Top 15 Marketing Automation Software for 2020

Familiar with the saying “work smarter, not harder”?

The right marketing automation software can help you do just that. 

In this article, I’m listing my 15 top automation software to help you streamline your marketing efforts across the board. 

Top Marketing Automation Software:

• HubSpot
• Marketo
• Bremy by Solution Dynamics
• Contactually
• SendinBlue
• Padot
• Genoo
• Bizible
• Hatchbuck
• Drip
• Act-On
• Ontraport
• Autopilot
• SharpSpring
• DialogTech

With technology evolving at a faster pace than ever, digital marketing has become a complex web of moving parts. Today’s marketers are juggling multiple social media accounts, managing email campaigns, growing subscriber lists, tracking consumer behavior, creating content, and everything in between.

But, the work doesn’t end there.

The performance of these marketing efforts must be reviewed and analyzed to ensure that what they’re doing is indeed effective. And much of the time, the tasks associated with measuring campaign results are often too repetitive and time-consumingfor the average marketer.

Luckily for you, doing everything yourself is no longer necessary, as these activities can now easily be streamlined using marketing automation tools.

What is Marketing Automation?

While the future of self-driving cars and cashier-less stores is still uncertain, automation is already making waves in the marketing world.

Regardless of industry or channel, marketing automation platforms allow companies to create personalized, seamless journeys for both leads and customers alike. Plus, these tools can also help you simplify a variety of marketing functions, enabling you to shift your focus to other core tasks that effectively nurture leads and drive revenue, including:

• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Inbound marketing
• Digital advertising
• Landing pages and forms
• Content marketing

Marketing Automation by the Numbers

The marketing automation industry is growing and expected to become one of the most important trends in digital marketing. Just how important? Let’s let the data speak for itself:

• Marketing technology spend now surpasses advertising spend for companies.
• 67% of marketing leaders currently use a marketing automation platform.
• 98% of marketers agree that effective marketing automation is key to long-term business success.
• Marketing automation spending is expected to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023.
• 79% of high-performing companies have been using marketing automation tools for three or more years.
• 74% of marketers say that the biggest benefit they see from automation is saving time.
• 88% of marketers said automation helps them reduce the time spent on preparing reports and analysis, therefore providing them with more time to dedicate to campaign strategy.
• 77% of CMOs at top-performing companies indicate their main reason for implementing marketing automation is to grow revenue.
• Companies that use marketing automation can generate twice as many leads as those solely relying on email software.
• Marketing automation tools drive a 5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.

Benefits of Marketing Automation Software

The benefits of using a marketing automation tool span far and wide, and include:

• Improved ROI. Marketing automation tools can automate upsells, cross-sells, and follow-ups, which can boost revenue and deal size.
• Reduced staffing costs. With various marketing activities being managed from one platform, you won’t need nearly as many employees on staff.
• Clearly defines processes and addresses obstacles. Having all your marketing processes clearly laid out makes it easier for marketing and sales teams to hold one another accountable.
• Enhances effectiveness. Marketing automation saves you a ton of time that would otherwise be spent performing menial tasks.
• More opportunities for creativity. Since you no longer have to repetitively do the same manual marketing activities, you have more time to invest in creative projects.

In this post, we’ve identified a variety of leading marketing automation tools that offer countless features, capabilities, and automated workflows that simplify many otherwise time-consuming marketing tasks.

While the following aren’t listed in any particular order, this list represents the top 15 tools worth taking a look at if want to streamline one or more marketing functions in your business.

Top Marketing Automation Software

1.     HubSpot

If improving your content marketing game is what you’re going for, then look no further than HubSpot.

Although it is primarily an inbound marketing software, HubSpot also offers an easy-to-use visual board that can be used to craft conditional workflows.

Plus, it has numerous built-in features to help you create content, optimize it for SEO, and more efficiently manage your email and social media campaigns. While there may be a bit of a learning curve in the beginning, HubSpot is the quintessential all-in-one tool that gives you the very basic functionality of several different marketing systems.

Pricing ranges from $50 – $4,400+ per month based on features and scale.

2.     Marketo

Best suited for large-sized companies with more than 100 team members, Marketo is a multi-functional platform that offers marketing automation, customer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management functionality, including budgeting tools and marketing calendars.

Marketo also integrates with Salesforce, which means if you sign up for Marketo and already use Salesforce for some tasks, you won’t waste time manually syncing content from one platform to the other. Marketo is also a stand out due to its ease of use and excellent customer support.

However, the platform does have a high price tag. Marketo offers three standard pricing tiers, at $895, $1,795, and $3,175 per month.

3.     Bremy by Solution Dynamics

Bremy by Solution Dynamics is a robust digital asset management tool—one that offers internet-based publishing products and services.

Designed to help you create and manage email newsletters, database publishing, and video proofing, Bremy enables modern enterprises to configure a customized solution for boosting marketing efficiency. Plus, you can use it across channels, which makes it particularly appealing to multi-channel campaign runners.

Starting price is listed as $750 per month, plus $3 per GB of storage. While the cost is comparable to other automation platforms, Bremy only integrates with three other applications—CRM, ADAM, and Campaign Manager.

4.     Contactually

Even though Contactually is mainly intended for real estate agents and brokers, you can use it for your sales and marketing strategy as well.

Contactually’s software makes it easy to stay engaged with every part of your network using information from your inbox and social media profiles. Just categorize your key contacts into buckets, and your Contactually account will take care of the rest. That means you won’t have to worry about who to follow-up with next, how any prior interactions panned out, or what to say to set the ball rolling.

With regular follow-up, you’ll have fewer cold connections, and more warm, engaged leads that want to work with you.

The Contactually pricing scheme has three subscription options. When billed monthly, the Professional plan costs $69, the Accelerator plan costs $119, and the Concierge plan costs $599.

5.     SendinBlue

SendinBlue is part email marketing, part short message service (SMS), and part email services utility.

What started out as a digital agency has since morphed into a powerhouse digital marketing automation tool that services more than 80,000 growing companies around the world. With this platform, users can generate an Automated Workflow channel that allows them to design multi-step and multi-channel campaigns with unlimited variables in just a few minutes.

All of SendinBlue’s plans include unlimited contacts, with tiered pricing based on the number of emails you want to send every month.

SendinBlue offers a Free plan which includes 300 emails per day. The Lite plan costs $25 for up to 40,000 emails per month, although there are a few limitations. Essential costs $39 for up to 60,000 emails per month, and the all-access Premium plan starts at $66 per month for 120,000 emails. Despite these astoundingly low prices, you actually have access to a surprising number of advanced features, such transactional emails, sophisticated forms, and even landing pages.

6.     Pardot

Powered by Salesforce, Pardot is a B2B digital marketing automation software that supports B2B analytics and account-based marketing solutions. It also seamlessly integrates with your CRM, email marketing, and even reports on the ROI of your campaigns.

And while many marketing automation tools usually offer lead-scoring packages, list-building features, and contact tags to help automate customer communications, Pardot delivers on all those capabilities without burdening users with an interface that’s overly complex.

This tool may not be quite as affordable for smaller businesses as standard plans start at over $1000 per month. Pardot offers three subscription options that are billed annually—Growth at $1,250 per month, Plus, at $2,500 per month, and Advanced at $4,000 per month.

The main difference between the plans depends on the number of automation rules, number of domains, integrations, and leads tracking.

7.     Genoo

A comprehensive suite of marketing automation tools, Genoo is a cloud-based solution that offers a centralized lead database, lead capture forms and progressive profiling, landing page creation tools, and a variety of other functions designed to boost your company’s marketing effectiveness.

Additional features include A/B testing, segmentation, sales intelligence, and ROI tracking.

Genoo pricing is based on two main plan categories with several tiers each—Pay per Email ranges from $199 to $1,495 per month and Pay per Lead ranges from $274 to $1,995 per month. The plan tiers are Standard, Premium, and Elite. The main differences between the tiers are the number of users, emails, and leads.

8.     Bizible

Bizible was created with the intention of bridging the gap between marketing and sales, enabling your business to make more profitable marketing decisions.

You can also use it in combination with AdWords to automate your ad campaigns and get a high-level snapshot of your success in getting leads and closing sales.While users also love that Bizible integrates directly into Salesforce, the platform’s analytics are not always the most accurate or the easiest to use.

Bizible is available in four different pricing plans for users—Track which is available for $500 per month, Optimize which is $1000 per month, Enterprise which is $2000 per month, and High Volume’s pricing details are only available upon request.

9.     Hatchbuck

If you’re a small to mid-size business looking to optimize your CRM and marketing efforts, Hatchbuck is the ideal choice for you.

Not only does it help you create and assign tags, which you can use to categorize and better track your incoming leads, but Hatchbuck offers combined sales automation, marketing automation, and email marketing features. Plus, you’ll have access to a robust library of more than 450 email templates that can be used directly or customized with Hatchbuck’s template builder.

The Hatchbuck pricing system covers four different plans—Starter at $49 per month, Small Biz at $99 per month, Team at $149 per month, and Professional at $249 per month. The main differences between the plans are dependent on the number of users, contacts, and emails included each month and access to advanced features like API and Webhooks, Hatchbuck Mobile, and user security.

10.  Drip

Geared towards B2C companies, Drip, appropriately enough, is a full-featured marketing automation platform designed for automating and managing drip email campaigns.

It houses numerous pre-made templates and can easily guide you through the creation process if you’re brand new to it. Marketers can also send targeted emails to first-time or repeat customers, assemble a visual workflow of their campaigns, and manage their leads. While they do not currently support B2B companies, Drip has a unique offering that’s not found in most other marketing automation solutions—its free Starter plan.

Companies with only 100 subscribers can join Drip for free and receive most of the same features as its paid plans. Some of those features include the Basic plan, which costs $49 per month for 2,500 contacts and the Pro plan is $122 per month for 5,000 contacts.

11.  Act-On

Serving more than 4,800 businesses worldwide, Act-On is a lead nurturing platform that offers a suite of automation-focused applications, including email marketing, website visitor tracking, lead management, social media management, reporting and analytics, as well as integrations with webinar and event planning.

It can help you design a landing page, build and optimize campaigns, track your inbound and outbound leads, and automate all your customer emails. Plus, Act-On is even capable of integrating with almost any CRM in the market.

Act-On’s pricing plan is based on the number of active contracts. For 2,500 active contacts, it is $500 per month, for 5,000 active contacts, it is $700 per month, and for 10,500 active contacts, it is $900 per month.

12.  Ontraport

Ontraport is another great option for anyone looking into marketing automation software.

It comes with built-in tools such as lead scoring, lead nurturing, email marketing, and task management, making it a very well-rounded all-in-one solution made for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and small businesses. This tool also offers a range of ecommerce features like automatic credit card payment collection, upsell and cross-sell capabilities, card abandonment, and more.

Ontraport comes with no setup fees, and is notably less than what some of their competitors are charging.

Choose from four plans—Basic costs $79 per month for one user and 1,000 contacts, Plus costs $147 per month for two users and 2,500 contacts, Pro costs $297 per month for three users and 10,000 contacts, and Enterprise costs $497 per month for five users and 20,000+ contacts.

13.  Autopilot

Autopilot automates every touchpoint of the customer journey via an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface.

Users can easily manage marketing campaigns with features like capturing leads from multiple websites, blogs or apps, and organizing them into different lists or folders. Autopilot even offers integration with different third-party applications, such as Salesforce CRM Segment, InsideView, Twilio, Slack, GoodData, and Zapier.

Autopilot offers per-month subscription pricing and is available in two pricing plans—Base is $20 per month and Business is $40 per month. While it’s on the affordable side, its lack of customizable templates is definitely a shortcoming.

14.  SharpSpring

SharpSpring is a fully integrated cloud-based marketing automation tool that supports marketing strategies, provides helpful guidelines, case studies, and on-site training for marketers.

The platform itself includes behavioral-based email automation, site tracking, and a built-in CRM system. While you can integrate with over 700+ third-party tools and CRMs via SharpSpring’s Zapier integration, one area where SharpSpring goes above and beyond is with landing pages. Although many marketing automation tools provide a base-level landing page builder, they’re typically plain and unimpressive.

SharpSpring has several stunning landing page templates to choose from. SharpSpring is priced on a month-to-month billing basis. The 1,500 Contact plan costs $450 per month, the 10,000 Contact plan costs $650 per month, and the 20,000 Contact plan costs $875 per month.

15.  DialogTech

If you rely on inbound phone calls as part of your marketing campaign, DialogTech should be at the top of your list.

This AI-driven conversation intelligence platform automates your voice interactions and provides you with metrics you can then use to analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns and ultimately, improve marketing ROI.

DialogTech pricing plans start at just $39 per month and reach more than 80 countries.

Get Started with Marketing Automation Software

The world of marketing is dynamic and ever-changing. And trends, no matter how popular, are never stagnant. That’s why it’s critical that your business stays up to date with any new developments taking place in the industry.

After all, the last thing you want is for your business to fall behind while your competitors stay ahead of the curve.

While there’s no shortcut to success, marketing automation tools allow you to spend more of your time and attention focusing on efforts that will boost your company’s efficiency. And with the help of this guide, we’re confident you’ll be able to find the right one for your business.