How marketing automation tools help with business growth
Marketing automation tools make marketers’ lives easier by offering software that automates repetitive tasks and streamlines processes in their daily workflow.
Marketing automation has become an essential and scalable part of driving growth for both B2B and B2C businesses. It accompanies marketers and their target audience throughout the customer lifecycle. From helping to generate leads to providing the data to analyse and improve campaigns, there are many tools out there that can help you achieve your goals faster. Some tools specialise in specific marketing efforts like email, social media or customer relationship management while others cover multiple areas.
The sheer variety can make it hard to choose the marketing automation software that’s right for you. That’s why we asked 32 experts to reveal their favourite marketing automation tools. Get their insights to find the tool that suits your unique business needs.
Dennis Yu – CTO
Dennis is CEO of BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company which partners with schools to train young adults. We offer courses, implementation, and consulting.
Website: https://blitzmetrics.com/
Social Media: https://twitter.com/dennisyu
Favourite Tool
MobileMonkey handles all our messaging channels, including Instagram messages. Larry Kim is the founder, who also founded WordStream, the world’s largest digital marketing advertiser– beating out all the other platforms by making their tool simple to use. They have impeccable support and really care about their customers. Omnichannel messaging is the most powerful source of lead gen and customer support, so you need one tool to tie it all together.
Noelle Philipps – Marketing Manager
Noelle Philipps is Performance Marketing Manager at Kenzie Academy. Kenzie Academy is a UX and coding school built to level the playing field so students from all walks of life can succeed in tech.
Website: https://www.kenzie.academy/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncphilipps/
Favourite Tool
Hubspot. This is marketing automation that goes beyond email, especially when factoring in integrations and custom development work. I can create sophisticated, conditional workflows that allow our team to spend less time on repetitive tasks, as well as target specific users with the right email, SMS, live chat, or website experience.
Francesca Chong – Content Manager
Francesca Chong specialises in content creation and multichannel marketing strategies. She currently works as a Content Manager at Mention.
Website: https://mention.com/en/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mention/
Favourite Tool
Not sure if it really counts as an Automation Tool, but I am loving GetSiteControl these days. It’s a great way for us to capitalise on our website traffic to promote our content and campaigns (you can probably see it live in action on our home page: mention.com). It’s extremely easy to use, very customisable and is great value for us, with integrations to our other marketing automation tools.
Melih Oztalay – Strategic Marketing
Melih Oztalay has 25+ years of experience in developing successful, efficient and strategic digital marketing and advertising solutions for businesses.
Website: https://smartfindsmarketing.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihoztalay/
Favourite Tool
We have found that Pathmonk‘s website conversion AI tool is helpful in identifying the website visitor’s journey. This journey is not only about the first time the visitor visits. The AI tool tracks repeat visits by that person so that you better understand their decision-making process and length of time.
By managing the visitor’s journey, the AI tool will present calls to action in a way that reduces the time for the visitor to engage with you.
This tool is great at understanding your conversion funnel.
Of course, their customer service and helpful team are a pleasure to work with too.
Pauline Wiles – Web Design
Pauline Wiles is a website designer who builds a crisp & compelling online presence for authors and solo entrepreneurs.
Website: https://www.paulinewiles.com/
Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/paulinejwiles/
Favorite Tool
MemberVault — MemberVault allows me to offer all of my free resources, digital products, and courses in one easy to browse marketplace that my audience can explore at their own pace. By getting away from the “funnel” mentality that my community only gets to see my content in the order I think best, MemberVault puts the power in their hands to decide what they need and when. By definition, it removes the pressure to craft elaborate funnel emails, giving me more time to notice how people are responding to my content, and engage with them. Plus, the MemberVault team is savvy, responsive, and genuinely interested in mutual results.
Virginia Zacharaki – Marketing Communications Associate
Moosend is a highly competitive Email Marketing and Marketing Automation platform. Virginia is passionate about knowledge, learning, teaching and creating.
Website: https://moosend.com
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginia-zacharaki/
Favourite Tool
Moosend is an email marketing and marketing automation platform that can help you skyrocket your email marketing campaigns and email lists in the blink of an eye. Through sophisticated automation tools you can personalize at scale, use triggers to create abandoned cart emails, beautiful newsletters, and boost your lead generation. And don’t worry if you’re new to this. Apart from its short learning curve, Moosend’s platform features an extensive library where you can find plenty of ready email templates and automation recipes that will fit your goals like a glove. My favorite feature though, is the intuitive Drag and Drop editor, that doesn’t require any prior HTML knowledge and fully supports GIFs, videos and various interactive elements.
Kinga Edwards – Creative Owner
Kinga has worked in an award-winning full service advertising agency in Poland as a Social Media specialist. Currently she runs her own marketing business – managing marketing projects (focused on social media and international content marketing) for brands in several countries.
Website: https://www.brainybe.es/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kingaodziemek/
Favourite Tool
- Kontentino.com – it sorts our the whole social media management process for my agency.
- Mediatoolkit.com – it gives us overview on “all about that buzz” around our brand, industry and competitors.
- LiveWebinar.com – cause it redefined webinars and virtual events for my company.
- This marketing tool cocktail is a game-changer.
Joy Corkery – Content Marketing Lead
Joy is a communication & marketing professional with strong team leader abilities and excellent project management skills. She is currently the Content Marketing Lead at Latana Brand Analytics.
Website: https://www.latana.com/
Social Media: https://twitter.com/joycorkery
Favourite Tool
Hubspot. As Content Marketing Lead at Latana, one of my goals is to generate leads with the content we produce. Hubspot forms are a a great way of easily collecting leads via our gated content. However, it is the email tool which Hubspot provides that I love the most. It is not just about getting leads, it is what you do with them later on. Here at Latana, we are big on lead nurturing and providing leads with actionable information on branding. Hubspot’s email automation makes it easy for us not just to design and create emails, but also set up a fruitful flow in a seamless manner. I would 100% recommend it to anybody looking for an email marketing automation tool.
Jeffrey Kagan – Chief Revenue Officer
Jeffrey is an experienced strategy leader with a demonstrated history of working in hi-growth environments.
Website: https://niftypm.com/
Social Media: https://twitter.com/JeffreyKagan4
Favourite Tool
My favorite marketing automation tool is Hubspot. It is super easy to use and enables me to manage my paid ads and leads in one central location as well as see specifically which customers we acquired through google ads or facebook.
Adelina Karpenkova – Content Marketer
Adelina is a Content Marketer at Joinative, a native advertising agency and SaaS. She’s builds marketing partnerships, establishing content collaborations, and developing actionable resources for advertisers.
Website: https://joinative.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adelina-karpenkova/
Favourite Tool
After a few months of testing different automation tools, I’ve chosen SendPulse for email automation. It’s affordable, intuitive, and user-friendly. The tool has all the necessary functionality for creating beautiful emails, setting up triggered campaigns, and measuring email marketing performance. What I like the most about the tool is that you get access to the automation feature even on a free plan. So, if you haven’t hit 500 subscribers yet and want to start with simple automated campaigns, you should definitely explore the tool.
Vikas Kalwani – SEO Specialist
Vikas is a Product-Led Growth Hacker and B2B Marketing Specialist skilled in SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing.
Website: https://wordable.io
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikaskalwani/
Favourite Tool
I have used many marketing automation tools but HubSpot is still my favourite. It’s user interface is amazing, saves time, the onboarding experience is majestic, easy to understand and use, and most importantly, the platform isn’t complex.
Victoria Greywing – Content Manager and Outreach Specialist
Victoria is Content Manager and Outreach Specialist at Movavi. Movavi is a simple, powerful tool that makes converting, handling and distributing your video content quick and easy.
Website: https://www.fastreel.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-greywing-897032191/
Favourite Tool
Being involved in digital marketing for a few years now, I know that creating videos can be a tiresome job. But it doesn’t have to. When I need to put together a quick video, I pick Fastreel. I like it because it’s very simple to use and has all the features I need: trimming, cropping, adding filters, split-screen capability, and inserting text. There’s also a bunch of ready-made templates that I occasionally use for short videos like intros or longer clips like corporate videos. These videos are a great fit for email-newsletters and posts on social media.
Shane Barker – CEO
Shane specializes in influencer marketing, product launches, content marketing, sales funnels, targeted traffic and website conversions. He also consults with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities
Website: https://shanebarker.com/
Social Media: https://twitter.com/shane_barker
Favourite Tool
Favourite Marketing Automation Tool: Ingramer
Reason: Ingramer is my go-to automation tool for Instagram marketing. I use the tool to grow my followers, curate content, and automate campaigns. I’m addicted to their “Instagram Direct Module” feature which sends automated replies based on trigger words. This way, I can keep interacting with my fans, followers, and clients and boost my engagement numbers. Since I have to juggle multiple accounts, I find their super-efficient scheduling feature to be a boon. I can schedule posts, Carousels, images, and Reels to keep up a regular posting frequency. And that’s not all. Ingramer’s hashtag generator is the best in the business. It boasts of 12 million hashtags from all major domains and advanced hashtag analytics. Super-cool tool!
Gaurav Sharma – Founder and CEO
Gaurav Sharma is a leading Digital Marketing Consultant grew an agency from 5-figure to 7-figure revenue in just two years | 10X leads | 2.8X conversions | 300K organic monthly traffic.
Website: https://attrock.com/
Social Media: https://twitter.com/Gaurav_Sharma11
Favourite Tool
Mailchimp.
Reason: Marketing automation is essential for most modern businesses, and mine is no exception. To automate my email marketing campaigns, I highly rely on Mailchimp. The cloud-based tool helps me create, execute, and track my lead generation email campaigns rigorously. Using it, I can create all sorts of campaigns with ease – event-based, transactional, and custom. Mailchimp offers all of the standard email automation features such as a subject line checker, email templates, A/B testing, and dynamic content creation. And the best thing about this tool? Undoubtedly, it’s their Smart Recommendations feature. It inspects 2 billion+ data points to give intelligent suggestions to help you improve your email copy and predict campaign moves. That’s one smart tool for generating qualified leads via email marketing!
Ana Karic – Head Of Marketing
Ana works with international clients on implementing and optimizing growth processes to help their businesses achieve rapid and sustainable growth.
Website: https://www.anakaric.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-grasic-karic/
Favourite Tool
I can’t say that it is my favourite one, but Klaviyo is certainly a tool a can recommend. It has a pretty intuitive interface, many options, good pre-made templates and simple dashboards. Besides, it is integrated with Shopify, which makes things much easier when it comes to e-comm projects, built on Shopify. Active Campaign is also one of the tools I use very often. Similar to Klaviyo, it has many options to customize your emails, to segment your subscribers and create automation flows with ease.
Yoni Yampolsky – Marketing Outreach Manager
Elementor is a free WordPress Website Builder, with over 5 million active installs. Yoni is currently the Marketing Outreach Manager for Elementor.
Website: https://elementor.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoni-yampolsky/
Favourite Tool
Snov.io. It combines Lusha with HubSpot
Olivia Broersma – Content Marketing Manager
Olivia is passionate about working with small businesses to help them achieve their revenue growth and customer connection goals online.
Website: https://www.cazbah.net/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cazbah
Favourite Tool
HubSpot. HubSpot makes it easy to track and manage everything in the prospect and client life cycle, all in one location. Their workflow tools make it easy to update information across multiple records, saving me a lot of time.
Vineet Gupta – SEO Strategist
Vineet is Digital Marketing Team Lead and SEO Strategist for ProProfs. He has 7+ years of experience in Digital Marketing.
Website: https://5minutesseo.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vineet18del/
Favourite Tool
Mailchimp works best for me as a marketing automation tool. It helps me create series of emails based on the specific triggers and helps me keep my audience engaged. Over the years, I have been able to automate marketing workflows, automatically send emails at the right time, visualize customer journey and do a lot more with the help of Mailchimp.
Maja Wiśniewska – Content Marketing Manager
Maja is PR & Content Marketing Manager at SMSAPI – a brand full of exciting perspectives. She describes herself as an open minded person interested in communication, always looking for interesting projects and a hard worker.
Website: www.smsapi.com
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maja-wi%C5%9Bniewska-11765069/
Favourite Tool
edrone – best CRM and for e-commerce, gives a deep analysis and opportunities to automate sales processes.
Marieta Karapetyan – SEO Specialist
The Crowdfunding Formula is a crowdfunding PR & Marketing agency. They are building a strong product development ecosystem that enables creators to turn ideas into successful global brands. Marieta currently works as the SEO Specialist.
Website: https://thecrowdfundingformula.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marietakarapetyan/
Favourite Tool
My favourite marketing automation tool is Google Data Studio. It’s an amazing tool from Google providing a completely managed web service. It saves a lot of time for me, as I can include all the important data from Google’s other products (Google Analytics, Google Search Console etc.). I can easily create reports and dashboards with a few clicks and share it with my team members letting them access to do any changes. But what I like the most is it’s real-time updates. There is no need to open your GA report every time to see how many organic users you have or check other goals. And it’s completely free.
Raul Galera – Partner Manager
Raul Galera is the Partner Manager at ReferralCandy, an app that helps eCommerce stores run customer referral programs, boosting their customer retention and word-of-mouth sales.
Website: https://www.candybar.co/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raulgalera/
Favourite Tool
I have to go with ReferralCandy (https://www.referralcandy.com/). We’re using our own software to run our affiliate program and streamline the whole process. Affiliates can sign up and obtain their own unique referral links. They can then share these links in their blogs, youtube channels, etc and get ecommerce store owners to sign up for the program. I can check daily/monthly stats and see who are the best affiliates at any time. The best part of it is that our reward deliveries are also automated so I know that affiliates are getting paid on time for their successful referrals.
Jeremy Moser – CEO (Link Building Agency)
Jeremy is a Co-Founder at uSERP, where he helps businesses improve organic rankings and direct sales through targeted, high-impact brand mentions and link building.
Website: https://userp.io
Social Media: https://twitter.com/jmoser
Favourite Tool
Wordable.io — It saves me hours per week when uploading content to my CMS. Instead of copying, reformatting, clicking every last link to open in a new tab, etc, I just connect Wordable to my WordPress site and export instantly from a Google Doc. It’s a game-changer for saving tedious hours.
Timur Koklu – SEO Manager
Timur Köklü is a passionate digital marketer. Timur is interested in everything related to SEO and eCommerce. He is working for Vectornator as the SEO Manager and operating an eCommerce shop as a side hustle.
Website: https://www.vectornator.io/
Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/vectornatorpro/
Favourite Tool
I’m a big fan of HubSpot, as well as the rest of my team. My colleagues and I use it for reaching out to creative minds. HubSpot’s CRM allows us to easily order our Influencer and Magazine leads in an efficient and automated way. Using their Slack integration allows us to always stay on top of each conversation. We easily assign other stakeholders to conversations in order to create contracts and make payments.
Ryan Prior – SEO Strategist
Ryan Prior focuses on SEO growth strategies for SaaS companies. He is currently the SEO Growth Strategist for Skale.
Website: https://skale.so/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priorryan/
Favourite Tool
My favorite marketing automation tool within SEO would be Ahrefs.
Although I wouldn’t describe Ahrefs as an automation tool (nor would they position themselves as one), there are several things within SEO which can be automated.
For example, monitoring your backlink profile, or running scheduled technical site audits. Ahrefs is great for both of those things. Combined with features for tracking keyword rankings, keeping tabs on competitors, keyword research & more, it makes a really solid all-in-one SEO tool.
Petra Odak – Chief Marketing Officer
Better Proposals helps you create your proposals faster, makes them look more professional and gives you all the tools you need to win the job as quickly as possible. Petra is currently CMO at Better Proposals.
Website: https://betterproposals.io/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petraodak/
Favourite Tool
Intercom – because it allows us to collect customer data and interact with them based on their interests and the actions they take on our website. It allows for a seamless omnichannel experience.
Shrey Gupta – Digital Marketing Strategist
Shrey is a Digital Marketing Specialist skilled in SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media who helps businesses in sustainable growth. He currently works as a Growth Hacker at LoginRadius.
Website: https://www.loginradius.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shrey-gupta-146987127/
Favourite Tool
Marketo I have used many automation tools so far and find Marketo one of the most connected and open marketing platforms in the market. This enables us to align the sales and marketing departments even more closer and it is one of the most scalable and collaborative marketing automation platforms. Also, it has an advanced, but simple to use, nurture feature and marketing ROI attribution reporting. The tool helps us to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows and increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.
Christopher Vasilis – CEO
Christopher is Founder and CEO at Woorise, they help small businesses to connect with an audience, collect leads and grow online without technical skills or a big budget.
Website: https://woorise.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophervas/
Favourite Tool
My favorite marketing automation tool is Mailchimp. MailChimp is what I typically recommend to clients when they would like to easily grow their email marketing efforts, and I’ve done so for the past couple of years now. I rely on MailChimp for email marketing as a tool as it’s easy to create segmented lists, building contact subsets, automate and track email campaigns. Mailchimp is so intuitive and provides useful templates to send out emails to subscribers makes it my go-to choice. I like how easy and fast is to design email templates and the ability to add tags to audience members, meaning that I can further segment my subscribers and send unique content to different tagged audiences.
Roxana Motoc – Marketing Manager
Roxana describes herself as a researcher, an online media & marketing passionate and a constant perfectionist. She currently works as a Marketing Manager for SocialBee.
Website: https://socialbee.io/
Social Media: https://twitter.com/SocialBeeHQ
Favourite Tool
SocialBee. It is my favorite marketing automation tool as it helps me share content on all my social media profiles from one place in less time that I’d normally need for such task.
The advanced posting features allow me to organize my content properly, so that I end up sharing a balanced mix of content. I can set my schedule in no time and make small tweeks over time if needed – either to expire posts or to recycle them after I make variations of the initial post. Not to mention that there are several sources from which I can import content, either via RSS, either though bulk imports or simply by using the SocialBee Chrome extension.
The multiple integrations are also extremely helpful. I can shorten my links with URL shorteners and then analyze the performance of my links across various channels.
Matt Janaway – CEO
Marketing Labs is an experienced SEO and Digital Marketing Agency in the UK. Matt set up Marketing Labs to help others generate more sales online.
Website: https://marketinglabs.co.uk/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattjanaway/
Favourite Tool
Zapier is one of my favourite automation tools because it works across so many services. From creating effective adverts to setting up email sends and simplifying social media, you can easily automate every part of a campaign or your daily activity to ensure everything runs smoothly.
But what’s really useful is the fact that you can map the customer journey, helping to create the best experience for every customer and ensure they see the right messaging at the right time on the right channel. With UX being such an important factor in terms of conversion and retention, this can make all the difference.
Kevin Dillon – Head Of Customer Success
Pitchbox is an influencer outreach and link building platform designed for in-house marketing teams, brands, and SEO agencies. Kevin currently works as the Head of Customer Success at Pitchbox.
Website: https://pitchbox.com/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-dillon-2b54a090/
Favourite Tool
Moosend. They really take marketing automation to the next level. At Pitchbox, we preach personalization and automation when it comes to your link building campaigns.
Moosend has that built in for your email marketing campaigns. They also make things easy with their pre-built templates. Their clean and concise reporting also gives you accessible insight into your ongoing campaigns.
Alex Gopshtein
Alex describes himself as a big data and digital marketing geek with a love for automation and workflows. He co-founded Pitchbox in 2013 and is responsible for data architecture as well as research and development.
Website: https://pitchbox.com
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgop
Favourite Tool
My favorite marketing automation tool is ActiveCampaign. It’s a complete platform that allows us to handle everything from straightforward email marketing campaigns to complex automation workflows. Their support team is excellent, and the extensive training material makes it easy to onboard new users.
Johnathan Grzybowski
Johnathan Grzybowski, is the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service that is fast, simple, and affordable.
Website: https://penji.co
Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/dotpenji
Favourite Tool
Tools are one of those things that only work well if you’re committed to them. I’ve tried just about every single tool out there to help with marketing automation and none of them really worked. It wasn’t until I went a bit old school and started to make notes, tasks, and reminders for myself on a Text/Edit (Notes on PC) document, alerts in my calendar, and a spread sheet.
These simply changes and patterns in my everyday life has allowed me to be more structured. It’s allowed me to be more focused. And it’s helped me understand my day a bit better.
We as a society as consumed by new toys, but in order to succeed and move your business along at light speed, requires you to take a step back and look at yourself and your business to uncover the problems you’re currently facing.
The main takeaway from our experts is that marketing automation tools free up time for marketers to engage more with their target audience and give them the information they need to explore what’s valuable to customers.
Software that lets you improve workflows through automatic updates across multiple records, schedule posts across all social media platforms in one go, and user-friendly interfaces to measure performance can make a day in the life of a marketer a lot easier.
HubSpot seems to be a favourite with its effective targeting, integrations and the combination of multiple services in one place. Still, which marketing automation software is right for you depends on your marketing strategy.
Now the choice is yours. We hope that the expert opinions we’ve gathered help you make an informed decision on which tool to use to grow your business in the future.
We’d love to hear from you! Let us know which tool you decided on and why by tweeting @getdesignwizard.
David Coen
