With so many marketing automation platforms doing similar things, you may be asking yourself, “Which one is best for my company?” In this post, we’ll explore some of the automation software packages for email marketers that provide the best value for money:
- Braze
- Pardot
- VBOUT
- HubSpot
- SendinBlue
- ActiveCampaign
- Klaviyo
- SharpSpring
Why is Marketing Automation So Important?
The marketing automation industry growth prediction has soared from a $500 million market to $6.4 billion by 2024. According to Salesforce’s fourth State of Marketing Report, 67% of marketers are already using at least one marketing automation platform. A further 21% plan to start using one.
So do yourself a favor and get on the ol’ automation bandwagon! Imagine executing an effective email campaign from start to finish without having to spend time on fiddly tasks. Marketing automation tools allow you to cut down on the mundane while optimizing your tactics.
Automation can help you:
- Sort through email list segments
- Capture leads
- Analyze lead behavior
- Automate the marketing task workflow
- Monitor campaign performance
- Measure campaigns to optimize, validate, and prioritize initiatives
- Reduce time spent administering marketing programs and completing tasks
- Improve close rates with timely and relevant engagement
- Boost brand and messaging consistency across campaigns and channels via templates and standards
- Shorten sales cycles with quicker response times
- Customize marketing to each customer’s needs
- Create scheduled and automated activities for continuous engagement without manual effort
Working sequentially with marketing automation, you can focus efforts on creative solutions for targeting customers. Timing, personalization, and analytics can automatically run in the background while you concentrate on higher-level tasks. This focus shift can help increase your close rates and improve lead quality.
Solve Key Business Issues
There are automation platforms on the market that offer a fairly small barrier to entry when it comes to cost. For some, there’s no cost at all to start. By frontloading costs into a good marketing automation platform, you can reduce staff expenses as well.
Marketing automation software can help other key business issues, such as:
- Creating more targeted, well-informed content
- Providing overall message direction based on customer data
- Customizing messaging across a customer base
- Personalizing messaging without manual work
OK, Great — But What About Email Marketing Specifically?
Email marketing management comprises a large part of automation software tasks. Let’s look at an example. When a user opts-in to receive your emails, marketing automation sparks to life by sending out a personalized welcome email. It then subsequently sends emails targeted at that customer’s specific online activities and viewing habits. Automation can do things like operate a B2B drip campaign or send a roundup of products for B2C customers.
That’s just one of the ways marketing automation can help with email management. Handling email delivery is another huge marketing automation time-saver. Delivery of emails to different time zones, opt-in management, handling bounce backs, unsubscribes, spam… the list goes on. You’ll just be happy you don’t have to do it!
Top 8 Email Marketing Automation Platforms to Consider Now
OK, we’ve identified why marketing automation is so important, the main benefits, and the business case for employing it. Now let’s dive into some of the top marketing automation platforms, what they have to offer, and their price points. Of course, the best tool for your business will depend upon budget, feature requirements, and whether you’re small, medium, or enterprise.
Braze
Braze is a comprehensive marketing automation tool that’s geared towards optimizing email marketing campaigns. Its analytics suite supports email performance through robust optimization and reporting. Braze also offers rich components such as push and web notification ability and a geolocation feature. Its onboarding process is seamless, and managing multiple campaigns simultaneously is a no-brainer with its easy-to-use segmentation and personalization tools.
With its custom templating, live previews, testing, and detailed insights, Braze is efficient and effective marketing automation at its best. In short, Braze can help you build detailed customer profiles and deliver targeted and timely messages that convert.
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Key value offerings: Email marketing focus, comprehensive analytics suite, cross-channel marketing
Free trial? No
Best for: Medium-sized businesses, enterprise
Price point: Braze’s pricing model is based on four subscription plans: Growth, Advanced, Pro, and Enterprise. Price ranges from $50K — $220K annually depending on service entitlements and product inclusions. No specific price points are listed publicly.
Note: Braze integrates directly with Dyspatch.
Pardot
A long-time player in the marketing automation world, Pardot helps all levels of businesses, from small ecommerce companies to enterprise. Some of their top suite highlights include email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting. Pardot’s straightforward UI and Salesforce integration allows for seamless setup and ongoing campaigns which marketers can simply ‘set and forget’.
Thanks to its powerful CRM, marketers can easily filter, target and customize campaigns according to audience needs and customer journey points. Featuring an easy-to-understand pricing package, this platform is a decent investment for the feature stack it offers.
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Key value offerings: Salesforce integration, feature rich
Free trial? No
Best for: Small and medium-sized businesses, enterprise businesses
Price point:
VBOUT
This all-in-one marketing automation platform helps business owners and marketing professionals centralize and automate tasks simply and smartly. Focusing on the customer journey via email marketing, VBOUT boasts drag-and-drop landing pages, in-depth native analytics, tracking, and social management. A bonus whitelabelling feature and the ability for companies to build plans with their own mark-up makes VBOUT a top contender. A low start-up cost of $100/month for unlimited contacts makes VBOUT worth considering, especially when you’re on a budget.
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Key value offerings: Whitelabel feature, email marketing focus
Free trial? Yes
Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses
Price point:
Hubspot
Since 2006, this leading automation platform has taken the onerous and frustrating parts of building sophisticated campaigns and made them simple. HubSpot’s easy (and fast!) integration with Salesforce and a straightforward onboarding process makes it a winner among companies big and small. The many advanced features it offers includes simple fusion with online ad platforms and advanced logic-based automation workflows.
Although HubSpot focuses on simplicity and usability versus competing for the most features or customization, its hallmark set of attributes continues to grow. With an insightful interface, effective tracking tools, monthly updates and a navigational import/export process, this is one well-rounded tool. It should be no surprise that HubSpot remains a top choice for interns and tech-savvy marketers alike.
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Key value offerings: Easy-to-use interface, advanced workflows
Free trial? Yes
Best for: Small- and medium-sized businesses, enterprise businesses
Price point:
SendinBlue
100,000+ growing companies around the world can’t be wrong when it comes to this marketing toolbox. SendinBlue email marketing software offers a strong combination of email marketing and marketing automation tools that help acquire, convert, and retain customers. SendinBlue shines with its mix of chat, Facebook, email functionality, and an attractive SMS marketing tool. Its simple and intuitive graphical interface allows for easy creation of large or small email marketing campaigns.
The platform is also designed to support multiple languages, allowing global users to employ it without any issues. Topped with a free entry-level package and to-scale pricing makes SendinBlue one of the most competitive automation platforms out there.
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Key value offerings: SMS marketing tool, geolocation support
Free trial? Yes
Best for: Enterprise businesses
Price point:
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign checks all the right boxes for creating, designing and sending emails, as well as building a connection with targeted audiences. Its user-friendly interface combined with a powerful analytics suite helps prioritize leads, keep track of tasks, and automate contact management. Easily create drip campaigns with the help of powerful features such as lead scoring, win probability, and automated segmentation.
An added bonus is ActiveCampaign’s superb customer service, which is responsive and friendly. They also take a proactive approach, reaching out to customers to see if there’s anything they need. Lastly, a price point that’s built to scale makes this platform a strong contender for companies of all sizes.
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Key value offerings: Powerful analytics, customer service
Free trial? Yes
Best for: Small- and medium-sized businesses, enterprise businesses
Price point:
Klaviyo
Boasting $3.7 billion in brand revenue in the last year, it’s no wonder Klaviyo remains a top choice for ecommerce businesses. Klaviyo focuses on stellar email experiences with its wide range of email templates, boasting simple or more creative designs. This versatility allows you to customize and adapt the content you want in your marketing campaigns. Its complete market segmentation tool allows you to successfully send out campaigns aimed at the correct audience. Tight integrations with platforms such as Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce enable intuitive ecommerce functionality.
Finally, a strong tracking and reporting suite gives marketers the power to target based on customer activity. Popular behaviors include what customers bought, what they looked at, where they interacted with your emails, and how much they spent.
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Key value offerings: Customizable email templates, ecommerce integrations
Free trial? Yes
Best for: Small- and medium-sized ecommerce businesses
Price point: Based on number of contacts
Start: 1 – 250 contacts: Free
251 – 500 contacts: $20/month
Increases $10-$20/month as contact list goes up
Up to: 150,000 contacts: $1,700/month
More than 150,000 contacts: Request a quote
SharpSpring
Considered one of the most flexible and insightful automation platforms, SharpSpring offers a comprehensive suite of features, functionality and performance. (All at a third of the cost of the competition.) Think powerful, behavior-based email marketing, native or third-party CRM integration, dynamic forms, landing page and blog builders, and social management. And that’s just for starters — it also boasts universal CMS compatibility and an ability to integrate with hundreds of applications.
Robust and rich, SharpSpring also gets top marks for its customer service. This spans the spectrum from initial sales team contact to onboarding and quick and responsive support that consistently satisfies. SharpSpring also has a reputation for continuously delivering feature and functionality improvements.
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Key value offerings: Customer service, feature rich, built-in native CRM
Free trial? Yes
Best for: Small and medium-sized businesses
Price point:
Ready to Choose the Right Tool For Your Business?
The sheer number of marketing automation platforms out there can make it a daunting task to choose just one. However, you should now have a strong sense of what features, pricing, and vendor traits are important. So, search with confidence. Ultimately, what’s right for you is a platform that helps you effectively target, monitor, build, and retain your customer base. All on budget, of course.
About Dyspatch
Dyspatch is an email production platform that integrates with marketing automation platforms and ESPs to help optimize email management easily and effectively. Our intuitive drag-and-drop email builder helps build amazing email campaigns using dynamic content blocks, visuals and interactive elements without having to custom code. Create multiple templates, organize workflows, preview and test, and never miss a sign-off or approval again with Dyspatch.
