Best CRM & Marketing Automation Platforms

Packed with powerhouse features: email campaigns, lead nurturing, lead scoring, analytics, CRM integration, and automated workflows, often triggered by if/then logic. Plus, extras like landing pages and social media management tools.

Biggest wins? Huge time savings and amplified efficiency. These platforms let you engage with customers on a personal level across a vast scale. They also help a ton with levelling up your marketing effectiveness and reporting.

Everyone involved in the customer journey finds value here, but mainly marketers.

From marketing gurus to sales professionals and customer service teams—it’s vital for both burgeoning businesses and complex enterprises.

The bigger the company, the more likely Marketing operations are pulling the strings on the marketing automation platform. At small companies, growth marketers typically take this on.

Rolling out a marketing automation platform is like hooking up solar panels to an old electrical grid.

Setting up the solar panels is pretty hard, but the trickiest bit? Ensuring that the sleek, new system “plays nice” with your existing system.

It’s all about smooth communication between the old and the new to avoid any major glitches.

Pretty much every company starts with CRM, and then adds on marketing automation, so the MA-to-CRM integration is where the most implementation resources will likely need to be deployed.

In my opinion, HubSpot and ActiveCampaign are fairly similar “all-in-one” options, while Marketo is the go-to for large enterprises with marketing ops teams who can handle serious customization for deep integration and heavy-duty use.

Prices can range dramatically based on features, users, and scale.

For small businesses, you might start around $20 to $100 per month with something like ActiveCampaign.

Mid-sized companies could look at $800 to $3,000 per month with platforms like HubSpot or Marketo, depending on the depth of features and the size of the customer base.

Enterprises could be looking at several thousand dollars per month.

It’s like choosing between a gym membership, a personal trainer, or a home gym—all about what fits your needs and budget.

Email tends to be the main channel for review campaign requests, and marketing automation platforms are the tech to send those requests.

Triggering review requests when users hit certain key milestones is a great way to leverage the power of marketing automation platforms’ powerful if/then logic.

In my 10+ years of experience of experience in B2B tech marketing, I’ve used marketing automation platforms extensively.

I bought, installed, and managed a Marketo instance for 2 years, and ran demand gen on Marketo for a year at another company. I started my career at Eloqua (now part of Oracle).

I’ve been using HubSpot Marketing Hub for the past 5+ years.