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10 Marketing Automation Tools and Software for 2024
Streamline repetitive tasks and focus on driving more leads and revenue for your business with marketing automation tools.
Simply having a great product or service isn’t enough.
You need a way to effectively reach your target audience, nurture leads, and convert them into loyal customers. That’s the power of marketing automation tools — they’re no longer a luxury, they’re a necessity.
The numbers speak for themselves.
A whopping 75% of businesses have already begun leveraging marketing automation in some way or another.
This blog post will be your guide to understanding why marketing automation is essential and how it can revolutionise your work processes. We’ll break down the best automation tools and show you exactly how they can benefit your business.
💡 Pro Tip
Ruler supercharges your CRM and sales tools by automatically enriching leads with detailed marketing source and attribution data. This lets you see exactly where your best leads come from, so you can optimise your marketing budget and focus on what works. Plus, Ruler automatically sends closed revenue data back to its dashboard, allowing you to use different attribution models and accurately credit revenue to the marketing touchpoints that drive the most sales.
Book a demo to see how Ruler can help optimise for maximum value
At their core, automation tools encompass a diverse range of software solutions designed to streamline repetitive marketing tasks.
These tools can take many forms, from social media scheduling platforms to marketing attribution software.
However, they all share a common objective: to save marketing teams from the burden of manual processes, thereby freeing up valuable time and resources for strategic initiatives.
Consider, for instance, the process of lead nurturing.
Traditionally, this might involve manually adding leads to a CRM and then crafting personalised email sequences.
Automation tools can streamline this process by automatically capturing lead data and enriching your CRM with details like lead source.
Related: How to send lead source to your CRM
This not only saves time but also ensures data accuracy by eliminating the possibility of human error during manual data entry.
Choosing the right marketing automation tool can be daunting given the multitude of options. To help you find the perfect fit, here are some essential features to consider.
Before diving into features and comparisons, take a step back and map out your automation goals.
What repetitive tasks do you want to streamline? Do you envision nurturing new leads with personalised email sequences, or automatically enriching your CRM with website form data?
Perhaps you want to automate revenue reporting by pushing data to your social media advertising platforms. By clearly defining your desired automations, you’ll be well-equipped to identify tools that align with your strategy.
Marketing automation tools offer a range of features at varying price points.
Set a realistic budget that considers your current resources and future growth plans.
Don’t get caught in the trap of choosing a feature-rich option that will break the bank in a few months.
Be mindful of hidden costs too, such as fees for additional users or exceeding usage limits.
The beauty of marketing automation lies in its ability to seamlessly connect different aspects of your marketing ecosystem.
Ensure the tools you consider integrate with your existing platforms, such as your CRM, website analytics, and sales software.
Disconnected tools create data silos, hindering the effectiveness of your automation efforts.
By prioritising seamless integrations, you’ll create a smooth flow of information that fuels your marketing campaigns.
Now that you know what to look out for, here’s a list of our top marketing automation tools to help get you started.
Marketing automation isn’t just about sending fancy nurturing emails. Ruler takes marketing automation to a whole new level by becoming an extension of your marketing measurement strategy.
It tracks visitors across sessions, identifying how they found you and what content piqued their interest. This meticulous data collection extends to ad impressions and their influence on conversions and revenue.
The real power kicks in when a visitor becomes a lead. Ruler seamlessly connects their details to their browsing history, painting a vivid picture of their journey.
It then automatically sends the lead to your CRM, complete with valuable marketing source data like the campaign, channel, keyword, and even the specific ad they clicked on.
Imagine Sara, on the hunt for a new car, types in “car dealerships in London.”
She clicks a Google Ad, finds a car she likes, and books a test drive.
Ruler not only sends Sara’s info to your CRM, but also enriches her record with the keyword she used and the ad details e.g. campaign, ad creative.
This tracking continues as leads progress through your sales pipeline. It helps identify campaigns generating low-quality leads, allowing you to optimise your marketing budget.
When a lead finally converts into a paying customer, Ruler uses an automation to track the revenue back to its dashboard. This empowers you to attribute revenue using various attribution models (including those discontinued by Google) and gain a true understanding of your marketing’s true impact.
Pricing for Ruler:
Prices start at £179 per month for small businesses with 5,000 monthly visits, with tiers based on website traffic.
💡 Pro Tip
Want more information on Ruler and the services we offer? Book a demo to see Ruler in action and learn how it can help evidence your marketing’s impact on revenue.
Book a demo of Ruler
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform designed to streamline your marketing and sales efforts, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses.
It goes beyond just email marketing, offering a comprehensive suite of tools to automate workflows, nurture leads, and convert them into loyal customers.
One of ActiveCampaign’s key strengths is its built-in CRM functionality.
You can store all your customer contact information in one place, track their interactions across different channels, and automate follow-up messages based on specific actions, allowing you to personalise your outreach and provide a more cohesive experience.
But ActiveCampaign doesn’t stop there. It also boasts powerful segmentation capabilities.
You can divide your contact list into specific groups based on various criteria, such as demographics, interests, or purchase history.
With these segments, you can craft highly targeted email campaigns and messages that resonate with each individual customer. This level of personalisation fosters stronger customer relationships and ultimately boosts your sales and marketing ROI.
Pricing for ActiveCampaign:
Pricing starts at $29 per month for basic features, with higher tiers offering more advanced capabilities.
Many applications claim to be automation-centric, but often they’re simply CRMs with a few bolted-on automation features. Customer.io cuts through the clutter – it’s a marketing automation powerhouse, pure and simple.
Customer.io is a customer engagement platform designed for marketers who crave sophisticated automated messaging campaigns.
Forget clunky interfaces and limited functionality. Here, you can build intricate customer journeys with multi-split branches, all thanks to the user-friendly drag-and-drop workflow builder.
This intuitive tool lets you visually connect actions and triggers, and even save workflow templates for future use.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketing professional or just starting out, Customer.io empowers you to craft personalised omnichannel experiences that keep your customers engaged.
Pricing for customer.io:
Pricing starts at $150 per month for 5,000 contacts.
HubSpot reigns supreme as the most popular marketing automation tool on our list for a reason.
It’s not just software; it’s a comprehensive suite designed to supercharge your entire sales funnel.
HubSpot streamlines workflows, empowers data-driven decisions, fosters stronger customer relationships, and ultimately propels your sales towards success.
Imagine having a centralised hub for managing your entire sales strategy, from nurturing leads to closing deals.
HubSpot provides exactly that – a treasure trove of tools to simplify every stage. Organise and track leads with ease, prioritise outreach efforts, and manage your sales pipeline efficiently – all within a single platform.
Craft pre-designed email templates, automate personalised email sequences based on customer behaviour, and gain valuable insights into email engagement metrics to optimise follow-up timings.
The possibilities for streamlining your sales process are truly endless.
Pricing for HubSpot:
Pricing varies depending on the specific features you need, so you’ll need to visit their website for a quote.
Leadfeeder is a powerful marketing automation tool that sheds light on the companies visiting your website, even if they don’t fill out a form or make contact.
This is a game-changer for businesses, as it allows you to identify potential leads who might be lurking in your website traffic.
It provides valuable insights like industry, size, and even contact details for employees within those companies. This equips your sales team with a roadmap to connect with the right people at the right time.
Leadfeeder’s automation doesn’t stop there. The data it gathers seamlessly integrates with popular CRM systems and marketing automation tools, eliminating data silos and ensuring all this valuable lead information is readily accessible within your existing workflows.
No more jumping between platforms or manually entering data – Leadfeeder streamlines the process, empowering your sales and marketing teams to focus on what they do best which is building relationships and closing deals.
Pricing for Leadfeeder:
Leadfeeder offers a free plan that allows you to identify up to 100 companies per month, with paid plans starting at $99 per month billed annually. The price depends on the number of companies you identify each month.
With over 12 million users, Mailchimp isn’t just a household name in email marketing – it’s a marketing automation powerhouse too. But what truly sets Mailchimp apart is its user-friendly approach to automation.
At the heart of Mailchimp’s automation magic lies its intuitive workflow editor. You can customise pre-built journeys with ease, adding new steps or actions with a simple click. It offers a vast library of rules and actions, allowing you to craft personalised journeys that keep your audience engaged, regardless of their needs.
Building automations from scratch is just as straightforward. You can simply choose the goal of your journey and start building it step-by-step. Mailchimp’s segmentation tools empower you to group your audience based on specific criteria, such as demographics or location.
This ensures your emails reach the right inboxes at the right time, maximising impact.
Mailchimp’s power extends beyond building campaigns. Their Audience analytics dashboard provides a crystal-clear view of your contact status and subscriber growth. Meanwhile, the Reports section offers in-depth insights into your marketing efforts.
You can track key email metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes to constantly refine your approach and optimise your campaigns for maximum impact.
Pricing for Mailchimp:
Offers a free plan for up to 2,000 contacts and paid plans starting at $11 per month.
Managing paid advertising across channels can be a headache. Building audiences, budgets, and optimising performance for each platform is a struggle. Tools like Metadata.io can streamline this process, saving you time and effort.
Firstly, Metadata.io automates the repetitive tasks that often bog down campaign launches. This includes building audiences for specific demographics and interests, managing budgets across various channels like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, and even optimising ad performance in real-time.
Beyond automation, Metadata.io leverages advanced algorithms to analyse campaign performance data. By automatically allocating budget towards the campaigns that are generating the best results, Metadata.io ensures you’re getting the most out of your advertising spend.
Pricing for Metadata.io:
The cost of Metadata.io depends on the size of your company. They have different pricing plans based on your employee count.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) caters to businesses at the enterprise level.
It’s a cloud-based marketing automation powerhouse designed for those with the technical resources and dedication to mastering a powerful platform.
This isn’t to say it’s not user-friendly, but its extensive feature set caters to complex B2B marketing needs.
Account Engagement seamlessly integrates with Salesforce CRM, allowing you to automate communication across various channels for existing contacts. This includes email marketing, lead nurturing, and even ROI reporting to meticulously track campaign effectiveness.
One of its most compelling features is website interaction tracking.
You can gain valuable insights into how visitors navigate your website, allowing you to build predictive lead scoring models based on parameters you define.
This translates into improved marketing efficiency. By identifying high-value leads, you empower your sales team to focus their efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact, eliminating wasted time and effort.
Pricing for Salesforce:
Requires contacting Salesforce for a quote, but except to pay from £1,000 per month.
On a tight budget but still crave marketing automation muscle? Look no further than Sender.
This email and SMS marketing platform strikes a perfect balance between affordability and functionality, making it ideal for small businesses and startups.
Sender equips you with everything you need to launch successful email campaigns. Craft stunning visuals with their user-friendly drag-and-drop email builder, and delve into campaign performance with in-depth analytics and heatmaps.
It offers a treasure trove of customisable pre-made email templates to jumpstart your creative process.
For those who crave more design control, an email design builder empowers you to craft unique, high-performing emails tailored to your brand.
Pricing for Sender:
Pricing starts at €25 per month for 2,500 subscribers.
Zapier isn’t your typical marketing automation tool.
This cloud-based platform shines in its ability to automate the mundane tasks that often bog down your sales team.
Imagine eliminating repetitive actions like manually transferring data between applications or waiting to trigger actions based on specific events.
Zapier streamlines these processes, freeing up your team to focus on higher-level strategies.
The magic lies in Zaps – automated workflows you can create to connect your existing tools.
For instance, a Zap can automatically generate a new lead in your CRM whenever someone submits a form on your website. This eliminates manual data entry and ensures timely follow-up with potential customers.
But Zapier’s power goes beyond simple one-to-one connections. Its true strength lies in its vast integration capabilities.
With support for over 3,000 apps, including popular CRM systems, email marketing tools, project management software, and more, Zapier empowers you to build a cohesive workflow that seamlessly connects all the essential tools in your marketing stack.
Data flows effortlessly across platforms, eliminating silos and ensuring everyone has access to the latest information.
Pricing for Zaiper:
Offers a free plan with limited connections, and paid plans starting at $19.99 per month for increased functionality.
Most of the tools on this list are CRM platforms that offer bolted-on marketing automation features.
Ruler takes a different approach.
Designed to work seamlessly alongside your existing CRM, Ruler automates lead enrichment with vital marketing source and attribution data.
This empowers you to pinpoint the exact origin of your highest-quality leads and optimise your marketing spend.
Ruler also automates the transfer of closed revenue data back to its dashboard, allowing you to utilise various attribution models and allocate revenue precisely to the touchpoints that drive the most conversions.
Book a demo with Ruler and see how it can transform your lead nurturing and attribution processes.
