Marketing automation tools are the crucial part of the business. Without these, you would need to do all your work manually which is unlikely for a business to make profit. Marketing automation software help automate repetitive tasks like sending emails, triggering automated emails, tracking customer behavior and scheduling social media posts.
In this post, I start off by the intoducing you to the best recommended tools by experts. Below, you will find some additional tools that could also meet your business needs.
Recommended
Sendinblue — Best For Supercharging Your Customer Messaging
- POWERFUL AUTOMATION FOR EMAIL, SMS, & MORE
- EASY-TO-LEARN WORKFLOW BUILDER
- TOOLS FOR THE ENTIRE SALES FUNNEL
- PAGE TRACKING INCLUDED IN ALL PLANS
Sendinblue is an excellent, all-purpose tool for adding automation to your regular interactions with customers and prospects.
At its heart, Sendinblue is a powerful messaging platform to help you with emails, SMS texting and online chat. And its generous in its offerings—you get a platform for managing those three channels, plus unlimited contacts, advanced segmentation, real-time reporting, visitor tracking on your web pages, and a workflow automation builder all in its free forever plan.
What’s even better is that Sendinblue’s workflow builder is visually appealing with a very gentle learning curve. That opens up the benefits of time saved and always-prompt responses to your whole team, even if they’re not already familiar and comfortable with automation tools.
Sendinblue has really helpful walkthroughs on building both simple and complex workflows, quickly getting your people up to speed on everything from automating welcome messages to triggering events based on customer, subscriber, or web visitor actions.
It’s worth noting that the Free and Lite plans will limit your automated workflows to apply to up to 2,000 contacts. At the higher tiers—Premium and Enterprise—you get unlimited automation as well as deep reporting, including heat maps, geolocation, device information, and more detailed open and click metrics.
There are also potent conversion-boosting features, like a landing page builder, Facebook advertising tools, and customizable signup forms.
Pricing for Sendinblue is eminently scalable. The free forever version is great for getting started and allows you to send up to 300 emails per day.
Paid plans break down as follows:
Lite
- Starting at $25/month for 10,000 emails
- Scales up to $99/month for up to 100,000 emails
- No daily sending limit
- Includes email support, A/B testing, and Sendinblue branding removal
Premium
- Starting at $65/month for 20,000 emails
- Scales up to $599/month for 1 million emails
- Everything in Lite, plus:
- Unlimited usage of automation tools
- Facebook ads and landing pages
- Detailed geographic, device, heat map, open, and click reporting
- Phone and chat support
- Multi-user access
Enterpise
- Custom pricing for custom volume of emails
- Dedicated account manager
- Service Level Agreement
- Dedicated IP address
- Fewer limitations and custom solutions for your needs
There’s a Sendinblue plan that can work for any organization of any size or need.
Try out Sendinblue through its free forever version today.
ActiveCampaign — Best For Small Business
- STARTS AT $49 PER MONTH
- TRUSTED BY 90,000+ BUSINESSES
- EASY TO USE
- 14 DAY FREE TRIAL
More than 90,000 businesses trust ActiveCampaign for marketing automation. It’s arguably the best visual automation builder with drag-and-drop functionality on the market today.
ActiveCampaign makes it easy for anyone, regardless of technical skill level, to set up both simple and complex marketing automations.
They offer great features from site tracking to event tracking, attribution, split actions, and automation goals.
I highly recommend ActiveCampaign for newer, small businesses. That’s because they take a complex subject and simplifies it with an easy to use dashboard and management tools. This is ideal for any new entrepreneurs out there looking to dip their toes into marketing automation.
Pricing for ActiveCampaign Plus with CRM and sales automation starts at $49 per month. The price is based on the number of contacts in your list. This subscription comes with email marketing, lead scoring, ecommerce integrations, and more.
If you want advanced features such as customer attribution, path to purchase, split automations, and machine learning capabilities like predictive sending, predictive content, and win probably, you’ll need to upgrade to ActiveCampaign Professional. This package starts at $129 per month.
At both of these price points, ActiveCampaign is an affordable option for small businesses. Try it free for 14 days.
Salesforce Pardot — Best For B2B Marketing
- STARTS AT $1,250 PER MONTH
- BEST FOR B2BS
- ROI REPORTING
- ADVANCED AUTOMATIONS
Salesforce is one of the most reputable and well known CRM solutions on the market today. So it’s no surprise to see Salesforce Pardot rank so high on our list of the best marketing automation software.
This software is made with B2B companies in mind with features like streamlined lead management, smart lead generation, email marketing, and sales integration.
Salesforce Pardot leverages the power of AI to improve your marketing efforts and sales strategy. You’ll also benefit from insightful ROI reporting to determine what campaigns are working and which ones need improvement.
Here’s a quick look at the Salesforce Pardot pricing options:
With plans starting at $1,250 per month, this software obviously isn’t the cheapest option on our list. But with that said, this type of pricing is expected for a B2B solution of this caliber.
Pardot makes it easy for you to create data-driven campaigns with a powerful and flexible visual builder. Simply map out each touchpoint in your funnel to improve the customer experience and identify gaps in the process.
Salesforce Pardot gives you detailed reports and analytics so you can improve automation campaigns based on real results as opposed to guesswork.
For B2B organizations seeking marketing automation software, Salesforce Pardot is second to none. The biggest drawback is the price, especially considering that you need to commit to a one-year contract. But you won’t have to worry about performance. Salesforce Pardot has everything you could possibly need and more in terms of software in this category.
Contact the Salesforce Pardot sales team to request a free demo.
Additional Information
For Lead Generation
- Rapportive: Gmail plug-in that displays contact information via LinkedIn. Can also help to verify emails.
- Conspire: Networking tool that helps to find mutual friends with people you want to meet.
- Verify-Email: Insert and verify any email.
- PluckHQ: Track keywords on twitter & gather contact information for leads list.
- Clearbit.com: Enter basic information on a lead and get an entire user profile.
- Mode Analytics: A SQL editor, Python notebook, and visualization builder, all rolled into one.
- Grabby.io: Pulls email addresses from websites.
- ScrapeBox: Link building tool and blog commenting
- Audiense: Helps you identify influencers on social platforms
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: A tool to investigate leads and find anyone on LinkedIn.
- Fakers.statuspeople.com: Audit Twitter followers to make sure partnerships are what they are.
- Charlie App: Automatically receive a one page email detailing all recent information about your contact before a meeting.
For Strategy
- KeywordTool.io: Helps you generate keywords based on actual search data.
- Survey.io: Survey your customers for free.
- WayBackMachine: See the old designs of any website.
- UseFomo: Adds a social effect to your website to create Fomo for your audience.
- Ahrefs: Understand traffic, back-links and keywords all in one place of any domain.
- SEMRush: See the keywords competitors are ranking for and what words they are bidding on.
- BuiltWith: Learn who uses what tools and where.
For Creative
- HemingwayEditor: Catches complex and big words to edit your writing and keep it simple.
- Litmus: Tests what Gmail tab your email will end up in.
- Unsplash: Stock photos
- Pexels: Stock photos
- Pixabay: Stock photos
- Startup Stocks: Startup Stock Photos
- GoodEmailCopy: The best copy examples compiled from various startups.
- PlusThis: Countdown timers implanted into your email to add urgency.
- InfusionSoft: Great 7 day email sequences.
- SumoMe: Heat maps to pop ups to social sharing, SumoMe grows your mail list.
- Unbounce: Build custom landing pages for any campaign, and use overlays to increase conversions.
- OptInMonster: Create & A/B test beautiful lead capture forms without a developer.
- HelloBar: Top and bottom bar pop-ups
- Dont-go: Changes your favicon & website titles upon exit-intent.
- Canva: Easily create beautiful designs + documents.
- HubSpot Signature Builder: A fun tool to create professional signatures
For Data & Analytics
- HotJar: Track and understand all user behavior with visual data.
- HeapAnalytics: Enhanced analytics in a simple platform.
- Alexa: Understand all competitor traffic.
- LuckyOrange: A suite of tools for tracking & understanding analytics of visitors on your website.
- SharedCount: Track shares, likes and social volume on pieces of content.
For Customer Support
- Intercom: Messaging products for sales, marketing & customer service to one platform.
- WalkMe: Create simple tool-tips to walk someone through your website.
- Qualaroo: Survey people in a simple way.
- Typeform: Create amazingly simple surveys for your website.
For Distribution
- Mailchimp: Online email marketing solution to manage subscribers, send emails, and track results.
- MixMax: Track, automate, and enhance your emails.
- BananaTags: Add email tracking, attachment tracking, email scheduling to your daily emails
- Thunderclap: Crowdfunding but for social media. Plan a community instance for sharing.
- Snip.ly: Add a personalized pop up to an external link you share online.
For Automation
- Buffer: Schedule & share your content at the best possible times throughout the day.
- UpWork: The largest online workplace to hire contract workers.
- Clickfunnel: Helps you build click funnels and workflows that optimize.
- MassPlanner: Automate the outreach on your social platforms.
- Hitleap: Gather fake traffic to throw off competitor campaigns.
- Ohdontforget: Schedule & automate text messages for one cent.
- Zapier: Moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on important work.
- IFTTT: Create workflows and automation for daily items.
- Instagress: Automates outreach on Instagram.
- Postradamus: Manage, schedule & automate your social media.
For Organization
- Trello: Organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding way.
- Slack: Real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams.
- Asana: Online tool to manage team projects and to-do lists.
- Expensify: A tool to help enhance the speed to which your team completes expense reports.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is one of the most useful productivity tools for digital marketing. It makes it possible to send targeted email campaigns, manage your website and social media automatically, optimize your advertisements and much more. Marketing automation software is used by all types of companies across all industries, including small business owners.