want but begins at $1,000 per month for 10,000 contacts.

19. Segment and Automate Customer Experiences Using iContact

Is email your jam? Then you might want to try one of the world’s easiest email marketing automation tools, iContact. The platform provides marketing automation software, email marketing services, and more so that your team can drive successful results every time.

Focus on email marketing with all the tools you need to grow your list, create beautiful campaigns, personalize emails, and automate the entire process.

Then take things further with smart sending, audience segmentation, and A/B split testing.

If you ever get confused, you’ll have access to strategic advisors who can help you “optimize your sending strategy and inbox delivery for maximum conversions.”

Pricing starts as low as $14 per month for 750 contacts. It costs $65 per month for 5,000 contacts, and $350 for 50,000 contacts.

20. Get BuzzBuilder Pro to Automate Cold Email Campaigns

BuzzBuilder Pro bills itself as a complete outbound lead generation system and backs it up by giving you all of the tools you need to automate the process of getting new customers.

First, there is its email marketing automation feature, which lets you create cold and personalized email campaigns that run on autopilot.

Once you have a bucket of leads, BuzzBuilder’s Predictive Lead Scoring tool shows you where to focus your energy by rating the likelihood of each lead converting into a customer.

Automation is key at every stage of the process, allowing you to save five or more hours each week.

You will need to call for detailed pricing information.

21. Create Automated Marketing Workflows With Net-Results

Some marketing automation solutions are incredibly powerful but way too complex to use on a daily basis. Others are easy to use, but don’t have the capabilities that enterprise businesses need. If only there was a marketing automation tool that was just right.

Enter Net-Results.

Net-Results helps to automate almost every kind of marketing task imaginable, giving you the power you need while being easy to use.

Their goal is to help you save time while allowing you to better uncover and nurture leads so that your revenue will grow quickly.

Features include an email builder, form builder, landing page builder, campaign builder, and A/B-test builder. Nurture leads, automate workflows, and more.

Unlike other enterprise tools, Net-Results’ pricing is clear and obvious. Prices start at $800 per month, billed annually for less than 2,500 contacts, and go up from there.

22. Streamline and Simplify Marketing Automation With GreenRope

GreenRope is “the ultimate dashboard for your business.” Manage operations, sales, and marketing all from one dashboard that will help you visualize your performance and make key business decisions. It’s a CRM at its core, but it also has a raft of other features, including marketing automation.

When it comes to marketing automation, GreenRope has everything you could ask for. Create powerful automated workflows from scratch using the drag-and-drop customer journey builder or use one of GreenRope’s pre-set templates.

Make use of all of GreenRope’s features by creating an integrated customer experience. Connect your marketing campaigns with your CRM to customize every touchpoint and ensure that every time a new contact gets added to your CRM, they are automatically added to an existing marketing campaign.

GreenRope isn’t as expensive as you might think. Pricing starts at $99 per month for 500 contacts and goes up to $799 per month for up to 50,00 contacts.

23. Deliver Automated Email Campaigns Using MailChimp

If you haven’t heard of Mailchimp, where have you been living for the past 10 years? Mailchimp is one of the best-known and easy-to-use email automation platforms on the planet. This tool is perfect for contacting prospects or customers who are vital to your success. If you need an effective email tool, this is one you should definitely check out.

Features include email marketing automation, personalized emails, automated welcome emails, behavioral targeting, engagement monitoring, and more. With this tool, you can trigger emails based on actions like sign-up date and website activity.

Mailchimp goes beyond helping you with your email now, though. The platform also lets you create and manage retargeting ads, so you can re-engage lost visitors.

You can send up to 1000 emails with Mailchimp for free. The Essentials plan allows for 5,000 emails and costs $10.97 per month. Premium, the most expensive plan, costs $295.27 per month and gives you unlimited users and up to 150,000 monthly emails.

24. Automate Marketing Processes with Gliffy

Do you think better when you can see your marketing plans in diagrams and charts? Then Gliffy is the perfect marketing automation platform for you. It lets you create organizational charts, high-quality flowcharts, UML diagrams, network diagrams, technical drawings, wireframes, and more.

Unlike other tools of this nature, there’s no need to download additional software. It works in your web browser to help you visualize workflows and boost marketing productivity.

Key features include workflow organization, an intuitive interface, collaboration with anyone with access to a web browser, and more.

The best part? Gliffy has a free trial!

It’s not expensive if you’re willing to commit, either. Gliffy costs just $8 per user per month.

Bonus: Add fresh data to your marketing campaign with DataForSEO

DataForSEO provides “comprehensive SEO data via API at a predictable price.”.

While they mostly work with SEO providers, you can use their data to juice up your marketing efforts.

Here’s a list of APIs DataForSEO provides:

• Rank tracking API
• SERP API
• Keywords data API
• Competitor API
• OnPage API
• Keyword finder API

What I Looked At To Find the Best Marketing Automation Software

I stand behind all of my top recommendations, but as you can tell, these are very different products.

Finding the right tool for the job is extremely important. Marketing automation software that serves one company perfectly might be a poor fit for another.

Below, I’ve laid out the major criteria you should use to evaluate each option. Use this guide to narrow your search down to a solution that meets your company’s marketing challenges.

Your Industry and Business Type

B2B businesses have different marketing needs than B2C companies. Agencies may also require automation tools that make it easy to handle multiple campaigns at once.

The size of your business matters, too. Large companies run complex, massive-scale campaigns and have bigger pockets. So, small business tools aren’t a good match.

However, smaller companies will probably find enterprise-grade features confusing and wildly out of budget, which is why those small business tools exist in the first place.

So, pay attention to who the software is built for when making your final decision.

Number of Contacts

Most pricing plans vary depending on the number of contacts or leads you have. The larger your list, the higher the price.

If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of contacts, enterprise-grade solutions are going to be more cost-effective. However, that’s not the case if you have a few hundred or even a few thousand leads on your list.

You’ll also want to think about how your list may grow in the future and what impact that will have on price and performance. A platform that offers a cost-effective solution right now may become unaffordable when you add 10,000 more contacts to your list. Similarly, some tools may not have the features required to run the kind of complex, multi-faceted campaigns you aspire to execute in the future.

Your Marketing Channels

Different marketing automation software supports various marketing channels.

From SMS and email marketing to social media and push notifications, it’s crucial to choose software that handles everything you need.

Smaller businesses with simple campaigns may not utilize a wide range of channels and can get away with using a more affordable tool.

However, large businesses with complex campaigns spanning numerous channels need something more robust to manage all the moving parts.

Furthermore, some software includes varying channels in different pricing tiers. So, you may start on one level and need to move up to gain access to more marketing channels. Or you may need to move to (or integrate) a new tool altogether.

It may help to map out your upcoming campaigns and decide which channels you plan to use.

Automation Features

Automation is at the heart of every tool on this list. But some offer more advanced automation features than others.

Do you need to score leads and prospects? Maybe you want to combine SMS, email marketing, and Facebook ads in the same customer journey. Or perhaps you need the ability to send hyper-targeted emails on autopilot.

Regardless of the complexity of your campaigns, don’t forget to consider:

• Split A/B testing
• Automated email campaigns
• Event and website tracking
• Contact management
• Visual customer journey mapping
• Automated segmentation and personalization
• Prospect and lead scoring
• Dynamic content
• Transactional emails
• AI-powered recommendations
• Action and logic-based triggers
• Reporting and analytics

You may not need all of them, and some tools don’t include them. So it’s critical to understand what you need (and don’t need) before making your decision.

Additional Features

It’s not uncommon for marketing automation software to include a handful of features typically found in a CRM tool, like live chat or customer support capabilities.

Before making a final decision, it’s essential to understand which additional features you need to fill the gap between marketing and sales or customer service.

You may already have these systems in place. So you won’t want to pay for additional features. But if you don’t, you might be able to save money, hassle, and time by choosing software that includes everything you’re missing under one roof.

FAQs

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is software that automates marketing workflows and handles routine tasks without marketers needing to interfere. 

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

Marketing automation allows you to get more done in less time, improves effectiveness, and provides access to far more data. For small or streamlined teams, it is ideal to do more with fewer resources. 

Are there any free marketing automation tools?

Some tools offer a free trial or free plan, including MailChimp, HubSpot, and Constant Contact.

What can I do with marketing automation?

A ton! You can automate email campaigns, reporting, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and much more. In some cases, you may be able to automate half of your job by using a comprehensive marketing automation tool. 

Conclusion

Good marketing has the ability to set you apart from your competition. However, it can be hard to keep up with what marketing strategies work and which ones don’t.

Even when you do, it’s hard to focus on all of them at once. You don’t always have the time or energy to do it. Neither do I.

Thankfully, marketing automation tools exist to make marketing easier for you and your team. By automating, you can spend your time and attention focusing on other efforts that will increase your company’s success.

Try out some of these marketing automation tools based on your needs and budget. Kick back as they streamline your processes for you. Then, pick your favorites and stick with them.

What marketing automation tools are you using?

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