20 Best Marketing Automation Software Solutions of 2023

This article has been updated with the most current marketing automation software systems of 2023 so you’ll stay in-the-know about the latest and leading solutions in the niche.

Is your marketing program getting harder to manage as it grows bigger? A category of software you can use to automate, streamline, and measure your marketing-related workflows and tasks is marketing automation software. Since there are plenty of products available in the industry, we compiled the 20 best marketing automation software solutions of 2023 to narrow down your search.

Marketing automation solutions changed the way businesses handle the relationship between their brand and customers. By automating various processes that would have otherwise been performed manually, you increase the efficiency and efficacy of your team in your marketing initiatives. This makes it a crucial component of customer relationship management.

Among others, the system uses predictive algorithm to target the right recipients of your marketing campaigns. Through a targeted and personalized approach, you can drive more conversions, turning leads into customers.

Marketing automation has been gaining traction among businesses as reflected in a 2018 survey conducted by emailmonday.com, which reported that 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation while a majority (58%) of B2B companies are planning to adopt the technology.

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Marketing automation has indeed come a long way since its humble beginnings and is still bridging the gap between marketing and sales. Numerous technologies have developed new functionalities that are capable of managing different marketing processes. These technology trends for marketers have been helping shape the future of marketing automation.

There are plenty of products available making it tedious to choose one. In addition to conducting a comprehensive business evaluation of your needs, it is helpful to explore and compare the features and functionalities of leading products in the category. To help you narrow the list down, we compared the 20 best marketing automation software solutions you should consider in 2023.

1. Freshworks CRM

Freshworks CRM combines the core CRM functionalities of Freshsales and the robust marketing features of Freshmarketer in a single platform. Freshworks CRM is built to further amplify the collaboration between marketing and sales, enhance communication with customers, provide a clear visual of every stage in the sales pipeline, boost engagement, and ultimately get the best quality leads.

As an intuitive software solution, Freshworks CRM is powered by Freddy AI, which is capable of providing predictive analyses that you can turn into actionable insights to improve your sales pipeline management, enhance engagement and retention, and more, in no time. Freddy AI is a proactive smart assistant that you can utilize to engage with website visitors, delve into your contacts’ publicly available information, score contacts, identify duplicate leads, and even detect if your contact is out of office, allowing you to immediately reschedule your appointment and move on to the next task.

Freshworks CRM

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What is unique about Freshworks CRM?

1. CRM customization. Different businesses have different needs and Freshworks CRM addresses this by providing its clients with customization tools to help them tailor their CRM into the customer relationship management solution that works best for their business operations.
2. Freddy AI. Freshworks CRM’s built-in smart assistant can analyze, automate, and customize our CRM experience. This powerful AI tool can assess your sales pipeline by reviewing your deals and helping you assess the best course of action to successfully close deals faster.
3. Marketing journey builder. This feature enables you to automate email marketing throughout your customer’s entire lifecycle. It also analyzes your audience’s behavior based on their interactions on your web pages, emails, etc., for better audience segmentation.
4. SMS and instant messaging integration. Freshworks CRM utilizes all possible forms of digital communication to stay connected with customers and prospects through SMS and WhatsApp Business.
5. Rotten deals monitoring. With most of the attention taken by promising leads, stagnant deals are often set aside and sometimes forgotten. Freshworks CRM prevents this from happening by letting you customize your deals’ “age,” so that “rotting” deals are highlighted before they turn into missed opportunities.

2. HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot Marketing ranks first on the list because of its overall complete functionality in helping you launch effective marketing campaigns. It specializes as an all-in-one inbound marketing solution to drive your traffic, increase lead conversions, and improve your ROI. It’s a tool that can help you from building and modifying your website to measuring the performance of your campaigns.

Known as one of the leaders in inbound marketing, HubSpot enables customers to discover and reach you in various channels—through social media, blogs, and search engines. It ensures quality over quantity by targeting content only to qualified leads and customers.

The platform empowers personalization by enabling users to design and customize their own workflows, content and formats. Furthermore, it optimizes your content for smarter targetting. Landing pages are customizable through the app’s drag-and-drop interface. In addition to marketing automation, its main features include social media monitoring, lead management, and landing pages, among others. 

HubSpot Marketing

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What is unique about HubSpot Marketing?

1. A hassle-free working environment. HubSpot Marketing is a reasonable alternative for first-time MA users, as it comes with an intuitive, hassle-free interface that performs proficiently even without coding. Users can build a website without IT knowledge, design their own workflows, prepare, format, and publish content, and engage customers in a more personalized way.
2. Compact and ready-to-use marketing funnel. Becoming an expert marketer has never been easier: You simply create an account, place contacts in the most appropriate stage of the funnel, score them, and personalize and distribute your content.
3. Marketing impact reports. The system relies on its tight HubSpot CRM and Salesforce connections to provide first-hand access to traffic data, and pull out valuable stats. You get to report confidently on the impact of each marketing effort, and learn how to improve your sales performance.
4. Delighted customers. What if your marketing system can give users additional reasons to visit your website? HbSPot Marketing specializes in delighting users, providing them keywords and key phrases, blog blueprints for optimized visibility, and content arranged in a way they’d expect it to be.
5. Part of a powerful business growth stack. HubSpot Marketing can be used both independently, and as part of the company’s sales+marketing+CRM stack. This means that you can have a single system in charge of boosting your traffic, motivating visitors to convert, closing deals, and staying organized.

3. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a powerful marketing solution designed to help businesses promote their business through email and social media marketing. It specially offers an extensive set of functionalities for email marketing. Features include a drag-and-drop editor for easy customization, email templates, automation tools, and real-time tracking tools.

What’s more, it lets its users connect with their customers through live events, online surveys, coupons, donations, and more which helps you drive more business. The great thing is that all of it can be managed in one place. You can also extend the functionalities by integrating the system with apps like Shopify, WordPress, and Salesforce. You can also extend your marketing campaigns to social media platforms. The vendor offers a free trial so you could try the features with no risk before making a purchase.

What is unique about Constant Contact?

1. Drag-and-drop editor. Creating and editing emails is not rocket science with Constant Contact’s built-in drag-and-drop editor. You can design mobile responsive and professional email by just dragging elements and dropping them in place.
2. Email marketing automation. The platform sends welcome email and resends emails to non-openers automatically. Email series is triggered based on where your contact clicks. Also, the platform segments the contacts to avoid sending the wrong message to the recipients.
3. eCommerce email marketing. Boost your e-commerce growth by using email marketing. Constant Contact allows online stores to promote their services and products through targeted emails. The platform integrates with WooCommerce, Shopify, and other e-commerce platforms, making it easier to streamline your marketing efforts.
4. Robust contact management tools. Organize your contacts with ease with Constant Contact’s contact management tools. The platform allows users to add contacts from their website and social media with ease and upload contact lists from third-party applications. Updates are done automatically, avoiding unsubscribed and duplicate contacts.
5. Real-time tracking tools. Know whether your campaigns are working or not through the platform’s easy-to-read reports and tracking tools. So you can also plan your next steps.
6. Social media marketing. Promote your services and products on Facebook and Instagram. Integrate Constant Contact with social media to create a marketing ad campaign. You can schedule, share, and monitor content from one location, hence no need to spend time switching between your social media accounts.

4. EngageBay

EngageBay is a comprehensive CRM software that offers marketing and sales automation and business process integration solutions. Designed by experienced marketing and sales professionals and software developers, EngageBay sports an intuitive platform that is easy to understand and use.

SMBs that are looking for a comprehensive CRM software should check out EngageBay. This is due to EngageBay having one of the most all-encompassing available features available in the current market as part of their free trial plan. The CRM solutions available in the free trial enables users to the various tools EngageBay possess that can help expedite vital business processes.

Moreover, their integrated CRM system ensures that any and every important marketing and sales process can be monitored and tweaked in one convenient and intuitive platform.

EngageBay

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What is unique about EngageBay?

1. All-in-One Suite. EngageBay’s CRM suite is designed to house marketing, sales and service management tools in one platform. Having these solutions in one nifty interface gives users the ability to see the bigger picture of their overall CRM processes as well as focus in on specific areas such as marketing, sales and customer service hassle-free.
2. Integrated Marketing Platform. EngageBay’s marketing platform gives both users and customers visibility as they interact and complete each step of the buying or subscribing process. Each interaction can be tracked and customer information can be captured and stored for future reference or targeted marketing campaigns. EngageBay’s CRM tools can also be automated to process more contacts, generate leads and improve engagements.
3. Free CRM, Helpdesk and Live Chat. One of EngageBay’s main selling points is its comprehensive free trial plan which consists of one of the most extensive free features of any CRM system so far. This includes their marketing, sales and services tools, along with their Helpdesk and Live Chat functions for customer engagement. SMBs are EngageBay’s main target in this regard since it allows small businesses to try out extensive CRM solutions first before they commit to the more premium plans.
4. Simple Customer Service and Helpdesk Solutions. As their name suggests, another strength of EngageBay’s CRM system is its engagement tools. Their loadout is easy to figure out and it allows owners to interact with customers in real-time or have automated responses to ensure customer satisfaction as well as lead generation.
5. Reliable Support. When it comes to issues or troubleshooting, EngageBay’s live support is readily available. They can be contacted via phone or email and they encourage users to submit tickets explaining their issue to which they would promptly address and assist in resolving.

5. Marketing Creatio

Marketing Creatio is a productive suite that brings together marketing, sales, and CRM functions into an affordable and flexible bundle. The vendor also offers a free trial for those who’d like to try out all the key features first.

The product’s system functions as a core lead generator and a differentiator that analyzes prospect behavior. It then makes it easy to distinguish sales-ready leads regardless of their industry, location, or purchase history. It is also an agent-friendly and well-organized hub that puts valuable data within easy reach, keeping your budget safe from excess expenses all along. The plans are affordable and customer-centered. Additionally, it doesn’t charge any recurring fees.

What is even more important is that Marketing Creatio makes marketing just as agile and business-specific as you need it, allowing you to draft campaigns and target users the way you want to. Such customization ensures invaluable benefits for brand awareness, transforming even the least-known business into a reliable and trustworthy partner. At the same time, you can integrate it easily with the rest of your software system, both when using it as a separate tool or in synergy with other Creatio products.

What is unique about Marketing Creatio?

1. End-to-end marketing automation. Marketing Creatio can be described as an agile and flexible system which compares marketing channels to distinguish the ones that generate the best leads, and does the same with prospects to select sales-ready ones, and to assign them to the right users. At the same time, this system modifies marketing streams, and tests the effect of different targeting processes to help you adapt to your business environment.
2. A variety of useful lead nurturing practices. Being an omnichannel product, Marketing Creatio leverages the best lead nurturing practices, so that leads would be automatically routed from one sales stage to the other, be it acquisition, qualification, or distribution.
3. An inbuilt content creator. Creative teams can use Marketing Creatio to develop their own brand-specific promotional materials, including e-books and papers, videos, conference events, newsletters, and many more.
4. Summarizing and analyzing lead information. Marketing Creatio covers all most effective lead management practices to collect and summarize information, making sure that all important customer details are clearly visible to the user. It focuses foremost on customers’ behavior and interaction with your content, and puts in action some sophisticated mapping to ensure accurate customer segmentation.
5. Collaboration features. Marketing Creatio gathers all customer data on a single location, and makes it accessible to all agents regardless of the department where they are working. In this way, the system eliminates miscommunication and duplicate entries, and makes sure everyone is on the same page. Note that the tool is also fully mobile-optimized, and allows agents to use it even when not in the office.
6. Member of a compact productivity bundle. Pushed by the idea to create a fully-functional customer management suite, Marketing Creatio united three productive modules in a single CRM package – Sales, Marketing, and Service. The price of this bundle is very affordable, which is why we recommend it to all companies looking to enhance customer service.

6. SharpSpring

SharpSpring‘s team believes that in-time delivery and streamlined communication are businesses’ main assets to drive growth and conversion, and thus focuses all features and efforts on helping you build relationships that will last. The system is very simple and painless to afford, and lets you distribute the right messages to the right people, at the right time. It is also one of the best integrated tools on this list, fully optimized for mobile usage and easily deployed by non-professionals. You should consider it because of marketing automation trends and tips, social assistance, powerful customer insights, and end-to-end mobile CRM.

What is unique about SharpSpring?

1. A simplified and personalized email marketing experience. SharpSpring makes email automation more than simple. It does not offer blast emails but rather personalized email messages, which are distributed to the right customers in the right time. Therefore, you will have the peace of mind that your correspondence won’t end up in the spam folder.
2. Dynamic forms for lead capturing. Lead capturing dynamic forms grab your visitors’ attention and give them an opportunity to get answers to their inquiries. A well-structured dynamic form becomes an essential part of your website and is easy to fill. It has a smooth drag-and-drop editor that allows you to build, customize and reorder the fields.
3. Streamlined social media integrations. SharpSpring allows you to follow your customers (and prospective customers) on popular social media, and observe their behavior and interests. Third party CRMs can also be integrated without any complicated procedures.
4. Moderate pricing. Instead of offering fixed plans for users coming from different market tiers and industries, SharpSpring works with custom pricing, and tailors an individual plan for each customer based on what he needs ad can afford.
5. Excellent client support. SharpSpring’s friendly and knowledgeable team can be accessed easily via email and phone, be it that you’re a basic or a premium user. They will be there to answer your questions and provide free-of-charge tips. Interested users can also check their free demo to see how this system works.

7. LeadSquared

If looking to combine marketing automation and CRM functionality on a fair price, look no further than LeadSquared. This is the tool that lands more leads and sells more products in synergy, and a valuable asset for large and decentralized teams. There is much to like about it, but we’d point out its efficient lead conversion practices, which happen to be unique in this industry: LeadSqaured works independently to push leads deeper down the sales funnel, boosts the sales velocity of your business with accurate lead qualification, and gives you a conversion prediction tool you’ll wish you’d had before. At the same time, LeadSquared will do a good job depicting areas for improvement, focusing primarily on bounce rates small businesses usually struggle with.

What is unique about LeadSquared?

1. Fully automated and independent workflows. LeadSquared is an automation-first system, and hence allows users to create interdependent workflows that work in-sync to automate complex business processes. Funnel movements are an excellent example, as they help change lead stages or update any other lead field right when a pre-defined lead activity occurs.
2. No-code campaign personalization. LeadSquared comes packed with beautiful templates, and offers a handy drag-and-drop tool where you can personalize your email marketing campaigns. You can utilize an array of elements like images, content and buttons, and a visual builder to produce vibrant designs with a personal touch. Coding skills won’t be necessary.
3. Drip marketing. In short, LandSquared makes sure you take the right action for the right customer at the right time. It guides leads down the sales funnel quite independently, and that’s what makes it so special – you can sketch your prospect conversation paths and define their journey on a simple visual builder, and automate most of your sales funnel within seconds.
4. End-to-end lead engagement. LeadSquared will not only pull leads into your system, but help you keep them engaged all along. You can send notifications and enable important autoresponders, highlight fresh deals they could be interested in, and make connection as streamlined as they would like it to be.
5. Tracking customers’ behavior. When it comes to lead differentiation, LeadSquared pays the most attention to activity and behavior variables. It allows you to track all leads’ moves, including CTA clicking and page viewing, and gives access to a customizable scoring feature that will distinguish ready buyers.
6. Professional customer support. LeadSquared offers a knowledgeable and friendly support team that will always be at your reach. You can contact them any time you want, via email, phone, or live chat. You will also find ready ticket forms embedded on their website, and plenty of training materials where you can look for answers independently.

8. Marketo

Many industry experts describe Marketo as the ‘best system of its kind’, and they’re fully justified to do so. Marketo is without doubt one of the leaders of market automation, putting in place unique lead gathering practices we could all learn something from. To begin with, the system covers virtually every digital marketing need, and guides the user from acquisition to advocacy. It offers a special module called Customer Marketing to accompany its email marketing and lead management features, developed as an independent instrument of engagement and real-time personalization. You will also appreciate its highly visual drag and drop interface which is very easy to use and does not require any HTML skills to create professional email templates, as well as its small-biz friendly pricing.

What is unique about Marketo?

1. Installing social components to your emails. All emails prepared and distributed via Marketo can include social components, attached using the system’s ‘Forward to a Friend’ function. Users will also be able to test a particular email before they send it, and  make dynamic, last minute changes where needed.
2. Creating beautiful landing pages with data capture forms. Marketo comes with a drag-and-drop interface, and a staggering number of flexible landing page templates. All templates can be tweaked into Facebook pages, and include data capture forms used to aggressively profile potential contacts and convert them into leads.
3. Native integrations with leading CRM and productivity service providers. Marketo can easily be associated with several CRM, business intelligence and collaboration frontrunners, among which Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Zoho CRM, Unbounce, Riva, and many more.
4. Fully optimized for social marketing. Marketo will easily become your favorite social marketing platform which you can apply in three different areas: social sharing, social engagement, and social promotion. It integrates seamlessly with all leading social media, which means you can reach out to potential clients wherever they’re coming from.
5. All standard analytics and reporting. Marketo won’t really reinvent the wheel when it comes to analytics and reporting, but still provide you will all essential summaries to make sense of your data. You get to work with various customizable metrics, including email and landing page performance, lead performance, and campaign performance among others.

9. Oracle Eloqua

Oracle Eloqua, or as developers like to call it – the MA execution tool that drives dynamic conversions, holds the reputation of users’ favorite experience personalization system. Available worldwide and in several different languages, Eloqua has one of the longest lists of satisfied customers to boast with, all of them impressed by its simplicity that doesn’t seem to harass functionality in anyhow. Eloqua does not only help develop effective strategies, but also modernized and enhances those that are already in place, giving your sales department the long awaited push-up to success. Another thing you will certainly adore about Eloqua is the drag-and-drop canvas interface, where you can transform, normalize, and arrange data, and orchestrate experiences across your paid, owned, and earned channels.

What is unique about Oracle Eloqua?

1. Sales and Marketing aligned. Oracle Eloqua helps you boost your ROI rates by bringing sales and marketing efforts together. For the purpose, it will deploy detailed customer information and unify buyers’ experience, identify and put forward valuable opportunities, and keep customer engaged with the idea of tracking their behavior all along.
2. Next-generation marketing analytics. Oracle Eloqua is a great choice to measure marketing success, as it examines how each campaign affects your bottom line, and maps cross-channel engagement to real revenue. You can use it for closed-loop reporting on pipeline and ROI impact, compare engagement efforts to conversions, and even analyze your website’s performance with Oracle Business Intelligence.
3. Very sophisticated lead management. Oracle Eloqua scores leads in a variety of unique ways, and measures highest lead yield quality to to aggregate behavioral data, and segment contacts for more deals. You will get a comprehensive data management set and digital body language that makes it easy to run different scoring models on the same lead.
4. Personalized experiences for more conversions. With Eloqua, you can deploy complex campaigns in less than no time, and use a simple drag-and-drop functionality to map audience flows on each available channel. In order to move and tweak data in the system, you won’t be expected to posses any IT knowledge.
5. Identification of revenue-driving audiences. Eloqua offers some of the best-looking and richest customer profiles you’ve seen, as it combines disparate data from different sources, and brings it into order. This way, the app makes it easy to segment audiences right away, and turn to those that have the exact buyer sentiment needed to close a deal.

10.  ActiveCampaign

While most marketing software developers looked for that little something that will make their product unique, the team behind ActiveCampaign found it in the most unexpected place – marketing automation done the old good way, just slightly more simple. Ever since, ActiveCampaign has been the synonym of no-clutter marketing automation, and a system that sends nothing but reasoned and effective messages. The system supports unconditioned customization, and brings up valuable sales insights and best practices. At the moment, it serves over 100.000 users who claim having access to all marketing faucet they need,  and delivers more than 150 hands-on integrations for undisturbed data migration.

What is unique about ActiveCampaign?

1. On-site tracking of your contacts’ behavior. ActiveCampaign can literally ‘see’ what a contact is doing on your website. Their entire page view history is attached to their contact record, so that you know what they have and haven’t done on your website, and can orchestrate marketing moves accordingly.
2. Conditional Content features for last-minute modifications. With Conditional Content you are able to dynamically alter content on a per contact basis. For instance, you could display entirely different images or blocks of text in an email based on how a contact is tagged or what web pages they have viewed on your website. It is also this feature that suggests last-viewed products for your customers.
3. An intuitive automation builder. ActiveCampaigns’s automation builder is a drag-and-drop flowchart tool that is intuitive to use, and allows you to create powerful processes and workflows without IT knowledge.
4. Event tracking capabilities. With Event Tracking, you will be able to communicate specific actions your contacts have taken to ActiveCampaign, and then use that information to create highly personalized marketing campaigns.
5. Fuly-featured sales CRM suite. ActiveCampaign’s automation tool extends seamlessly into a CRM, and puts in place a smooth transition from marketing into sales. The same marketing automation tools that can be leveraged during the marketing process, and used to automate many other important tasks.

11. Exponea

Exponea Marketing Cloud is another opportunity-pursuing system that can simplify omnichannel communication, and help you make the most of your marketing operations. It brings together an array of useful marketing automation tools, and combines them with practical AI capabilities and advanced insights to raise conversions within any business environment. It is also a number-one alternative for businesses trying to maximize customer value and optimize acquisition ROI with limited resources, with a relatively cheaper access to first-class functionalities such as Ad control and attribution modeling. What customers also like about it is its long-term and secure data storage.

What is unique about Exponea?

1. One-of-a-kind Marketing scenario designer. The platform offers a powerful Scenario Designer that gives them full control over their marketing efforts, and gives them access to features such as drag-and-drop campaign editors, WYSIWYG email editors, premade templates, A/B testing, and Jinja template engine support.
2. Result-oriented attribution modeling. Exponea is before anything else a fully-integrated marketing cloud, and lets companies leverage the power of detailed customer analyses, and make use of previous experiences to improve performance. Its Attribution Models, Personalized and Running Aggregates, Custom Metrics, and SQL Reporters will all help you achieve the results you need.
3. Modern ad management. Exponea’s Ad management toolkit unites and analyzes the performance of all your online marketing campaigns, and uses interactions and CRM data to retarget look-alike audiences. Your ads are automatically and artificially managed to ensure you can leverage their maximal potential.
4. Data tracking & Long-term storage. Exponea uses tags to track specific online interactions, and imports data from as many third-party systems as you’ve integrated it with. This data is later stored in BigQuery and Hadoop for easy retrieval, can be used any time to trigger any type of customer-centered action.
5. Plug-and-play accessibility. Exponea will be completely installed in an hour or so, and it will take you no more than three weeks to run it at full speed. It will be a breeze to maintain, as it doesn’t require the client’s IT department for ongoing support, and it enables seamless integration between data collection, analytics, and execution.

12. Real Magnet

Real Magnet is an intelligent, forward-looking automation system that serves both proficient and first-time marketers. Its first attribute is simplicity, as this tool won’t overwhelm you with complex navigation and HTML skills, but will rather give you an intuitive environment to modify and build campaign templates. Another thing that makes Real Magnet a preferred solution is end-to-end marketing automation, as its team paid took all tedious operations out of a user’s reach – turn it on, and Real Magnet will take control over email campaigns, social tools and analytics, conversions, and reporting. All along, you will be accompanied by a friendly and knowledgeable team that guarantees some of the shortest response times in this industry.

What is unique about Real Magnet?

1. Editing and designing mobile-friendly campaigns. Real Magnet comes with a content editor platform that allows you to edit and design campaigns. The campaigns are mobile-friendly, which allows you and your customers to access them using mobile gadgets. You can use the same editor to build custom reports.
2. Inbound marketing. Real Magnet will bring all your inbound marketing efforts together and facing a common goal, and help you attract visitors, target and generate prospects, and easily convert those into loyal and paying customers.
3. Search engine optimization. Real Magnet will not only help you discover and target prospects, but also enable web searchers to find your services. You can use this platform to build a fully-optimized website around strategic and effective metadata, and to pick those keywords that will portray your content and services.
4. Survey management. The most distinctive advantage of Real Magnet is that it merges survey and email marketing activities, and provides you with a unique ability to distribute your surveys, polls, and questionnaires to all interested audiences. The feature will be of particular interest to social media marketers.
5. Open API architecture. Real Magnet helps connect with third party applications due to its API feature. Some of those third party applications include the Viacom, Drury Hotels, and American Red Cross, among others.

13. Pardot

There is little chance you haven’t heard of Pardot, a product which gained staggering popularity rates despite of being relatively young (and just as much on-point compared to its enterprise-grade competitors). While there is a serious share of this popularity to ascribe to its Salesforce foundation, there is much more to this system to convince you that you need it – Pardot offers end-to-end lead generation and lead management, effortless email marketing, seamless sales alignment, and a number of detailed ROI reports. You will also be impressed by how it works with the rest of your software ecosystem (in particular if you’re a current Salesforce users), as Pardot was designed to blend seamlessly and inquire minimal IT adjustment.

What is unique about Pardot?

1. A Salesforce-powered product. Pardot is Salesforce’s flagship marketing automation product that holds a great reputation for uptime and usability. This also means that the tool is well-integrated with other Salesforce products, and that it follows the company’s unified mobile usability approach.
2. B2B marketing automation. Pardot works side by side with Salesforce to orientate marketing efforts in the right direction. It places marketing and CRM tools under the same roof to connect the dots of your diverse marketing channels, and ensure that customers have a unified experience on all of them.
3. Insightful ROI reporting. What Pardot is probably best known for is insightful ROI reporting that measures and tracks campaign performance, and ties marketing and sales indicators in comprehensive units. You can also use this system to pull out advanced lifecycle and email reports, and connect it to your favorite BI tools for even more powerful analytics.
4. Seamless sales alignment. With Pardot, you will give your sales agents the unique possibility to distribute marketing-approved mini-campaigns among customers, and drive them to sales in real time. You can drop leads directly into CRM nurturing tracks, and follow Gmail interactions with instant alerts.
5. Generating only high-quality leads. Using Pardot, you can generate high-quality leads with the help of customized and targeted emails. Pardot also boosts your sales pipeline, calculates marketing ROI, and tracks customer behavior.

14. IBM Marketing Cloud

A list like this would not be complete without IBM’s flagship automation tool, developed by a company that first launched and established the pillars of digitized marketing as it is today. IBM Marketing Cloud addresses a number of B2C marketing needs, focusing predominantly on optimizing email campaigns and managing customer data for analytic purposes. It is a safe way to go even when it comes to mobile engagement, as it handles really professionally the cross-channel experiences for email, mobile, and web users. Its biggest contribution will be keeping your marketing efforts consistent, and your customer database under full control. If you’re already using an IBM product, Marketing Cloud is the closest to spotless marketing automation you can possibly get.

What is unique about IBM Marketing Cloud?

1. Building a consistent cross-channel experience. With IBM Marketing Cloud you can develop, automate, and deliver standardized experience for email, mobile, social, and web users, and adopt a more personal approach that motivates audiences to convert.
2. Cognitive analytics. IBM Marketing Cloud specializes in understanding customer behavior, and helps you report on it in various different ways. You can use its cognitive analytics suite to draw conclusions and make data-driven decisions for deepened customer engagement.
3. Interactions on social media. With IBM Marketing Cloud you can interact with your audience over social media, integrate your communications and use automation for social media campaigns. Such communication combined with IBM’s first-class analytics will enable you to reach prospective customers, understand their behavior, and respond to their preferences.
4. Multi-channel approach to lead scoring. Lead management has also been made easy and effective through this IBM product. It comes with a multi-channel approach to scoring new leads and nurture the old. Just as a good lead scorer system, it enables you to understand your customers and empowers better alignment of your sales process.
5. Faster ROI improvement. IBM Marketing Cloud can be easily connected to the rest of your marketing & productivity ecosystem, as it is a very scalable platform that has no trouble integrating with any tool or data source. It is hosted entirely in cloud, and thus requires no updating or maintenance by your side.

15. iContact Pro

iContact Pro is a very affordable, customer-first alternative to premium targeting systems, with plenty of marketing automation features to tickle the imagination of creative marketers. Its core functionality is modern campaign management, as the platform allows users to tweak end-to-end the experience of their subscribers, and then distinguish and nurture the most relevant leads. iContact Pro will also cover your social media posting and monitoring needs, and keep you in line with all social trends. Last, but not least, this system offers a robust analytic suite and lead scoring mechanism that will help you gauge the full sales potential of your contacts.

What is unique about iContact Pro?

1. Facilitated, in-time management of marketing campaigns. iContact Pro offers tools for segmentation, A/B testing, and a message builder to fulfill email marketing needs of your company. It comes with list management tools for easy management of client IDs which often becomes difficult due to an ever increasing client base.
2. Individualized workflows. iCOntact Pro allows you to target subscribers in a highly personalized manner, with individualized workflows that place the right content in front of the right customer, at the right time. For the purpose, the tool monitors and uses data such as customer behavior, interaction history, type, geography, and more.
3. Social media management tools. This cloud-based software also integrates social media management and robust analytics. Social media management tools let you shoot scheduled campaigns over Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, launch and join important conversations, follow trends, and engage with audiences in real time.
4. Seamlessly integrated marketing automation tools. iContact Pro will combine a variety of useful marketing automation features, including attractive landing pages, analytics, email marketing, sales and social media integrations, and many more.
5. Strategic Salesforce integration. Contact can be integrated with SalesForce to help you manage the sales process. It also offers analytics which is vital for strategic planning and can be used to access the marketing funnel reports. These analytics play a major role in deciding resource allocation for marketing and sales in long term planning.

16. Wishpond

Wishpond will please marketers with one of the cutest interfaces they could possibly use, but still disclose a number of unique growth capabilities for their companies. It combines four essential marketing tools in a single set-and-go platform, namely landing pages, popups & forms, contests & promos, and complete lead nurturing and marketing automation. Wishpond nurtures leads based on their information and real-time and on-site activities, and releases a series of unique, personalized drip emails to those that are ready to buy. It is also well-known for dynamic lead scoring and list segmentation, as well as its connectivity with more than 30 popular software services.  The size of your business won’t matter, as Wishpond works well for small, medium, and large companies.

What is unique about Wishpond?

1. Mobile-responsive landing pages. Wishpond is most appreciated for allowing developers to build and optimize attractive landing pages, which are at the same time fully mobile-responsive. The process will require no IT skills or coding knowledge, and takes place on a no-brainer drag-and-drop editor to save your time.
2. Popups & Forms for lead generation. Wishpond leverages the potential of random site visitors with popups and creative contact forms, as well as unique methods such as sidebars and overlays. This is the fastest and most personalized way to generate leads.
3. Contests and Promotions. Wishpond gives interested followers an additional way to connect with you and benefit from your services – its beautiful contests and promotions. You will be offered features alike photo contests, Instagram photo competitions and promotions, sweepstakes, and many more.
4. Dynamic lead scoring. In order to simplify lead management and segmentation, Wishpond will score leads as they arrive in the system, using no other information than personal details and activity history.
5. Tight integration with more than 30 marketing service providers. To ensure an unobstructed flow of data between different systems and sources, developers made Wishpond work in synergy with 30+ popular marketing apps and systems. The list includes names such as Salesforce, Zapier, MailChimp, Slack, Sugar CRM, and many similar products.

17. GreenRope

GreenRope is in fact a fully featured customer relationship system that offers some of the most advanced marketing automation tools for high-class lead management. We recommend it because of its excellent, fully automated process setup, efficient art automation features, and relatively easy onboarding. It will govern the journey of your customer from awareness to conversion, and create unique paths for him to engage and interact with your service. For the purpose, GreenRope uses an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, and takes into account both the actions and the inactions of your leads. There are many ways in which you can customize these interactions, including follow ups, personalized emails, intricate road maps, and more.

What is unique about GreenRope?

1. Small-biz friendly. With even 7 different pricing packages that cater to the needs of different teams and businesses, GreenRope is made easily affordable even to small businesses and startups. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that all users are provided with enterprise-grade marketing functionalities.
2. Marketing automation bundled in a compact CRM package. GreenRope integrates all important aspects of running a modern small or mid-sized business, and combines marketing automation features with well-organized CRM functionalities. This means that you can enhance your sales and improve communication with customers all from a single system, which also makes data accessible to all team members, and enhances collaboration.
3. Streamlined communication. GreenRope uses a variety of omnichannel strategies to engage leads at scale, and build lasting customer relationships. It provides a modern digital experience for your users, and nurtures leads on your landing pages, websites, and social media.
4. Website builders. A unique opportunity offered by GreenRope is to build informative and engaging websites for customers. Simply choose a suitable template, add your colors, fonts, logos, and layouts, and you are ready to go. The website will then be automatically tracked, and you will receive timely notifications on how users are interacting with your content.
5. Advanced workflow management. GreenRope allows you to implement personalized and business-specific workflows and rules in all sales and marketing operations. In such way, you and your team will stay organized and retain full control over projects, tasks, and follow ups.

18. AdRoll

35,000 advertisers worldwide are relying on AdRoll’s marketing suite to retarget and prospect platforms of choice, and for a good reason. AdRoll is a whole new world of marketing possibilities – This poweerful operator provides unlimited access to prospects and audiences via any app, device, browser, or operating system, including social media and Google-style native directories. With more than 500 ad exchanges, AdRoll leaves little chances that you won’t be able to target a customer of interest, and gives you the right transparency & control tools to communicate successfully. You will be particularly impressed by its BidIQ™, our proprietary real-time bidding algorithm that will place your ads at the right place, and charge little to do so.

What is unique about AdRoll?

1. Stable cross-device connections. AdRoll makes use of connections across devices, allowing you to retarget those high-intent desktop website visitors on their mobile devices as well. In-app retargeting is also available thanks to AdRoll’s partnerships with leading mobile analytics and measurement providers to make your campaigns easy and effective.
2. Open access to customer data. With AdRoll, you can you can reach and engage your customers across any device, app, or browser, with access to more than 500 ad exchanges, including native inventory like Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
3. First-class performance engineering. AdRoll offers a special, one-of-a-kind proprietary and real-time bidding algorithm named BidIQ that ensures your ads get the right placement for the right price.
4. Full transparency and control of your marketing campaigns. AdRoll allows you to place ads, track performance, and refine your campaigns with this easy-to-use platform. You can also seamlessly integrate the application with leading marketing solutions, and count on the tech support team to be your strategic and creative partner all along.
5. Lots of upcoming innovations. AdRoll continues to develop its retargeting capabilities as it plans to offer retargeting via Prospecting and Instagram in the future. Currently, these features are in beta development, but users can still send personal access requests to use them.

19. Salesfusion

Salesfusion will automate core sales and marketing operations, and leverage the maximum capacity of your resources to help you sell more. It is a well-known partner for sales campaign execution, which offers 24/7 assistance to all users, and puts in place a dedicated Marketing Concierge program to share some practical experience. Basically, it will turn into the marketing adviser you always wish you hired.

How exactly does Salesfusion boost your productivity? The platform provides an array of enterprise-class MA tools, among which attracting and capturing leads, creating intricate campaigns, streamlining lead processing and management, and using top notch BI tools to analyze the results of your activities.

What is unique about Salesfusion?

1. Consolidated sales and marketing tasks. Salesfusion eliminates the division between sales and marketing. While traditional marketing automation platforms were designed to consolidate and optimize marketing tasks, they do very little to create a unified sales funnel or facilitate the crucial hand-offs between sales and marketing, and that’s where this system comes the handiest.
2. No wasted leads. Today’s buying process is significantly more complex. Marketers need to ensure that leads aren’t wasted. If they aren’t ready to buy at the time sales engages with them, marketers need to know so they can continue to nurture them in an automated way that is consistent with the interactions they have had through the process.
3. CRM-style relational database. Salesfusion is unique to the industry by addressing this problem with a CRM-style relational database and native integration to the leading CRM platforms. By creating a bi-directional flow between sales and marketing, the app ensures that no lead gets left behind. The marketer will also be able to push leads to conversion based on their needs, preferences, and level of engagement.
4. Long-term relationships with quality leads. Salesfusion is purpose-built for B2B companies that want to align sales and marketing to engage in long-term relationships that drive more qualified leads, improve conversion rates and increase revenue. As a marketing automation platform, the app streamlines processes to accelerate demand creation with an easy to use platform that allows companies to quickly realize the value of marketing automation.
5. All necessary integrations. Salesfusion offers native integrations with Salesforce, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and InforCRM. It also connects to built-in SEO audit and webinar platforms (Go to Webinar, Webex); social listening and publishing to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus; email deliverability tools such as BriteVerify and Litmus; data enrichment systems alike InsideView; and website tracking tools like Google Analytic.

20. ONTRAPORT

Rather than a simple marketing automation hub, ONTRAPORT is a fully-featured business automation solution that peaks into each and every aspect of your market performance. All the way from predicting your bottom line to driving actual opportunities at your side, ONTRAPORT will be there to assume full control over your marketing and lead management efforts. The system has many unique bells and whistles to distinguish it from competitors, including eCommerce, SMS & postcard engagement, landing pages, membership sites, marketing tracking, and more. It also offers a number of prominent integrations and expert partnership, as well as an open API architecture which makes it usable in any software ecosystem.

What is unique about ONTRAPORT?

1. All-in-one business automation. ONTRAPORT is not devoted exclusively to marketers, but to all departments and teams involved in the management of a business. It will automate all your prospects, customers, and partner communications, and enable a consistent and memorable experience for all of them. It will also keep track of all tasks performed within the team, and store them systematically for facilitated reporting.
2. Unified marketing efforts. The distinctive benefits users commonly associate to ONTRAPORT is being able to automate all marketing efforts. This system combines online data sources with offline marketing campaign assets to enhance customers’ experience, and allows you to create one-of-a-kind, personalized funnel journeys.  Its campaigns are powerful, dynamic, and highly-converting.
3. Tracking of marketing campaigns. It will take as much as clicking on a single button to obtain all information on how your campaigns are progressing, and what needs to be done to improve them. You can measure the effect of each and every marketing effort, and thus make more confident business decisions.
4. Direct integration with WordPress. You can integrate your WP membership sites with your ONTRAPORT account in a matter of minutes, and generate passive income from member-exclusive programs.
5. An eCommerce suite. With ONTRAPORT in your toolkit, you can build customizable order and upsell forms, and get your storefront running in minutes by distributing them directly to target audiences. The suite is also equipped for shopping cart management, and secure payment automation.

As we conclude our list of top CRM systems, we hope you were able to narrow down your options. If you’re still unsure, we recommend you start by assessing Freshworks CRM. This platform is ranked first because of its robust combination of AI-powered CRM and marketing functionalities that can drive traffic, increase lead conversions, and improve ROI, all the while optimizing your content for a more accurate target market. What’s more, you can start using the software for free if you sign up for the startup plan. 

By Jessica Stewart

Jessica Stewart is the resident marketing analyst at FinancesOnline and a pioneering member of our research team. She believes that data is at the center of business and marketing technology is its enabler, a point not lost in her articles published in major outlets such as BusinessInsider, USA Today and Entrepreneur. Beyond assessing the standard tools for workflow automation, campaigns, messaging, and real-time alerts, Jessica focuses on the software’s bottom-line ROI— how it helps marketers perfect their data-driven method to collect and process customer data, measure the KPIs, and, ultimately, realize profits.