5 Valuable Email and SMS Automation Tools for Marketing Teams

Marketing automation software can save you time and money while helping you to reach your target audience more effectively. These tools allow you to automate certain marketing tasks, such as email and SMS campaigns, which can help to streamline your marketing processes.

In addition, many of these tools offer powerful analytical features that can help you to better understand your target audience and improve your marketing strategies. Research and the latest marketing automation statistics show that companies that invest in automation see a return on investment of $5.44 per dollar spent.

We’ve rounded up 5 of the most effective email and SMS marketing campaign automation tools that are popular for marketing teams, with good reason. These tools have the potential to save you time, make your lead nurturing process fool-proof, and increase the number of marketing qualified leads you generate each month (and by extension, increase sales). We’ll dive into a product overview and review of the top features below.

1. Klaviyo
2. Marketo
3. Mailchimp
4. Drip
5. Sendinblue

Best Overall Email and SMS Automation: Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an email and text automation platform that touts itself as the “growth marketing platform that helps deliver more personalized experiences across owned marketing channels like email, SMS, in-app notifications, and web” and has a robust feature set that users rave about.

Within Klaviyo, you can design and send personalized email campaigns based on your customers' activity. There are also a selection of pre-built email automations that are based on user behavior triggers you can implement with ease. Templates for email campaigns, suggestions for subject lines, and more help you send high conversion emails with ease.

In addition to email automation, Klaviyo also boasts SMS automation capabilities, including multiple ways to get customers to opt-in to text messages from your business. Automated SMS messages can be triggered based on user behavior on your website or e-commerce site, and keep 2-way SMS conversations within the Klaviyo dashboard.

With almost 700 5-star reviews on G2, Klaviyo is well-liked by its users. Solomon P. writes of Klaviyo on G2, “Klaviyo is exceptional for its in-depth segmentation abilities. For instance, we don’t even collect gender data on our website but Klaviyo’s AI is able to predict the gender split of our customers! Also we’ve never had a problem with the emailing, scheduling, basic functions. Really love how easy it is to set it up and get it running.”

Despite the positive reviews, many have noted that the cost of Klaviyo is beginning to outweigh its benefits. In particular, some users have cited unclear pricing policies and large jumps in costs, especially when first starting out.

Best In-Depth Marketing Automation Capabilities: Marketo

One of the earliest marketing automation software tools, Marketo is truly robust in its automation capabilities for marketing teams. It was acquired by Adobe in 2018, and continues to impress marketing teams with its customizable tools and reporting.

According to their website, “Marketo Enagage is the world’s largest marketing automation platform,” with the ability to measure and optimize marketing campaign performance, leverage customer data to inform marketing choices, and facilitate email marketing, lead management, digital advertising, and social campaigns.

Lucy G. writes in a review of Marketo on G2, “…for the many years I have been in the field of marketing and sales, I have been using Adobe Marketo Engage as our most trusted and reliable marketing tool and I have not encountered any downside or technical challenge that wasn’t solved ASAP by the technical support.”

Marketo’s impressive feature set and in-depth automations make it suitable for larger, more established marketing teams and not small businesses working with a limited budget. Pricing is not disclosed directly on Marketo’s website.

Best for Just Getting Started With Email Automation: Mailchimp

On the other hand, if your team is small but growing, Mailchimp may be the perfect place to get started with email automations. Mailchimp offers a handful of affordable pricing options and an intuitive email campaign platform for designing and sending out emails in bulk.

Their user friendly platform is easy to navigate for beginners, and integrates in just a few steps with other software you might use like Gmail, Squarespace, and Shopify. When you’re ready to level up your email automation game, Mailchimp also has a number of features to help you get more out of your email lists with segmentation, analytics and AI tools.

Clinton O. writes in a review of Mailchimp’s email software on G2, “Mailchimp is most helpful for building visually pleasing email designs using intuitive drag and drop layouts. Mailchimp also makes it easy to schedule campaigns for specific target audiences. The audience dashboard allows you to keep track of recent growth, engagement rates and even audience locations, which can help you target future emails more effectively.”

With drag and drop email designs, templates to help you get started, and fairly easy contact importing, Mailchimp is a great solution for email automation beginners and small businesses. Plus, they even have a completely free plan for up to 2,500 email sends per month – an easy way to test out the software and see if it’s right for you.

Best for E-Commerce Email Automation: Drip

For businesses focused on e-commerce, Drip is one of the leading email and SMS automation platforms with a mission to arm independent shops with the tools to rival larger e-commerce players, like Amazon. They also offer forms and pop-ups to add to your e-commerce site to grow your audience and build your email and SMS marketing lists.

This multifunctional tool integrates with all of the popular e-commerce apps like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and more, plus they also integrate with over a hundred other software to ensure your marketing tech stack runs as smooth as possible.

Reviews of Drip are mostly positive, however some users point out that the platform could be easier to navigate and is complicated to figure out at times. Jamie M. writes on G2, “One of my favorite things about Drip is the email segmentation and tagging tools. Drip is the most accessible and intuitive software for us to create automated email sequences. The templates, ease of use, and integrations with all the other platforms and software we use to make it valuable to us.”

Despite some aspects of the software having a learning curve, their support team offers a library of content to help new users, including video tutorials and training webinars. Drip offers a free trial for new users, and pricing after that depends on how many contacts are in your database.

Best Affordable, All-In-One Option: Sendinblue

If you’re running a small business with a limited marketing budget but still want to get the most out of email and text automation tools, Sendinblue is an affordable standout. With a multitude of marketing and sales tools to help grow your business, Sendinblue touts itself as the affordable but comprehensive option for SMBs. On their website, they state, “We dream of a world where small businesses are on equal footing with big brands. That’s why we give you the tools big companies use to attract, engage, and nurture their customer relationships — without the enterprise price tag.”

With Sendinblue, you can gain access to email and SMS marketing automation tools, as well as website chat, signup forms, a custom landing page builder, and even a sales CRM. With all this in one platform, Sendinblue aims to be your business' hub for marketing and sales activities. They offer a free trial of the software, however, for more advanced tools like A/B testing and the landing page builder companies must upgrade to a higher paid plan tier.

Vittorio C. writes in a review of the software on G2, “I was looking for a solution suitable for getting in contact with a list of companies to develop opportunities without investing too much time. My approach wasn’t exactly the classic mass mailing approach and the CRM tool of Sendindblue has covered completely my business pipeline.”

While larger businesses with an established marketing and sales tech stack might not find Sendinblue to be their first choice, it’s a great and affordable option for businesses that are just getting started and need some pricing flexibility.

Build Your Automated Marketing and Sales Pipeline

Email and SMS automation tools can help streamline your marketing and sales processes, making it easier to reach more customers and increase sales. With a variety of options to choose from, there is an email and SMS automation tool out there that will fit your needs. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking for a more comprehensive platform, the tools we’ve covered can help you build incredible automated marketing practices.

Looking to round out your sales tech stack in addition to your marketing tools? Kixie is a calling and texting platform that integrates with all of the marketing software mentioned above, as well as many other platforms. Try out Kixie’s business phone system and tools to help you manage both inbound and outbound calling free for 7 days.