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 / Net-Results / Keap

WH Score
8.1
Campaign Monitor
16reviews
Starting Price:$9 per contact / per month
Specializing in email marketing and automation, Campaign Monitor offers a set of intelligent tools to make email efforts extra intuitive. Start off by creating personalized email campaigns, which can also be taken a notch above by crafting equally customized user journeys as well.  
WH Score
8.1
Campaigner
20reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Since 1999, Campaigner has been active in the forefront of all things email. Its email marketing solution is designed to give marketers the power to create bespoke campaigns, based on what users like (or don’t like).
WH Score
8.0
Sugar Market
22reviews
Starting Price:$0 per contact / per month
Sugar Market offers a comprehensive marketing automation system that offers everything the modern marketer needs to build bespoke campaigns, and track the performance levels of each with advanced analytics suites. 
WH Score
8.0
Ontraport
32reviews
Starting Price:$24 per contact / per month
With over 15 years of experience in the email management industry, Ontraport introduces trusted delivery infrastructure to offer nothing short of the best in bespoke email marketing. Create personalized email campaigns for multiple platforms, and track success rates with advanced analytics tools for...
WH Score
8.0
ActiveCampaign
9reviews
Starting Price:$29 per user / per month
ActiveCampaign is a customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platform that enables businesses to manage and automate their marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. It offers a range of features to help companies to streamline their workflows and improve their customer e...
WH Score
7.9
Genoo
5reviews
Starting Price:$199 per user / per month
Genoo is a marketing automation platform that pays prime focus to the needs of SMBs. In business since 2008, the Genoo marketing platform has been offering smaller, boutique businesses a platform that contains all the resources they need to leverage their existing CRM systems – for a holistic ...
WH Score
7.9
Bitrix24
0reviews
Starting Price:$0 per user / per month
Bitrix24 is a comprehensive customer relationship management tool that can assist organizations of all sizes manage and expand client connections. Bitrix24 supports cloud, on-premise, and hybrid settings and automates everything from lead tracking to sales automation. It caters to a wide range of co...
WH Score
7.9
CallTrackingMetrics
0reviews
Starting Price:$65 per user / per month
CallTrackingMetrics is a global conversation analytics provider giving marketers data to make confident strategy decisions. Over 100,000 users, including The Washington Post, Verizon Connect, and ServiceMaster, rely on CTM to make data-driven advertising decisions. CTM integrates with core tools mar...
WH Score
7.9
Emarsys
0reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Emarsys, a SAP company, is an omnichannel Customer Engagement platform with robust tools to help marketers build, personalize, and scale effective, cross-channel marketing campaigns that produce optimal results and drive revenue. Emarsys is an industry leader in campaign personalization and is trust...
WH Score
7.8
Constant Contact
12reviews
Starting Price:$9.99 per contact / per month
With Constant Contact, go from building a customized website to digital advertising – all from a single and centralized platform. Powered by AI, Constant Contact features everything that the modern business needs to successfully run a business across the digital space. 

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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