Email is the best-performing marketing channel for many businesses when it comes to ROI. If it’s not at the top for your organization, it’s probably close. But conventional email marketing isn’t enough to fully capitalize on what today’s audiences need and expect. Email marketing automation — and all that it enables your company to do … Continued
Email is the best-performing marketing channel for many businesses when it comes to ROI. If it’s not at the top for your organization, it’s probably close. But conventional email marketing isn’t enough to fully capitalize on what today’s audiences need and expect. Email marketing automation — and all that it enables your company to do — is now the standard if you’re looking to maximize efficiency, revenue, and customer engagement.
So, whether you’re unhappy with your current marketing technology implementation or need one that can better serve your growing business, read on for a wide selection of the best email automation platforms.
More than 293 billion emails are sent every day, just between businesses and consumers. Drift estimates that number will approach 350 billion by the end of 2023.
Because email marketing remains the highest-performing channel for ROI (according to Hubspot, 59% of B2C marketers put it at #1), it’s imperative that businesses use it effectively to engage customers, prospects, and new leads in the best way. Automation makes that possible.
Here’s just some of what you can accomplish with email marketing automation:
Go beyond demographics to segment by industry, the intentions and preferences of customers based on their actions, and where they are in the sales process.
Keep people from getting emails they don’t want and that don’t apply to them. For example, someone already in your sales process doesn’t need an email about a great new deal. And many people don’t want emails on holidays and weekends.
This tedious work is vital to maintaining an optimized list. For instance, if a prospect sets up a vacation auto-reply, email automation can prevent them from receiving emails until they change their status. List management also means removing emails that bounce or are non-existent. Again, this is highly tedious work, and artificial intelligence could be more effective.
The most sophisticated email marketing automation platforms make it possible to achieve a high level of 1:1 personalization. You’ll see several such services in the list below, which features 35 of the best email automation platforms. Customers appreciate it, but they have no idea how much work it takes to achieve it.
Do more than just A/B tests of subject lines. With the right platform, you can run multivariate tests on a whole host of components. You can also track conversions, bounces, unsubscribes, engagement, and ROI based on how you prefer to measure them.
One study from Demand Metric found that the top challenge facing email marketers today is competition for attention in the inbox. Email automation helps you break through the clutter by increasing personalization and relevance.
Use the links to jump to a platform and learn more:
Considering the state of email marketing in 2021, many companies find themselves wanting more out of their email automation.
So, let’s take a look at 35 of the best email marketing automation platforms available today. This list is alphabetized, not ranked in any other way. We’ve also color-coded each platform based on the type of organization for which it’s the best fit:
The 14 enterprise-level platforms are purple. These typically cost over $1000 per month.
The 11 mid-range automation platforms are green. These range in cost from very low to hundreds per month.
The 10 simpler email automation platforms are blue. These often have free options, and will cost less than $50 per month for most small businesses.
Platform prices usually depend on the number of contacts, but there are exceptions to this.
Act-On is built on the idea of responsive marketing. When subscribers take actions, Act-On’s email marketing automation enables you to respond in the best way possible, at the best time. It integrates with all major marketing technology platforms, making it a good choice for enterprise-level companies that use a lot of different systems.
Act-On uses an ‘active contact’ model for pricing. This means that they bill based on who you’re actually engaging with, not how many contacts are on your list. For example, if you have 500,000 contacts in your CRM, but you only email 25,000 of them in a month, you pay for the 25,000.
ActiveCampaign is one of the most affordable mid-range email automation platforms.
Create signup forms and landing pages, and add custom branding to both web pages and emails. Implement lead scoring, which allows you to identify your most engaged contacts and reach out to them with targeted messaging and SMS marketing.
ActiveCampaign offers a ton of integrations and includes sales features like lead capture forms. It also calculates your ‘win probability’ of making a sale with a particular contact. Create automated workflows with segmentation and the drag-and drop-format makes it relatively easy to use without a lot of technical knowledge. Even a solopreneur can make use of this platform without additional help.
Its higher-priced service options include predictive sending and content, as well as custom domains, custom reporting, and split automations.
If you’re already using other tools from Adobe such as Adobe Analytics, Creative Cloud, or Dreamweaver, this is a strong platform to consider. It also connects to other large databases and CRMs like eCommerce platforms and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Adobe Campaign uses a flexible data model that lets you customize user profiles, which allows for better personalization in your email marketing. With data from Adobe Analytics, you’ll be able to use email and other channels to find new audiences and trigger timely messages.
With Adobe, you can create relationships across multiple touchpoints, devices, and channels, including push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, email, and even direct mail. It uses a flexible subscription model based on active customer profiles, defined as contacts you’ve messaged within the last 12 months.
Built for smaller businesses and work-from-home entrepreneurs, Automizy offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop email builder, with no coding required. You can accomplish all simple email marketing tasks with this platform, but they also offer some extra perks that other basic services don’t have.
For instance, their AI will test your subject lines against data from over one million campaigns that have been created on their platform. And you can test four different subject lines, not the usual two that many other services allow.
Importing your contacts is very easy, and you can create signup forms and landing pages to aid in attracting and converting more leads to your email list.
A good option for businesses looking to use higher-level automation, Campaigner enables you to build customer journeys that include multichannel marketing through email and SMS, as well as landing pages, forms, and webhooks.
It also allows you to optimize campaigns for conversions by tracking the data for each customer, including purchase history and conversion metrics. One of the goals here is to find your most profitable niche segment. You might learn that a certain area of your city converts better, for example, or people in certain industries.
You can run full-fledged multi-variable experiments that go much further than A/B tests. In addition to subject lines, you can test pre-headers, design, copy, send times, and from names. And its workflow validation check ensures that no prospects are getting lost in your funnels, which is often a problem with other platforms.
Campaigner integrates with all the big eCommerce tools, though it has received some complaints about customer service and usability.
Cheetah Digital is distinguished among enterprise-level email marketing automation platforms for its ability to deepen customer loyalty, in combination with data.
It delivers cross-channel marketing technology by offering real-time personalization and permission-based data strategies that ensure consumer privacy. Their system allows you to meet the customer where they prefer to be reached, incentivize engagement, and enhance loyalty.
Cheetah Digital gets high marks for usability, whether you’re creating campaigns, uploading data, or downloading reports. You can create new segments, test them, and run campaigns faster than with comparable platforms.
In terms of ease of use for smaller businesses, Constant Contact may be at the top of the list of best email automation platforms. Processes and tasks simply work the way you expect them to.
They also regularly add new features, taking their platform beyond just basic email service. You can do A/B testing, event marketing, and surveys. You can schedule social media posts, create landing pages and autoresponders, and build forms that can be placed anywhere on your site. And all new contacts can be assigned to unique list segments.
They make it easy to cull inactive and non-existent emails to keep your bounce rate down and integrate with a ton of other services, including all major eCommerce platforms. Plus, they offer live phone support, while many comparable services do not.
ConvertKit offers a slightly more tech-heavy option for smaller businesses, content marketers, and bloggers. Some coding knowledge will be helpful for this email automation platform.
But it offers many of the same tools that you would want from a basic email automation service, including A/B testing, landing pages, well-designed email capture templates, and the ability to tag contacts based on their actions. Its service uses primarily text-based emails.
ConvertKit uses a visual automation builder and keeps all your contacts in one large list, broken up using its tag and segment approach. This is very different, and in some ways easier to work with, from other comparable services. Another unique aspect of ConvertKit is that they offer the same features for all pricing options. While many other tools open up additional features for higher-priced plans, ConvertKit offers everything to everyone. Price differences depend only on number of subscribers.
Designed and built for internet businesses and tech companies, Customer.io is not for the non-tech user. Some advanced skill is required, or you’ll need a developer to set it up and maintain it.
That’s exactly what some companies are looking for, and if that’s you, then this is a great option. Customer.io offers most basic email marketing automation services, and the advanced technical skill required to use it also gives you the ability to customize it to your liking.
The platform dotdigital offers ‘omnichannel’ marketing, which means that you can market through email, SMS, social media, and push notifications. You can also create responsive email templates, customized landing pages, and trackable links, as well as surveys, autoresponders, and web forms.
It allows you to run A/B tests on landing pages as well as emails, and lead scoring enables you to create segments for personalized marketing and reaching your best prospects. Plus, dotdigital integrates with major CRM and eCommerce platforms such as Magento and Shopify.
For those looking for automated workflows that trigger based on a variety of user actions, Drip offers a powerful array of tools and services. You can create personalized marketing campaigns that are activated based on various triggers, such as a user clicking on a particular link. Automate lead magnet delivery, customize popup forms, and use lead scoring to optimize for your most engaged contacts. Drip also allows you to create Facebook and lead generation ads.
There have been issues with images not always rendering correctly, but this is the sort of thing that you can easily catch and fix using Email on Acid, which lets you preview your emails on over 90 clients and devices before sending them out.
Drip has begun to focus their service around eCommerce businesses, and integrates with all the major platforms including WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify.
Eloqua is one of two enterprise-level email marketing automation platforms available through Oracle. We’ll discuss the other, Responsys, later.
Eloqua is the better option for B2B businesses, offering lots of training, tons of extensions, sales and campaign ROI analytics, and deep integration with your CRM.
The focus here is on flexible data and intelligent campaign management. Eloqua lets you use targeting and segmentation to identify quality leads based on their profiles and preferences. Engage buyers when they want you to, on their preferred channel — the hallmark of personalization and relationship-based marketing.
It features multichannel personalized marketing tools based on real-time data and sophisticated nurturing sequences, at scale. Eloqua keeps your data clean across multiple geographic areas, and can connect with any system because of its open framework.
Being part of a large company, Eloqua has had some issues with customer support.
Another enterprise-level platform, Emarsys focuses on particular niches to deliver omnichannel marketing through email, digital ads, mobile, and direct mail.
It uses AI to deliver predictive analytics specific to the retail, travel, hospitality, and eCommerce industries. Emarsys also unifies customer data through its open architecture system and API, and offers tons of integrations with all major eCommerce platforms.
One of the most highly-reviewed of the enterprise-level email automation platforms, emfluence enables you to cross-sell to your CRM database and reward clients using segmentation and lead qualification.
With great customer service and ease of use as long as you have a software developer on your team, you can use emfluence to create goal-oriented digital marketing campaigns. Create automated, manual, and transactional emails — all personalized and targeted using lead scoring — as well as landing pages, surveys, and social media posts. You can also perform website tracking, so you’ll have more data than just how contacts respond to your emails. You’ll know which web forms are performing best, for example, and can optimize for better lead generation.
Emfluence produces very nice PDF reports with formatted charts and graphs, making it easy to see and discuss your progress based on your preferred metrics.
Exponea’s platform was built from scratch, with no acquisitions of other services or software. That enables it to deliver seamless integrations between your customer data and every function Exponea provides.
It gives you a unified view of all the data and touchpoints related to each contact so you can target your messaging at the right time and in the right place to convert and retain more customers. The idea here is to leverage your data to create personalized, one-on-one customer journeys.
You’ll also be able to monitor your KPIs and can create private dashboards that perform customized calculations and data visualization. With these, you can set goals based on data such as referrals, time on site, page views, conversions, and user interactions.
This is a great platform for predictive modeling, campaign management, and personalization, especially if you’re in their targeted industries.
GetResponse is another company that began as a basic email service but has evolved into a platform that offers more. It’s still categorized here as a basic service, but could also be considered a mid-range platform.
Supporting 15 languages, GetResponse enables you to do lead scoring, design landing pages, create Facebook and Google ads, and set up marketing campaigns using a drag-and-drop workflow builder. Then, you can track each subscriber’s data, journey, and money spent.
GetResponse also has a webinar marketing feature so you can do live, paid, recorded webinars. Attendees are limited based on the package you purchase, but registrants are unlimited. If that seems strange, that’s because typically, you’re doing well if 40% of registrants actually show up for your webinar.
It is important to note that GetResponse has had complaints about a frustrating user experience and subpar customer support.
HubSpot is a platform that’s difficult to categorize. It certainly does offer enterprise-level email marketing automation along with all its other services, but because of the way they allow companies of almost any size to access some of their services at various price points, we’re categorizing it as a mid-range platform.
HubSpot is built around four hubs — marketing, sales, service, and customer management software (CMS). You can purchase any one of them in isolation or you can bundle them. Each has different levels of service with different features and price points.
The starter level for just the marketing platform, for example, doesn’t include very many email marketing automation options. But it does include the use of a conversational bot, retargeting capabilities, meeting scheduling, live chat, and sales quotes. Many of these features are not offered by most other platforms on this list. And again, that’s their starter-level service.
You can create quite a lot of automation of many types and in many channels using HubSpot. It’s worth your time to explore their options and see if there’s a bundle that is right for you.
Featuring marketing automation, workflows with trigger-based actions, landing pages, and analytics, this cloud-based email marketing platform also lets you do surveys, autoresponders, and other email marketing tasks.
It’s an easy-to-use platform that integrates with Salesforce and many other apps. iContact has been around a while and is a solid option for any business looking for a straightforward drag-and-drop style email automation platform.
Iterable offers multichannel marketing geared towards particular B2C industries. In addition to more traditional email campaigns and automations, you can take advantage of special features like text-to-win campaigns, SMS marketing, push notifications, coupons, and more.
Iterable uses trigger-based campaigns and gives you the ability to nurture new users, re-engage lapsed contacts, and send personalized messages across multiple channels at scale. Easy to use, you can build your emails in Iterable without knowing any code using drag-and-drop functionality.
Formerly known as Infusionsoft and voted by PCMag as the best marketing automation platform for beginning marketers and startups, Keap focuses on lead generation. It empowers marketers to convert new leads into clients and repeat customers based on data.
Actions taken by contacts can trigger emails, direct mail, tags, segmentation, drip sequences, and any other sort of marketing funnel targeted at that user. Keap also has a payment collections service so you can use your financial data to drive future marketing campaign ideas. This includes the ability to send invoices.
Another solid entry in the mid-range email marketing automation field, Klaviyo integrates seamlessly with Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, and other big CRMs and eCommerce platforms.
It uses data science, analytics, and event triggers to let you create personalized and segmented marketing campaigns. It features pre-built automations and an easy-to-use flow builder. You can also create and manage Facebook and Instagram advertising through Klaviyo, as well as SMS marketing and unlimited A/B testing.
Designed for high-volume senders but without the complexity of enterprise-level email automation platforms, Net Atlantic offers real-time reporting, high deliverability, and responsive tech support. It also features trigger-based campaigns, landing pages, autoresponders, surveys, and A/B testing, as well as mobile-optimized emails.
Net Atlantic offers flexible pricing options that make it a viable choice for a variety of business sizes.
One of the most well-known among basic email automation platforms, Mailchimp is a cloud-based solution that requires no coding knowledge. But, it still allows you to create event-triggered email automation, segment your audience into lists, and post on social media.
Mailchimp lets you create landing pages and signup forms, and perform A/B testing. It also has some retargeting features that enable you to narrow your list down based on behaviors and locations.
Working with lists in Mailchimp can be a little unwieldy, but it does have a free option so you can try it out.
Mailjet is much like other basic platforms on this list, with one key exception: It serves businesses in over 150 countries. For international businesses, Mailjet has been a go-to choice for basic email marketing automation for a long time. Mailjet’s price structure isn’t based on the number of contacts in your database. Instead, it limits the number of emails you can send each month.
You can create autoresponders, manage your lists, design responsive emails, do A/B testing, and trigger email sequences based on the actions taken by your subscribers.
One of the biggest names in the enterprise level of email marketing automation, Marketo lets you grow relationships with customers and scale your marketing as your business expands. It does a LOT of stuff. The smallest pricing package allows for 25 users, so this is certainly meant for large companies.
You’ll get advanced analytics, database encryption to protect your customer data, mobile push notifications, SMS marketing, a dedicated IP address, tons of integrations, and encrypted authentication of new contacts.
Marketo empowers you to do cross-channel nurturing and marketing, automate your campaigns and customer journeys and segment and target your audience. They also enable you to create predictive content and audiences for new campaigns.
Because it’s Microsoft, this is one place where you can access enterprise-level email marketing automation for a mid-range price. And let’s be clear: Dynamics does a lot more than just email or even just marketing. You can also use it to support sales, customer service, accounting, operations, and even human resources. With Microsoft, you can bundle all your business operations under one umbrella, if that’s important to you. It’s a whole-business platform.
The marketing component of Dynamics enables you to use many of the same strategies as other enterprise-level platforms. For B2C businesses, you can perform real-time customer journey orchestration. That means that you’re coordinating efforts across multiple channels and using multiple forms of technology. It’s powered by AI, which helps you turn insights into actions and customers into fans by recommending the best content, channels, segments, and analytics for your goals.
Microsoft also meets strict compliance and security requirements for protecting customer data.
Again, you need a big team to utilize Dynamics effectively, because support isn’t always up to the task since the platform is so immense and the user interface can be challenging at times.
For basic email marketing automation built specifically for eCommerce, Omnisend is a great option. It lets you create eCommerce-specific automations like cart abandonment sequences, welcome series, and transactional emails. It also integrates with all the big eCommerce platforms: BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Shopify.
You can create landing pages and signup forms, perform A/B testing, send out SMS marketing, and segment your contact list based on behavior.
Besides the eCommerce platforms, Omnisend is more limited in its other integrations.
If you’re looking for an enterprise-level email marketing automation platform that will allow you to use AI to turn CRM data into actionable insights, Optimove is a good choice. They describe their platform as being for ‘high velocity, data-centric, promotional’ brands. It’s a ‘science first’ relationship marketing platform.
With Optimove, you can use AI to create valuable customer engagement opportunities using self-optimizing algorithms that continually improve your campaigns and customer journeys. It also harmonizes your marketing across multiple channels so each customer receives the optimal message at the right place and time.
Optimove also has a valuable attribution feature that calculates the worth of each customer interaction. For instance, suppose a user sees three social posts, clicks on one, signs up for your email, receives seven emails over two months, and later makes a purchase. How much ROI can you attribute to each of those steps? In simplistic systems, the sales or product page where they made the purchase gets most — or all — of the credit. Optimove’s feature provides a much more accurate assessment of your campaigns’ performance.
If you’re already using Salesforce as a CRM, adding Pardot might make logical sense. Their marketing automation is built on their platform so the integration is seamless. Salesforce is very complex, and integrating with other platforms is often a challenge.
Pardot enables you to perform most of the same marketing automation tasks as other enterprise-level platforms, such as multichannel marketing, segmentation, personalization, and triggered email sequences. If you aren’t using Salesforce already though, this is probably not your best option.
Another great mid-range option for eCommerce businesses, Rejoiner features an array of automated trigger options that help you maximize lifetime customer value. For example, you can create triggers for abandoned carts, new subscribers, sudden price drops, anniversaries and birthdays, subscription renewals, and more.
Combined with lead scoring, webhooks, and A/B and control group testing, you can create a lot of great automated campaigns that will support your marketing and free you to focus on other tasks.
Rejoiner also offers an enterprise-level service that includes campaign management, help with creative execution, and deliverability consulting. They excel in helping businesses recover lost revenue. They work with you on your copy and design creative — they don’t just hand you the software and leave you to it. This sets Rejoiner apart from every other service on this list.
Similar to Eloqua in some ways but focused more on the needs of B2C companies, Responsys is built on the idea of creating contextually-relevant digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels, using advanced intelligence, at scale.
For instance, you can perform multivariate testing — up to eight variables at once — of subject lines, images, content blocks, and more. It also features a ‘fatigue analysis’ service that identifies customers who are worn out and need to be reached in a different way.
You also have the use of adaptive intelligence, analytics, marketing optimization, testing, targeting, segmentation, and many other features often found at this level.
More than just email marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrates with Pardot (discussed earlier) seamlessly for B2B marketing automation. It’s one platform for all your marketing data and KPIs so you can make smart marketing decisions.
In addition to the personalized email studio, you’ll be able to build customer journeys across multiple channels and departments. You can visualize, track, and manage customer experiences and engagement at precise moments.
With this system, the goal is to target, acquire, and re-target customers on an individual basis, including personalized interactions with chat, SMS, and push notifications. You can also listen, publish, and engage with customers and leads on social media.
What began as a basic email marketing automation service has advanced into a mid-range tool, and SendinBlue’s broad pricing range reflects that. They still have a free option, but also offer much higher-priced versions.
In addition to the basic-level email automation tools, SendinBlue lets you do SMS and chat-based marketing and customer service, as well as automated campaigns like abandoned cart workflows, segmentation, landing pages, signup forms, and Facebook ads. Their automation builder is easier to use than many other platforms.
SendinBlue also offers a CRM service. For their lower-priced options, however, they’re not known for having great customer support.
There are a lot of enterprise-level options. And though SharpSpring is the last one on our list of the best email marketing automation platforms, don’t overlook it.
First, SharpSpring gives you a dedicated account manager. If you like having reliable and responsive customer support from someone who knows your business, that’s a major perk. You’ll also get unlimited users and lots of training and templates. It integrates with a ton of other platforms, CRMs, scheduling and event apps, and form builders. SharpSpring also features open-source, developer-friendly APIs. And, you’ll get a dedicated IP address, and the ability to create white-labeled sending domains.
SharpSpring uses branching logic to engage leads at critical points of their buying process. You can create buyer personas and assign contacts to them so you can improve your targeted messaging. It also lets you use chatbots, dynamic landing pages, behavior-based emails, dynamic form builders, a CRM service, and sales automation.
Lastly, SharpSpring will send you a list of each day’s hottest leads to your inbox, so you’ll know what to act on immediately and never miss an optimal sales moment again.
Zoho is another platform that’s hard to categorize because they offer so many services and options. It’s also another international choice, as it serves businesses in over 180 countries.
Zoho merges a CRM with an email marketing automation platform. It uses conversational AI that studies your CRM data to amass lead predictions about who is most likely to convert. It also sends ‘intelligent alerts,’ which suggest the best times to contact a lead.
If you step down from that higher-level service and just want email automation and marketing, you can get that too.
Here, Zoho still offers a wide array of features, including the ability to do polls and surveys, add GIFs, videos, and attachments to mass emails, and run A/B tests. You can also create automated workflows using drag-and-drop technology, or you can use their predefined workflow options.
Track where contacts are on their nurturing journey so you know how to communicate with them, and set your ‘email cadence’ to optimize how often people receive emails.
Zoho has a very strong sender reputation through its domain authentication service. That means good email deliverability: a critical element of email marketing. They also have good phone support and a ton of integrations.
Yes, that’s a ton of choices. But narrowed down by your type and size of business, the list gets considerably smaller.
One thing to be aware of is that no matter which email platform you use, technology keeps changing. Email automations and templates that used to render correctly will, at times, stop working as well.
Email on Acid’s role is to ensure you deliver perfection with an automated pre-send email checklist that includes testing on over 90 devices and clients. Because automations tend to just sit there unattended once they’re created, you may forget to update them.
So, it’s a good idea to periodically test your automations and templates, as well as any new email campaigns you’re creating, to be sure they’re showing up correctly. Email on Acid integrates with just about all the automation platforms on this list, if not all of them.
