15 Marketing Automation Tools for 2021
Research shows that 51% of companies today are using marketing automation tools, with 58% of B2B companies planning to adopt the technology soon. The software automates marketing tasks, streamlines workflows, and helps to measure the results.
These tools function as your central marketing database for all information and interactions, helping to establish segmented, timely, and personalized marketing experiences. Here are the 15 best marketing automation tools for lead management, collecting customer information, and tracking your campaigns’ entire lifecycle.
HubSpot Marketing
With over 60,000 users worldwide, Hubspot is among the most powerful marketing automation tools on the market. The tool offers a full growth suite that includes marketing software, sales software, and support. Even better, it’s compatible with B2B and B2C businesses in different segments, including retail, marketing, real estate, accounting, and more.
Hubspot comes with a user-friendly visual board that helps you create simple or highly complex conditional workflows. It might take some time to master everything in the tool, though Hubspot’s Academy will help you scale-up more quickly.
Active Campaign
Active Campaign is a Chicago-based email automation tool helping over 90,000 businesses send fewer emails while achieving better results. The tool boasts a plethora of features and integrations, with affordable pricing plans and friendly customer support.
When it comes to automation, Active Campaign allows autoresponders based on different preset conditions. You can also manage your contact list within its CRM system, while the customer messages feature helps you send transactional emails to your site’s visitors.
Autopilot
Whether you’re a startup or a Fortune 500 company, Autopilot is a great way to build visual customer journeys. Everything is well designed in a friendly and easy to navigate interface, and you can annotate your automation sequences with stickers, emojis, and explanations. That makes it easy for teams to get involved in building sequences.
Users also love Autopilot’s ability to trigger actions on other tools included. That saves you from configuring integrations on tools like Zapier, making your sequences easier to follow and understand. Even better, Autopilot boasts of world-class reporting and also encourages you to set goals for each automation sequence.
Convert Kit
While ConvertKit is relatively new in the market, it remains among the most powerful email marketing automation tools out there. The tool was created with content creators and bloggers in mind, making it an excellent beginner option.
Don’t expect any whistles or bells, as ConvertKit doesn’t even come with email templates. In fact, they encourage their users to send emails with plain text to increase user engagement. As such, it’s a decent option for beginners looking for an affordable marketing automation tool for content-based businesses.
SharpSpring
Launched in 2014, SharpSpring is a reputable cloud-based marketing tool offering a host of automation services. That includes marketing automation, customer relationship management, sales team automation, mobile and social marketing, customer service, and more.
SharpSpring can integrate with any CRM, allowing users to keep their existing CRMS and the information within. You can also use the system’s scoring and lead nurturing tools to track the visits, engagement, and demographics of individual lead pages.
Omnisend
Omnisend is a multi-channel marketing automation tool created with growth-focused businesses in mind. The platform combines SMS, email, social media, and other channels under one channel, allowing marketers to reach more customers and scale your business revenue.
Its features allow users to streamline and optimize their marketing efforts no matter the channel they choose. There are built-in templates to guide you while creating personalized emails, alongside other features to automate sending these messages. Even better, you can use Omnisend to create powerful lead forms that boost your lead capture rates.
Marketo Engage
As part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage is a cloud-based email marketing tool for companies of all sizes. The tools help you monitor and manage engaging customer relationships through a range of integrated applications capable of social marketing, marketing automation, and lead nurturing.
Marketo Engage is also useful for budget management, sales insight, analytics, and web personalization. Additionally, it has native integrations with SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SalesForce. That gives you bi-directional communication with your team to get a clear picture of the prospects on their pipeline and prioritize according to lead engagement.
Drip
Another cloud-based email marketing tool, Drip, caters to businesses of all sizes in industries like advertising, consumer goods, e-learning, and marketing. The key features include multi-channel marketing, workflow automation, customer activity reporting, and personalized email campaigns.
Drip comes with a visual and text-based email builder, helping you create engaging, personalized emails for different customer sets. These sets of customers can be defined by activities, segments, demographics, and more. Even better, Drip’s website tracking helps you track the customer journey and allows you to track customer loyalty using leaderboards.
Zoho Campaign
Similar to Drip, Zoho is an email marketing solution that offers social media integration and customer relationship management in a unique subscription model. Their free plan offers limited features, though you can still send 12,000 emails per month to around 2000 subscribers. Even better, their other plans are very friendly to small and medium businesses alike.
With Zoho Campaign, you can reach out and engage your customers by automating everything from creating custom email-based campaigns to segregating and maintaining mailing lists. You can also use customized or pre-defined templates to improve audience engagement with their mass mailing, tracking, and reporting. However, the analytics tool might be a little confusing, so it’s advisable to watch their demo videos carefully.
MailChimp
When sending email blasts and email marketing campaigns, MailChimp is the largest service provider on the market. Besides ruling the email marketing industry, the tool now includes domain and website hosting, site-building, and CRM features.
MailChimp offers a host of features, including landing pages, marketing automation, e-commerce integration, data insights, and advanced analytics. However, Mailchimp’s forms are pretty basic, though you can try other tools specifically tailored for that, such as LeadPages and ThriveLeads.
SendinBlue
A cheaper alternative to MailChimp, SendInBlue, is one of the top email automation tools SMBs can use under a small budget. The tool is continually evolving from a simple email marketing tool to a sophisticated software solutions hub with built-in CRM functionality and expanded automation.
Some of the best features that SendInBlue offers include A/B testing, SMS, reports and analytics, opt-in forms, bounce management, email templates, CRM, and more. Most users are happy with the tool’s ease of use and how effortless it is to adjust their emails’ designs. However, not everyone is impressed with the basic templates they offer.
InfusionSoft
Also known as Keap, Infusionsoft is a cloud-based marketing solution that offers marketing automation, CRM, and e-commerce functionality under one roof. The tool is designed for small businesses looking to streamline their sales and manage customer experiences across multiple industries.
You can use Keap to segment your contacts, send emails, track customer interactions, and run campaigns using personalized communication triggers. Additionally, you can manage e-commerce, doing everything from managing inventory to fulfilling purchases and paying for expenses. The tool also helps you create online shopping carts, send quotes, invoices, and track your digital storefront activity.
Mautic
Mautic is a crowdsourced digital marketing software that relies on the online community to maintain its code and deploy new features. The tool has continued improving since it hit the market in 2014, picking up momentum with high-tech companies, and it’s currently used by over 200,000 organizations globally.
Since it’s an open-source platform, Mautic is free to use, making it perfect for freelancers, SMBs, and large tech companies. You need to natively install Mautic on your computer before enjoying its automated marketing services alongside other standout features. These features include drag and drop workflow modules, integration with external CRMS, and customizable email channels, templates, and themes.
Ontraport
Ontraport is a simple business automation software that caters to solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. While the software offers marketing automation and customer relationship management, you also get other features like email marketing, landing pages, reporting, and eCommerce.
Ontraport’s biggest advantage is its dedication to insights and reporting. Unlike other tools, it gives you a clear picture of how your campaigns are performing. Additionally, it helps with lead generation and nurturing, affiliate and task management, payments, event management, and membership site creation and management.
ManyChat
Marketing automation is about more than just emails, and ManyChat understands that. This tool helps you automate repetitive conversations on other platforms like SMS and Facebook Messenger, working the same as a chatbot.
You can build your bot within minutes using the inbuilt templates, all thanks to their responsive interface with drag-and-drop features. Additionally, the information that you learn about your prospects can be incorporated into your CRM and other eCommerce tools. That means you can integrate it with MailChimp, Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and BotSheets.
Which Marketing Automations Tools Should I Try?
When choosing marketing automation tools, the main deal-breakers for your top choices will be pricing, usability, and integrations with your current tools. However, most people are willing to look past these deal-breakers if the tool can offer CRM/ sales capabilities, email automation tools, social media tools, and training. Nonetheless, it pays to research while different marketing automation tools according to the features you want.
