10 best marketing automation software and platforms in 2022

Marketers can successfully execute technology to help them accomplish cool things that expand their brand, reach more prospects, and facilitate sales in closing more deals.

The key to making it happen is choosing the right tools.

Anytime you’ve shopped for marketing automation tools you’ve undoubtedly dug through extensive lists of options. The sheer comparisons are enough to make you give up and keep doing things the old way!

That’s why we cut through the noise and gathered a list of the 10 best marketing tools and platforms in 2022. We narrowed down our list based on valuable marketing metrics, functionality, advanced features, and cost-effectiveness. Whether your company is a small startup or a large marketing agency, one of these software options is bound to be something that will improve your marketing results.

What is marketing automation software?

There are so many repetitive tasks required in marketing that handling them manually sucks time out of everyone’s busy schedules. Why waste time handling them when you could free up your schedule doing things that move your initiatives forward, manage marketing resources, and grow the company's bottom line instead?

This is where marketing automation software comes in. These platforms and apps give you specific ways to automate repetitive parts of your processes. By automating these repetitive tasks, you can streamline your workflows, and your team can focus their time on more high-value work.

Better communication, better outcomes: Check out Teamwork's collaboration software here.

Types of marketing automation

Thirty-five percent of marketers said the top reason for implementing marketing automation was to help the marketing and sales teams work together. If marketing were an animal, it would have about a dozen arms. There are several marketing sub-sections, each as important as the next. One marketing tool may dramatically improve social media marketing but do nothing to address your SEO initiatives. This is why most small businesses and large corporations use more than one type of marketing automation. (This is also why it’s essential to choose tools that integrate with each other — more on that topic later.)

We can segment marketing automation into five distinct categories:

Lead management

One of marketing’s main objectives is to generate and warm up leads that can eventually become clients. Marketing automation offers several ways to manage leads effectively.

First, automation tools provide lead generation tools like automatic opt-in invitations to blog posts, newsletters, and other updates. Second, some tools, like customer relationship management (CRM) software, allow marketers to store lead lists with personal information and preferences to help market to them. Finally, some marketing automation solutions use a data-driven approach to lead scoring, which shows marketers who is ready to buy and who needs more warming up.

End-to-end lead management helps keep more prospects in your pipeline and helps marketing send more qualified prospects to your sales team.

Email marketing

Most marketing campaigns depend, at least in part, on email marketing.

Marketing automation platforms with an email marketing tool offer robust opportunities to amplify your company’s email efforts. They provide customizable email templates, give you a way to conduct A/B testing, make it easy to include calls-to-action (CTAs) to drive the buyer’s journey, and collect important data you can use to measure your results. Track open rates, click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, and even figure out the best days and times to send emails with these powerful automation apps.

Workflow management

Warming up leads and moving prospects through the buyer’s journey is integral to marketing’s success. Marketing automation tools provide a way to set up automated workflows that trigger when a prospect acts, like filling out a landing page to download an ebook.

These triggers can drop the contact into an email campaign that automatically enrolls them in a drip campaign, which is a series of emails that performs a specific action (like offering leads more information) or provides a limited-time promotion. Automation workflows are a more hands-off approach to conducting lead nurturing.

Social media marketing

Multi-channel marketing is essential for almost every marketing strategy. This includes social media marketing.

Being active on social media allows companies to expand their brand and reach more potential customers. It also satisfies a key element of inbound marketing: Show your value first instead of diving into a hard sell.

You can connect with your company’s buyer persona in a non-threatening way on their favorite social media channels — and your marketing automation tools make it easy.

Social media management is a necessary marketing automation feature. Automation tools that allow you to set posts to publish later, schedule out your content calendar, and track likes, shares, comments, and new subscribers are pivotal in managing your social media strategy.

Audience segmentation

Some people on your contact list may be interested in a product or promotion, whereas others would have no interest. Keep your digital marketing efforts relevant and avoid being redundant and annoying in your campaigns by using a list segmentation tool.

Breathe life into your marketing campaigns by using filters to automatically split out your list of contacts into smaller lists targeting specific demographics. Common filters are city and state, job titles, company size, where they are in the customer journey, and industry type.

Marketing to segmented lists allows you to create more specific marketing campaigns and avoid generic ones that get anemic results. By using audience segmentation, your message can be on point and hit home with your targets.

Our top 10 marketing automation tools

Marketing automation returns results. Nucleus Research finds that, out of every dollar marketing teams spent on automation, they enjoyed a $5.44 return on investment.

Even so, picking the best tools for your specific business can be tricky.

Out of the dozens we looked at, the following automation tools are our favorites. We based our findings on ease of use, functionality, intuitive features, integrations, and cost. If you're missing a marketing tool in your marketing stack, you'll most likely find what you need here.

1) HubSpot

Any marketer who's been in the game longer than 15 minutes has heard of HubSpot, as it’s an exceptionally designed, multi-use platform. The cohesive way that HubSpot aligns marketing and sales makes this tool a sure-fire winner, with easy-to-use features and access to tons of prospect and customer data.

Key features

• Super simple drag-and-drop features for designing emails, landing pages, and blog posts 

• Social media scheduling, posting, and analytic reviews via social media management component

• Easy-to-build workflows to build drip campaigns that nurture, qualify, and re-engage leads

• CRM integration lets marketers, sales, and customer support share information about customers and prospects

Pricing

• Free plan: Users can take advantage of a few tools in this package at no cost.

• Starter package: $45 per month. Includes 1,000 contact database, some of the platform’s form automation, and removes the Hubspot watermark from your emails, landing pages, and forms.

• Professional package: $800 per month. Includes 2,000 marketing contacts, an omnichannel marketing platform with various ABM tools, dynamic personalization, A/B testing, and analytics.

• Enterprise: $3,600 per month. Includes 10,000 marketing contacts and advanced reporting and customization opportunities.

2) Marketo

Owned by Adobe, Marketo has a long history of providing inbound marketing automation to all sizes of businesses. Their stellar reputation is based on their platform’s ability to help marketers identify, identify, and accelerate the customer experience. This platform is one of the best ones for B2B marketing teams.

Key features

• Intuitivelead scoring and grading tool

• Advanced reporting features

• Campaign management tool

• Easy-to-design sales funnels and measure with full analytics data

Pricing

• Growth: Call for pricing. Marketing programs with under 50,000 contacts can use this plan to scale.

• Select: Call for pricing. This plan offers more automation choices.

• Prime: Call for pricing. Supports both lead and ABM from the same application.

• Ultimate: Call for pricing. The full array of features is available on this plan and includes up to 25 users.

3) Eloqua

Another beast of a marketing automation platform is Eloqua. It gives users many options for building their lead generation, managing their social media and marketing campaigns, and analyzing their results. In addition, Eloqua integrates with the most popular marketing tools (like Salesforce).

Key features

• Personalized email campaigns and automated responses

• Optimized for mobile

• Online behavior tracking

• Data quality management

Pricing

Eloqua offers many benefits, and the pricing reflects that. As such, it’s typically not a choice for a small business on a tight budget.

Paid plans start at $2,000 per month.

4) Mailchimp

For companies that focus on email marketing as a big chunk of their efforts, Mailchimp is a must-have tool in your arsenal. Their expansion into ecommerce tools makes this platform even more valuable, depending on your industry.

Key features

• Complete marketing hub

• Easy-to-navigate audience dashboard

• Marketing email automation, segmentation, and personalization

• Subject line helper and creative assistant

Pricing

• Free: Lets users create professional-looking email campaigns

• Essentials: Starts at $11 per month and offers some testing and scheduling features

• Standard: Starts at $17 per month and gives users enhanced automation and optimization options

• Premium: Starts at $299 per month and lets users market to an unlimited number of contacts, use the full suite of features, and access priority support for assistance

5) ActiveCampaign

If email marketing and marketing automation are your goals, or you need a CRM, ActiveCampaign may be the tool that can give you everything you want (and then some).

Automate your email follow-up, find your most engaged prospects, and build high-performing workflows that allow your team to focus on more pressing tasks.

Key features

• Reminder notifications

• Engagement score to measure where leads are in the journey

• Automations map displays the entire customer lifecycle

• Advanced reporting and attribution tracking

Pricing

• Lite: $9 per month, paid annually

• Plus: $49 per month, paid annually

• Professional: $149 per month, paid annually

• Enterprise: Pricing available via quote only

6) GetResponse

This user-friendly software returns a healthy return on investment (ROI) with its feature-heavy platform. Send emails, nurture leads, and drive conversion with this tool’s helpful automation features. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to get started, either!

Key features

• Powerful email marketing automation

• Audience tools that provide multi-channel engagement

• Data-driven segmentation

• Sign-up forms, pop-ups, and landing pages capture leads to increase your pipeline

Pricing

• Free: Up to 500 contacts, unlimited newsletters, one landing page, and more

• Email marketing: Starts at $15.59 per month for up to 1,000 contacts

• Marketing automation: Starts at $48.38 per month for up to 1,000 contacts and provides marketing and event-based automation

• Ecommerce marketing: Starts at $97.58 and is the Marketing automation plan plus quick transactional emails, ecommercesegmentation, and more

7) Act-On

This automation tool can make all stages of the customer journey seamless and simple from before the first touch until you're creating customer loyalty. It’s designed with B2B companies in mind, so if you’re a SaaS, financial, agency, or other organization that serves businesses, give this one a close look.

Key features

• Personalized emails and managed deliverability

• Easy landing page and form builder

• Grade and score leads

• Dynamic content

Pricing

• Professional: Starts at $900 per month for 2,500 contacts

• Enterprise: Pricing available via quote only

8) BIGContacts

Since it’s designed specifically for small teams, small businesses looking for a feature-rich email marketing platform, contact management software, and CRM software should put this one on their shortlist.

Key features

• Automated tasks and reminders

• Automated email drip campaigns

• Contact and system dashboards

• Ready-to-use reporting

Pricing

• Big: $5 per user per month, billed annually

• Bigger: $15 per user per month, billed annually

• Biggest: $25 per user per month, billed annually

• Enterprise: Pricing available via quote only

9) Campaigner

Multi-channel marketing automation is on the menu for this one. Powerful reporting, advanced automation features, dynamic content tools, and workflow builders are a few of the many reasons Campaigner made our list.

Key features

• Campaigner’s Reputation Defender protects sender reputation and prevents emails from going to spam

• Intuitiveautomation workflow builder with recurring campaigns and autoresponders

• Content blocks and conditional content

• Experimenting features like send times, A/B testing, multivariate testing, and name testing

Pricing

• Starter: $59 per month for up to 5,000 contacts

• Essential: $179 per month for up to 25,000 contacts

• Advanced: $649 per month for up to 100,000 contacts

• Ecommerce: $79 per month that includes Shopify and Magento integrations, unlimited contacts, and more

10) Sendinblue

Once an email marketing tool, this app has expanded its reach into a broader marketing tool. It offers valuable marketing automation features with built-in CRMfunctionality.

Key features

• Individualized customer experience workflows

• Optimized automation efforts with A/B testing, global restart, and exit conditioning

• SMS marketing for time-sensitive messages and promotions

• Personalization assets for transactional emails, landing pages, and more

Pricing

• Free: Unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails a day.

• Lite: $25 per month; no daily sending limit, no watermark on marketing collateral

• Premium: $65 per month and adds marketing automation, Facebook ads, multi-user access, and landing pages to the Lite plan

• Enterprise: Pricing available via quote only

Level-up your marketing automation with Teamwork

Inside SaaS Sales reported that 65% of companies use automated drip campaigns. This showcases the prevalence of marketing automation and its relation to successful results.

There are almost too many choices when it comes to choosing a provider of marketing automation. Before you invest, identify your highest-priority goals, the functionality you need to achieve those, and your budget. Use our list as a starting point to choose the ones that meet your expectations, improve your marketing processes, and drive sales.

If your marketing team needs a way to automate tasks, simplify your marketing automation and lead nurturing, and improve efficiency, add Teamwork to your suite of solutions. Our project management software may be the tool that takes your efforts from acceptable to exceptional. Learn more about how we help marketing teams improve their processes today.