The Best Marketing Automation: The 2024 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Marketing automation software, which dates back to the early 1990s and is designed to help companies generate leads, create and optimize campaigns, and then track the results, has grown swiftly in the past few years. Research firm Statista expects that in 2024 global marketing automation industry revenue will rise an estimated 12.6 percent to top $8 billion and that the annual figure will increase by more than 160 percent by 2032, reaching $21.7 billion. And usage among marketers is high, with Demand Spring reporting that in 2021, 96 percent of marketers used a marketing automation platform for their business. And Nucleus Research estimates that marketing automation’s returns $5.44 for every dollar spent.

The adoption of more digital channels, such as virtual and augmented reality, video, online, email, social media, and mobile, make up the greatest movement in the market, analysts say. And look for tighter integrations between marketing and sales platforms as the two distinct business function groups feed off of each other, informing each other’s work practices and potential strategies.

The Top Five

Adobe has invested heavily in its marketing automation solutions in the past few years, with a strong focus on content creation and helping companies deliver one-to-one personalization at scale through generative artificial intelligence and real-time insights. Its latest content innovations provide an integrated set of products for marketing campaigns and personalized customer experiences with workflow and planning, creation and production, asset management, delivery and activation, and insights and reporting as the key building blocks.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub has a number of very popular marketing features, including email marketing, forms, mobile optimization, contract management, live chat, ad management, and traffic and conversion analytics, with a goal toward helping companies attract attention, collect contacts, and engage customers. The company has updated the product frequently, which, according to Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir, makes HubSpot “very competitive in the marketing automation space.” Data from Datanyze, though, indicates that HubSpot is more than competing. HubSpot, it said, had the largest market share in the industry with 38.32 percent.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem, with unique capabilities for developing customer journeys, filling pipelines, creating personalized messages, tracking campaign performance, engaging leads and accounts, optimizing strategies, and more, across email, mobile, social, web, and advertising platforms. For many users, it’s the full package. “Salesforce’s broad portfolio of marketing automation capabilities, coupled with Data Cloud and the Einstein One platform, enable it to support a high degree of customization and personalization at scale,” Wettemann says.

SugarCRM’s marketing automation product, sold under the Sugar Market moniker, helps companies attract, nurture, and qualify leads; develop and optimize campaigns; predict leads’ likelihood of converting and flag prospects to prioritize; create and personalize content; manage events; and more. SugarCRM’s marketing automation tools offer lead qualification, ROI measurement, data segmentation, email campaign management, and more. “Core marketing automation capabilities and embedded AI make Sugar a good contender for organizations seeking core marketing functionality,” Wettemann observes.

Zoho Marketing Automation is a multichannel software solution with features to ease the marketing process and generate, nurture, score, and convert sales-ready leads, track campaign performance, design landing pages, and plan automated multichannel campaigns. With Zoho marketing automation, users can observe the activity of their audience on native or outside web apps, get a bird’s eye view of ROI and budget distributions, and manage their presence across a variety of channels and social platforms. Zoho also offers a variety of integrations with other business applications. “Zoho provides core marketing automation capabilities…as well as integrated digital asset management, events management, and other marketing-related capabilities on the same platform,” Wettemann says.

Niche Players

Analysts this year identified Active Campaign, Constant Contact, and Klaviyo as key niche players in the marketing automation space.