The Best Marketing Automation Software for 2022

Marketing technology has advanced drastically over the past several years thanks to targeted advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and other areas. Even an older staple like email marketing has continued to evolve. This evolution continues in 2022 with a renewed focus on omnichannel campaigns that add complexity and nuance to marketing strategy. With all these new avenues, the challenge for many companies lies in choosing the best messaging route for specific customer segments and relationships. That’s how marketing automation software can help your business.

With that in mind, these are the best platforms we’ve tested. Read on for our top picks, followed by everything you need to consider when choosing the right marketing automation software for your needs.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Best Overall

Why We Picked It

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive martech platform that integrates most of the features marketers at small to midsize businesses need, including email marketing, campaign automation, and even customer relationship management (CRM). Because of its integrated nature, its focus is increasingly on tracking and optimizing the entire customer journey with a unified UI.

Who It’s For

HubSpot deserves a serious look for any organization that wants a fully integrated marketing system that provides a variety of tools in one place. It also excels at adapting to the needs of your business as the demands grow. However, its all-in-one design may actually be a drawback if you’re already invested in standalone tools for CRM and sales functions.

PROS

• CRM integration included
• Vast selection of social media management options
• Stellar marketing automation
• Offers integrations with other HubSpot solutions

CONS

• Expensive
• Steep learning curve

Campaigner

Best for Advanced Marketers

Why We Picked It

Campaigner is primarily an email marketing solution, lacking the multichannel focus of some of its competitors. However, its strength lies in highly customizable workflows that give you many ways to precisely manage email marketing efforts. It also offers additional marketing automation features, such as purchase behavior analytics.

Who It’s For

You’ll probably want to look elsewhere if you’re looking for software to help manage your campaigns across multiple channels. On the other hand, if email is your primary focus, Campaigner offers well-designed automation tools. Just be aware that the sheer wealth of options makes its UI more complex than tools designed for neophyte users. (Editors’ Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)

PROS

• Accessible 24/7 customer support
• Productivity-focused UI
• Wide range of templates and options
• Comprehensive onboarding and online resources

CONS

• Requires credit card for free trial
• No free version
• Migrating from other solutions isn’t easy

Mailchimp

Best for Growth Marketing Campaigns

Why We Picked It

Mailchimp has grown into the marketing automation space, having begun life primarily as an email marketing solution. Following several acquisitions—and having itself been acquired by Intuit in 2021—its latest iteration now includes basic e-commerce, survey, and CRM features, in addition to basic campaign automation and analytics. Putting all these tools in one place means you don’t need to sign up for multiple services to get the features you need.

Who It’s For

Don’t let the name fool you; Mailchimp is about more than just email. Small businesses that are just getting into marketing automation, and like the idea of getting a turnkey e-commerce solution in the bargain, would do well to give it a look at this service. Still, Mailchimp is best suited for lightweight marketing work, so seasoned or advanced marketers may find that they quickly outgrow it.

PROS

• Full marketing hub
• 
Workable free tier with flexible pricing 

• 
Websites and e-commerce plans bring revenue-sharing options
• Adds turnkey e-commerce for merchants

CONS

• Lackluster email template experience 

• Campaign tracking is limited and somewhat difficult

Salesforce Pardot

Best for Salesforce Customers

Why We Picked It

Pardot is CRM leader Salesforce’s comprehensive B2B marketing automation platform, and it has few peers. Its deep feature set includes list-building features, lead-scoring packages, contact tags, campaign rules, and a host of other automation capabilities. Yet even with all that complexity, it is also commendably easy to use.

Who It’s For

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say Pardot has it all, so of course, there’s a catch. In this case, the gotcha is the price tag. You’ll need to have fairly deep pockets to buy into what Salesforce is selling. However, if you can handle the cost, you’ll get what you pay for (although smaller businesses and less experienced marketers may find its expansive feature set daunting).

PROS

• Stellar range of features in automation and email marketing
• Unlimited automation branching
• White glove new user onboarding service
• Convenient integration with Salesforce apps like Einstein

CONS

• Too expensive for smaller SMBs
• Lacks standalone mobile apps

GetResponse

Best for SMB Automation Needs

Why We Picked It

Although it’s primarily an email marketing system, GetResponse has expanded into web-based chat and SMS marketing. It also gained sophisticated marketing workflow automation capabilities, putting it nearly on par with some of the more prominent comprehensive marketing tools. In addition, integrated e-commerce capabilities help enable direct online payments.

Who It’s For

Beginning marketers will appreciate GetResponse’s outstanding user experience and its attractive price. If you’re looking for a service that goes beyond basic email marketing and adds some multichannel tools, it may be for you. Unfortunately, the company discontinued its 24/7 phone support, meaning some users might be frustrated when they need urgent assistance.

PROS

• Expanded features like SMS and email chat
• Powerful auto-responder options
• Easy email marketing features
• Improved e-commerce integration

CONS

• Analytics are underwhelming
• Lacks 24/7 phone support

Infusionsoft by Keap

Best for Beginning Marketers and Start-Ups

Why We Picked It

Infusionsoft melds marketing automation with email marketing and CRM in one package. As a result, it helps businesses spend less time with data entry and managing marketing information across disparate systems. It also offers many support options, including a white-glove “expert coaching package” that makes setting up the solution painless—for a fee.

Who It’s For

Fledgling businesses that are kickstarting their sales, marketing, and email campaigns are an ideal fit for what Infusionsoft offers. If your business is inclined to treat sales and marketing as a unified process, it’s certainly an option worth considering. Larger companies with clearly delineated sales and marketing departments may prefer a solution that clearly focuses on marketing automation while using a separate product for CRM functions.

PROS

• Combines CRM with email marketing.
• Makes it easy to add contacts
• Great coaching and support options

CONS

• Expensive
• Reporting could use some refinement
• Template designs are limited

Sendinblue

Best for Ease of Use

Why We Picked It

Although it began life as an email marketing package, SendinBlue has evolved into a more complete digital marketing hub that features basic CRM functionality. From standout automation controls to wading into SMS marketing, it’s a mature and flexible platform that’s easy to use. What’s more, SendinBlue costs significantly less than most competing services.

Who It’s For

SendinBlue’s integrated solution should have enough features to suit most SMBs. Its customers will appreciate the low-cost pricing model. However, one caveat is that its list of third-party software integrations is shorter than some competing services. If linking your marketing automation efforts with multiple other systems is a requirement, you may need to keep looking.

PROS

• Wealth of transactional email and SMS features
• Includes basic CRM functionality
• Impressive range of automation and integration
• Expanded template building options

CONS

• Initial account setup can be tedious
• Data import can be convoluted
• Advanced template creation is a separate service and cost

Zoho Campaigns

Best for Zoho Customers

Why We Picked It

Zoho offers a comprehensive business applications suite, of which Campaigns is but one. They are well-integrated, making them a good option for businesses looking to fill multiple software needs. Campaigns’ marketing automation tools are fairly robust, including trigger-based workflows for onboarding new contacts, re-engaging lost contacts, keeping new customers, and letting customers know about current deals or offers.

Who It’s For

Obviously, customers of Zoho’s other products should give Campaigns a look, but it could be viable for other customers as a standalone solution. Campaigns’ primary focus is email marketing, but its marketing automation capabilities are solid and improving. Be careful, though; the chief downside is its expensive cost.

PROS

• Well-designed campaign and marketing tools
• Convenient integration with Zoho CRM
• Outstanding reports feature

CONS

• Dated email template designs
• Initial setup takes time
• Could be a costly solution for some SMBs

Campaign Monitor

Best for Campaigns and Newsletters

Why We Picked It

Another product that began life as a basic email marketing platform, Campaign Monitor offers essential marketing automation features, too. You can queue up workflows, including some templated examples. Its high-end features include pre-built engagement segments to calculate subscribers’ activity, email optimization, scheduling, link tracking, and content-editing permissions for templates.

Who It’s For

Companies that are only now getting started with email marketing will find a solid entry-level platform in Campaign Monitor. As your campaigns grow in sophistication, you can use Campaign Monitor’s automation features to improve their success. If you’re already familiar with marketing automation and its potential applications, you may find Campaign Monitor a little lacking compared to more full-featured competitors.

PROS

• Versatile email templates
• Easy-to-use WYSIWYG interface
• Easy automation tool
• Good SMB analytics

CONS

• Contact importing difficult when matching custom fields
• No SMS channel
• Lacks direct online support via phone or chat

Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns

Best for Large-Scale Marketing

Why We Picked It

Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns is designed for midsized companies looking to deliver email marketing campaigns at scale. The company says its product suite sends out trillions of emails each year. Its integrated mail transfer agent (MTA) reduces the complexity of running high-volume email campaigns by handling all the technical details for you, like infrastructure scaling, ISP outreach, real-time analytics, and reputation monitoring. 

Who It’s For

If reaching a truly massive customer pool is a must for you, Twilio SendGrid is definitely one of the standouts on our list. Its unique design makes it ideally suited for this purpose. However, it falls short of the mark if you need a full-featured marketing automation platform. Its features in that area are limited when stacked against competitors, and better options are available, especially if you’re only planning moderate email volume.

PROS

• Designed for sending emails at scale
• Good reputation management
• Solid email analytics for campaign success tracking

CONS

• Rudimentary template and HTML editors
• Dedicated IP address and email validation only on Pro Plan

Read Our Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns Review

Buying Guide: The Best Marketing Automation Software for 2022

(Credit: Campaigner)

What Is Marketing Automation?

Email marketing is a significant first step toward developing solid communications with your customers and prospects. But once you have moved past one-off messages and decided to create prolonged, personalized messages powered by customer data, it’s time to try marketing automation.

Marketing automation is a way to free marketers from tedious and repetitive tasks while delivering effective marketing messages promptly. The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helps marketers optimize the effectiveness and timeliness of their marketing messages using automation. 

By tracking users’ behaviors on websites and other channels, marketers use this data to understand customers’ interests and intent. AI can then automatically suggest what content and marketing messages will be most relevant to these leads and the best time to send these messages to yield the best results. When deployed properly, marketing automation can set businesses apart from their competitors with automated yet highly personalized messaging that boosts sales through customer engagement. 

Marketing automation solutions can handle the complex, grueling work that is integral to a marketing campaign while pulling from multiple data sources. The software culls information like the number of opened emails, e-commerce carts left behind, and web form data to make your marketing decisions easier.

Similar to email marketing software vendors, marketing automation software vendors have created workflow templates that help guide you through the automation process. This way, you don’t have to build new sequences from scratch.

Basic templates usually start with an interaction, such as a “Welcome” or a “Thank you for making a purchase” message. Once a contact receives the initial email, they are guided through a sequence based on their actions. For example, if Clark receives a welcome message, and then clicks a link to an offer, that action automatically pulls him onto a distinct email marketing journey. Conversely, if Lois deletes her welcome message, she may automatically be pulled off the workflow to conserve your email output.

More complex marketing automation applications are geared toward potential sales. For example, a customer who abandons a shopping cart on your online store sets off an alert that triggers an email to that customer with a generous discount code or other offers to sweeten the deal. Deploying automated marketing messages on the fly can help retain customers who have made a buying decision, but who may be price-sensitive or looking elsewhere. Multiply these opportunities by the size of your contact list, and it becomes clear that marketing automation is a necessary tool for most businesses.

Which Marketing Automation Software Is the Best?

How complicated and deep your campaigns run often depends upon which vendor you choose. For example, no tools better exemplify the simplicity, effectiveness, and scalability of marketing automation software than two of our Editors’ Choice tools: HubSpot Marketing Hub and Salesforce Pardot. Both offer unlimited email and unlimited sequencing options, which means you can create a workflow with multiple branches for each stage of the sequence and an unlimited number of sequences.

Both HubSpot and Pardot offer an array of functionality that should suit your business regardless of how intricate your marketing strategy might be. We found HubSpot better suited for small businesses that are steadily growing their marketing activity, whereas Pardot is ideal for large enterprises with complicated marketing plans already in place. In total, we tested 10 marketing automation tools, each of which offers some unique features that make them stand out from the field.

Conversely, Zoho Campaigns is mostly designed for users who want to follow customary workflows that guide users through typical sequences. Because of this focus, Zoho doesn’t offer unlimited sequencing or branching. This tool is perfectly suitable for marketers who just want to make an offer after a welcome email or for marketers who want to wish people a happy birthday once a year.

And in some cases, a more traditional email marketing tool may be enough. For example, Mailchimp, which is an Editors’ Choice selection for email marketing, has worked towards expanding its feature set so it can work as a full digital marketing platform. So far that’s meant adding postcards, landing pages, integration with Instagram and Facebook, Google Ads, social posting, and a marketing calendar. All that sounds great, and there are several other email marketing brands doing the same thing. It’s a good growth path for budding SMB marketers, just be sure the burgeoning feature set has what you need.

(Credit: Mailchimp)

How Much Does Marketing Automation Cost?

Marketing automation software is typically priced one of two ways: either by the number of contacts in your database or by the number of emails you send each month. For example, Salesforce Pardot starts at $1,250 per month for email marketing, prospect tracking, lead nurturing and scoring, reporting, forms and landing pages, and standard customer relationship management (CRM). This plan can be upgraded to two higher tiers, each of which offers additional features, plug-ins, and add-ons. All three bottom-tier Pardot plans give you capacity for 10,000 contacts, while the Premium plan boosts that up to 75,000.

Don’t be alarmed by Pardot’s price tag, as it’s easily the most expensive tool we reviewed. HubSpot Marketing Hub lets you store up to 15 million contacts for $45 per month in its Starter plan, $450 per month for its second-most feature-rich plan, and $1,200 for the Enterprise plan. 

On the lower end of the pricing spectrum, you’ll find products such as Campaigner, which costs only $59 per month, though that only includes 5,000 contacts and 50MB of in-app multimedia storage. Sendinblue and Zoho Campaigns both offer free plans for companies that are unwilling to spend on marketing workflows. Both tools scale upward for added capacity and complexity, and each offers pay-as-you-go plans for companies just dipping their toes into email marketing and marketing automation.

(Editors’ Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)

One of the key differentiators for the solutions we tested lies in how they handle templates and workflows. In addition to an organic integration with the larger Salesforce platform, Pardot offers one of the cleanest user interfaces (UIs) and perhaps the largest variety of prebuilt templates on the market. But its best features are designed to improve your workflows once you create them.

For example, you can pretest the process of an automated program to see how it reacts. This is essentially a fire drill automation campaign to ensure your complex branching doesn’t lead to a dead-end or a duplicate email. Pardot also lets you schedule social media campaigns and simultaneously post in real time to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If you really want to manage your marketing program with one solution, Pardot also offers a search marketing tool that plugs into Bing, Google, and Yahoo. You can check search engine rankings, monthly volumes, and ranking difficulties as well as run competitor analysis and monitor your paid search campaigns. No other tool we reviewed offers this type of search marketing functionality.

HubSpot Marketing Hub heavily relies on list building to help you manage your workflows. It lets you shrink (or grow) your lists in the same way you would narrow down products on Amazon or eBay. This feature is incredibly straightforward and fast. When you add a URL to a contact record, HubSpot will automatically pull in demographic information, such as the contact’s company location and the number of employees.

You can email a contact directly from the Contact Record, and you can make a voice-over-IP (VoIP) call if you have turned on this paid feature of HubSpot Sales. This integration lets you log and save call information within each contact record so there is a transparent history of which marketers and sales professionals interacted with contacts. You can also schedule interactions with contacts. You won’t find these features on the other platforms we reviewed.

(Credit: HubSpot)

Drag-and-drop tools for building collateral, such as email templates or campaign brochureware, used to be a rarity, but they’ve shown up in several of the products we tested. It’s a nifty feature for beginning marketers because it’s easy and also opens the door to other devices, like touchscreens. The only downside is that sometimes this ease of use comes at the price of customization. If the tool you’re looking at has drag-and-drop functionality, it’s best to also make sure it’ll let you import content made with straight HTML code. That way, you’ve got the ability to do more sophisticated or custom content if you need it.

Several tools also provide unique tag removal that automatically pulls contacts from campaigns if they perform a certain action. This is a core automation feature and should definitely be part of your toolkit if you’re shopping for one of these platforms. For example, if contacts don’t open three emails in a row, you can set the tool to remove all such contacts from the workflow, to ensure you’re not sending messages into a vacuum.

On top of that, you need some kind of dashboard to best see how your automation strategies are working with your content, campaigns, and especially your audience. The best kind are customizable, real-time alert dashboards. These let you track your campaign elements as they’re working. However, that customization usually comes with either a learning curve on your part or some added expense in the form of a consultant or a product engineer to help you get everything configured. But the results are worth it. For instance, if you sent an email to someone a week ago, but they just opened it this second, then you’ll see their name pop up at the top of your dashboard. From this tab, you can send a follow-up email or adjust the contact’s standing within the specific workflow.

How Do I Choose Marketing Automation Software?

What we’ve described above is only a subset of the key features you’ll find when using these platforms. What’s above should have some form of representation in whatever tool you choose. But how those features are implemented can be just as important as whether or not they’re available. Hitting that Free Evaluation button is practically a mandatory prerequisite to finding what’s right for you. As is talking to a sales rep about future directions. Using the APIs that most of these tools have bundled, you can probably create whatever customized features your campaigns need by using third-party software. However, it’s easier and certainly cheaper if you can find what you need as part of your core marketing platform.

None of the tools we tested are bad. In fact, each of them will provide you with more power than your standard email marketing platform will. Some offer additional customer insights and increase the chances of closing sales, some are more expensive, and some do a better job of letting you customize your workflows to suit your specific needs. Read the individual reviews for the full details.

For more on business software, check out The Best CRM Software and The Best Business VoIP Providers.

Gadjo Sevilla contributed to this article.