Best Marketing Automation Software for Business

Marketing automation is a holistic process that joins email, websites and social media channels into a unified force. Beyond simply streamlining the day-to-day work of your marketing department, marketing automation software (such as CRM tools for example) helps it work smarter with automated workflows based on user interaction with your content. In this way, marketing automation better targets interested parties, more effectively wielding your advertising dollars and stretching your budget further.

With the right selection, marketing automation software can help you attract new customers, cultivate old relationships and reduce waste in your marketing budget. Business News Daily can help you sort through the noise and make the decision that suits your team best.

Here is a roundup of our favorite marketing automation platforms. For a comprehensive look at how to choose a marketing automation solution, read our Buyer’s Guide for Marketing Automation Software.

Our Reviews

HubSpot: Best Marketing Automation Software for Small Businesses

HubSpot

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HubSpot stood out as the best marketing automation platform for small businesses with its scalability. Its features are comprehensive and useful, but what really sold us was HubSpot’s ability to seamlessly grow with a young company into a full enterprise system. While there is a bit of a learning curve to overcome and the initial price tag seems high, HubSpot delivers a quality marketing automation system that is easy to use and understand.

Customer and technical support for the solution are helpful and highly accessible, and a healthy online community helps support one another with advice and discussion about the product itself and strategies that can be employed by using it. HubSpot will help your business grow more efficiently and eliminate the need to implement new systems and retrain staff.

Oracle Eloqua: Best Marketing Automation Software for Enterprises

Oracle Eloqua

Oracle’s marketing automation solution, Eloqua, is an advanced and comprehensive system that is highly effective for large companies that have the team to back it up. Eloqua excels at creating automated campaigns through its Campaign Canvas.

Drag-and-drop functionality makes the process fun and straightforward; you drop an icon on the canvas and connect it to the next step in the workflow by dragging your mouse. Using Campaign Canvas is almost gamelike and simplifies what can be a somewhat convoluted process.

Eloqua’s central dashboard is also a big plus, giving the user easy access to virtually any aspect of the marketing automation process in a single click. Tabs boasting every asset and lead, as well as shortcuts to different campaigns, accompany at-a-glance reports on the homepage, giving a bird’s-eye view of your ongoing marketing campaigns.

Pardot

Pardot offers the most comprehensive and customizable marketing automation campaign of any software we looked at. The platform’s Engagement Center allows users to create sequences with multiple branches at each step of the way, rather than simple “yes/no” binaries.

A strong array of features allows users to create quality content with ease, while smart content and analytics help optimize content for search or tailor it to a specific lead segment.

Pardot is on the expensive side (starting at $1,000 per month), so we only recommend it for large companies or users with truly deep pockets and an experienced team to operate the system.

Zoho Campaigns

The simplicity of Zoho Campaigns makes this low-cost marketing automation solution highly usable and easy to learn. Your staff can become acquainted with the platform quickly, and you can be sure it won’t break the bank.

While Zoho Campaigns is basic compared to our other best picks, it offers very small businesses, startups and those on a budget access to core marketing automation functions for just a handful of dollars every month. However, if you’re looking for a more sophisticated, customizable marketing automation tool, it might be best to consider one of our other best picks.

Our Methodology

To determine the marketing services we think are the best for small businesses, we spent dozens of hours researching the top companies. Here is an explanation of our selection process.

Locating the Best Services

To determine which marketing automation platforms are the best, we looked for similar reviews online, examined market share and customer feedback, and talked to small business owners about which solutions they have employed themselves. We also asked entrepreneurs what they liked and disliked about each system.

Choosing the Best Services

Next, we created a list of marketing automation platforms that performed somewhat favorably or commonly appeared as market leaders. In addition to those mentioned by small business owners we spoke to and those platforms we were already familiar with, we looked at solutions that appeared on reputable online review sites and business websites.

Researching Each Service

We then researched these vendors and narrowed our list down further. We visited company websites, watched videos and demos, read guides and reviews, examined online resources and training materials, and used free trials when available. We also posed as business owners considering a solution to gauge the quality of customer service each service provided.

Analyzing Each Service

From our list of 35 marketing automation platforms, our top picks are HubSpot, Oracle Eloqua, Zoho Campaigns and Pardot by Salesforce. Our final pool of candidates also included Active Campaign, Act-On, Marketo, GetResponse, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaigner, Infusionsoft and SendinBlue.

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