Marketing automation software automates marketing actions or tasks, streamlines marketing workflows, and measures the outcomes of marketing campaigns. These tools provide a central marketing database for all marketing information and interactions, helping marketers create segmented, personalized, and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects. The best marketing automation software provide automation features across multiple aspects of marketing including email, social media, lead generation, direct mail, digital advertising, and more.
A key component of marketing automation tools is the provision of analytics features to determine the success of an entire campaign across segments and channels. These features measure the impact of campaigns on marketing team KPIs and campaign ROI, as well as the impact of campaigns on company revenue.
Marketing automation products often integrate with CRM software, social media management software, CMS tools, and account-based orchestration platforms. While marketing automation tools do include email marketing features, products in G2's Marketing Automation category are excluded from the Email Marketing software category, which houses tools that only address automation in the email channel.
To qualify for inclusion in the Marketing Automation category, a product must:
Automate two or more of the following: email, social media, SMS, and digital ads
Provide advanced email marketing capabilities including A/B testing, spam filter testing, scheduling, segmentation, and detailed performance reporting
Act as a central marketing database for marketing information and interactions
Allow dynamic segmentation of marketing campaign targets
Contact targets across multiple channels after specific actions, triggers, or periods of time
Perform lead management to include lead nurturing and lead scoring
Generate forms and landing pages to collect prospect information
Provide analytics and reports that track the entire lifecycle of a campaign, including ties to revenue and/or campaign ROI
