Marketing automation software helps businesses streamline and scale their marketing efforts by automating campaigns, workflows, or tasks across multiple channels. These platforms serve as a centralized marketing database to enable teams to create segmented, personalized, and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects based on customer interaction data. These marketing automation tools should ideally support omnichannel marketing engagement across email, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, direct mail, digital advertising, and more.
A key component of marketing automation tools is the ability to create highly personalized journeys based on user behavior, preferences, and lifecycle stage. By leveraging dynamic content, segmentation, and behavioral triggers, marketers can tailor messages to individual users in real time. This level of personalization improves engagement and conversion rates by reaching customers through the right channel at the right time.
Marketing automation products often integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) software, customer data platforms (CDP), social media management software, e-commerce platforms, 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 primarily 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 workflows: 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
- 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 campaign return-on-investment (ROI)
- Provide personalization features to tailor marketing campaigns based on customer behavior
- Integrate with sales or marketing software such as CRM, CDP, or e-commerce platforms
- Not be categorized in the email marketing software category — products must cater to multiple channels, including email marketing
