Marketing Automation Software That Supercharges ROI

Running marketing by hand eats up time. Lots of it. It’s also prone to natural human error and mistakes slip in. Messages go out late or miss the mark. In short, it’s not sustainable, and in this day and age, you’re better off automating certain tasks to free up your time.

If you want higher ROI, you should focus on 4 key things: trigger timing, segmentation, personalization, and reporting. These will ensure that your messages go out at the right time, each message reaches the right group of people, and that the message feels like it was tailored for them.

We’ll show you some of the best marketing automation software that will help you and your time move faster, reach people efficiently, track what works, and repeat after making changes.

8 Best Marketing Automation Software

Each of these tools are great in their own way. The one that’s perfect for someone else may not necessarily be perfect for you. Define your business goals and then you’ll be able to find the right fit for you.

Omnisend

Omnisend is best for ecommerce brands needing email and SMS with prebuilt automations that enable additional revenue flows.

It helps online stores set up email marketing flows without much effort. You can leverage welcome series to greet new buyers, recover abandoned carts by reminding customers to come back, segment your audience however you see fit, and more.

Key Automations

• Welcome
• Abandoned cart and checkout
• Post-purchase
• WIn-back
• Product recommendations

Integrations

• Shopify
• BigCommerce
• WooCommerce
• Other major ecommerce platforms

With Omnisend, you don’t need to build flows from scratch if you don’t want to. You can instead use ready-made ones and launch faster than you’d think.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot is best for teams wanting CRM-native automation and cross-channel orchestration.

It ties marketing with your contacts, sales, and customer support. It keeps everything in one place, which means less back and forth. You can create advanced workflow using if/then rules, score leads, automate follow-ups, and more.

Key Automations

• Lead scoring
• Email/SMS workflows
• Journey orchestration
• AI agents and assistants

Integrations

• HubSpot CRM (native)
• Salesforce
• Other apps within its large ecosystem

With HubSpot you’re getting more than just a marketing automation platform, but you’re also paying more.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is best for SMBs needing powerful branching and AI-assisted journey building across email and SMS.

It allows you to build smart automation paths. You can send different messages to people who open the message and the ones who don’t. It also uses AI to help pick the right content or action.

Key Automations

• Multi-trigger workflows
• Conditional branches
• AI-powered automation builder

Integrations

• Shopify
• WordPress
• Zapier
• 900 more tools

With ActiveCampaign, you get a powerful asset to your marketing automation with many capabilities. Even though it’s one of the more expensive ones, it’s still rather affordable compared to other enterprise-grade platforms.

Brevo (Formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo is best for cost-conscious teams needing email, SMS, and WhatsApp functionality plus transactional messaging.

It’s a good pick if you want value without losing necessary features. It’s an omni-channel tool that supports not only different platforms, but also sends transactional messages like receipts or shipping updates.

Key Automations

• Trigger-based workflows
• Dynamic content per user
• Abandoned cart flows
• Re-engagement campaigns

Integrations

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Shopify
• 150+ other tools

With Brevo, you balance between price and power, which is a great option for startups with a tight budget and small stores.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce is best for B2B teams aligning marketing with sales for lead management, scoring, and account-based marketing.

It’s a giant in the B2B industry. If your sales and marketing teams use the same system, everything connects smoothly. You can build nurturing systems, score leads based on activities, alert sales reps automatically, and more.

Key Automations

• Lead scoring
• Account-based marketing (ABM)
• Sales alerts
• Multi-touch nurture programs

Integrations

• Native to Salesforce CRM
• Works with Salesforce Data Cloud

With Salesforce, big sales teams become able to keep marketing and sales synced up, which helps manage joint efforts significantly.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is best for small teams starting out with visual journeys and basic multi-channel touches.

It’s a simple and clean tool that provides a drag-and-drop builder to create customer journeys. Mailchimp is a great option for beginners who want to try automation and don’t have large contact lists, as it can scale the pricing quite a lot.

Key Automations

• Visual journey builder
• Delayed sends and triggers
• Templates for common flows
• Analytics for open/click rates

Integrations

• Canva
• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Other 300+ tools

With Mailchimp, you can expect a decent introduction to the entire email marketing sphere and discover what you need, what you don’t, and more.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is best for ecommerce and D2C brands needing deep segmentation with email, SMS, and push in one flow.

It’s built for online stores. It uses data from your website and/or store, which allows you to send highly personalized messages. For example, it can remind a customer when it’s time to reorder a product.

Key Automations

• AI-created flows
• Replenishment emails
• Browse abandonment messages

Integrations

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• BigCommerce
• 350+ other platforms

With Klaviyo, you can segment deeply. It allows you to create many different categories for a high level of personalization.

Customer.io

Customer.io is best for product-led startups and SaaS teams using real-time event data to drive messages.

It uses events from your product, like someone finishing a signup or hitting a feature, to trigger messages. It’s for teams that want tight control and lots of data.

Key Automations

• Data-driven journeys across email, push, in-app, and SMS
• Visual builder

Integrations

• APIs
• CDPs like Segment
• Webhooks

With Customer.io, you get an extremely flexible tool, but you may require the help of a developer at first.

How to Choose the Best Marketing Automation Software

Picking the right tools depends heavily on your setup:

• Data fit. Consider if the CRM is built-in or if you’ll need to connect it. Some tools make it easy, others don’t.
• Channels. Define the channels that you use. Some offer only emails, others add SMS, WhatsApp, and in-app messages.
• Automation depth. Decide if you only need a few templates or a full branching logic with AI support.
• Focus. Ecommerce needs product feeds and cart data. B2B needs lifecycle tracking and scoring.
• Reporting. Look for tools that show revenue attribution and cohort analysis if that’s what you need.

Bottom Line

The right marketing automation tool can help you save time and boost revenue, but you need to put in some time and effort when choosing one. Consider your business goals, team size, data setup, tech-saviness, CRMs, and more. Then, choose a tool that will do the heavy lifting for you while you focus on more important things.