The 12 Best Marketing Automation Software
With marketing professionals getting busier by the day, there’s never been a greater demand for software and tools that make their jobs easier. From lead generation to managing email campaigns, there are countless ways marketing automation software can reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive or overly complex tasks.
However, with the global marketing automation software market expected to grow to $25.1 billion by the end of 2023, so many options mean that choosing the best marketing automation software for your organization can be a challenge. To help narrow down your choices, here are the 12 best marketing automation software options.
Best email automation software
When you think of marketing automation software, email is probably the first marketing channel that comes to mind. Ever signed up for an online store’s newsletter? Both the newsletter and the confirmation emails are probably sent by no-code automation tools.
Email marketing automation is usually triggered by actions customers and visitors take on an organization’s website. With the ultimate goal of driving conversions and revenue, email automation can be a powerful tool for any business. Kickstart your organization’s email program with the following email automation software.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the original email automation software solutions — and probably the most well-known.
With Mailchimp, you can create and automate personalized marketing journeys that are driven by customer data and behavioral patterns. You’ll never have to wonder whether you’re sending the right email at the right moment, as Mailchimp’s optimization automatically does this for you.
In addition to their email automation specialties, Mailchimp allows you to automate your e-commerce actions through the platform of your choice so you can target your messages and emails even more accurately.
Pricing: Mailchimp offers a free plan for beginners looking to try out basic automation tools, while paid plans start at $11 monthly based on 500 contacts.
Salesmate
Salesmate is a CRM and customer journey software. Salesmate might be one of your company’s best cost-to-value investments because it can be a beneficial tool for the sales, marketing, and customer experience teams.
For marketing teams, Salesmate is a potent CRM email marketing tool that may assist you in quickly designing and implementing campaigns.
Email campaigns are created using a drag-and-drop journey builder by Salesmate. Additionally, this tool is not just for emails.
You can use different indicators, such as Live Views, Campaign Goals, Automation Logs, etc., to quickly monitor your campaigns’ effectiveness. You have enough information from that to run A/B tests on campaigns and find the best fit.
Pricing: The starting price ranges from $12 to $40 per user each month. Meanwhile, there are useful add-ons to improve your everyday workflow.
Moosend
Moosend offers an easy-to-use interface that empowers you to create unique marketing automations.
If you’re looking to create emails, Moosend provides a simple drag-and-drop builder in addition to their proven email templates. Once a potential customer visits your website, your automated Moosend campaign begins. Based on a number of triggers you can customize, the visitor will receive a relevant email based on Moosend’s proven data. Whether you’re looking to remind someone of an item they’ve left in their card, onboard new users, or qualify leads, Moosend has an automated solution for your business.
Pricing: Moosend offers a 30-day free trial, with paid plans starting at $9 monthly.
SendX
SendX is an intuitive and affordable email marketing tool. SendX provides unlimited email sends with every plan, powerful automation capabilities, and best-of-breed email deliverability. It offers a wide range of professional-looking and well-optimized email templates to choose from, a simple and agile drag-and-drop editor with easy navigation, and enables catering to mobile users with optimization for mobile.
You can segment the customers on the basis of demography, subscriber behavior, and more than 25+ other parameters. It offers a free migration service from any ESP, a bundle of responsive email templates, and over half a million stock-free images for your email campaigns.
If you are looking for an ESP that can provide you with all the capabilities you need to implement your email marketing strategy, you should consider trying SendX.
Pricing: There is a 14 Day Free Trial (no credit card required, instant setup). The monthly paid plan starts at $9.99.
SendInBlue
Rated the “best Marketing Automation platform for small and medium-sized businesses,” allows you to save time and boost conversions by automating your segmentation and marketing messages.
With both beginner and advanced automation workflow options, SendInBlue allows you to create a customized experience for every single customer, no matter how big (or small) your business is.
You can track customers through the buying process with lead scoring and onboarding workflows that adjust to fit their needs, plus you’re able to test multiple paths by A/B testing your email automation messaging.
Pricing: You can get started with a free plan, while paid plans begin at $27.90 monthly.
Best social media marketing automation software
Social media automation helps social media managers save time when it comes to repetitive tasks. While you want to be choosy when it comes to what social media tasks you automate (ie. you probably don’t want to have a bot writing your Instagram captions), strategic social media automation can significantly boost your brand’s success.
Here are a few social media automation tools with everything from scheduling and publishing posts to reporting and analytics.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite offers an all-in-one solution for busy social media managers. Their most well-known automation tool is Hootsuite Publisher, which determines and suggests the best times to post content and allows you to bulk schedule up to 350 social media posts at once.
In addition to their publishing tool, Hootsuite’s Analyze tool provides real-time updates and reviews for automated social media reporting and analytics. You’ll get an automatic overview of how well your content is performing, and on which channels.
Additionally, the Hootsuite Insights tool (powered by Brandwatch) ensures you won’t need to be manually monitoring what others are saying about your brand. It automatically alerts you if there are unusual spikes in mentions or significant changes in sentiment, potentially saving you from social media crises.
Pricing: A 30-day free trial is available, with paid plans after that starting at $49 monthly.
Heyday
With a recent Meta (Facebook) report finding that 69 percent of Americans feel more confident about a brand when they can message them through social media, it’s clear that digital customer service is an important part of any marketing strategy.
In addition to automating routine inquiries (such as order tracking and refunds), Heyday’s virtual sales assistant tool offers customers personalized product recommendations through your company’s social networks.
The enterprise-level tool’s “Conversational AI” virtual assistant uses natural language to elevate the customer experience, while saving your social and customer service teams valuable time. While Heyday’s platform can automate around 80 percent of a business’ inquiries, the tool enables a handoff to a “real” member of your team if the inquiry is more complex. Bonus: Heyday is now a part of Hootsuite, making your social media automation strategy even more simplified.
Pricing: Best suited for Enterprise-level users, Heyday can be purchased through your Hootsuite representative.
MobileMonkey
With Heyday (under Hootsuite) a great option for larger businesses, MobileMonkey’s InstaChamp tool provides a social media customer support automation solution for small-to-medium-sized organizations.
Through MobileMonkey, social media managers can automate messages through Facebook and Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) as well as automate responses to post comments. Not only does this save your social media team countless hours where they’d be manually responding to messages, but it improves customer engagement and satisfaction.
For example, if you’re running an Instagram contest where participants have to share one of your post’s in their Instagram Story for a chance to win, it would almost be impossible to respond to each user. With MobileMonkey, you can send automated thank you messages to every participant, letting them know that you appreciate their engagement or even sending them a promotional code just for entering.
Pricing: A free plan is available, with paid plans starting at $9.95 per month.
The best all-in-one marketing automation software
If you’re looking for multiple functions within one tool, an all-in-one marketing automation software solution might be the best choice for your business. These tools usually include automated campaign management, email marketing, landing pages, lead management, and a variety of other capabilities.
These are some of our favorite options for businesses needing a more robust automation tool.
Pardot
As part of Salseforce, Pardot is a comprehensive all-in-one marketing automation software tailored specifically towards larger B2B marketers.
With Pardot, you can target your communications with customers over multiple channels including email, social media, search marketing tools, and even their internet-supplied car if desired.
Some of Pardot’s features include data-based personalization, lead activity tracking, campaign, lifecycle, and performance reporting, as well as a multi-part automation creator (just to name a few).
Pricing: Pardot’s plans start at $1,250 monthly based on up to 10,000 contacts.
Marketo
Touted as the “world’s largest marketing automation platform,” Marketo (an Adobe company) offers countless features for mid to large-range businesses.
With Marketo, organizations can find and engage the right customers, build and scale automated campaigns, measure and optimize their marketing programs, and identify the most relevant sales prospects.
Using the power of AI and comprehensive behavioral data, Marketo helps businesses connect with their customers through automated personalized experiences, emails, landing pages, web properties, and more.
Pricing: While Marketo’s prices aren’t disclosed on their website, research reveals that their entry-level plan starts at $895 per month.
Keap
Targeted specifically towards entrepreneurs, Keap offers an all-in-one platform that automates marketing email, texts, landing pages, payments, and CRM tools. Thanks to these capabilities, Keap customers are said to save at least 10 hours per week.
A Keap customer survey found that 44 percent of potential clients will move on to a different company if a business doesn’t reply fast enough. With this in mind, they created an automated follow-up tool that sends text and email messages to prospective customers once they sign up via your site. In addition to this feature, some other example actions Keap can automate include appointment reminders and purchase follow-ups.
If you’re looking to incorporate your existing tech ecosystem, Keap’s Zapier integration connects to more than 2,000 apps so you have even more sales and marketing automation power.
Pricing: A 14-day free trial is available. After that, Keap’s paid plans start at $40 a month for your first two months.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s powerful features make it a popular choice when it comes to all-in-one marketing automation software solutions.
While HubSpot can help you automate simple email workflows, the tool’s possibilities go far beyond the basics. Using a visual board, you can map out the workflows you want automated. Here, you can use advanced segmentation logic to target specific customers with the appropriate workflows, plus personalize emails using your CRM.
HubSpot is made to work across a variety of teams and with countless integrations (sales software, marketing software, and support software), which helps ensure follow-ups and leads are never lost or ignored. For example, you can set up internal notifications when a client makes a purchase or signs up for an email promotion, where the task is then automatically added to your CRM or Salesforce.
Pricing: HubSpot’s paid plans start at $45 per month
Driving automatic
Automating repetitive tasks is one of the best ways to save time and resources for your business. With marketing automation software available for everything from building email campaigns to nurturing leads, there are plenty of opportunities to make your work life easier — and drive more revenue for your company.
Need to sync Mailchimp and HubSpot to other tools?
With Unito, you can sync Mailchimp contacts, HubSpot deals, and more to the rest of your tool stack.