Marketing Automation Software

What is Marketing Automation Software?

Marketing automation software automates typical marketing functions and workflows such as email marketing, social media posts, lead management, and ad campaigns to help companies streamline marketing efforts across various channels. Marketing automation solutions help organizations create efficient marketing workflows and provide tools that companies can use to customize the experience customers have with marketing campaigns and materials.

Marketing automation platforms are beneficial for companies of varying types and sizes, offering advantages such as:

  • Increased efficiency with automated tasks and streamlined marketing workflows,
  • Improved conversions with highly personalized and targeted marketing campaigns,
  • Enhanced lead management with prioritized, automated tasks,
  • Improved and streamlined omnichannel customer experiences.

Key Features of Marketing Automation Platforms

  • Lead Management: Marketing automation platforms provide lead management tools to help companies build automated, optimized lead flow processes. Using these tools, organizations can gather, track, and qualify leads and create lead nurturing sequences to help convert more customers. Leveraging lead data helps businesses understand customer behavior and create highly personalized marketing campaigns to boost conversions.
  • Campaign Management: Marketing automation software provides campaign management tools that help organizations plan, build, launch, track, and analyze omnichannel marketing campaigns. Monitoring and measuring results from marketing efforts helps businesses understand what marketing elements are performing best and gives companies insight into campaign performance, so that collateral or strategies can be adjusted to optimize conversions.
  • Social Media Management: Marketing automation platforms offer social media management tools to help companies support an active, engaged online presence with streamlined and automated social posts, content reposting, social post scheduling, and analytics. Social media management automation helps organizations focus on marketing and online engagement strategies by automating all the routine work that goes into fostering an active social media presence.
  • Content Management: Marketing automation platforms offer content management tools to help organizations create, organize, store, and share digital content with accuracy and efficiency. Content management tools typically include content creation, scheduling, personalization, and distribution across various channels. Marketing automation solutions also offer analytics to help companies track marketing content and campaign performance, with real-time collaboration capabilities further helping enhance efficiency within team workflows.
  • CRM Integration: Marketing automation platforms integrate with CRM software to bolster any existing customer data, providing sales teams with extra context on previous engagements and interactions across multiple communication channels. Inversely, CRM software integrations can also power marketing automation platforms by divulging trends through existing customer data, so campaigns can be targeted better.

To learn more about marketing automation software, please visit our marketing automation software FAQs.

Top 10 Marketing Automation Software

Phonexa / SharpSpring / Marketo Engage / SAP S/4HANA / Oracle ERP / Act! / Ortto / BenchMarkONE / Advantage Anywhere / Net-Results

WH Score
9.0
Phonexa
8reviews
Starting Price:$100 per user / per month
Phonexa is an enterprise-grade tracking software for performance and partner marketing designed to tie revenue back to campaigns, channels, publishers, and networks through marketing attribution. Its functionalities are ideal for improving digital marketing campaigns, especially in affiliate marketi...
WH Score
9.0
SharpSpring
295reviews
Starting Price:$449 per contact / per month
SharpSpring is a comprehensive marketing automation software designed to help businesses of all sizes streamline their marketing efforts and boost ROI. With its powerful features and flexible pricing options, SharpSharpSpring is a popular choice among marketers looking to improve their lead generati...
WH Score
9.0
Marketo Engage
85reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Marketo is a cloud-based marketing automation platform designed to help B2B and B2C businesses streamline their marketing efforts and drive revenue growth. It provides a comprehensive set of tools to plan, execute, and measure campaigns across multiple channels, including email, social media, mobile...
WH Score
8.9
SAP S/4HANA
98reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Developed by the German company SAP SEP, SAP Enterprise Resource Planning software is a robust business management solution that incorporates all operational aspects within an organization under a single integrated system. As of 2015, it is the world’s most widely used enterprise application s...
WH Score
8.9
Oracle ERP
152reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Oracle ERP represents one of the globe’s leading enterprise software organizations. They have built a sophisticated portfolio of business software applications through high-profile acquisitions. The company is well-known for its strengths in the database, and infrastructure systems. It offers ...
WH Score
8.7
Act!
141reviews
Starting Price:$30 per user / per month
Act! is the world's best selling CRM system for managing contacts and communication with customers. This CRM solution can effectively record information, organize daily tasks effectively, and lets you communicate and share information.    
WH Score
8.7
Ortto
22reviews
Starting Price:$509 per user / per month
Ortto (formerly Autopilot) is a marketing automation software that enables businesses to automate, personalize, and scale their marketing efforts. It provides a robust set of tools for businesses to create, manage, and measure campaigns that drive growth and engagement with their customers. With Ort...
WH Score
8.7
 BenchMarkONE
25reviews
Starting Price:$0 per contact / per month
BenchmarkONE provides marketing automation and email marketing solutions as part of its mainstream CRM offering. Staying in step with every single contact in your database is made resourceful yet effortless, thanks to real-time monitoring and campaign-specific landing pages. 
WH Score
8.7
Advantage Anywhere
8reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Advantage Anywhere is purpose-built for senior living communities and multi-family housing, combining lead nurturing, sales follow-up, sales and marketing automation into a single, intuitive platform. It’s the only all-in-one software that integrates AI-driven workflows, video email, and prope...
WH Score
8.6
Net-Results
12reviews
Starting Price:$800 per contact / per month
With Net-Results, build targeted and customized email campaigns with simple drag-and-drop modules. Analytics tools such as sales enablement, lead attribution and visitor tracking provide further insights towards consumer behaviors and other patterns – which can help marketers iterate their cam...

Learn more about Marketing Automation Software

What is the difference between marketing automation and sales automation?

The difference between marketing automation and sales automation is that marketing automation software is used to help grow a customer base and nurture potential and existing customers, while sales automation is about tracking leads and closing deals that have been funneled through marketing channels.

Marketing automation and sales automation software work well when integrated. Additionally, CRM systems and sales enablement tools can also be integrated to further serve any CX strategies that a business may have custom-created.

What is the difference between marketing automation platforms and CDPs?

Marketing automation platforms enable marketing teams to manage leads, orchestrate campaigns and test results within a single platform - while Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) facilitate centralized profiles of each customer.

CDPs can be integrated with any number of software solutions (including marketing automation platforms), as data therein can be leveraged to reach the right customers at the right time, as well as offer highly personalized product recommendations.

Can marketing automation platforms generate content?

Marketing automation platforms typically do not generate content for blogs or social media posts. However, many top marketing automation vendors may offer AI-powered content generation and summarization capabilities. On the other hand, many marketing automation platforms can also be integrated with AI-based content generators, for teams that require the same.

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