Marketing automation has gone through a drastic change in the past few years. Marketers, growth hackers, and founders have started using completely different marketing channels for their business.
Marketing automation tools have proven to be very effective when it comes to finding an automated marketing solution for your workflow. In fact, marketing automation has reached a new level with all the automation tools currently available on the market. Here are the best marketing automation tools to automate your workflow.
In this article
Why is Marketing Automation important for your business?
Before jumping directly to the tools, let’s first understand the benefits of marketing automation.
It saves time
Automation has been saving time for humans for ages. This is no different. Your marketing team can work more efficiently at other tasks if they save more time through automation.
Improves customer relationship
You can automate your marketing efforts and focus on lead nurturing and customer relationships. Here are tools that will give you insights on a customer’s journey on your website. You can identify the exact intent and treat each customer accordingly.
Workflow management automation
The biggest benefit through marketing automation is better workflow management. You can identify processes that could be automated like collecting forms, sending intent driven messages to customers and much more through these tools. After identifying these activities, you can automate these processes from your workflow. If you’re running a business, you must know everything about Workflow Management. It would help you a great deal while growing your business in the right direction.
Lets you take data-driven decision
When you have concrete data regarding each and every single strategy in your business, you can take decisions accordingly. You don’t need to shoot arrows in the dark anymore, you can use your marksmen to get ready for a bullseye every time.
Helps you get most of your budget
If you get the right tool, you might save enough to hire a new employee for your team. This way you are making the most use of your marketing budget by adding manpower from your savings. Marketing automation tools are not pricey and can definitely give you the value for money.
You may think that marketing automation is a process that is needed only for large international businesses, but there are affordable local marketing software options, that can be a good solution to any local business as well.
These were a few of the basic importance that every company will observe after using marketing automation tools. That being said, let’s jump right into the categories.
Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media has changed the way marketing worked. It has brought a paradigm shift in the marketing activities that were used to promote a brand. Here are some social media marketing automation tools for you.
1. Woorise
Woorise is the easiest way to create viral giveaways & contests, landing pages and engaging forms such as surveys and quizzes. It helps you to generate leads, grow your subscribers list and social media following, engage your audience and drive traffic to your website. It’s an ideal tool for businesses and e-commerce brands that want to increase sales and interest in their products.
Woorise integrates with popular marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, Google Analytics, Bitly, Zapier, PayPal, Stripe and many more.
Key Features :
- Drag & Drop Builder to create stunning Giveaways and Contests
- Conditional Actions & Confirmations
- Pre-Made Layouts & Templates
- Customization & Design Options
- Social Actions to Increase Engagement & Followers
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 23€/Month
Get started with your marketing automation for free!
2. Buffer
Buffer is a social media management app to drive engagement and results on social media. Its features will help you plan and schedule social media content. You can handle multiple accounts if you need them. It is also available on android and iOS so you can access your social media accounts from anywhere.
Price: Plans start from 15$/month
3. Hootsuite
Though email marketing automation is important, social media marketing is crucial too which is why so many businesses and marketers are looking for a way to automate at least part of their social media marketing efforts. Hootsuite is perhaps one of the most powerful and popular solutions in this category with an affordable price range and a variety of features to use on a daily basis.
Some of the most basic features Hootsuite provides include content scheduling and curation, conversation monitoring (when users talk about your brand online), and so on. In other words, you get everything you need to establish yourself online and start growing your social media follower base and community. You can also keep track of multiple social media channels all at once from a single dashboard.
Because you will be getting notifications about everything happening in real-time, you will get the ability to find user-generated content almost instantly and either repost it on your page or respond to complaints quickly. For example, when a user posts a review of one of your new products, you can leave a comment under the post or repost it on your page. These will also help you interact more with potential customers and attract followers to your accounts.
Price: Plans start from 25$/month
4. CoSchedule
Though CoSchedule is more expensive than Hootsuite, it is a social media marketing automation solution that is just as popular. Just like Hootsuite, it focuses on planning your social media activity by scheduling posts and having an overview of your plans days, weeks, months, and even years in advance. Moreover, you can go back and reuse the content you have already posted before.
CoSchedule lets you manage multiple social media accounts from different social media platforms which means you have everything in one place. The platform lets you schedule over 60 posts at the same time and viewing your calendar as an interactive interface. The most useful aspect of CoSchedule is that it also allows you to view data for each of your posts so you can analyze their performance and decide what you will be doing next.
Like Hootsuite, it lets you reuse or republish your past posts, but it also has such unique features as WordPress compatibility and staff management. You can also use CoSchedule for customer support which is why it has become so popular among business owners and marketers alike. If you have tried Hootsuite before and weren’t satisfied with it, you can try CoSchedule for a change.
Price: Plans start from 17$/month
5. SocialPilot
Social Pilot is a scheduling and marketing tool for social media that is specially made for small businesses and digital marketing agencies. It has features that would help you schedule posts and get analytics on apps like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr.
Price: Plans starts from $25/mo
6. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a social media monitoring tool. You can get complete reports on what people are saying regarding your brand on social media. You can find specific posts and address them. Its core competency is that they claim it takes just a few seconds to set it up.
Price: Plans starts from 39$/Month
Email Marketing Automation Tools
Email marketing automation tools are amazing if you have an email list that you have built throughout your business life. You must start building your email list from scratch instead of trying to buy pre-made email lists. These tools let you automate that process of communicating with them.
7. Mailchimp
Almost everyone has heard of MailChimp one way or the other. This solution is specifically designed for email marketing and allows you to automate many processes without sacrificing a large part of your budget (the price range is much lower than all the previous marketing automation tools on this list). That being said, MailChimp is gradually expanding and starting to offer features both for email and for other types of marketing.
MailChimp assists you at every stage of email marketing. At first, it will help you get in touch with potential and existing customers to persuade them to keep you on their subscription list. Then, you will be using such features as welcome email automation, engagement monitoring, behavioral targeting, and so on to continue sending interesting email newsletters and other types of emails (e.g. transactional, notifications, etc.)
You can also use different logic programming to send out emails triggered by the actions your customers make. For instance, you could have a “Discounts & Sales” email being sent to the customers who regularly check your website for discounted items. The best thing is that MailChimp’s pricing starts at $0 if you have less than 2,000 contacts which means you will be able to use all of these magic features for free if you are just starting out.
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 9.99$/Month
8. SendInBlue
One of the best marketing automation tools currently available on the market is SendInBlue. When it comes to automating your communication with customers, this is the tool you will want to be using because it packs in so many different features all together in one place. Of course, it’s still worth looking at other options before you decide to choose SendInBlue as your go-to application.
SendInBlue is best used for email marketing automation, though it has various features for other purposes including CRM, SMS marketing, chatting, and so on. For instance, SendInBlue lets you segment your audience to personalize your emails and even direct your subscribers to landing pages (made by Woorise, for example), encourage them to use signup forms, use retargeting, and integrate Facebook Ads into your overall campaign.
This tool also has various common features that are an absolute must for email marketing. For example, lead scoring and reporting will give you insights about your email campaign. SendInBlue also has amazing customer support, so you can be sure that you will get a fast reply if you have any concerns about the program. This is especially important if you are new to using automation tools and will be learning a lot at the beginning.
9. Drip
If you want to automate your email marketing campaign, but you don’t want to or can’t pay a lot for your solution, Drip is probably the best thing you can find on the market at the moment. It’s a popular marketing automation tool with many features suitable primarily for e-commerce businesses. Moreover, it integrates perfectly with pretty much all the e-commerce tools you are already using.
By using the data you collect about customer behavior, you can then use Drip to personalize and automate your campaigns. Because it is so specifically suitable for e-commerce marketing, all of its features are quite well-developed with all the nuances of email marketing taken into account. For example, some of the features Drip offers include multi-channel marketing, email builders, one-off emails, and email campaigns.
Drip also makes sure that its users get the most accurate data through analytics which allows them to further customize and improve their marketing campaigns. Personalization also plays a major role for Drip which is why it offers so many features for using personalized content as a part of your marketing strategy. Besides, Drip is often regarded as a CRM platform, so you can be sure that it really does have nearly everything you could be looking for.
Price: Plans start from 19$/month for 500 contacts
10. Gmelius
Gmelius is a browser extension that allows you to transfer your Gmail and G Suite account into an automated workplace. You can automate your replies, send email outreach, and answer customer questions from their dashboard itself. You will find their app on the iOS & Android platform as well which would allow you to manage your email automation from remote spaces.
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 9$/Month
11. Mailshake
Mailshake is a tool that would enhance the efficiency of your sales team. You can send cold emails and set communication tasks with your prospects through a mobile phone or social media. It has native integration with sales platforms like Salesforce and Pipedrive. Other than that you can send mobile supported emails, Event-triggered emails, and manage your subscribers from the web app itself.
Price: 59$/Month
12. PersistIQ
It is a platform that would allow you to send email campaigns, email sequences, and track them packed in a chrome extension. It has a free plan where you can experiment with a few emails and send a 3 stage email sequence. You will also get an email tracker and email finder in the free plan. You can extend the plan after using it. This is again a sales friendly tool that would help you capture more leads through cold email campaigns.
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 29$/Month
Customer Engagement Tools
There are a few different ranges of tools that fall under the umbrella of customer engagement tools. These automation tools are the ones that help you maintain your relationship with customers as well as interact with them in some way. Here are some customer engagement automation tools.
13. Hubspot
Hubspot is a huge platform that allows you to automate your business at 360°. But the particular platform that we are talking about is useful to handle customers. You can integrate all your customer communication into one universal inbox. You can get the benefits of ticketing, Live chat on your website & chatbots.
Price: Free, Premium plans are 35$/month
14. Intercom
Intercom is a customer messaging system that would allow you to put a widget anywhere on your website that would allow you to directly communicate with your prospects. These are leads that are looking at your high intent pages. You can automate the initial message with a hook and start the conversation later. If all of your executives are busy, it will automate a response which collects the email address.
Price: Plans starts from 87$/Month
15. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign combines the features of a CRM and a marketing automation solution at an affordable price while still having many features to use. The aspect of ActiveCampaign that makes it truly special is that it doesn’t rely entirely on automation which is the approach most marketing automation tools take. Instead of automating all of your tasks, it helps you and your team enhance your actions by automating part of your tasks.
Marketing automation can’t solve all your problems, so it is important to differentiate between the tasks that need to be performed by human employees and the tasks that can be automated. ActiveCampaign uses such features like notification emails to inform the actions of your human employees who can then assess the automated tasks to see where there might be an issue with the process. In other words, these notifications are a safety measure.
This way, your human employees don’t get replaced entirely by software while the software you use doesn’t make too many mistakes by automating too many of your tasks. It takes some time to learn how to use ActiveCampaign, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run considering that it is fairly affordable and provides you with a multitude of both basic and advanced features to enhance your marketing campaigns.
Price: Plans start from 55$/month for 500 contacts
16. User.com
This tool allows you to interact with your customers with smart and easy tools. You can create UTM trackers for each user, build retargeting ads, nurture leads, and much more. These are all the marketing automation tasks that would require you to use multiple tools.
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 49$/Month
17. Crisp
Crisp is a customer support software that is designed after taking care of the needs of startups and SMBs while scaling their system. They have created a dashboard that includes Sales Marketing and Support. Their free plan includes a live chat feature with 2 operators.
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 25$/Month
18. Eloqua
Eloqua has been compared to Marketo, another popular marketing automation tool, quite a lot. Also known as Oracle Eloqua, this tool is incredibly expensive, so it is mostly suitable only for big companies and enterprises that have the resources to spare for a tool of this kind. Nevertheless, Eloqua is ultimately worth the money as it offers a wide array of different features pretty much for every situation imaginable.
One thing that really makes Eloqua stand out is the customer support and guidance you get from their team once you start using the marketing automation program. The integration provided by Eloqua is exceptional too, so if it is important for you to be able to combine your automation tool with a CRM, then Eloqua is probably a very good choice. In addition to that, you can also consider using other Oracle tools along with Eloqua.
You can integrate Eloqua with numerous other third-party services and tools – around 700 different options – to get the most out of your marketing automation strategy. This will also allow you to improve your marketing personalization and streamline all of your processes. Moreover, Eloqua is known for specializing in B2B companies, though other businesses, marketers, and entrepreneurs will find it just as useful.
Price: Customized
19. Poptin
It’s a lead capture platform that will help you convert more leads. Their platform will help you create smart pop-ups, forms, and widgets. You can create popups through easy and interactive inbuilt design tools within minutes.
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 19$/Month
20. Marketo
Like Eloqua, Marketo is not a very cheap automation tool. But just like Eloqua, Marketo has a variety of features that totally fits the price tag. In some sense, Marketo can cover almost every marketing channel you can think of, especially when you consider the fact that it was acquired by Adobe which only increased the number of tasks you can perform with the help of this marketing automation solution.
For example, if you get the full version, you will be able to use features both for social media marketing and for online advertising. Because of its integration with pretty much all the Adobe products, it is a powerful enterprise-level marketing automation tool. But while it is a popular tool, it is important to remember that small businesses and entrepreneurs will probably want to look elsewhere for a more affordable tool.
Marketo has some commonly found features as lead management and mobile marketing that allow you to get the most out of your campaigns by using all the possible options presented. By using such features, you also get the ability to continue your relationships with customers well beyond their purchases turning them from one-time clients to returning customers. In other words, Marketo gives your business longevity and your marketing more influence.
Price: Pricing is based on database size
21. Pardot
Like Eloqua and Marketo, Pardot is mostly suitable for big companies and enterprises. It is a part of SalesForce, and you will probably need some time to learn how to use it properly just like with the majority of complicated marketing automation platforms with numerous features. In other words, it is more of a suite of different tools that you can use to create a powerful and successful marketing strategy.
Pardot lets you automate your communication, integrate your CRM, start marketing through emails more effectively, use lead nurturing and scoring more efficiently, get accurate ROI reports, and so on. This solution also lets you track the interactions you have on your website which, in turn, lets you use this data to predict future customer actions and reduce the time you spend on potential customers that you won’t be able to convert into clients.
That being said, there are some things that Pardot can’t do. For example, it doesn’t have the lead generation functionality that is one of the most basic features of pretty much every marketing automation tool. It is still a very powerful marketing automation platform, so you shouldn’t dismiss it if you have the resources to spend on a solution like this and want to start learning a new program already used by millions of other companies like yours.
Price: Plans starts from 1,250$/Month (up to 10,000 contacts billed annually)
Search Engine Marketing
These marketing automation tools are related to the search engines that we use on a daily basis. The biggest search engines today are Google, Bing, and Baidu. Here are the search engine marketing tools:
22. AdRoll
AdRoll is a digital marketing platform. It has a free plan where you can create brand awareness ads for search engines like Google, and Bing. You can also create retargeting ads, and get audience insight. With 9$ a month, it is quite a good deal if you are a startup.
Price: Free, Premium plans starts from 9$/Month
23. SEMRush
SEMRush is a digital marketing tool for analytics. You can get the data of your competitors’ webpages and take decisions accordingly. This research would help you in your content marketing efforts. It has a pretty extensive plan for eCommerce projects and businesses that need a great web presence.
Price : 99.95$/Month
24. Wordstream
It is a digital advertising management software solution that allows you to manage your Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads campaigns in one dashboard. With a single tool, you get to create paid search engine ads as well as paid social media ads. They have created an intelligent algorithm that would suggest you change in your ad campaigns according to your personalized data.
Price: Based on your ad spend, Generally starts from 199$/month for 1000$ ad spend
25. Spyfu
Spyfu is a marketing platform that helps you analyze your competitors easily. The tools are easy and simple to use. You can create keyword listings and ad copy along with highly accurate competitors’ AdWords data. You can use the software to research organic search results from high performing pages and also identify top performance metrics.
Price : 39$/Month
Miscellaneous Tools
These tools are the ones that are useful in your marketing automation and it will also help you manage your workflow. But we could not put it in a particular category. So here are some miscellaneous tools.
26. Prisyc
Prisync is a price and merchandise management software. You can track your competitors’ products and prices by adding the URL of your competitor in the dashboard. You will get daily reports through different channels. If you use this automation in the right direction, you can derive a pricing strategy through this tool.
Price : 59$/Month
27. Partnerstack
It is a partner management platform that lets you automate your affiliate marketing efforts. You can get analytics of the clicks generated by every URL and data of all the working sources of your company-related content. You can create a marketing strategy that helps you achieve this goal better after this data.
Price: Customized
Conclusion
To sum up, marketing automation platforms have been around for quite some time now, so if you haven’t used any of them to this day, it’s probably about time for you to consider selecting the marketing automation tools you deem the most suitable in your circumstances. Let us know if we missed out on any tool that you use for your marketing automation in the comments.
