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Kaleigh Moore

May 12, 2024

The 9 Best Marketing Automation Tools: Uses, Pros, and Cons

The best marketing automation tools do more than save time—they help you scale your marketing efforts. Here are some of our favorites for expanding your reach.

Marketing is getting to be busy work. According to one survey, an average marketer might spend 16 hours per week on routine tasks. Drafting emails, segmenting customer lists, parsing through analytics—it’s all too much. And a busy marketing professional is not always the same as an effective one.

16 hours is nearly half a workweek’s worth of routine tasks to automate. More ambitious marketers can set their sites higher than outsourcing repetitive work. If you can use marketing automation to free your time, you add almost 50% of additional time and energy to your week—which helps your business scale.

There’s just one caveat: you’ll need a few tools to do it.

What are marketing automation tools?

Marketing automation tools are software platforms and online dashboards that make it easy to streamline your most repetitive lead-generating tasks. Social media posting, lead nurturing, and analytics all fall under this category. But there’s a wide range of a marketer’s weekly activities you can automate, including:

Routine tasks. Drafting emails, managing ad campaigns, building a social media calendar. Even if these are all necessary, they’re all potential distractions. If you can outsource these to Generative AI or software, you can save time and energy to redirect to big-picture thinking.
Personalizing customer interactions. Marketing automation through a chatbot or email campaign software can segment your audience. Send different messages to different locations, demographics, and purchase history. Even with minimal work, good marketing automation can make each email and customer interaction feel more organic.
Lead nurturing. Targeted content isn’t only about a customer’s location or name. It’s also about when and context. Delivering targeted content to each stage of the buyer’s journey also personalizes your touchpoints with them. AI marketing tools can even alert you to the highest potential leads based on the criteria you set.
Analytics. It’s 2024. Don’t run a report manually. Today’s dashboards and automatic report generators can produce key statistics and even start to interpret them.

How do marketing automation tools help the average marketer? Boosts to your productivity and personalization are obvious. But they can also help you achieve scale. If you can clean out 16 hours of mundane tasks every week, you make everyone in your marketing team capable of greater reach than you ever imagined.

The types of marketing automation tools you can use

There are two approaches to marketing automation. You can dig up specific tools for specific challenges, like adding email automation and scheduling apps to your tech stack. This can be effective if you don’t feel overwhelmed except for one small kink in your marketing chain.

Or you can go big from the start with an all-in-one marketing automation solution. Let’s look at the options you have available:

All-in-one: Tools like Brevo and Hubspot offer entire suites of marketing automation features. The trick here? All-in-one software can be expensive. Pricing can vary depending on the size of your team. The good news is that these tools tend to integrate with other solutions like your CRM (customer relationship management) and calendar software.
Email automation: Klaviyo can automate email marketing to the point where it runs itself. It has drag-and-drop functionality to build workflows: you set it up once, and Klaviyo runs in the background thereafter. For example, if someone views one of your products, you can program Klaviyo to wait 5 hours and then reach out with a personalized follow-up.
Marketing channels: Use a tool like Customer.io to handle onboarding, cross-selling, and omnichannel support. It’s a suite of marketing automation tools designed to create a cohesive experience for the customer. On your end, the convenience comes when you stop tying disparate tools together. You can simply set the customer-facing automation to go, then head to lunch.
Reporting: Once upon a time, you might have to manually track user activity or generate reports. But tools like Ortto change that. It can handle reporting—like monitoring pre-set activities such as email opens and reactions to widgets. As with Klaviyo, you can create workflows to improve lead nurturing, too. For example, you might set Ortto to send out a webinar invitation to people who declined your free trial.
Scheduling: Tools like Calendly eliminate the risk of email or phone tag. Integrate them with other tools to set up reminders and follow-ups for customers you’ve chatted with on the phone.
Writing, drafting, and editing: Use Jasper and ChatGPT for help brainstorming, iterating, drafting, and editing content for social media, newsletters—or anything that needs words, really. Combine these tools with email automation, and your newsletter will start to run itself.
Connecting apps: What if you want your automation “a la carte”? Use Zapier to connect different apps, building entire systems of triggers and responses to automate manual tasks. For example, you can use Zapier to trigger Jasper to write a new social media post whenever you save a Slack message. If one idea on Slack strikes you as ideal for your audience, you simply hit the “save” button. Automation takes care of the rest: drafting, posting, you name it.

Tools like Jasper are helpful for their specific features. However, you can also exploit their full offerings as enterprise AI marketing platforms to create full, end-to-end processes for generating content for marketing campaigns. Let’s explore what these tools look like—and why you might consider adding them to your marketing team.

Essential marketing automation tools you have to start using

Jasper

Jasper is an AI marketing platform capable of handling front-to-end automation tasks. Jasper can take on everything from AI assistant to managing your marketing dialogue flows. And it’s especially useful in creating and managing conversational AI experiences. If you’re automating how you create marketing campaigns, Jasper will be an essential tool.

Best Uses:

Automating your campaign asset creations. Jasper Campaigns can create emails, landing pages, and paid advertisements in the same brand voice.
Automating your content repurposing. Jasper works with Remix, which helps you spread the most effective marketing messages across different channels.
Integration. Integrate directly with other automation tools like Zapier, Make, and Webflow.
API. With API handy, you can build automation tools and processes into your Jasper workflows even if they aren’t native to the application.

Pros:

Brand voice and knowledge base: Jasper can generate entire campaigns from your predesigned brand voice, which helps save on review and edit time when you build assets.
Collaboration tools: Jasper includes Kanban views, calendars, and in-text task assignments to plug enterprise-size teams into the same projects.
Image editing: Recently, Jasper rolled out Clipdrop integration for fast image editing and publishing, including background remover tools and upscaling images without losing quality.
Resource libraries: Have your team tap into a resource library to discover how much AI can automate for them—because the answers might surprise them.

Cons:

No free plan: Unfortunately, there’s no free plan here. Jasper does offer a free trial option for exploring the features, but running Jasper will require a portion of your marketing budget dedicated to the platform.

Hubspot

Hubspot is another all-in-one marketing solution. It doesn’t use Generative AI as heavily as Jasper, but it offers plenty of email marketing and lead nurturing tools to keep customers rolling into your business.

Best Uses:

Lead generation: HubSpot is great at capturing leads through different media like landing pages and webforms. It will then plug those leads into its automated workflows.
Content marketing: Create, schedule, and distribute content like webinars—and check out how well they’re landing via audience analytics.
Social media management: You can use HubSpot to schedule and monitor social media posts and view everything from a single dashboard.

Pros:

All-in-one: Many people who use HubSpot rarely have to add much else to their marketing automation.
Analytics: HubSpot collects and centralizes your data for quick analysis.

Cons:

Cost: HubSpot’s pricing can be expensive—and sometimes downright prohibitive for small businesses.

Brevo

Brevo is another all-in-one offering, especially adept at gathering incoming leads from emails and scheduling meetings. The advantages include a free plan that can serve as a more affordable alternative to HubSpot.

Best Uses:

Email marketing: Brevo’s tools are great for dialing in personalized email campaigns and crafting unique messages for specific customer segments.
Integrating with CRM: Brevo can automatically handle all sorts of scheduling and lead nurturing features, allowing you to focus on sales calls.

Pros:

Highly personalized. Many B2B companies use Brevo because its advanced segmentation features make it easier to personalize content—even at scale.
Workflow automation: You can create large, complicated workflows for lead nurturing across multiple touchpoints.

Cons:

Learning curve: Large and complex can work for big-ticket B2B. But small businesses may find Brevo too unwieldy.
Fewer integrations: Although it’s all-in-one and plays nicely with CRM tools, other marketing automation may be more challenging to integrate.

Klaviyo

With Klaviyo, you can use a drag-and-drop workflow designer to construct subtle and highly personalized email sequences. It’s not “all-in-one” like the other solutions, but you'll love it if you focus on emails.

Best Uses:

Email and commerce: Klaviyo can integrate the two, helping you build highly targeted campaigns based on your customer lists.
Powerful automation: Triggers, flows, conditional splits—Klaviyo has it all to build campaigns with precision.

Pros:

Great segmentation: If you have a wide list and need to create customer-specific campaigns, Klaviyo can help you craft personalized messages.
Scaling: Klaviyo is popular with businesses of just about any size because of how well it scales with your needs.

Cons:

B2B access: Ecommerce is one thing, but Klaviyo is more effective when you have lots of consumer data to feed it—which isn’t always available with B2B marketing.

Customer.io

Customer.io helps integrate your marketing channels to make a cohesive experience from the customer’s point of view. For automation purposes? That means you won’t have to strain to tie disparate tools together.

Best Uses:

Data pipelines: Customer.io collects data from your campaigns and puts them into customer profile attributes for easy-to-assemble marketing campaigns.
Marketing sync: You can easily sync customer segments across sponsored ad tools like Google and Facebook Ads.

Pros:

Flexibility: The more data you feed Customer.io, the more choices you’ll have. There’s plenty of flexibility and customization for your marketing automation here.
Data processing: While some marketing tools offer only basic analytics, Customer.io depends on high-quality customer data—and works to gather it.

Cons:

Learning curve: It’s not always easy to learn how to plug in your data to get Customer.io up and running effectively.

Omnisend

Omnisend automates both email and SMS outreach. Its pre-built workflows are great for growing businesses when you don’t have enough time to set up automation.

Best Uses:

Ecommerce email marketing: Features like abandoned cart recovery and product recommendations are essential here, and Omnisend helps you automate them.
Mobile: Thanks to SMS and push notification automation, Omnisend might be the best marketing automation tool on this list for integrating with mobile advertising.

Pros:

Easy to use: Omnisend has a reputation for being easy to use, meaning it’s an effective tool, even if it’s your first marketing automation platform.
Affordable: The current “standard” plan is only $16/month—and there’s a free version you can use as well.

Cons:

Customization: Or lack thereof. Omnisend is good for starting businesses, but if you want more integrations and features, you may find that you’re stuck with what they offer.

Ortto

Expensive but robust, Ortto is ideal for gleaning as many insights about your customers as possible. It will also handle report generation and build customer alerts so you don’t constantly have to comb through your data.

Best Uses:

Personalized email marketing: Especially for targeted campaigns.
Analytics and reporting: Here, you’ll get highly-specific insights like open rates and what features of your business drive the most conversions.

Pros:

User-friendly: One of the primary benefits of using Ortto is it takes complicated customer data and makes it easy to interpret.
Lead scoring: Ortto can also handle that interpretation so you can identify the best-quality leads.

Cons:

Feature limitations: This is not an all-in-one tool, so you may have to use it to focus on marketing data automation.

Calendly

Though not overflowing with automation features, Calendly is an essential distraction-elimination tool for scheduling sales calls.

Best Uses:

Scheduling appointments: Calendly opens your calendar to incoming leads—clients, customers, team members, and more.
Time management: “Open” your schedule to manage your time efficiently, and you’ll make appointment scheduling and reminders a breeze.

Pros:

User-friendly: Simply set up your open schedule dates and your account, and Calendly will create your calendar to handle all the rest.
Customization: You can schedule meeting preferences like duration, availability, or even meeting types.

Cons:

Limited function: Calendly is a bit of a one-trick pony: it can automate meeting scheduling and reminders, but don’t expect it to do much else.

Webflow

Webflow is an in-browser web design tool for building highly responsive websites. For marketing automation purposes, that makes it great at collecting top-of-funnel traffic and converting them into bona fide leads.

Best uses:

Website creation: The no-code design here is on par with anything else, and it includes automatic optimization to access your landing pages on different devices.
Online stores: Create ecommerce stores with Webflow to build and manage your first shop.

Pros:

Integration with Jasper: Merge Webflow with Jasper to automate web creation processes like building new landing pages.
SEO: Webflow’s built-in SEO features can help you drive organic traffic to your site without complicated strategies.

Cons:

Learning curve: As much as it’s designed for people who aren’t professional web designers, you might find it frustrating to figure out if you don’t have experience building web stores.

A marketer is only as effective as their tools

You don’t have to pick and choose which tools you want. You can double-dip—for example, a Zapier connection between Jasper and Google Sheets can integrate three tools together to get the most out of each. Or you can integrate your favorite “niche” tools like Calendly into all-in-one solutions to make your life easier.

But marketing automation is not just about convenience. It's also about extending your reach: more ideation, more campaigns, more personalization, and more distribution.

For more on marketing automation and how to save time and scale up your business, explore ways to automate your most common marketing tasks using AI.

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