Today’s post is on the best marketing automation tools that you should be using. Due to our tight schedules, due to our hectic lifestyles, we don’t have time to think about “what do I need next?” And this is why I’m writing this post. This post will save tons of your time, but it will also help you gain tons of profit in the next months/years. After reading this post, you will be able to choose one out of these marketing automation tools and optimize your time & leads for more leads. Trust me, these are the best tools out there!
Hubspot — The Best Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing Automation Software
If you’re looking for an easy way to automate your sales, customer service, and marketing processes, Hubspot Growth Suite is an excellent and affordable solution.
And the best part? Hubspot goes beyond automating your business processes. It also helps integrate and optimize different departments in one centralized location, thus streamlining your entire business’s workflow.
However, their marketing automation capabilities are powerful on their own, with features like:
- Blog post and SEO planning
- Ad tracking and management
- Social media management
- AI-powered live chat
- Email marketing
- Forms and landing pages
- Revenue attribution reporting
- Visual workflow builder
- Account-based marketing
- A/B split testing
- Predictive lead scoring
Hubspot offers basic features, like emails, landing pages, forms, and live chat capabilities for unlimited users absolutely free. So, you can try it out without spending a penny.
Alternatively, you can sign up for a free demo to see all of their advanced features in action.
The Growth 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 $11.25 per month, and additional users cost $6 per month.
But they also have advanced plans for larger and more complex campaigns, including:
- Professional — $1,780 per month for advanced features
- Enterprise — $4,000 per month for all features
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. Basically, HubSpot makes it cheaper to grow faster.
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.
Constant Contact — The Best for Engaging Social Media & Email Prospects
Modern marketing doesn’t happen on one channel. It’s happening all across the internet on a wide array of devices all at once.
There are many omnichannel solutions for marketing automation, but Constant Contact takes the cake for most businesses needing an easy way to join email and social media efforts.
With its unified dashboard that anyone can use, Constant Contact lets you stay on top of both with ease. You can push new social posts and reply to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn from the same place you can set up automated email sequences and drip campaigns.
Schedule out social posts for next month or quarter and then sync that messaging up with your email campaigns. Plus, with the platform’s intensely customizable emailer, you can segment messaging with individual sequences that are based upon what you know about your contacts.
Whether you’ve gathered crucial info about your list members manually or you use Constant Contact’s custom form builder to capture it on your landing pages, you can set up individual email sequence tracks based on any of it that will automatically send based on triggers that you set.
So, 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 Pacific 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 is available on all of Constant Contact’s plans. But its most useful email features come in the Email Plus plan. In it, you can set up automated behavioral and welcome sequences, plus include dynamic content in your emails.
Email Plus starts at $45/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 unlimited email sends and automated email resends to non-openers with the standard Email plan. That’ll run you $20/month for up to 500 contacts.
Unify your social and email campaigns by getting started with Constant Contact.
EngageBay — The Best for Improving Your Customer Support
How does marketing automation help your support team? EngageBay knows you can’t have sales, marketing, and support existing only in siloes, especially if you sell a product or service where post-sale engagement is every bit as crucial as getting to a sale in the first place.
Specifically, EngageBay’s automation capabilities help your customer service in a couple of ways. First, the same automation tools that allow you to set up triggers, email sequences, and drip campaigns are also available to support reps.
In this platform, you can set up automations based on several service triggers:
- Ticket creation
- Ticket status change
- Ticket priority change
- Assigned rep change
- Tags added or removed
EngageBay has an easy-to-use automation builder that allows you to set actions or conditions based on those triggers, making it easy to streamline the flow of support requests and lessen the pressure on your reps to handle backlog. Priorities and assignees are set clearly and updated automatically, taking a lot of manual work off your plate.
But the second, and perhaps bigger, benefit is how well this integrates with marketing and sales automation to create a better customer experience from start to finish.
EngageBay’s automation tools can start from the moment a prospect expresses interest by joining your list. From there, through your sales funnel and beyond the purchase, this CRM can take care of 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 is handling more than troubleshooting issues. Maybe your service team also provides continuing customer training (something that’s 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.
Maybe best of all, EngageBay can be tried out for completely free. They have a free-forever package that lacks the automation tools, but allows you to get used to the platform and dashboard.
Automation tools start at $29.99 per user/month in the Growth plan. That can handle up to 50,000 contacts and 25,000 branded emails per month. Need more contacts? Upgrade to Pro for $47.99 per user/month to have no limits on the number of contacts, plus get double the emails that Growth offers and more advanced features.
Bring together your three core departments and provide them all the same useful automation tools by signing up with EngageBay today.
ActiveCampaign — The Best for Email Marketing Automation
Email is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. All the tools on this list include email marketing in one form or another, but ActiveCampaign specializes in it.
So, it’s an excellent option if you want to hone in and focus on improving your email marketing strategy. It’s also a super affordable tool that includes numerous automation features for leads anywhere in your funnel.
With that said, they also offer 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 ecommerce
You can also set up numerous types of emails like autoresponders, targeted or triggered emails, broadcasts, scheduled emails, and automated funnels.
And 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 — $9 per month with up to three users
- Plus — $49 per month with up to 25 users
- Professional — $129 per month with up to 50 users
- Enterprise — $229 per month with unlimited users
Each tier includes more advanced features, and pricing is based on the size of your list, starting for up to 500 contacts.
So, keep in mind that you will have to pay more than the prices above as your list grows.
Freshworks CRM — The Best for Small to Midsize Businesses
Freshmarketer was one of my favorite marketing automation platforms. There was a lot of customizability to get campaigns just right, but it wasn’t required. I never had to hire a professional service to babysit the software in order for it to work.
Freshmarketer is now Freshworks CRM, and it’s phenomenal. Now, intelligent marketing automation is just one part of an exceptional platform that anyone in the office can use.
SMBs don’t have to worry about hiring a team of super-users just to run campaigns, but they get a lot of the marketing automation features they need to attract customers, nurture their audiences, understand their needs, and drive conversions.
It’s my #1 recommendation for most users—and for a good reason.
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. All while doing less work with better results.
Plus, 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 incredible 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
Furthermore, 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.
You can try Freshworks CRM 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 depend on the number of contacts you have, so keep that in mind.
They offer Growth, Pro and Enterprise plans of the full Freshworks CRM, or just the marketing services. Plans for the full CRM start at $29/month for 1,000 active contacts. Plans for Marketing Cloud start at $19/month for 500 contacts.
Pardot — The Best for B2B Businesses
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.
But it is a bit expensive, so it’s best suited for larger businesses. Their 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
They also offer 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 pronounced par-dot. The “t” is not silent.
Get in touch with Pardot today.
Acoustic — The Best Enterprise-Grade Multi-Channel Marketing Automation Software
Acoustic offers an array of marketing automation products for centralized cross-platform multi-channel marketing. From personalization and email campaigns to web content management and experience management, they offer something for everyone.
Acoustic Campaign is their marketing automation tool, encompassing mobile apps, push notifications, SMS, group chats, social media, ads, email, print campaigns, and more.
You can also combine this with Acoustic Personalization and Acoustic Analytics for a powerful combination of campaign management, data, and using that data to deliver the right message at the right time.
With Acoustic Campaign, you get access to powerful features, including:
- Drag and drop campaign builder
- Action, logic, and AI-recommended triggers
- Seamless mobile and digital channel campaigns
- Lead management and scoring
- Split A/B testing
- Customer journey mapping
- Planning and budgeting
- One-to-one ads and lookalike audiences
- Advanced personalization
- Reporting and analytics
Furthermore, they have a community forum where you can publicly ask questions. They also provide an online academy packed full of educational videos and training so you can get the most of your custom automation package.
Note: Acoustic is built for moderate to large volume campaigns with countless moving parts. So, it’s perfect for businesses managing complicated campaigns across numerous channels.
But it’s overkill for a lot of businesses and anyone running single-channel campaigns.
Pricing isn’t available online, and you have to schedule a consultation to learn more. So, keep in mind that you won’t be able to sign up and get started immediately.
Act-On — The Best for Marketing Agencies
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.
And 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 going on.
Furthermore, 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.
2. Sendinblue
Sendinblue first became highly-regarded as an underdog in the world of transactional email tools before they began to make waves with their marketing automation product.
Granted, Sendinblue’s visual marketing automation builder may not be as visually attractive as ActiveCampaign’s, but it’s no less powerful. In fact, Sendinblue’s automation builder is so free of bells and whistles that it’s actually quite refreshing to use after using some of the tools that require contacting support or reading documentation just to complete basic tasks.
So, what are the main benefits?
1. Pricing – Sendinblue is one of the most affordable email marketing tools and offers marketing automation for free if you have fewer than 2,000 contacts. While most companies looking for marketing automation will have more than this, their pricing is still reasonable and based largely on email volumes.
2. Deliverability – Having used Sendinblue for one of our ventures, I can vouch for the fact that Sendinblue’s deliverability rates are very good – and recent research reports put them as having one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry.
The main downside we’ve faced using Sendinblue is their sending limits. While it’s likely a flipside of their deliverability rate being so good, Sendinblue limits how many emails you can send. While it appears to be a monthly limit, it’s actually a daily limit (the monthly limit is divided by 30). This has caused us several issues when going over our quota has meant emails end up being put on hold until the next day.
With that said, we still use Sendinblue to this day and consider it to be a good, stable, and relatively simple marketing automation tool. Being a French company, Sendinblue was one of the first marketing automation companies to declare GDPR compliance, and their history in transactional email has meant that they’ve been able to offer many marketing automation features that are difficult to find elsewhere, such as SMS messaging and real-time deliverability reporting.
Autopilot
When I first tested Autopilot, I had fairly low expectations. I expected it to be just another carbon-copy marketing automation tool with nothing new to add.
But that all changed when I saw the best-designed canvas for building email automation sequences that I’ve come across.
If you’ve ever built an email automation sequence, you know how quickly they can become confusing. Autopilot solves this in a rather quirky way, by allowing you to annotate your automation sequences with emojis, stickers and explanations, making it easy for teams to collaborate on building sequences.
While it can look a bit messy at first glance, this feature makes it possible to revisit an automation sequence a year after building it and quickly get up to speed with that’s going on.
Another feature I love about Autopilot is its ability to trigger actions in your other tools inside Autopilot. This saves having to configure integrations using a tool like Zapier and makes your sequences much easier to understand.
Autopilot’s reporting is also world-class. By default, Autopilot encourages you to set a goal for each automation sequence, so that you can later view reports around how that automation sequence is hitting its goal.
For example, if I set a goal for my lead nurturing journey to convert 20% of contacts to buy my product, I can then produce a report like this.
Starting at $49/month for 2,000 contacts, Autopilot is far from the cheapest option, particularly considering that Autopilot does not offer an in-built CRM. However, Autopilot is extremely intuitive and great for teams that need to collaborate on powerful email automation sequences. If we had to move from ActiveCampaign, this is likely where we’d go.
Omnisend
Founded in 2014, Omnisend is a relatively new tool on the marketing automation scene, but that hasn’t stopped it becoming a leading marketing automation tool for e-commerce companies.
While their platform is far from the best designed, they have a number of innovative features, including integrations with Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, to help e-commerce marketers automate their marketing across numerous channels.
By only working with e-commerce companies, Omnisend’s email templates are all designed to solve specific challenges faced by e-commerce marketers, from reducing cart abandonment to driving product reviews.
But the main reason why Omnisend is the no-brainer marketing automation tool for e-commerce businesses is the fact that they natively integrate with your e-commerce platform.
Whether you use Shopify, Magento, or any other major platform, Omnisend will hook in, so that you can trigger your campaigns based on your customer’s behaviour and see reports on how your marketing automation impacts sales.
Besides their platform’s mediocre look and feel, the only remaining downside to address with Omnisend is cost.
To access the features that make Omnisend interesting, you’ll need a PRO account which starts at $199/month for 10,000 contacts. Unlike HubSpot, Omnisend’s pricing does remain quite reasonable as you grow, but nonetheless – it’s not cheap.
Rejoiner
Our final contender is for those wishing to delegate management of their marketing automation to a team of experts.
Rejoiner is a managed marketing automation platform. Unlike most tools where you pay your subscription fee and must then figure out how to use the tool to grow your business, Rejoiner shares this accountability.
Their platform is intuitive and is particularly well-tailored to e-commerce and SaaS businesses, where incremental improvements can result in major uplifts in revenue.
But it’s their à la carte services on everything from marketing automation strategy to the copywriting, design and deliverability testing, that separates them from every other marketing automation tool.
I should probably also point out that it works. When we were analysing over 100+ marketing automation tools in our study, Rejoiner came out extremely high for one key reason: They had one of the highest satisfaction scores for customers.
As you’d expect, Rejoiner comes with a hefty price tag. I’m told that a typical client of theirs pays $4,000 – $6,000/month for their platform and services.
For the majority of readers, this isn’t going to be the right tool. But – if you’re looking for a marketing automation tool for a large SaaS or e-commerce platform, and don’t want building campaigns to take up precious internal resource, Rejoiner is the tool for the job.
Conclusion
Hubspot is my top recommendation for most businesses. It’s built for small to midsize companies interested in automating their marketing processes to grow their businesses and save time.
Plus, it’s affordable, easy to use, and packed full of powerful automation features.
However, it’s not the perfect solution for everyone. So, don’t forget to use the criteria we talked about as you sort through finding the best marketing automation software for you and your team.
you could try your hand on any of the tools above and see which works for you. cheers!