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