The 36 Best Marketing Automation Tools to Use in 2020

1

Encharge.io

As far as the HubSpot marketing automation goes, if you’re an early-stage startup that needs to create lifecycle customer experiences, you’re bet better off with one of the cheaper tools on this list like Encharge.io, ActiveCampaign or Autopilot. Paying north of $500 for a flow builder and $40,000 to be able to send event-based emails (when someone does or doesn’t do something in your app) is reckless when you can get that and a lot more for as little as $30/mo if you go with a tool like Encharge.

#Marketing Automation #Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms 1 social mentions

2

Ortto

Autopilot takes an entirely different approach to marketing automation compared to the rest of the tools on this post. Instead of trying to build a complete all-in-one tool, Autopilot helps you work with the best-in-class tools. Autopilot offers native integrations with a good number of tools and an easy to use visual flow builder.

#Marketing Platform #Marketing Automation #Customer Data Platform 8 social mentions

3

HubSpot

It takes time to master every single feature that HubSpot offers, but the ecosystem around this tool can help you get to grips more quickly. HubSpot Academy, HubSpot partners, local user groups, and the plethora of blog posts are just a part of the wealth of knowledge that this company offers for free.

#CRM #Small Business CRM #CRM Platforms 13 social mentions

4

Marketo

Marketo provides a comprehensive marketing suite with email marketing, landing page builder, leads management, segmentation, funnel and lead tracking, analytics, and a whole lot more. Contrary to HubSpot, Marketo doesn’t provide in-house CRM.

#Marketing Automation #Digital Marketing #Marketing Tools

5

Eloqua

As one of the most expensive tools on this list, it’s unlikely that Eloqua is going to be the first choice for your SaaS. Eloqua is primarily used by Enterprise level companies with more than 1,000 employees.

#Marketing Automation #Email Marketing #CRM

6

Pardot

If you run a B2B SaaS, rely heavily on Salesforce, and you’re able to pay $15,000 per year for a marketing automation tool, Pardot could be a good choice for your SaaS. Otherwise, skip to some of the less expensive options in this post.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Marketing Automation

7

SharpSpring

That being said, Sharpspring is an option if you’re looking for a platform that offers its full suite of tools and will not cost more than your monthly revenue (yes, HubSpot and Eloqua, I’m looking at you). A complete set of features is included in all plans. That means you’d be able to send trigger-based emails and create marketing automation flows even on the smallest plan that starts at $450/mo.

#Email Marketing #Marketing Automation #Email Marketing Platforms 1 social mentions

8

Keap

Keap is a platform built for solopreneurs and small service businesses. It offers useful automation features for service businesses. Still, It lacks some crucial features like product messaging and integrations with tools like Segment.com and Stripe, to be a viable choice for a software company.

#Sales And Marketing #Sales Tools #Marketing Tools 3 social mentions

ReplyBuy is the easiest way to start a conversation and close a sale. Their solutions enable businesses to collect payments with a simple text and manage one-to-one personalized conversations at scale.

10

WebEngage

WebEngage is a full-stack marketing automation and customer data platform that helps consumer businesses drive more revenue from their existing customers and anonymous users through highly contextual and personalized user engagement across channels like Email, Mobile and Web Push Notifications, In-app Messages, SMS, Web Overlays, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

#Email Marketing #CRM #Marketing Automation Platforms 1 social mentions

11

MailChimp

Think of Mailchimp as the MVP of email marketing for SaaS. Mailchimp is an excellent tool if you’re just starting out or in the pre-launch stage. At this stage, you don’t have a lot (any?) users and email subscribers, so a free and easy to use tool that offers a simple email capture form and basic newsletter is plenty enough.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Email Marketing Automation 84 social mentions

12

AWeber

Aweber is a decent email marketing tool but not the absolute best product in the category. You’re going to outgrow Aweber relative fast, and with alternatives like Active Campaign, Autopilot, Drip, and Encharge, which are priced at the same level, it just makes sense to start with something else.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Newsletter Marketing 1 social mentions

13

ActiveCampaign

As far as the HubSpot marketing automation goes, if you’re an early-stage startup that needs to create lifecycle customer experiences, you’re bet better off with one of the cheaper tools on this list like Encharge.io, ActiveCampaign or Autopilot. Paying north of $500 for a flow builder and $40,000 to be able to send event-based emails (when someone does or doesn’t do something in your app) is reckless when you can get that and a lot more for as little as $30/mo if you go with a tool like Encharge.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Marketing Automation

14

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a great email marketing tool for creators. It’s reasonably cheap, starting at $29/month for 1,000 subscribers. The native integrations with tools like Gumroad, WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, teachable, and WebinarJam, makes ConvertKit a good first choice for bloggers, authors, podcast creators, and influencers.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Newsletter Marketing 20 social mentions

15

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a basic email service provider that lacks even some rudimentary level of marketing automation features. There are no automated tagging based on events or any other type of automation aside from basic autoresponders.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Newsletter Marketing

16

Drip

If you’re OK with going with a tool that is increasingly more focused on eCommerce businesses and unlikely to roll out a SaaS/product-related feature any time soon, then Drip is a viable choice for you. Drip has a powerful visual flow builder, event-based triggers, and a solid list of integrations.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Newsletter Marketing 1 social mentions

17

Brevo

Sendinblue is a good choice if you’re looking for a robust tool that has CRM, webchat, email marketing, and basic workflow builder. It also supports transactional emails, which helps the decision if you’re a SaaS company.

#Email Marketing #Newsletter Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms 14 social mentions

18

MailerLite

Mailerlite is an affordable email marketing solution for small businesses and bloggers. With Mailerlite, you get a pretty usable user interface, basic forms, pop-ups, and recently they even rolled out surveys.

#Email Marketing #Email Automation #Newsletter Marketing 2 social mentions

19

GetResponse

GetResponse is the last tool in our email marketing automation section. It offers a comprehensive set of features:

#Email Marketing #Newsletter Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms 1 social mentions

20

Customer.io

Some tools like Customer.io, Autopilot, and Encharge merge the gap between marketing and transactional emails and provide a cohesive platform to automate the whole customer journey from a lead to an active user. However, there are platforms like Sendgrid and Mailgun that focus specifically on transactional emails. These infrastructure platforms are usually used by developers rather than marketers, as they require technical knowledge and understanding of APIs.

#Email Marketing #CRM #Email Marketing Platforms 27 social mentions

21

Intercom

All in all, Intercom is one of the most popular and preferred messaging platforms by SaaS companies. The cons of Intercom is that it gets expensive once you start to have a little bit more active users, and also, lacks a visual workflow builder similar to tools like Encharge and Autopilot, which limits the possibilities of customer journey creation. Last but not least, Intercom is not the best choice if you want to send transactional emails, as Intercom doesn’t allow sending the same email to the same person more than once.

#CRM #Customer Iteraction #Customer Messaging 6 social mentions

22

Drift

Drift is a conversational marketing and sales platform that helps you connect with the leads that are ready to buy. Drift is the first company to leverage the power of live chat and automated chatbots for sales purposes. Since their launch in 2014, they’ve established themselves as the best customer messaging platform to help you book more sales meetings, shorten your sales cycle, and connect sales reps with leads faster.

#Customer Support #Help Desk #Live Chat 1 social mentions

23

User.com

User.com is a new player in the marketing automation field that started as a customer messaging platform, but now it does a lot more than that. User.com is an affordable alternative to the big guys like Intercom and Active Campaign that offers:

#Marketing Automation #Email Marketing #CRM

24

Klaviyo

With Klaviyo, you’d be able to create sophisticated eCommerce flows with minimal efforts. For example, creating segments of customers who purchased product X but didn’t purchase product Y, or customers who viewed a specific product page but didn’t make a purchase. By having these segments, you can send personalized emails to them, increasing the conversion rate. Klaviyo also allows you to sync custom audiences to Facebook. Klaviyo offers a very limited free plan with up to 250 contacts, and 500 email sends. Then, the plans start at $20/month for 500 contacts.

#Email Marketing #Email Marketing Platforms #Newsletter Marketing 3 social mentions

25

Metrilo

Metrilo is a growth marketing platform for modern consumer brands. The analytics in Metrilo measure your business performance and give you insights for strategic decisions. The engagement tools are built on the vast data and enable you to bond with your customers long-term. Metrilo starts at $119/month.

#eCommerce #eCommerce Analytics #Advertising

26

Exponea

Exponea is a customer data platform and an enterprise-level marketing automation tool for eCommerce businesses.

#Email Marketing #CRM #Small Business CRM 1 social mentions

27

SendGrid

Sendgrid is the most well-recognized transactional email platform out there. Founded in 2009, today, the company has over 78,000 global customers. When it comes to the API plans, Sendgrid offers a Free plan which allows you to send 40,000 emails for 30 days, then 100/day forever. The paid plans start at $14.95/month.

#Email Delivery #Transactional Email #Email Marketing 104 social mentions

28

Mailgun

Mailgun is an email infrastructure and transactional email platform built for developers that need a simple email API integration to send, receive, and track email with their app regardless of what programming language they use. Mailgun offers a flexible pricing model that starts at as low as $5/month for 10,000 emails.

#Email Delivery #Transactional Email #Email Marketing 11 social mentions

29

Mandrill

Mandrill is the transactional email API for Mailchimp. It has a user-friendly interface and an HTML editor that’s easy to work with. A non-technical user can also operate it effortlessly to create and send data-driven emails, including targeted e-commerce and personalized one-to-one messages.

#Email Marketing #Email Delivery #Transactional Email

30

Twilio

Twilio brings a powerful API for phone services enabling companies to make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages. This is a developer’s platform, so you’re not going to be using Twilio if you’re a marketer or a non-developer.

#Communication #Cloud Communications #Customer Engagement

31

SendPulse

SendPulse is a marketing automation platform that offers multiple channels of communication with customers: email, web push notifications, SMS, and Viber. You can send different types of messages separately or combine them into automated sequences.

#Email Marketing #Email A/B Testing #Newsletter Marketing 6 social mentions

32

DialogTech

#Call Tracking And Analytics #Phone Numbers #CRM

ReplyBuy is the easiest way to start a conversation and close a sale. Their solutions enable businesses to collect payments with a simple text and manage one-to-one personalized conversations at scale.

34

Zapier

Zapier offers a free but quite limited plan that allows you to automate up to 100 tasks a month. From $61.25/month for 2000 tasks, you can also leverage Zapier Paths — a workflow tool that lets you build multiple outcomes into one Zap.

#Web Service Automation #Automation #API Tools 11 social mentions

35

Make.com

Integromat is a less known but more powerful competitor of Zapier. Integromat is the most advanced online automation platform. It is not only capable of connecting apps but can also transfer and transform data. For more technical people, the HTTP/SOAP and JSON modules allow for connecting to almost any web service.

#Automation #Web Service Automation #Workflow Automation

36

ifttt

Although, not a marketing automation tool, IFTTT could be a great addition to your stack of productivity apps and help you automate some of your repetitive daily tasks.

#Web Service Automation #Automation #API Tools 179 social mentions