CRM Marketing Automation Software | Top 10 Reviewed for 2023

The best CRM marketing automation software lets you automate redundant marketing tasks in an effort to streamline the entire sales process. With a top-notch CRM marketing automation tool in your business, you’ll easily manage your potential leads, organize current and potential customers and channel your marketing team to increase productivity and sales.

With that said, finding the best CRM automation software for your business is certainly a challenging task. Here, we’ve reviewed the 10 best CRM automation software based on criteria like pricing, degree of automation offered, integration, and customer support, amongst others. Read on to learn how the likes of Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM can help catapult your business.

CRM Marketing Automation Tools | Top 10 Shortlist

Salesforce beats others on the list to become the #1 CRM marketing automation tool with features like personalized customer support, unmatched lead tracking, excellent integration features, and an intuitive dashboard. Are others a match for Salesforce? See for yourself:

1. Salesforce — Overall, the Best CRM Marketing Automation Software in 2023 | Try it Now with the 14-Day Free Trial.
2. Pipedrive — The Best CRM Automation Software for Email Campaigns and Marketing Processes | Put it to the Test with the 14-Day Free Trial.
3. Zoho CRM — The Best CRM and Marketing Automation Platform for Excellent Lead Management | Test it Free for 15-Days.
4. Monday Sales CRM — Best Free CRM with Marketing Automation and Personalized Email Templates.
5. Zendesk Sell — Top Sales Automation CRM System to Boost Your Sales Team’s Productivity | Offers a Generous 30-Day Trial.
6. HubSpot — Leading Customer Relationship Management Software to Simplify Pipeline Management.
7. Freshsales — Free CRM Software to Create a Personalized Sales Funnel & Customer Journey.
8. Maximizer CRM — Leading CRM Marketing Automation Software for Increasing Customer Engagements & Retaining Clients.
9. Less Annoying CRM — A Popular Beginner-Friendly CRM App for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses.
10. Oracle NetSuite — Quality CRM Automation Software for Filtering Interested Leads.

10 Best Marketing Automation CRM | Top CRMs Reviewed

Surely, you want to know more about our top picks for the best CRM apps for marketing automation. Read on as we dig into the details of each of the top CRMs, including their best features, pros, cons, and pricing. Ready?

1. Salesforce — The Best Overall CRM Marketing Automation Software in 2023

Salesforce is perhaps the most beginner-friendly CRM tool for marketing automation. Besides not needing your credit card info to get started with the free trial, you also don’t need to install any software.

Plus, if you need a little help knowing the platform better, you can chat or call their agents anytime.

Speaking of its CRM features, Salesforce is a master of automating lead assignments. This means each incoming lead is assessed based on their background and needs and is routed to the sales rep best suited to handle them.

Your leads get the best possible assistance from employees who specialize in their area of concern, and you don’t have to waste your time pairing them manually.

Speaking of automation, Salesforce does a fantastic job automating the process of acquiring new leads through its web-to-lead capture feature.

You can embed forms on your website for your prospects. Anytime someone fills it out, a new lead is automatically created in your Salesforce dashboard, with all the information automatically imported to your database.

To further cut back on manual updates, you can integrate your email account with Salesforce. Each email conversation will be automatically updated on your CRM platform, helping you keep an eye on the quality of the conversation and the persuasion techniques of your team.

Pricing

Salesforce CRM starts at $25/user/month and includes features such as case management, service console apps, and telephony integration.

All Salesforce plans also offer the option to purchase add-ons, such as Field Service Lightning and Digital Engagement, for an additional cost. While the add-ons may be somewhat expensive, starting at $50/user/month, they can benefit your business.

If you need additional features, such as service contracts and web services API, you can upgrade to a higher-end plan. Try the market’s leading CRM solution today, completely risk-free, with the 14-day free trial.

2. Pipedrive — The Best CRM Automation Software for Email Campaigns and Marketing Processes

Pipedrive is rated the number one CRM tool by users thanks to its easy-to-use interface and CRM features.

If automation is your top priority, you’ll appreciate Pipedrive’s activity reminder feature. It reminds you of upcoming tasks or events, such as following up with a lead or scheduling a meeting with a potential customer.

If your team deals with hundreds of leads every month, some of them might go unattended. The activity reminder feature is here to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Like Salesforce, you can generate quality leads with Pipedrive via a web-to-lead feature. Place a user-friendly web form on your website, let interested prospects fill it out, and Pipedrive will automatically create a lead profile on the backend.

This saves you the trouble of manually transferring the form answers into your lead database. Automating the process also minimizes room for missed entries and errors.

One of our favorite things about Pipedrive is the customizable pipelines. Note that you don’t have to stick to its pre-designed pipelines — create your own, add as many stages and fields as you need, and run your marketing campaigns as you find suitable.

Speaking of pipelines, managing each entry or lead and their stages are quite simple if you’re with Pipedrive. You don’t need any coding for that. If you need to rearrange something, you can do so with a simple drag-and-drop.

Pricing

Pipedrive offers a basic Essential plan for $9.90/user/month that includes lead and deal management, customizable pipelines, lead inbox, deal rotting, and more.

While the basic plan offers limited features, such as 3,000 open deals and 30 custom field limits, you can upgrade to a premium plan for more open deals and custom field limits, plus additional features like:

And more. The best part is that all Pipedrive plans come with a 14-day free trial to try out the software without any risk.

3. Zoho CRM — The Best CRM and Marketing Automation Platform for Excellent Lead Management

Zoho CRM specializes in marketing automation that helps bring the best out of your customer and lead management team. With their work being easier and free of mundane, repetitive tasks, they can focus better on winning over new clients.

Zoho not only automates lead capturing but also independently scores their chances of converting based on their interaction.

For example, if a lead has a 70% chance of converting versus another that has a 20% chance of converting, you’ll certainly want to prioritize the former and close the deal as soon as possible — that’s how Zoho CRM helps you make more profit.

Zoho CRM significantly reduces your workload by automating major data entry processes. For example, any time you receive an email for a new address, Zoho will automatically add it to your contact list, along with all the information available about them.

Similarly, whenever you reach out to a new prospect, your entire team will be notified automatically so that you don’t have to keep them updated about every lead development.

Once you remove these small yet time-consuming tasks from your team’s schedule, they’ll have the time to let their creativity run and close more deals.

With Zoho CRM’s marketing automation features, you’ll also be able to segment your audience better. This will help you target them with personalized campaigns, which in turn will boost your engagement and conversion rates.

Pricing

The Standard plan for Zoho CRM includes predefined reports and dashboards, email templates, and custom fields, which are suitable for small to mid-sized businesses. For more advanced functionality, you can upgrade to the Enterprise or Ultimate plan.

If you’re unsure if Zoho CRM is right for you, try it for free with the 15-day trial that doesn’t require you to enter any credit card information. No risk of losing any money.

4. Monday Sales CRM — Best Free CRM with Marketing Automation with Personalized Email Templates

Monday.com has more than 152,000 customers worldwide. Established in 2014, users love its diverse range of features which prevents the need to manage multiple CRM tools.

One of our favorite things about Monday.com is it lets you centralize your lead interaction. By integrating it with your email, you can automatically track every conversation for future reference.

In addition to that, it also lets you create personalized email templates so that you can target a group of similar leads with the same template instead of typing it out manually for everyone.

Another way Monday.com helps your team save time is by automating repetitive work, much like our top picks.

For example, any time your leads open an email, the sales rep in charge is notified right away. This way, they can pick the right time to get in touch with the leads in case they don’t hear from them first.

Similarly, Monday.com also lets you set up reminders for upcoming events so that you don’t miss out on important customer-centric processes. The best thing about Monday.com is it offers more than 23k+ app integrations — probably the highest any CRM tool offers.

By integrating your Monday.com account with tools like Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive, or Excel, you can use all these platforms from a single dashboard, creating the perfect centralized customer management tool.

Pricing

If you run a small business or are a solo entrepreneur, the free forever plan from Monday.com is a good fit. It allows up to two users and 1,000 contacts.

For a more established small business or a large corporation that requires automation and speed, we recommend the Basic CRM plan. It includes unlimited:

If you need more advanced features, you can try the Enterprise plan, which will quote you a custom price based on your specific needs.

Try Monday.com risk-free for a full two weeks with a free trial before deciding if it’s your cup of tea.

5. Zendesk Sell — Top Sales Automation CRM System to Boost your Sales Team’s Productivity

Zendesk Sell understands the importance of work flexibility and working on the go. That’s why it has a super intuitive mobile app that gives your team offline access to the customer database — no more WiFi troubles interrupting work.

You’ll also like Zendesk Sell’s email tracking feature. With it, you’ll know which of your emails have been successfully delivered, how many have been opened, and who engaged with your emails — and also who didn’t.

This way, your team can filter out interesting leads and include them in their next outreach session. Why go after dead leads when Zendesk Sell can help you zero in on the interested ones?

Zendesk Sell will also record every conversation between your team and your leads and customers. Whether it’s over a call, email, or message, recording the entire conversation lets you understand which techniques are helping you win (or lose) clients.

The more you evaluate your relationship with your customers, the better you get at keeping them content.

Depending on the plan you choose, you can also get detailed insights on your team’s performance or of an individual rep, which will help you find the shortcomings of your sales department and discover ways to help them better convert the leads.

Pricing

Zendesk Sell is a comprehensive customer service and sales platform with a wide range of features, starting at $49/agent/month.

The Suite Team plan includes:

And more. For advanced features such as customizable ticket layouts, private conversation threads, and up to 500 AI-powered automated answers, you can upgrade to a premium Zendesk Sell plan.

Try Zendesk Sell for yourself with the lengthy 30-day free trial, with no financial commitment required.

6. HubSpot — Leading Customer Relationship Management Software to Simplify Pipeline Management

HubSpot is popular among businesses of all sizes for its vast business tools. Whether you need help with marketing, customer service, or content management, HubSpot has a solution for every single business need of yours.

Speaking of marketing automation, HubSpot simplifies deal creation. It understands when you create a new deal with an existing contact from your database.

Once the deal is created, it’ll automatically update all the information it has on the contact to your deal, eliminating the need for manual data entry. In addition to that, you can also create custom pipelines.

Each customer is different, and sometimes they might not fit your existing parameters. This is where HubSpot’s flexibility to create custom pipelines with different stages and columns shines.

You can even rearrange the fields with a simple drag and drop. Whatever view works for your team, HubSpot will deliver.

Instead of wasting your time on cold pitches, HubSpot helps you find the ones genuinely interested with its service tracking feature. It’ll tell you who’s visiting your website and what actions they’re taking on it.

This will help you assess the interest level of the prospects, and you can then follow up with them at a suitable time — the chances of lead conversion are far higher in this case compared to boring cold pitches.

Pricing

HubSpot CRM offers a free forever plan with features like a shared inbox, help desk automation, and custom surveys.

If you’re a larger business with expanding needs, you may want to consider a paid plan, like the Starter pack, which costs $45/month (billed annually). This plan includes:

While HubSpot doesn’t offer a free trial like some other CRM platforms, its free plan and demo give you the opportunity to test the tool without any risk. Give it a try today.

7. Freshsales — Free CRM Software to Create a Personalized Sales Funnel & Customer Journey

Freshsales’ brilliant CRM marketing automation not only shortens your sales cycles but also leaves you with enough time to create a personalized experience for your leads.

For starters, if your team is struggling to communicate with all the queries from your website visitors, you can make things easier for both of those parties with Freshsales’ live chat feature.

An AI chatbot takes over the initial queries of your prospects and only connects them to your team when they’re sufficiently interested in moving to the next step.

To ensure you’re investing your time in the right leads, Freshsales helps you track visitor intent. For example, someone who quickly scrolls through your website isn’t nearly as interested as someone who spent some time reviewing your features and pricing list.

Knowing how each prospect interacts with your website helps you find the most profitable potential clients, which helps you allocate your time and resources wisely.

Freshsales’ biggest selling point is the Sales Sequence. Surely, you don’t want to waste time responding to each lead. The Sales Sequence feature will take care of it.

Set up automated replies with behavior-based or day-based triggers and bid adieu to manual follows ups.

For example, if a lead doesn’t respond to your emails within four days, you can send an automated follow-up to confirm their interest — imagine how much time you’ll save this way.

Pricing

Freshsales offers a free forever plan with features like contact and account management, 24/5 support, and a mobile app.

While this plan has many great features, we recommend getting a paid Freshsales plan to access Freddy, Freshsales’s highly regarded bot, which costs just $15/user/month.

Freshsales also offers a 21-day free trial on all its paid plans, giving you plenty of time to determine if the tool is right for your business. With no financial risk, we say try Freshsales today.

8. Maximizer CRM — Leading CRM Marketing Automation Software for Increasing Customer Engagements & Retaining Existing Clients

Maximizer CRM not only helps you bag new leads but also helps you retain your old customers and helps you supervise your sales reps better.

To help you retain your old customers, Maximizer CRM offers a Customer Health Analysis Index. This feature monitors your interaction with each customer and gauges their interest level to flag them as either “safe” or “at risk.”

The customers at risk are unhappy with your service and have a higher chance of leaving. With a fair warning in advance, you can jazz up your service, sort out their problems and increase the chances of them renewing your contract.

Speaking of retargeting old customers, you undoubtedly want to first target the ones with the greatest contributions to your revenue. The good news is you don’t have to spend time manually auditing to find the highest-paying customers.

Maximizer CRM’s detailed insights will automatically tell you what each customer is paying you for and how much. With such real-time data, it’ll be easier to make informed marketing decisions.

To make your team’s life easier, Maximizer CRM also offers a bunch of productivity tools. For example, quick access to important client data helps you communicate better with your clients without spending hours looking for their profiles.

Similarly, email integration makes supervising employee-to-customer communication easier than ever. Simply put, you’ll be able to get more done in less time.

Pricing

Maximizer CRM offers two plans, which include 10,000 contacts and a 100GB database size.

However, the Sales Leader Edition also includes a Kanban board for tracking and monitoring sales teams and data visualizations for insights into productivity and revenue. You can choose the plan that best fits your needs.

While Maximizer CRM doesn’t have a free trial, book a live demo to see how the tool works in real time before deciding if you want to purchase it.

9. Less Annoying CRM — A Popular Beginner-Friendly CRM App for Small and Mid-size Businesses

Less Annoying CRM takes a refreshing approach to CRM — effective, easy to use, and just a single plan to choose from.

If you’re looking for a CRM platform that helps you with marketing automation and also gives you full control over how you design your dashboard or pipelines, then look no further than Less Annoying CRM.

It provides you with a default template to get started, following which you’re free to add as many fields and columns as you need and customize them the way you want.

Don’t want to waste time briefing your team members every morning, explaining their job for the day? Less Annoying CRM’s email reminders will be your friend. With this feature, everyone on your team gets an automated email with all the events and tasks for the day.

If you’re moving from a different CRM platform, you can export all your spreadsheets and contacts in bulk easily. CSV imports and exports make starting your journey on this new platform a breeze.

With that said, the best thing about Less Annoying CRM is its customer support. Everyone gets instant support over call or email between 9 AM to 5 PM from Monday to Friday.

No matter what the issue is, Less Annoying CRM’s prompt support will get it fixed for you in no time and at no additional cost.

Pricing

Less Annoying CRM is straightforward with its pricing, offering one plan for $15/user/month with no hidden fees or contracts.

If you have over 10 users and need assistance with onboarding, you can contact Less Annoying CRM via email for help. Try out Less Annoying CRM risk-free with the month-long free trial.

10. Oracle NetSuite — Quality CRM Automation Software for Filtering Interested Lead

Oracle NetSuite’s CRM platform is one of the few to have a dedicated marketing automation wing.

For starters, it helps you identify which leads are interested in your service and worth investing in by comparing their behavior with buyer-readiness conditions. Each company has different criteria for lead qualification, so you can customize it and set your own rules.

As soon as a lead matches these predefined criteria, it’s passed on to the sales team. This way, you save a lot of time you’d have otherwise spent on cold pitching or trying to persuade leads who aren’t that interested in doing business with you.

NetSuite’s comprehensive sales features make the next step easier. The sales team gets quick access to customer data, which helps them connect better. In addition to that, they also have:

All a click away. The compactness of this platform gets the job done faster. Instead of digging through tons of data or going through multiple steps to get your hands on one file, you have everything at arm’s reach.

What’s more, NetSuite’s advanced analytics dashboard creates personalized insights for each CRM department. For example, the marketing team will only get insights related to the conversion rate, engagement ratio, and reach.

They have no control over sales analytics, such as revenue and closed deals, to keep things simple for them. Oracle NetSuite will give you a clean and organized insight dashboard to simplify the feedback process.

Pricing

Oracle NetSuite offers a customizable plan for each user, tailored to their specific needs.

The subscription starts at $99, but the final price is determined by adding an annual license fee based on the core platform, number of users, and optional modules, as well as a one-time implementation fee for initial setup.

To design your plan and get a custom quote, you can contact Oracle NetSuite’s team and request a product tour to see if the tool is a good fit for your business.

Top CRMs for Automated Marketing | Top 10 Compared

Sometimes seeing a head-to-head comparison of tools can help. Here’s a quick table highlighting the key differences between the best CRM tools with marketing automation so that you can arrive at a decision quicker:

Why You Need a CRM With Marketing Automation | Key Benefits

Integrating CRM with marketing function is a new-age success mantra. Let’s review some of the main advantages of combining CRM with marketing automation.

Increased Efficiency

A CRM with marketing automation can significantly increase efficiency by streamlining and automating repetitive tasks. This can include tasks such as email campaigns and social media marketing, as well as other marketing activities that can be time-consuming.

Automating these tasks allows businesses to free up time for more high-value activities, such as strategy development, customer acquisition, and sales.

In addition, marketing automation can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing campaigns by allowing you to segment and personalize your marketing efforts.

Better Targeting

You can better assist your present and future clients by synchronizing marketing automation with CRM. You can evaluate and analyze customer behavior with ease and plan your future decisions on those insights.

By using marketing automation, businesses can deliver targeted and personalized marketing messages to specific groups of customers or prospects, leading to higher conversion rates and a better overall customer experience.

Helps Resolve Issues More Quickly

Integration of CRM with marketing automation helps identify the issues and offers solutions when sales decline or marketing initiatives fall short of expectations.

Additionally, integration makes it easier to see when leads have lost their validity or when click-through rates for particular campaigns and adverts start to drop.

Better error detection in customer and contact information guarantees that communications are delivered to the intended recipients.

Enhanced Customer Experience

It’s obvious that CRM systems will offer your company a wide range of advantages, but their greatest benefit will be their potential to enhance the customer experience.

CRM will make it simpler to pinpoint your consumers’ demands, enabling you to customize your communications and engage them in meaningful interaction. This would increase conversion rates, resulting in quicker sales, and higher customer retention.

How We Chose the Best CRM Marketing Automation Software | Key Ranking Criteria

Making it to the list of best CRM marketing automation software wasn’t easy. Here are some key features we considered while zeroing in on our choices.

Ease of Use

When selecting a CRM marketing automation tool, ease of use is an important factor to consider. The software should be easy to use and navigate, with a user-friendly interface that’s intuitive and straightforward.

This will make it easier for your team to adopt and use the software daily, increasing efficiency and productivity. It’s also helpful if the software offers training and support resources to help users get up to speed quickly and effectively.

Integration

In addition to ease of use, it’s important to consider the software’s ability to integrate with other tools and platforms. The CRM marketing automation tool should seamlessly integrate with platforms your business uses, such as email marketing, social media, or accounting and payroll software.

This will help ensure that your marketing efforts are coordinated and aligned, leading to more effective campaigns.

Scalability

As your business grows and evolves, it’s important to choose a CRM marketing automation tool that can accommodate a growing company’s needs and support many users.

The software should be able to handle an increasing volume of customer data and support a growing team. It’s also helpful if the software is flexible and customizable, allowing you to tailor it to meet the specific needs of your business.

Pricing

When choosing a CRM marketing automation tool, it’s important to consider the pricing. The software should offer competitive pricing, with options for different business sizes and needs.

It’s important to carefully evaluate each tool’s features and pricing to determine the best fit for your business. Be sure to consider the overall cost of the software, including any additional features or integrations you may need.

Marketing Automation CRM FAQs