Know how to make the most out of your marketing automation strategy. 

Marketing automation is a valuable tool for companies looking to make the most out of their marketing efforts. Choosing the right platform can help improve efficiencies, all while improving customer engagement and increasing sales. 

If you’re looking for a marketing automation company to help take your business to the next level, you’ve come to the right place. This article will share 10 marketing automation companies and outline the dos and don’ts of marketing automation. 

Want to skip ahead? Here are the dos and don’t well cover later in this article: 

• Do utilize marketing automation to build relationships and nurture leads
• Don’t forget you need to develop your content
• Do automate customer communication and improve internal processes
• Don’t lose personalization due to automation
• Do use data to help form your marketing decisions
• Don’t set it and forget it

10 Marketing Automation Companies

There are plenty of marketing automation platforms out there to choose from. A simple Google search has provided you with dozens of results, but how do you really know what company will work well for your business? 

It comes down to what you’re business is looking to achieve and how much you want to automate. 

If you’re just looking to automate your email marketing efforts, maybe you don’t need a full-service marketing automation platform. But if you’re looking to take your marketing to the next level with automation across various tactics, you might need a partner with a more comprehensive service range. 

This article compiled a list of marketing automation platforms that cover all of the above. From simple email marketing to complex artificial intelligence and predictive technology — you’ll find a platform that fits your needs. 

Listrak

Listrak provides customers with a full-service marketing automation platform. Whether you’re looking to automate your daily marketing tactics such as email and SMS messages or looking to implement predictive technology — Listrak can help you achieve your goals. 

Get to know your customers on a more personal level and start providing them with the content they want. Using real-time data will allow you to develop personalized customer journeys and send relevant content based on their interactions. Image courtesy of Listrak. 

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Manage multiple channels from email, SMS, and push notifications to direct mail
• Create cross-channel marketing campaigns that reach customers at the right time, on the right channel based on their previous engagements
• Use customer data and insights to create real-time journeys based on their behaviors 
• Incorporate predictive personalization tactics to identify exactly what customers will need in the near future and send it at the most optimal time 

Pricing: Pricing is custom and based on specific business needs

The right partner, with the right technology, can take your current marketing to the next level. By better understanding your customer insights, creating full cross-channel marketing, and having a glimpse into what your customers are planning to do next, you can stay ahead of the competition. 

Dotdigital

Dotdigital is an omnichannel marketing automation platform that will allow you to manage everything from customer communication to eCommerce integration. This platform will enable you to easily send and manage emails, drive traffic to your website, and capture new leads to continue to grow your business. 

Automation workflows allow you to create campaigns that move customers through the buyer’s journey. By meeting their needs at each stage of the journey, you can move them towards making their first purchase and becoming loyal customers. Image courtesy of Dotdigital. 

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Automate all of your marketing tactics, including email, SMS, social, web, and chat functions to help free up valuable time
• Utilize artificial intelligence to help grow your brand and better understand the wants and needs of your customers
• Develop campaign-specific landing pages with customized forms to increase conversions and attract new leads
• Learn from your current campaigns with reporting and analytics that provide real-time results

Pricing: Pricing is custom and based on business needs

Not exactly sure how to get started with your marketing automation? Dotdigital has several additional services, including onboard assistance, technical support, training opportunities, and even managed services and creative design capabilities. 

Braze is a marketing automation platform that helps you understand every one of your customers better and optimize campaigns according to their real-time needs. With Braze’s help, you can quickly build customer journeys that can adapt and change as your customers’ needs do.

Know exactly how your campaigns are performing and where your future opportunities are. By taking the guesswork out of your marketing, you’ll be able to provide customers what they want and see higher campaign metrics in the process. Image courtesy of Braze. 

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Use artificial intelligence to help you optimize campaigns and make necessary changes to evolve customer journeys based on their interactions and behaviors
• Create personalized experiences across multiple channels, including email, mobile apps, and more
• Integrate your marketing platform with multiple other tools and technologies to make the most out of your resources
• Track, manage, and understand customer data to better communicate with all of your customers

Pricing: Pricing is custom and based on business needs

Braze has experience automating marketing efforts for companies in various industries, including delivery and transportation, agencies, media and entertainment, travel and hospital, retail, and financial services — no matter your challenges, they have the experience you need. 

Automizy

Automizy is a marketing automation platform that focuses on improving your email marketing efforts. By making email development and management more effortless than ever before, you can create messages that stand out and convert. 

It’s not just about creating beautiful emails. With the help of Automizy, you can create customized journeys and send your customers down the right path based on their real-time interactions. Image courtesy of Automizy.  

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Grow your subscriber list with signup forms and platform integrations
• Track and react to customer behaviors to send relevant emails at the right time
• Create personalization emails with the help of advanced personalization, interested tagging, and list segmentation
• Test various email components to learn what performs best, then build emails that increase open rates

Pricing: Pricing is based on the number of subscribers you have. Plans range from $9 to 119 per month, with custom plans available.  

If you’re simply looking to automate your email marketing tactics, Automizy is an option you’ll want to consider. Focusing specifically on your email efforts will allow you to quickly see higher engagement and conversion rates — which can directly impact your revenue and growth. 

SharpSpring

SharpSpring is a sales and marketing platform that will help you better understand your customers, manage communication, and allow you to improve your lead qualification process. With all of this data connected to your CRM and sales automation, your teams will know when a new qualified lead is identified. 

The better you understand your customers, the better you can serve their needs. Passing a lead onto the sales team too soon could result in a loss of a sale down the road. Knowing exactly when to engage with your leads is a valuable tool. Image courtesy of SharpSpring.  

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Create email campaigns that respond to customer behavior and track leads after they click to understand their next move better
• Develop workflows to engage leads and move them through a personalized buying journey based on their interactions
• Integrate the marketing automation platform with your CRM to track opportunities and create customized services
• Build and design campaign landing pages that drive conversion and bring in new leads

Pricing: Pricing is dependent on the number of contacts you have. Plans range from $550 to $1,250 per month, and there are customized plan options available. 

SharpSpring is a great solution for companies who are looking to connect their sales and marketing teams. Having the ability to understand customers better and see how they are engaging with your campaigns will help you identify qualified leads and see increased revenue. 

Act-On

Act-On is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses grow their business and improve the overall customer experience. Whether you want to improve your landing pages, manage emails, or develop a lead scoring program — Act-On has a tool for you.

Create well designed, professional landing pages and use A/B testing to learn what your customers are engaging with most. Then take that insight and incorporate it into future landing pages to see higher conversion rates. Image courtesy of Act-On. 

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Develop web forms to manage customer information and optimize lead generation efforts
• Utilize dynamic segmentation to group your subscribers based on similar traits and behaviors 
• Get the reporting you need to improve your current marketing efforts and better understand your customers
• Integrate your CRM to see a full customer view and improve your account-based marketing efforts

Pricing: Pricing is dependent on the number of contacts you have. Plans range from $900 to $10,000 per month, with custom plans available for companies with more than 1 million contacts. 

Whether your goal is to grow your business, improve engagement, or deliver a holistic brand experience, Act-On has a solution for your needs. Their expertise ranges across industries, including banking, insurance, manufacturing, and more. 

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that focuses on improving your email and SMS messaging capabilities. By better understanding your customers and integrating dynamic content into your messages, Klaviyo can help your emails and SMS messages standout from the crowd. 

Klaviyo can integrate historical customer data, such as purchasing intent, to send relevant messages based on customer behaviors. Easily create ads and emails to pique customer interest, and win-back lost sales. Image courtesy of Klaviyo. 

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Segment your subscribers based on their behaviors and engagements to improve targeting
• Incorporate dynamic content to serve customers with advanced personalization such as product recommendation and cart history
• Use Facebook ads to get your message out to the right customers at the right time
• Attract new leads and subscribers with sign up forms and website popups to continue to grow your email list

Pricing: Pricing is dependent on how many contacts you have. Plans range from $20 – $1,200 per month, with custom plans available.

Klaviyo can help eCommerce companies achieve their desired results by putting the customers’ needs first. Whether you’re a small business or enterprise business, Klaviyo can help you continue to grow and improve your customer communications. 

Thryv

Thryv is a marketing automation platform that was created with small businesses in mind. By sending the right messages at the right time and never missing a follow-up opportunity, Thryv can keep your brand top of mind. 

Build relationships and send messages to your customers on meaningful dates like birthdays and anniversaries. This lets them know you’re thinking about them and provides them with a little extra incentive to visit your site. Image courtesy of Thryv.

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Schedule emails based on specific dates and times, or send one-off announcements and promotions
• Send triggered marketing campaigns based on customer behaviors to build stronger relationships
• Utilize pre-existing templates to make both email and text communication more painless than ever before
• Measure campaign success with the reports and analytics that you need

Pricing: Pricing is customized and based on business needs. 

Thryv is a great option for small businesses looking for a company that has their needs in mind. This platform offers various other capabilities outside of marketing automation, including scheduling and appointments, reputation management, document storage, and more. 

Emarsys

Emarsys is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses create a highly personalized omnichannel experience. Whether you’re looking for a platform to manage customer engagement, manage marketing tactics, or improve personalization — Emarsys has you covered. 

This platform can help you manage everything from customer loyalty programs to omnichannel automation and more. By bringing it all into one platform, you can see a full picture of your customers. Image courtesy of Emarsys. 

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• 1:1 personalized marketing that sends messages to your customers based on real-time data
• Easily create loyalty programs that keep your most important customers engaged and coming back to your site
• Manage your emails, mobile marketing, and ads all from one central location 
• Use artificial intelligence to automatically segment, personalize, and automate your content across all of your channels

Pricing: Pricing is customized based on business needs. 

If you require a platform that provides you with a wide range of automation capabilities, this is a great solution to consider. With experience in the eCommerce, retail, and travel industries, you can tap into their knowledge to continue to grow. 

AWeber

AWeber is another marketing automation platform that focuses on helping businesses improve their email marketing strategies. Having the right email automation partner in your corner can help you improve email creation, sending, and list growth.

Easily send and manage your email campaigns with campaign reporting. Whether it’s a sale promotion or nurturing campaign, you’ll know exactly how well it performed. Image courtesy of AWeber. 

Marketing Automation Highlights: 

• Build emails with the guidance of artificial intelligence to quickly create professional, branded emails 
• Choose from pre-built templates to make the email creation process even simpler
• Automate email sending and personalization to provide customers with the best experience possible
• Integrate sign up forms into your marketing efforts to continue to grow your subscriber list

Pricing: There are multiple pricing options. Plans range from $16.15 – $146.15 per month, with customized plans available. 

AWeber can help make your transition to email automation smooth with onboarding assistance. With all the email services available through their platform, you’ll quickly start to see the impact automation can make on your email marketing. 

The Dos and Don’ts of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can be a very powerful tool, but there are things you still need to consider. While it might be the perfect solution for freeing up extra time when it comes to email marketing, it’s easy to set it and forget it — leaving room for missed opportunities and outdated content. 

That’s why we’ve compiled a list of a few dos and don’t of marketing automation. By following these tips, you’ll get the most out of your marketing automation and see the results you’re looking for. 

✔ Do Utilize Marketing Automation to Build Relationships and Nurture Leads

Building relationships with your customers is a vital part of growing your business. If you’re not taking the time to get to know your customers and provide them with a personalized experience, you’re doing marketing all wrong. 

The better you know your customer, the more you can cater your communications to their wants and needs. This will result in higher engagement, more sales, and return customers. If you’re focusing on making a sale and don’t care about the person behind it, you’re missing future sales opportunities.

When it comes to building lasting customer relationships, there are plenty of benefits that make it worth your while. Here are just a few examples of what you stand to gain:

• Reduction in your customer churn rates
• Build customer loyalty and increase return visitors
• Customer retention is cheaper than acquiring new customers
• Strengthen your brand and reputation 

Marketing automation is a great tool to nurture leads and build lasting customer relationships. Having the ability to create automated workflows will keep customers engaged and enroll them in campaigns that fit their specific needs. 

Building relationships with your customers will result in more customer loyalty. While it might seem like a lot of work to keep these people engaged, the payoff is well worth the work put into it. Image courtesy of Peer to Peer Marketing. 

Here are a few of the ways that you can put your marketing automation to work and start building better customer relationships: 

• Nurture your leads. This is the idea of engaging with your customers across the entire sales funnel. When you nurture your leads, you will be engaging with them based on their current needs and providing a helping hand to move them towards making a purchase. 
• Improve customer retention. Automation platforms allow you to identify when a customer is at risk of churning. With this knowledge, you can put workflows in place to reduce the loss of active customers. 
• Build loyalty. Loyal customers are what you should be striving for. These customers not only continue to make purchases with you, but they also promote your brand to their friends and family. 

“The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%” — OutboundEngine. 

If nothing else, keep this statistic in mind when you’re thinking about the importance of building customer relationships.

⊗ Don’t Forget You Need to Develop Your Content

Once you get rolling with marketing automation, it’s easy to forget that you’re still in charge of the content that your customers see. 

With all of the automation capabilities, from advanced segmentation, automatic campaign enrollment, and triggered messages — you can almost forget that you’re the one who needs to continue developing engaging content for your audiences. 

This means you need to stay vigilant in the content you’re creating and ensure it provides value to your readers. If you’re creating content that has nothing to do with what your customers want to see, even the best marketing automation platform can’t help. 

If you find yourself struggling with this, you’re not alone. One of the most significant content marketing challenges businesses face is producing engaging content and creating it consistently. 

Having the ability to create engaging content and consistently is something that many companies struggle with. It’s important to remember that automation can only do so much, but it does provide insights on what your audience may be interested in. Image courtesy of Optinmonster. 

Although a marketing automation platform won’t solve your content creation problems, it can help you identify your customers’ topic areas. By collecting customer data and using this information to identify your customers’ gaps and interest areas, you can use these insights to create relevant content. 

✔ Do Automate Customer Communication and Improve Internal Processes

There are two parts to this automation do. 

The first is automated customer communication. This is one of the main reasons that companies choose to invest in a marketing automation platform. Using automation to create, schedule, and manage customer communication is proven to save you money and free up time for your team to focus elsewhere. 

Here are a few of the different ways you can automate your customer communication more effectively: 

• Email marketing
• Social media
• Cross-channel marketing
• Lead generation capabilities
• List segmentation

Chances are good, none of these were a big surprise to you. These are some of the most common ways automation is used. But did you ever think about how it can improve your internal processes? 

That’s right. Marketing automation can be a valuable tool for bringing your sales and marketing teams together. By increasing visibility between teams, both sales and marketing can benefit from the right platform. Image courtesy of Salesforce. 

Automation doesn’t have to be limited to creating workflows and sending emails. It can also bring the roles of the marketing and sales teams together to improve productivity. 

Collecting customer data based on their real-time interactions and behaviors will allow you to score leads better. This means that you will be turning more qualified leads over to your sales teams. Then, by creating one central location to house all of your customer data, you can pass along more detailed information to the sales teams. 

So what if you don’t work in a business that requires a sales team? 

Automation can still help you identify what customers are most likely to purchase soon based on their recent interactions. You can set triggered messages to help land the deal — resulting in higher revenue numbers directly from your marketing automation efforts. 

⊗ Don’t Lose Personalization Due to Automation

In a time where customers receive hundreds of ads a day, personalization is vital to helping your content stand out. 

And we’re not just talking about adding the subscriber’s name to the subject line. You’ve got to dig deeper. Find out what your customer likes, doesn’t like, and how they’ve recently engaged with your brand to provide them with the most relevant experience possible. 

“52% of consumers would switch away from brands that don’t personalize communication.” – Medium.

Here are some examples of how you can take your personalization to the next level: 

• General demographic data
• Purchasing history
• Previous browsing history
• Location in the sales funnel
• Personalized recommendation 

Luckily, many marketing automation platforms can still help you automate your personalization efforts. 

With artificial intelligence and predictive technology, your platform can read and learn customer data to understand their interests. The platform can then automatically segment subscribers, enroll them in relevant campaigns, and produce relevant triggered messages.  

Companies that choose to invest in personalization experience higher sales increases, and customers are happier with their experience. Image courtesy of Bloomreach.

Personalization can play a significant role in the success of your marketing campaigns. Putting the right personalization tactics in place will provide you with the following benefits: 

• Effective audience targeting
• Better content development
• Improve customer relationships
• Gives your brand an identity
• Boosts conversion rates and sales

No matter how you look at it, personalization is an essential part of your marketing strategy. Don’t forget that as you transition to your marketing automation platform. Use that momentum and the platform capabilities to make your personalization efforts better than ever before. 

✔ Do Use Data to Help Form Your Marketing Decisions 

Marketing automation platforms allow you to collect, manage, and understand more data than ever possible before. Daily, you’re collecting more and more data on your customers, from their interactions with your brand to their interests and demographics. 

Having this data at the touch of a finger allows businesses to start making data-driven marketing decisions. It takes the guesswork and assumption making out of marketing and leaves companies with concrete plans and strategies. 

Companies can benefit from data-driven marketing in the following ways: 

• Better understand your target audience
• Build strong relationships with current and potential customers
• Know what channels your audience’s preferences and promote your brand there
• Improve personalization capabilities

More and more companies are moving towards data-driven marketing. Using real-time customer data has proven to increase marketing performance and improved customer experience. Image courtesy of Vivial. 

The more you understand about your customers, the more relevant your marketing efforts can become. Having the ability to quickly understand and react to all of the data you’re collecting is a unique tool — and marketing automation platforms do just that. 

Your marketing automation platform can collect, review, and provide you with an output of only the most relevant content to your needs. This will then allow you to review the data and make decisions based solely on the hard facts, rather than opinion or emotion. 

As you start to transition towards a data-driven approach, your engagement and conversion metrics are directly impacted.  

⊗ Don’t Set it and Forget it

After you’ve taken the time to create all of your current workflows and automate your campaigns, it can be easy to “set it and forget it.” If you hope to have a successful, long-term marketing automation strategy, you don’t want to fall into this habit. 

Over time you need to review and adjust your campaigns. Even the most generic and evergreen content needs to be reviewed at least once a year to ensure it’s still relevant and doesn’t require any adjustments. 

Repetitive campaigns are also a great opportunity to do testing and learn what your audiences react well to and what just might not be working as well. A/B testing can help you make small changes to your campaigns and learn valuable insights into improving your future marketing efforts. 

You may also need to take a look at your segmentation and who is receiving the messages you’re sending. Maybe there’s an issue with the workflow you created, or you need to create an entirely new segment based on your recent customer data. If you never revisit your automation efforts, you’d be missing out on some great opportunities. 

Make the Most Out of Your Marketing Automation 

Transitioning to marketing automation doesn’t have to be an intimidating or complicated process. Whether you’re a small business or have a million email subscribers, marketing automation can help you improve your daily operations and customer interactions. 

These dos and don’ts will help you get started down the right track and help you avoid some of the common mistakes made by automation newcomers. The next step is up to you, choosing the best platform for your specific business needs.