Best Marketing Automation Platforms for 2026

Explore practical guidance, frameworks, and expert insights to help marketing teams increase opt-ins, accelerate activation, and scale AI-driven personalization responsibly. Marketers don’t lack data, they lack high-quality, preference-rich data they can trust and activate.

If you’re looking for new tools to add to your list, or you’re wanting to check out marketing automation for the first time, take a look at the marketing automation software tools we’ve compiled in this article. No matter what industry you’re in, it’s easy to set up marketing automation for any situation. Explore the fastest-growing markets for real estate marketing automation software and understand their connection to the wider economic and demographic landscape. Therefore, it’s a marketing automation software solution you may want to consider if you’re only interested in email marketing automation. Let me guess — a marketing automation software (if you’re currently using one) just crossed your mind.

One of the most valuable things Ontraport offers is its focus on reporting and insights. It’s organized and easy to understand, which makes setting up workflows less intimidating. The content editor speaks plainly, providing recommendations on length, structure, and keyword usage to make search-friendly content without being overly complicated. Surfer automates the content workflows by finding relevant keywords, clustering your content together, and giving marketers optimization recommendations based on SERP data.

See how personalized marketing can lift loyalty and raise ROI.

The right sidebar tracks entity coverage while writing articles, to ensure your content is optimized for search and AI answer engines. You can also see which prompts you’re showing up for as well as how competitors and other sources are cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. Surfer works by analyzing existing search results to identify common patterns in structure, keywords, headings and entities.

While marketing automation requires minimal maintenance, there’s still some effort needed on your part, especially during setup. When that contact starts to move toward a purchase, such as putting something in their cart without checking out, you can set it up so they receive an abandoned cart email from you. This wandering route is called the customer journey, and it’s different for everyone. Automation tools are individual workflows you can set up to perform different functions that will help you accomplish the goals you’ve identified for your marketing strategy. If it all goes as planned, your system then engages your contacts, right when it’s most likely to make them convert.

Key benefits of using marketing automation platforms

If you’re going Automated marketing to do it right, you’ve got to do, well, nonstop. Although email marketing is a common use case for marketing automation, it’s not the only one. In this article, we have collected responses from 1000+ experts and surveyed 2500+ online businesses from different industries to answer some of the compelling questions about automation. Businesses need marketing automation software to improve efficiency, save time, and enhance customer engagement.

Marketing Cloud Keynote

• If you’re advertising on social (and you really should be), you need a dashboard showing all your results in one place.
• Marketing automation helps you send perfectly timed messages across important touch points.
• The location where you’re sending the SMS messages influences pricing.
• It leverages automation to help businesses generate more leads, accelerate sales pipelines, and unlock deep insights into marketing performance.
• What I also like about LiveChat is it integrates with Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, so you can also answer messages from each platform.

You can use social media automation to publish posts during peak audience times, maintain a steady queue of posts, analyze social data and set up automatic responses to customers. Moreover, Sprout even comes with a chatbot builder to automate your messages and improve your customer care. Sprout offers additional analytics insights on your post performance. It comes with a content calendar to maintain a steady queue of posts and automatically posts them at the desired time. If you want the full experience of managing your social media accounts, customer support and deep insights into your audience, sign up for a free 30-day trial from Sprout Social.