14 Best Marketing Automation Tools For Small Businesses

Let’s understand why we need marketing automation tools, especially for small business owners.

So what do you spend your time on as a marketer?

According to data from HubSpot, most marketers report having their days dominated by a series of routine tasks.

They lose over 3.3 weekly hours towards data analysis, organization, and collection.

Among the various marketing automation tools, Email alone takes up another considerable chunk of time, almost 3.6 hours each week.

Marketers are also busy with landing page creation, dedicating a little over three weekly hours to the task.

Social media posting and commenting hogs up about as much time in a week, while list management is the least time-consuming task, requiring under 2.7 hours a week.

Image courtesy of HubSpot

When you add it all together, that’s about 16 hours a week a marketer is spending on these tasks while using different marketing automation tools.

Considering the average 40-hour workweek, that’s a huge chunk of time to lose, particularly for small business owners with limited resources.

Although this data is from 2016, you may find that your own small business’ marketing team falls into the same pitfalls.

The above duties are those your marketers must do consistently, either daily or weekly. There seems to be no way to recoup back the lost time.

Actually, there is, and it’s known as marketing automation software. If you’re not already using a marketing automation tool for your small business, that’s something you’ll want to change ASAP.

In this post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about marketing automation software, including fourteen of the best marketing automation platforms to consider.

Table of Contents

What Is Marketing Automation Software?

Before we can get any deeper into our marketing automation for small business recommendations, let’s start with a marketing automation definition.

Automation means to do something automatically. Using marketing automation tools, , you allow a tool or software to take the basic tasks your marketing team does every day and automate them.

Whether it’s data collecting and social media updating to even sending emails, follow-ups, and other communications, marketing automation software can take care of it all.

This does not necessarily mean that you hand over the reins to a piece of software and expect it to do everything.

Automation can certainly pick up the slack, but you have to set the rules. You may create tags or input information into fields, such as when personalizing emails.

Even still, marketing automation software promises many benefits. Your marketing team can save those 16+ hours of time when automation takes care of basic tasks.

This frees up their schedule to brainstorm great new marketing campaign ideas or an inventive way to keep your customers engaged.

Your marketing team can save those 16+ hours of time when automation takes care of basic tasks.

What Are the Key Features and Functions of Marketing Automation Software?

The features found in marketing automation tools differ depending on the company and how much you pay.

Some of the more common features and functions you can expect most marketing automation platforms to have are as follows.

Advertising and SEO

One reliable way to attract leads and new customers is to advertise. Whether you opt to use social media advertising or pay to get your ads on websites, advertising automation can make your ad goals easier to achieve.

SEO, which dictates where your website appears when visitors and leads search for it online, is another feature marketing automation tools can assist in.

Reporting and Analytics

How many people opened your emails? How many people clicked the links within the email? How much social and website traffic are you generating every week or month?

To answer those questions, you can use a marketing automation tool.

Whether you need to study analytics on a single channel, such as web traffic, or even multi-channel analytics like online directories, traditional media, call metrics, direct mail, eCommerce, or social media, you can curate detailed data that indicates the direction of your campaigns.

Other metrics you can learn from the reporting and analytics included in many marketing automation platforms are ROI, conversion rates, and lead funnels.

If your small business is obtaining success after success through the efforts of your marketing and sales team, then great!

You’ve found what works and can keep making tweaks to it.

If your analytics are less than promising, then there’s no time like the present to improve upon your campaigns so they grab people better the next time.

Social Media

Any company worth its salt today must have a robust social media presence. That goes for your small business as well. The jungle that is social media can be an incredibly time-consuming one to navigate, and it’s typically not the job of your sales team to hack through it.

Your marketers will enjoy much more spare time to work on converting customers and creating campaigns when utilizing social media automation.

Direct message interfaces, social listening to cull trends, and scheduled social posting make it easy to maintain a social presence without dedicating excess time to the task.

Lead Nurturing

Another crucial duty that your marketing team is responsible for is lead nurturing. By engaging and building that professional relationship with leads now, they could become loyal, buying customers later.

Yet if your marketers have a large group of leads they’re nurturing at once, taking the time to email and follow up with each one leaves little room for anything else.

When you consider that not all these leads may even convert, that time might not even result in a profit. For a small business, that’s an awfully huge gamble to take.

Automated lead scoring will ensure that only prospective customers get the time and attention of your sales and marketing teams.

Then, in segmenting the leads automatically, it’s far easier for your marketers to reach out to each segment for much higher engagement.

Further services found in marketing automation like automated alerts, drip campaigns, and a comprehensive lead database also make lead nurturing easy and effective.

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Email Marketing

Among one of the biggest features of marketing automation by far is email marketing.

Taking the time to craft just the right message to your audience that’s personalized and engaging is a gargantuan task, albeit a necessary one.

Your marketing team can now take advantage of mobile optimization for sending emails and follow-ups anywhere, automated form creation, behavioral trigger emails, batch emails, automated email sending, and segmented emails to make their lives easier.

Nurture customers with carefully crafted and well-timed drip email campaigns from EngageBay

Why Choose Marketing Automation Software Over Other Software Options?

Some of the above tasks seem like they could perhaps be achieved with customer relationship management software or CRM.

Since you’re a small business owner and funds are tight, if you only have to choose between one type of software over another, why choose marketing automation?

Well, when pitting CRM and marketing automation tools, it’s ideally better if you use both.

You can rely on automation to generate leads and nurture them, then CRM to organize your contacts, track interactions, and guide the lead to your sales team.

If you had your eye on business intelligence software, this is another good investment, but not at the exclusion of marketing automation.

Your marketing team especially needs a solution formulated for them.

Instead of debating whether you should buy marketing automation software over the second type of software, it’s better to come up with a budget to eventually afford both.

Your small business will be better off for it.

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How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Platform for Your Small Business

We’re about to share 14 of the best marketing automation tools on the market for 2023. All will seem quite tempting at points, which makes deciding on only one a challenge.

We encourage you to read this section now and then come back to it after you finish the article so you can begin narrowing down your options for the top marketing automation tool.

Scalability

You may be a small business now, but someday, you’ll evolve to a medium-sized or even a large, Fortune 500 company.

When those days arrive, will your marketing automation be able to scale up with you or will you be stuck only able to support 50 employees when you now have 500?

Those are very important questions you’ll have to think about before you sign a contract on any automation software.

Support

Your marketing team is in the middle of a huge project when the automation platform goes down.

If you call someone for support, will you be put on hold for the next 40 minutes? Will it be 12 hours before you get a response to your email?

Make sure you look into how well-supported the software is. Outages and failures should be minimal and, if they occur, the platform should be up and running again quickly.

It also shouldn’t be impossible to get a hold of support so they can answer your questions as they arise, not hours or days after the fact.

Price

Your budget is stretched incredibly thin as a small business. It’s possible to find some free marketing automation software, and if not, then inexpensive plans are the next best thing.

Do keep in mind that the costs to keep using the software may increase as your number of contacts or employees grow.

Features

If you’re at the point where you’re ready to invest in a marketing automation tool, then surely you know what features you’ll need out of the marketing automation software.

Make sure you read the fine print on any software pricing plan to ensure you get the features you want for what you’re paying.

The Top Marketing Automation Tools for 2023

You know why you need SMB marketing automation and even what to look for in automation software. You’re still seeking the best platform for your small business.

We recommend any of these nine marketing automation systems.

Whether you choose EngageBay, ActiveCampaign, Drip, GetReponse, HubSpot, ConvertKit, Infusionsoft, Mailchimp, or Sendinblue (Brevo), know you’re making a great choice for your small business.

#1. EngageBay

What Is It?

The first marketing automation platform we recommend is EngageBay. Created in 2017 by Sreedhar Ambati, the founder of EngageBay strove to create an alternative to HubSpot that was within the budget of startups and small businesses.

Considered an all-in-one platform, EngageBay includes CRM, sales, and marketing services.

Features

Within EngageBay’s Marketing Bay are all the marketing features you need, including automation. Here are the features you can use as part of the marketing automation software:

Web forms and behavior tracking: To engage your customers so they’re more receptive to your marketing efforts, web forms can build and nurture the developing relationship. You customize the forms, choose when they pop up and select the behaviors that dictate them. You can also use behavior tracking through EngageBay to get a better grasp on who your audience is.
Prospects tracking: EngageBay’s prospects tracker will fill you in when your customers do all sorts of important things. From opening emails, clicking email links, or even checking out with a purchase, you’re at the forefront so your marketing team can act right away.
Email personalization: Create the most personalized communications for your customers yet with email personalization services. Using such data as customer interests, location, and company can increase open and click-through rates.
Customer segmentation: The people that comprise your small business audience are not all the same. Get to know them for their likes and interests and then segment them by that or other criteria, such as age, location, gender, or income with EngageBay’s customer segmentation feature.
Predictive lead scoring: Your small business wants to work with only the most qualified leads. Using predictive lead scoring, you can ensure those leads who are more willing to buy are the only ones who enter the sales and marketing funnel.
Drip email campaigns: Email automation in the form of drip campaigns allow your marketers to reach out to leads and customers alike, building your small business so it can continue experiencing growth.
Workflow builder: The average marketing team handles a lot of tasks, as we explained in the intro. With EngageBay’s visual workflow builder, you can oversee all tasks your marketing and sales teams are currently tackling. The builder uses a simple drag and drop functionality for creating workflows in minutes.
Automated services: No matter what you want to automate with EngageBay, you can. This includes live chat and support, CRM, landing pages, marketing campaigns, lead scoring, social media, text marketing, and email marketing.

Pricing

Like several of its other services, EngageBay offers its marketing automation for free. If you decide you’d like to use more of EngageBay’s services, you can add the All-in-One starting at $8.99 a month, the CRM & Sales Bay starting at $7.79 a month, or the Marketing Bay starting at $7.79 a month.

You can select from four plans. The Free plan has 1,000 branded emails a month and 1,000 contacts. For $8.99, the Basic plan gives you 10,000 branded emails and 15,000 contacts every month. You also get features like a social suite, integrations, SMS marketing, and email templates.

The Growth plan for $29.99 a month gives you 25,000 branded emails and 50,000 contacts. You also add on call records, proposals, custom domains, site messages, and marketing automation.

When your small business grows even further, you might be interested in the Pro plan at $47.99 a month.

You get more advanced marketing automation as well as custom reporting, proposal analytics, and web analytics. You also have unlimited contacts to work with.

All prices are per user.

Pros and Cons

If you’re thinking of using EngageBay as your marketing automation tool, that’s a great choice. Here are some pros and cons to help you make up your mind.

Pros:

EngageBay offers most of its marketing automation services for free. When you combine that with their free CRM, a small business like yours can get started with a lot of valuable software at no cost to you.
EngageBay’s other plans are quite affordable, suiting small businesses.
As an all-in-one suite, you can pay for sales and marketing software in one with EngageBay!

Cons:

EngageBay only integrates with Sendgrid, Mandrill, Xero, Postmark, Zapier, and Mandrill right now, which may be somewhat inconvenient. More integrations are on the way.

#2. ActiveCampaign

What Is It?

For email marketing automation tools, ActiveCampaign is another solid option to explore. ActiveCampaign was founded by Jason VandeBoom in 2003. Their cloud software services are made for smaller and mid-sized businesses.

Features

Your marketing team can automate their daily tasks in different ways using ActiveCampaign. Here’s an overview of their features:

Single-view automations: See all automation tasks on your marketer’s plate in a single view. This lets you and other marketers make instant tweaks to the system without interrupting someone else’s workflow.
Audience segmentation: Like with EngageBay, ActiveCampaign also lets you segment your small business audience to better understand them. Your marketing team can personalize the communications that go out to each segment for greater personalization and a higher engagement rate as well.
Easy automation: To get started using ActiveCampaign’s automation services, it takes just a few clicks. They too use a drag-and-drop workflow builder to establish what gets automated.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign has four pricing plans, but their costs differ depending on your contacts. For 500 contacts, you’d pay $9 a month for the Lite plan, $49 per month for the Plus plan, $129 a month for the Professional Plan, and $229 a month for the Enterprise plan.

At 5,000 contacts, the prices increase thusly: $69 a month for the Lite plan, $135 a month for the Plus plan, $199 a month for the Professional plan, and $359 a month for the Enterprise plan.

Should your small business eventually accumulate 25,000 contacts, the Lite plan is now $179 a month, the Plus plan $319 a month, and the Professional plan $479 a month. If you were interested in the Enterprise plan, it’d have custom pricing.

Pros and Cons

Before you choose whether ActiveCampaign suits your small business’ marketing automation needs, check out these pros and cons.

Pros:

ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation services are quite comprehensive.
You’d also pay for services like machine learning, SMS and messaging, CRM, sales, and email marketing with your monthly subscription.
You can get some marketing automation features for the Lite plan so your small business doesn’t have to spend too much.

Cons:

That ActiveCampaign price creeps their marketing automation packages as you add more contacts, which means you can keep expecting to pay more and more as your small business grows.

#3. SendX

What Is It?

SendX is an intuitive and affordable email marketing software, essentially created to solve the requirement of small business owners. Founded by Varun Jain, Agnibha Nath, and Mayank Agarwal in 2016, SendX offers unlimited emails at no additional cost, and has an extremely simple pricing structure.

Features

If you go for SendX, here’s the list of features that will make you feel happy that you made the right choice.

Email templates: Inside SendX, there are over 50 free templates. Plus, SendX has one of the biggest email template collections on the web with 1500+ templates.

Send unlimited emails: You can send unlimited emails using SendX per day. Unlike a few other ESPs out there, SendX does not restrict the emails you can send per day in any way.

User-friendly Email Editor: The WYSIWYG email editor in SendX is a simple draft & drop email editor, and you do not need any HTML coding skills whatsoever to use it.

Pricing

SendX’s pricing system is very simple and they charge you only based on your subscribers. It starts at $ 7.49 per month (billed annually) and it goes up depending on the size of your subscriber list.

Pros and Cons

Here’s a gist of its pros and cons to help you decide whether SendX is a great fit for your business or not.

Pros:

The 14-day free trial of SendX provides access to all of the product features, and you will be able to make a well informed buying decision. You will know exactly what to expect, and SendX fulfils your expectations in this regard.

Cons:

SendX does not offer advanced workflows. So if you are looking for a highly sophisticated workflow feature, as what some of the pricey tools offer you, you should probably not choose SendX.

#4. Outfunnel

What is It?

Outfunnel is a marketing automation tool, yet it’s more integrated than most tools currently available. By connecting the email data to sales, marketing, and CRM, that data is actually used for more purposes than just emails.

Features

Outfunnel is an automation system that collects data from email analytics and from CRM systems. It performs lead scoring based on this wider dataset, then displays and integrates the scores into CRM actions if desired.

It can handle many typical email marketing tasks:

Sending emails in batches, defined by sequences
Use customized HTML to make emails more personalized
Send drip campaigns and create lead scores based on email engagement data

What it does that others can’t do well?

Syncs CRM data down to the email marketing tool, allowing for CRM contact lists and triggers to seamlessly drive email campaigns from CRM-defined segments.
Send email campaigns triggered by CRM activity
Compile CRM activity, website analytics, and email engagement (even from external email analytics tools like MailChimp)- into one unified lead score
Bi-directional sync of the contacts list, unsubscribes, new subscribers from MailChimp direct to the CRM and vice versa

Pricing

Outfunnel is priced for several different levels of marketers. When you sign up, you can try any plan for 14 days without a credit card, completely free of charge. There’s a Starter plan at $19/mo, the Growth plan at $49/mo, and the Professional plan at $125/mo. All plans include live chat and email support.

The Starter plan allows you to send 1000 emails, sync with Mailchimp for 1000 events, and track 1000 visitors per month.

Moving up, the Growth plan raises the limits to 15k emails and Mailchimp events, plus 15k web visitors/mo.

The Professional plan raises your limits even more, to 50k across all 3 metrics, and includes telephone support.

Pros and Cons

Consider these things before moving forward with a purchase of an Outfunnel subscription:

Pros:

Outfunnel is great if you’re using Copper and Mailchimp, and want an easy way to sync the contacts back and forth.
If you’re a small business and want an all-in-one lead scoring tool, Outfunnel is great

Cons:

If you’re sending 50k plus emails/month, Outfunnel probably is too small for you.
If you don’t use Hubspot, Pipedrive, Copper, or Mailchimp, you might miss out on most of the functionality.

#5. Drip

What Is It?

Our third recommended marketing automation tool is Drip. The company got its start through Rob Walling, an investor, podcaster, author, entrepreneur, and Drip’s founder. Drip specializes in marketing eCommerce CRM, but they offer marketing automation as well.

Features

What kinds of marketing automation features can your small business marketing team use to automate through Drip? Here are some that will interest you:

Personalization: To make discounts and coupons more effective, it helps to personalize communications. Drip lets you automate this feature so more of your audience opens your company’s emails.
Customizable workflows: As you’d come to expect in marketing automation software, Drip lets you customize and adjust your workflows liberally. In doing so, you can ensure your marketing team reaches customers at the moments it matters most.
Audience segmentation: You can also find audience segmentation as a part of Drip’s marketing automation software. With built-in features like Custom Fields, Events, and Tags, your small business never has to wonder who’s shopping when and what they’re doing. You can then take that information and use it to segment your customers.

Pricing

Drip says you can use their services for free, to begin with. Then, as you add 2,000 active accounts, a Drip subscription costs $49 a month. For 8,000 contacts, it’s $184 a month, for 20,000 people, it’s $308 a month, and for 100,000, it’s $1,300 a month. Once you surpass 160,000 contacts, the pricing plans are custom.

Pros and Cons

You should keep these pros and cons in mind if you’re seriously thinking about choosing Drip for your marketing automation.

Pros:

You can take advantage of a 14-day free trial to use all of Drip’s features before you commit.
Drip even offers an in-house expert to guide you through the software during your demo.
Drip has partnered with such companies as Yakima, Pit Viper, and Silhouette.

Cons:

Drip offers pricing like ActiveCampaign’s, with more contacts for their marketing automation offerings costing you more money. If you don’t particularly like that cost model, then you might not feel inclined to use Drip either.

#6. SocialBee

What is it?

SocialBee is a social media marketing solution designed for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and agencies. Founded in 2016 by Ovidiu Negrean and Vlad Hosu, SocialBee is a tool that can help automate and streamline the user’s overall social media presence.

Features

Your marketing team can automate multiple social media-related tasks using SocialBee. Here are some of its core features:

Scheduling: With SocialBee, users can schedule content for various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Content creation: Create posts by yourself, or use the AI assistant to generate captions and images. The integrations with Canva, Unsplash, and Giphy can also help you make your posts visually appealing.
Bulk importing: Fill your content library using the bulk importing features for media and links. You can also set RSS feeds and automatically add new blog posts to your library.
Analytics: SocialBee provides users with detailed analytics and reporting, allowing them to track the performance of their accounts. Users can track metrics such as engagement, reach, and follower growth and use this data to optimize their strategy for better results.

Pricing

SocialBee offers several pricing plans starting from $29 per month for the Bootstrap plan, and it goes up depending on the number of social media accounts you need.

SocialBee also offers a 14-day free trial, which allows users to test the platform before committing to a paid plan.

Pros and Cons

Take a look at the pros and cons of SocialBee to help you determine whether this social media management tool is the right fit for your marketing automation requirements.

Pros

SocialBee provides a powerful collection of features designed to assist you in managing your social media presence more intelligently and swiftly, such as the ability to recycle evergreen posts and personalize content for each social media network separately.
The platform supports all major social media platforms, allowing users to manage multiple accounts from a single platform.
By allowing for multiple workspaces per brand or client, SocialBee enables you to maintain a well-organized system for your posts while managing everything from a single platform.

Cons

While SocialBee offers a range of pricing plans to suit various business needs, it does not currently provide a free plan.
Users can’t create and schedule posts using the SocialBee mobile app.

#7. GetResponse

What Is It?

If you’re still looking for an automation tool for your small business in 2020, GetResponse should also be on your radar. As an email marketing platform, GetResponse was founded by Simon Grabowski, its CEO. Today, the company has grown to include customers in more than 183 countries.

Features

GetResponse offers solutions in areas like autoresponders, conversion funnels, landing pages, webinars, and email marketing. For the sake of this article, we’ll focus on their marketing automation features.

Email sequence automation: GetResponse’s email sequence automation helps increase your open and click-through rates. Your marketing team will also save so much time.
Lead scoring: Sift through leads to separate the qualified prospects from the uninterested ones with lead scoring from GetResponse.
Customized workflow templates: If your small business has its own unique workflow, use the customized workflow templates to visualize and share workflows with all parts of your company.
Recommended product automation: GetResponse’s recommended products feature helps you acquire and retain customers. This is all automated so your small business can work more efficiently.
Visitor and customer tracking: Track your customers, and your website visitors and leads as well. Whether you use a marketing automation workflow or send an automated sequence of emails to best gauge interest, you’ll learn a lot about your audience.
Email personalization: Besides its email automation, you can use GetResponse to customize your emails for better nurturing and engagement. Features like tags and assignments make personalization easier.

Pricing

Let’s take a look at GetResponse’s pricing. They offer four plans over three billing periods. If you bill annually, you can save 18 percent. By billing on a 24-month basis, you can shave 30 percent off your overall costs.

The Basic plan for 1,000 contacts costs $15 a month. This includes e-product selling, Facebook ads, lead funnels, a single monthly sales funnel, automation templates, landing pages, autoresponders, and email marketing.

GetReponse calls the Plus plan its most popular. At 1,000 contacts, this plan is $49 per month. Besides the above features, you also get five monthly webinar funnels, five sales funnels, contact tagging and scoring, webinars for 100 attendees, and five automation builder workflows.

One step up from that is the Professional plan, which costs $99 a month for 1,000 contacts. This includes such features as on-demand webinars, unlimited webinar funnels, unlimited sales funnels, webinars for 300 attendees, paid webinars, and automation builders.

The Enterprise plan is the most costly, with custom pricing for 100,000 people on your list. You also get the most features, among them email campaign consulting, webinars for 500 people, single sign-on, deliverability consulting, your own dedicated IP address, an account manager, and transactional emails.

Pros and Cons

Here are the pros and cons of choosing GetResponse for your marketing automation tool.

Pros:

You can sample a 30-day free trial of any pricing plan to choose the one that’s the best match for your small business’s needs.
You’re not solely paying for marketing automation with a GetResponse subscription, but an array of other services as well.
GetReponse’s annual or 24-month billing options give you an opportunity to save money, which is useful for small businesses.

Cons:

If your list size grows to 5,000 contacts, then the price of a monthly GetResponse subscription might be a little costly for small businesses.

#8. HubSpot

What Is It?

Last but certainly not least, we have to talk about HubSpot. This major marketing and sales software company was founded in 2006 by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. Their service includes sales and inbound marketing options.

Features

Focusing on HubSpot’s marketing automation, which is within their Marketing Hub, here are the features:

Lead segmentation: HubSpot refers to it as partitioning, but you can still segment your leads using this marketing automation tool.
Lead management: Track interactions with leads over the short-term and long-term so your sales and marketing team can plan the best approach to convert.
Email automation: HubSpot’s marketing automation revolves around email and is designed to enhance your outreach, content, and engagement with your customers.

Pricing

Depending on the service you’re interested in from HubSpot, prices may vary. For the Marketing Hub, you have your pick among three pricing plans.

The first of these, the Starter, gives you 1,000 contacts for $50 a month or $600 a year. By switching to annual payments, you can save 20 percent.

The included features under this plan are ad retargeting, email marketing, list segmentation, contract website activity, forms, conversational bots, live chat, ad management, and landing pages. You can also use HubSpot’s CRM, which is free.

The Professional plan costs $800 per month or $9,600 a year and also includes 1,000 contacts. You get the above features as well as filtered analytics, custom reporting, video hosting, CTAs, A/B testing, social media, and marketing automation.

HubSpot’s most costly plan, Enterprise, is $3,200 a month, which is $38,400 a year. Your features include everything above as well as smart reporting, web traffic analyses, list segmentation, a contact attribution report builder, custom event triggers, multi-touch revenue attribution, adaptive testing, and calculated properties.

Other features are social permissions, hierarchical teams, and partitioning.

Pros and Cons

If you’re thinking of trying HubSpot, these pros and cons will make your decision easier.

Pros:

HubSpot is the cream of the crop in marketing software, even though their services far outprice everybody else’s.
The Marketing Hub is quite comprehensive, giving you many of the services your small business should need for success.
HubSpot offers bundles that may make some of its services more affordable.

Cons:

HubSpot is very expensive, especially when you consider you don’t even get to use marketing automation unless you pay for the Professional plan.

The Free plan limits you at only 1,000 subscribers, and the paid plans can get expensive fast, especially the Creator Pro plan.
The Free plan limits you at only 1,000 subscribers, and the paid plans can get expensive fast, especially the Creator Pro plan.
The Free plan limits you at only 1,000 subscribers, and the paid plans can get expensive fast, especially the Creator Pro plan.

#9. ConvertKit

What Is It?

An email provider founded in 2013 by Nathan Berry, ConvertKit caters its services towards online creators of all kinds. Today, ConvertKit’s presence has grown to the point where the company has employees in nearly 59 cities around the world.

Features

ConvertKit’s array of marketing automation features make it a valuable option to consider for your small business or startup. Here’s a closer look at those features:

Email automation: Automate more of what your company does every day with ConvertKit. From automated funnels with app rules to email scheduling, targeted content, and more, automation like this saves you time.
Automated segmentation: Categorize buckets with ease when segmenting your leads through automation.

Pricing

ConvertKit’s Free plan starts at $0 a month. This option is for small businesses with an audience that’s just developing. You get up to 1,000 subscribers as well as features like:

Unlimited traffic
Subscriber tagging
Customizable domain
Unlimited forms and landing pages
Email broadcasts

The Creator plan starts at $29 a month for 1,000 subscribers and costs $119 a month for up to 10,000 subscribers. You can add as many as 900,000 subscribers or more for custom pricing.

The third ConvertKit plan, Creator Pro, starts at $59 a month for 1,000 subscribers and $807 a month for 95,000 subscribers. You can also add up to 900,000 subscribers with this plan. The features include:

Newsletter referrals
Team invitations
Priority support
Email broadcast redirect links
Facebook custom audiences
Subscriber engagement scoring
Deliverability reports

Pros and Cons

Before you commit to ConvertKit, consider these pros and cons.

Pros:

ConvertKit has a completely free plan, which is a good option for small businesses and startups.
You can get free migration services to ConvertKit with one of the paid plans.
You have the option to add plenty of subscribers to your current payment plan, up to 900,000 of them.

Cons:

The Free plan limits you at only 1,000 subscribers, and the paid plans can get expensive fast, especially the Creator Pro plan.

#10. Infusionsoft (Keap)

What Is It?

Next on our list is Infusionsoft, which is today referred to as Keap. This company was founded in 2001 by Eric and Scott Martineau with Clate Mask, who is now the company’s CEO. A few years after being founded, in 2004, Keap introduced its automated sales lead scripts, expanding its services into SaaS.

Features

Keap’s features encompass areas such as CRM, sales, invoicing, and marketing. We’ll stick within the latter camp. Here are Keap’s marketing automation features:

Marketing campaign builder: Customize your campaigns with Keap’s marketing campaign builder. Ideal for building email message sequences, you can set the rules of the automation based on client actions or other triggers.
Automation templates: Templates that follow when/then rules make it easy for anyone in your company to feel like an automation master.
Advanced automations: When you’re comfortable moving on from the automation templates, Keap lets you work with advanced automation. You can customize the rules so they work for you.

Pricing

With three plans to choose from, Keap gives its customers options.

Your first choice is the Keap Grow plan for new businesses and startups. This plan starts at $79 a month for one user and 500 contacts. Here are the automation features included with the Keap Grow plan:

Easy automations
Basic Smart Forms
Limited API integrations
Reminders
Data migration
Phone and chat support
Default user roles

The Keap Pro plan is for service businesses that have been around the block. This option starts at $149 a month for one user and 500 contacts. You get the above automation features plus:

Pipeline automation
Campaign Builder automation
Reports

The Infusionsoft plan is Keap’s top option, starting at $199 a month for one user and 500 contacts. Everything above is included as well as:

Advanced Smart Forms
API integrations
Custom user roles
Affiliate management

To add more contacts, it’s $30 a month for 1,000 contacts, $130 a month for 5,000 contacts, $200 a month for 10,000 contacts, $300 a month for 25,000 contacts, and $350 a month for 50,000 contacts.

Pros and Cons

Let’s wrap up this section by going over the pros and cons of Keap.

Pros:

That you can choose between basic or advanced automation lets you get comfortable automating routine tasks before moving on to more complicated concepts.
Keap has a free trial you can use that’s good for 14 days.
With their wealth of services, Keap could come in handy for more than automation.

Cons:

Keap’s plans may look cheap, but remember, you’re only paying for one user and 500 contacts at the advertised prices. If you want more than that, prepare to add hundreds of dollars extra to your monthly bill.

#11. Mailchimp

What Is It?

You probably know Mailchimp mostly for its email services; it’s in the name, after all. Established back in 2001, Mailchimp started through the collective efforts of Dan Kurzius, Mark Armstrong, and Ben Chestnut.

Features

Are you ready to learn about Mailchimp’s automation options? Here’s the full list of features.

Pre-built journeys: Select the pre-built journey that most suits you and then you’re off to the races. Your options include:
Customer re-engagement
Product follow-ups
Order notifications
First purchases
Best customers
Product retargeting
Product recommendations
Abandoned cart emails
Welcome series
Automated scheduling: MailChimp’s automated scheduling can ensure your message reaches the right parties at the right time with send time optimization and delivery by time zone.
RSS to email: Automate the best of your content straight to email with this feature.
Data automation: Never miss a birthday, anniversary, or milestone with Mailchimp’s data automation. You can strike when the iron is hot and possibly earn a sale.
Transactional emails: Use Mailchimp’s SMTP or API for sending transactional emails to your audience.
Behavioral automation: When your lead or customer reacts, you can progress your campaign with automation based on their behavioral triggers.

Pricing

Mailchimp’s Free plan is always $0 a month. You gain access to one audience and these automation features:

Free preview of Customer Journey Builder
Classic automation builder
Single-step automation
Free preview of Pre-Built Journeys

The Essentials plan, which Mailchimp says is for companies prioritizing email, adds three audiences for $9.99 a month to start. Besides the above, here are the automation features included:

Customer Journey Builder
Pre-Built Journeys

The Standard plan, Mailchimp’s own recommendation, starts at $14.99 a month. Your last option is the Premium plan, which starts at $299 a month. With this plan, you gain access to all Mailchimp automation features, including branching points and multiple starting points.

Pros and Cons

Think carefully on these pros and cons of using Mailchimp as your marketing automation tool of choice in 2020.

Pros:

Mailchimp is one of the better-known names in the sphere of marketing.
The pricing plans are quite reasonable, including the Free plan for startups and small businesses.
Mailchimp offers phone chat and email support for most of its plans.

Cons:

Compared to some of the other services we’ve discussed, you may be lacking somewhat in marketing automation options.

#12. Sendinblue (Brevo)

What Is It?

Last but certainly not least, we have Sendinblue (Brevo), a cloud-based marketing company created in 2007. The company’s founders, Kapil Sharma and Armand Thiberge, have added SMS marketing, retargeting, landing pages, CRM, automation, and email marketing to Sendinblue’s (Brevo) list of services in the years since it started.

Features

Here’s how you can automate your small business or startup with Sendinblue (Brevo):

Automation workflow templates: Whether you want to schedule that welcome email or launch an automated marketing campaign, Sendinblue (Brevo) makes it possible with its automation workflow templates. All templates have drag and drop editing.
Customized workflows: Tailor your automation to your company’s needs with customizable workflows through Sendinblue (Brevo). You can select the workflow entry point, actions, conditions, and exit point.

Pricing

Sendinblue (Brevo) has a Free plan as well, just as most of the other automation services we’ve discussed. Their Lite plan starts at $25, the Premium plan starts at $65 a month, and the Enterprise plan is custom-priced.

You’re capped at marketing automation workflows for 2,000 contacts with the Lite plan, but the Premium plan removes that restriction. You get the most marketing automation features as part of the Enterprise plan as well as advanced reporting.

Pros and Cons

Let’s go over the pros and cons of using Sendinblue (Brevo) now.

Pros:

Even the free plan has some handy automation features.
Customizing your automation workflows lets you get more out of your Sendinblue (Brevo) subscription.
Sendinblue’s (Brevo) services are made for smaller businesses like yours.

Cons:

That you need to get a custom quote for the Enterprise plan suggests that it will likely be expensive.

#13. FluentCRM

What is it?

Unlike other tools in this list, FluentCRM is a WordPress plugin that offers email marketing automation and CRM features. It’s an affordable option that can significantly cut down email marketing costs for small businesses, LMSs, and Membership sites.

As a result, this amazing plugin has become the go-to solution for over twenty thousand businesses despite being launched only in 2020.

Features

FluentCRM primarily focuses on providing affordable marketing automation features within WordPress. Along with that, you’ll also get some much-needed CRM features. Here’s a quick overview of FluentCRM’s features:

Built-in and integrated form builder(s): FluentCRM offers built-in integration with Fluent Forms, one of its sister concerns. You can also integrate this plugin with MailOptin and Convert Pro to grow your subscribers list efficiently.
Automated integrations: Since FluentCRM works within WordPress, it offers automatic integration with 30+ popular plugins like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LearnDash, MemberPress, BuddyBoss, etc. Thus, you’ll get the contacts and other relevant data without hassle!
360° contact overview: Who wouldn’t love a complete overview of their contacts within their email marketing platform? FluentCRM does exactly that! It imports and updates contact data so you can get to know your contact better.
Smart contact segmentation: As segmentation and personalization are vital in email marketing, FluentCRM comes with several smart contact management features. Along with lists and tags, it also gives you the power of flexible tagging and advanced contact filtering for segmenting contacts based on various data points
Email campaign management: WIth FluentCRM’s intuitive email campaign management features, you can run and manage successful email marketing campaigns. Moreover, you’ll also get the required insights to understand how your campaign has performed.
Email sequence: The email sequencing feature lets you create email series that triggers based on events.
Marketing Automation: FluentCRM gives you 40+ event-based triggers for automating timely and relevant activity-based emails. You can easily design and shape user journeys through its visual workflow builder while being able to track funnels efficiently.
Granular reporting: Granular reporting does exactly what it says. You can track and monitor everything and get the necessary KPI metrics to upgrade your marketing efforts.

Pricing

Since FluentCRM is a self-hosted plugin, it offers a free version with limited features. For all features and integrations, you can buy the plugin for a yearly fee based on how many websites you have. There’s no contact limit, so you don’t have to worry over the “success-tax!”

Single Site License – $129/year
5 Site License – $249/year
50 Sites License – $499/Year

Pros and Cons

FluentCRM is a great choice for websites that are running on WordPress. However, it’s good to know the pros and cons of using this tool. Check them out before making your call.

Pros

FluentCRM is the cheapest marketing automation tool considering you only have to pay a yearly fee for unlimited contacts.
You’ll get important CRM functionalities along with marketing automation.
The free version is a good choice for basic email marketing.
Automated integrations with 30+ plugins. No paid add-ons are required.
14-day no-question refund policy.
Regular updates

Cons

This is a WordPress plugin, so you need a WordPress website.
FluentCRM doesn’t have an email sending service. You may have to pay a small fee for it.

#14. Scribe

What is it?

As your team grows, so do your processes. Scribe supports knowledge-sharing and process documentation. While not isolated to marketing, the tool lets you instantly document any workflow and automatically create step-by-step guides. This streamlines project management and enables your team to learn your processes for any marketing automation quickly.

Features

Scribe offers a browser extension or desktop application (for pro accounts) that can create an instant guide to enable training, SOP development and immediate knowledge-share with your small business’ growing team.

Automatically generated step-by-step guides: Simply click record and Scribe will monitor your key strokes and clicks to create a step-by-step guide, complete with written instructions and screenshots.
Customizable text, steps, and images: You can instantly personalize your guide to add tips, additional info, or even combine documents.
One-click sharing: Send a Scribe to any member of your team either through a quick link or in the Scribe platform.
Easy embed in any knowledge base: No matter what your team uses, your Scribes are immediately accessible.
Easy Updates: Tools evolve and processes change. Simply update your Scribe to have those changes visible wherever the Scribe lives.
Enterprise-grade security and controls: Keep your team secure with SSO and more
Browser extension and desktop app

Pricing

Scribe has a simple pricing model, with many of features available with the Basic Plan, which is free. Following that is a monthly charge for Pro or Enterprise accounts.

The Basic Plan is free and lets you create unlimited guides, work with any web app, quickly customize and share or embed your Scribe anywhere. This is best for testing the product and seeing how it could fit into your processes.

The Pro Plan is $29 per user a month and works with any web or desktop app, create branded guides, customize screenshots and monitor engagement insights. Depending on the complex nature of different workflows and project management software, you might want to add this level so you can make more refined screenshot edits. The brand addition is also an excellent way to keep everything consistent, internally and externally.

For Enterprise Accounts, they offer a customizable package based on number of users and your unique use case. Customers get SSO and directory sync, auto-redaction for sensitive data, knowledge base integration and enterprise grade governance and security. This is best for teams looking to socialize the product with the rest of the company, or who have a large and dynamic department.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Scribe is the first product of its kind and is blazing a trail in screen-capture and documentation for small businesses.
The Basic Plan is completely free, can be used with any web browser and offers unlimited guides.
Customizable costs at the Enterprise level allow you to identify exactly how the product can support your small business.

Cons

The desktop app is only available for Pro accounts and up, which charge per user.
Screenshot redactions are only available for Pro accounts and up, which charge per user.

Conclusion

Automation in marketing can save your company lots of time, thus giving your marketers more leeway to focus on engaging current customers and nurturing new ones.

If you’re not sure which marketing automation software is best, we shared 12 amazing picks that suit all sorts of budgets.

With marketing automation, your small business is ready to grow!

👉Unlock the full potential of your marketing strategy with our guide on the most effective free marketing tools! 🔓