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Digital marketing is increasingly becoming complex as marketers juggle numerous channels, publish more content, and manage vast data. Marketing automation helps manage repetitive tasks, cutting down time and allowing marketers to focus on more critical tasks.
Statista revealed that marketing professionals consider marketing automation one of the most effective marketing strategies, second to content marketing. A HubSpot State of Marketing report claims that 76% of companies used automation for marketing more than they did for sales or finance.
The heavy workload of marketers necessitates the use of automation tools not just to reduce the workload but to increase their productivity and efficiency. As marketing campaigns become bolder and reaching customers becomes even more complex, it’s no longer a question of whether you need an automation tool or not. It’s already a question of what tools will suit you best.
Check out our list of the best marketing automation software to solve various aspects of marketing campaigns.
Marketing Automation Tools to Grow Your Business in 2024
Depending on the nature and scale of your marketing campaigns, you’d discover that some tools are better suited than others. We list the top tools for each type of marketing strategy, such as email marketing, social media marketing, and influencer marketing.
Omnisend is an email marketing automation platform aimed at helping high-growth eCommerce stores automate their email workflows. You can also use the platform to combine email with SMS and other communication channels. Omnisend gives you an intuitive drag-and-drop interface where you can create automated communication workflows that combine the preferred communication channels of your customers. This process increases conversions and reduces abandoned carts. They also have an in-built analytics tool that helps you determine which workflows are working and which aren’t, so you can improve your system. This email marketing platform also comes with pre-built workflows to get your campaigns up and running within minutes. These workflows include Welcome Series, Product Abandonment, Cart Abandonment, Order Confirmation, Shipping Confirmation, and Cross-Sell. A free plan lets you reach up to 250 contacts with 500 emails per month. If you want to reach more, prices start at $16 per month for up to 500 contacts. To request a demo, visit the Omnisend website. Affiliate marketing is another marketing strategy that benefits from marketing automation platforms. In fact, you can run large-scale and sustainable affiliate marketing campaigns when you have the right automation tools. Refersion is an affiliate marketing tool that has grown to become an influencer marketing platform. Refersion integrates seamlessly with eCommerce platforms and popular marketing apps to build efficient and scalable affiliate and influencer marketing campaigns. The tool helps you discover thousands of affiliates and influencers using robust discovery tools and recruit them automatically to your campaigns. You can also post your campaign in their influencer marketplace, where interested participants can apply. The platform makes tracking easy with trackable links and codes. Payment is seamless and flexible—you can pay in flat commissions or create special incentives for increasing sales volumes. You can use Refersion Pay to manage payments or link to PayPal. There’s a Professional Program that costs $99 per month but is limited to tracking only 50 monthly order conversions. If you have a large or high-volume affiliate program, you’d need the Enterprise Program, which comes with custom pricing. Talk to their sales rep or request a demo by visiting their website. Trellis is a comprehensive eCommerce marketing automation platform, designed to empower brands by leveraging AI, advanced analytics, and automation to optimize their eCommerce merchandising strategies. Catering to both growing and established brands, as well as agencies and brand aggregators, Trellis stands as a solution for businesses aiming to make profitable, data-driven decisions. Key to Trellis’ offering is its 4P automation – Placement, Product Content, Promotion, and Pricing. With AI-driven insights, brands can effectively position their ads, refine product content for higher conversions, harness the software to secure the best deals on platforms like Amazon, and automate pricing strategies based on real-time shopper demand. For businesses invested in Amazon and Walmart’s platforms, Trellis provides a unique decoding of Amazon’s A9 Algorithm, ensuring products achieve the visibility they deserve. With features such as always-on keyword research, daily bid optimizations, and streamlined campaign workflows, businesses can tap into actionable analytics to grow their market share while ensuring maximum return on investment. To accommodate a diverse range of businesses, Trellis offers a tiered pricing system, starting from $299/month for enterprises generating up to $2M in annual sales, and scaling up to $1,400/month. Custom pricing is also offered. Iconosquare’s history started with gathering Instagram statistics to help brands grow on the platform. This foundation has led the platform to build a robust analytics tool that uncovers trends and seamlessly helps brands understand their campaign performance using a beautiful and intuitive interface. You can track almost anything like community analytics, content analytics, engagement, reach and impressions, post analytics, page performance, and stories analytics. You can also gain insights into industry benchmarks and your competitors to compare your performance. Moreover, you can monitor how your brand is mentioned across social media. You can automate social media reporting, so you receive them at a specified time via email. You can also schedule posts and automatically tag accounts and locations on your posts. Plus, you can collaborate with your team on planned posts before publishing any content. Iconosquare works with Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Prices start at 49 EUR per month for three social profiles and two team members. Try it for free, or get a demo by visiting their website. When it comes to influencer marketing, it can feel as though everything has to be managed manually—from finding the perfect influencers to managing the campaigns they participate in. That’s where Find Your Influence comes in with its robust search and discovery tools, automated recruiting, and seamless campaign brief planning feature. Once you’ve created your campaign, you can upload it to the software and set up several details to help you find or match with the ideal influencers. You can reach out to influencers you like and make an offer. When the campaign is ongoing, the platform helps track the results and identify which influencers are performing as well as you’d like. The platform also has a Survey Tool that allows you to broadcast questions to influencers belonging to Find Your Influence’s network. This will help further reduce the time of manually searching for the right influencers. Find Your Influence was created by marketers who faced the challenges of managing successful influencer marketing campaigns. That’s why every feature on the platform has been carefully developed to meet a specific need. Prices start at $199 per month, but it doesn’t have access to Influencer Search and Influencer Survey capabilities. The Essentials package at $800 per month gives access to both plus several other features. Key Features: Campaign Management, Influencer Marketplace, Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Product/Gifting Tools, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Channels: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube Do you believe that your customers are the best advocates for your brand? That’s what the founder of Upfluence thought when they created their influencer marketing platform. The tool allows you to search their massive database of influencers of all sizes from different industries, but it takes the discovery phase a step further. Once you connect your online store to the platform, it searches your customer database to discover influencers who are already visiting your website and purchasing your products. You can then use Upfluence to offer them incentives to share your brand on their profiles and create dedicated campaigns to foster long-term collaborations. The result is a sustainable and efficient influencer marketing campaign that generates the best ROIs and builds a loyal customer base. There are three packages available—Growth, Scale, and Enterprise—which differ mainly in the number of seats available. Prices are not published, so you should contact Upfluence for pricing details. Key Features: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Campaign Reporting, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Affiliate Management, Affiliate Campaigns, Channels: Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Tiktok, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs Keap was created by Infusionsoft to help small businesses with simpler needs get started in marketing and sales automation. Keap starts by automating your email marketing campaigns, then automating the entire sales funnel by keeping a powerful CRM and managing leads. According to their 2020 customer survey, Keap saves their customers 10 hours per week by automating repetitive tasks like lead captures and follow-ups. They also help convert customers faster by providing quick follow-ups and encouraging repeat sales and referrals. You can integrate over 4,000 third-party apps like Zapier, QuickBooks, Google Calendar, and more to take your automation to the next level. Aside from built-in automated workflows, Keap also has an Advanced Automations builder, which lets you create customized workflows suited to your campaigns. Prices start at $129 per month (1,500 contacts and two users). There’s a 14-day free trial, so you can explore the platform and see if it fits your business. You can also watch a demo on their website. Emercury is a powerful email automation software that helps businesses build profitable marketing automation systems. They are the platform that brands like Nike, Hilton, Philips, and Target use. With their integrated form generator, you can capture high-quality targeted leads and nurture them with pre-built email templates. You can build an automated conversion funnel that’s easily scalable and cost-efficient. You can also segment your audience using various factors like demographics, activity, scoring, and more to ensure the right audience gets the right message. Additionally, Emercury lets you perform A/B split tests and tracks various metrics like open rates, bounce rates, and CTR to help you optimize your campaigns further. You can sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo on their website. Prices start at $57 per month for 9,999 contacts. If you’re a brand whose customers frequently interact and purchase from social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, then you know how challenging managing private conversations are. That’s what ManyChat aims to solve. ManyChat is a chat marketing automation platform built to help brands increase sales and customer engagement by automating personalized conversations in Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS. They have an intuitive drag-and-drop flow builder where you can create the usual conversation flows designed to capture leads and convert them. You can also continue the conversations via SMS or WhatsApp by capturing phone numbers or emails. The platform integrates with tools like Shopify, Google Sheets, HubSpot, and Zapier to complement your existing processes. According to its website, customers experience a 130% increase in CTR versus the industry average by using ManyChat. Prices start at $15 for the Pro version, but there’s a limited Free Tier to help you explore ManyChat’s features. Do you struggle to manage multiple social media accounts for your business? Hootsuite does that and more. Their main goal is to help brands maintain order and organize multiple social media accounts, so they can stay on top of their posts and interactions. Once you’ve organized your profiles, you can use Hootsuite’s powerful post-scheduling tool that saves you time from manually posting on each channel. The scheduling tool also helps ensure your post appears optimized because there’s a preview of how it’ll look per channel. What’s more, you can view them in calendar mode to grasp how your posts work together and reschedule quickly by dragging and dropping them to specific dates. For big companies, you can bulk schedule up to 350 posts at a time. Hootsuite centralizes private/direct messages and comments/mentions into one inbox, so you can quickly monitor your audience’s interactions with your brand. An in-built AI tool also learns the most common questions and suggests the correct saved replies. Hootsuite costs $49 per month for one user and 10 social media accounts. There’s a free 30-day trial, which you can claim by visiting their website. Buffer started as a social media automated publishing tool that allows you to schedule posts in advance. Their publishing tool works with major social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and TikTok and supports Reels, Stories, and Posts. You can plan the perfect posting schedule and view your scheduled posts at a glance. You can also create posts from one central place and customize them per network. Plus, it has a browser extension that lets you share anything from other websites. Buffer helps you engage with your customers through its engagement tool, where you and your team can quickly manage comments, messages, and mentions. They also have a robust analytics tool that helps you determine the success of your social media campaigns. Meanwhile, their simple landing page builder helps curate all your links in one place. Buffer offers a limited free plan where you can post to up to three channels. Paid plan starts at $5 per month per channel. 1. Omnisend
2. Refersion
3. Trellis
4. Iconosquare
5. Find Your Influence
6. Upfluence
7. Keap
8. Emercury
9. ManyChat
10. Hootsuite
11. Buffer
How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Software
With hundreds of marketing automation platforms available, choosing the best one for your team’s needs can be challenging. These tools are integral to achieving synergy among your campaigns and keeping your team motivated to reach their goals. Working with the right tools also impacts how well your brand serves your customer.
Here are several factors you should consider when choosing the right automation software.
1. Easy to use and adapt
Even if the tool you chose has tons of great features, if your team isn’t using it, then it’s useless. When selecting the right automation tool, look for one that would be easy to learn and integrate with existing workflows. This increases the chances of adoption and ensures teams are comfortable using it.
2. Integrates with existing tech stack
Not all marketing automation platforms integrate with the right set of tools. You should select one that can work with your CRM system, accounting system, and other existing tools. You don’t want a disjointed team operating on multiple platforms because this leads to redundancy and higher workloads.
3. Easy to maintain and update
Most automation platforms come with automatic updates, but you need a dedicated person in charge of the tool's overall maintenance and documentation process. You should also consider a platform with zero to little downtime and one where you can quickly back up your data.
4. It has the features you need
Marketing automation platforms come with many bells and whistles, but you should only focus on the features you need. Don’t be fooled into getting a platform whose features you eventually discover is too much for your organization or whose features are mismatched with your team's needs.
Objectively consider the different features—even those across price tiers—and determine which ones are helpful for your team or not. Compare other platforms and check which ones will give you the results you want for the best price.
5. Must be cost-effective
Marketing automation software comes in all shapes and sizes. There are tools with robust features that charge high fees and tools with basic features that charge per module or integration you bring in. You want a platform with features you can maximize for their price.
Wrapping Up
With the advent of new channels and strategies to reach customers, marketing has grown increasingly complex in the last several years, leaving marketers with much work on their hands. However, the rise of marketing automation tools like the ones listed here helps marketing professionals create better campaigns that reach the right audiences and deliver value.
If you’re considering taking your marketing efforts to the next level, check out these tools and see how they can automate specific tasks and leave you free to pursue more creative and strategic ones.
