Best CRM with Marketing Automation Platforms for Business Growth

CRM and marketing automation are two of the most sought-after types of small business software, and for good reason. Businesses constantly strive to build stronger customer relationships and streamline marketing tasks through automation. The good news is that many CRM platforms now offer robust marketing automation features, and similarly, many marketing automation tools are integrating CRM capabilities.

This article delves into the top CRM platforms that seamlessly integrate marketing automation, showcasing the most effective SaaS products designed to empower businesses.

10 Best CRM with Marketing Automation Overview

For a quick summary of the platforms in this guide, refer to the table below:

What is CRM?

CRM is short for customer relationship management. Its main focus is how businesses can unlock more value from customers. This is done by tracking interactions and capturing data about customers.

CRM tools capture customer data. This is then fed into sales, marketing and customer service processes. You’ll often find CRM platforms that specialize in one of the three.

With its focus on data, CRM leads to better decision-making. And that in turn helps to make customer-facing processes more efficient and effective. CRM is very effective in identifying new sales opportunities and increasing revenues. A better understanding of customers’ needs and preferences also leads to greater satisfaction.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the process of automating repetitive marketing tasks. The most obvious example is automating how and when messages get sent, or content gets published.

Marketing automation can also help with customer relationship management. This can cover updating customer records, segmenting audiences to help target emails, SMS, and ads, or ‘lead scoring’, which involves tracking customer engagement. These scores are then used to decide who to focus attention on.

The benefits of marketing automation include saving time and increasing accuracy. All the repetitive tasks involved in running marketing campaigns don’t just eat up time; they can be hard to keep track of. Automation makes sure everything is done without fail, quickly and efficiently. Many businesses highlight automation as a top desired feature in a CRM tool.

What are the differences between CRM and Marketing Automation?

CRM is designed to help you manage customer relationships and interactions. Marketing automation is designed to save time and improve efficiency.

You can use marketing automation software for CRM tasks. But this highlights another difference. CRM focuses on the full customer lifecycle, everything from initial lead generation and nurturing through to sales and service. Marketing automation focuses on the early stages. Companies use sales and service automation for nurturing, closing, and retaining customers.

The 10 Best CRM with Marketing Automation Solutions

Different purposes mean CRM and marketing automation can complement each other. It makes sense for CRM platforms to automate tasks, as automation speeds everything up and makes life easier. It also makes sense for marketing automation software to include CRM features, as understanding your customers leads to better-targeted, more conversion-focused campaigns.

The 10 platforms picked out below fall into 2 categories: either CRM platforms with marketing automation capabilities or marketing automation software that has branched out into CRM.

1. ActiveCampaign: Best Sales and Marketing All-Rounder

ActiveCampaign is one of the most popular marketing automation platforms on the market. Its popularity has a lot to do with its versatility. Originally launched as email marketing software, its feature list has grown and grown. Today, it’s a full sales and marketing automation platform with a sales CRM.

ActiveCampaign is hard to beat for marketing automation. It hits the right balance of advanced features and ease of use. There are more than 900 fully customizable workflow templates. Its automation workflow builder is one of the best available. The drag-and-drop interface takes no time at all to get used to, but the choice of triggers, conditions, and actions is huge.

ActiveCampaign features can mix and match email, SMS, and social. Dynamic content lets you personalize what every recipient sees, and you can get content creation help from AI.

With the sales CRM add-on, you can link marketing automation into sales pipelines. This is especially useful for B2B sales teams. Sales engagement workflows help sales teams identify the best leads to focus on and then automate follow-up tasks.

The sales CRM also has win probability calculations, so you’re not just rating your best leads, you’re making revenue forecasts from them. Find out more in ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign pricing starts at $15 per month. To access the sales CRM, you need the Plus plan with the CRM add-on, starting at $108 a month for 1000 contacts and 1 user. There is a 30-day free trial. Check out ActiveCampaign pricing to make sure you select the right plan.

Verdict: ActiveCampaign is the best CRM and marketing automation all-rounder. It has something to offer businesses of all sizes and types.

2. HubSpot: Best Full CRM Platform

HubSpot is a giant CRM platform. It has ‘hubs’ for marketing, sales, service, content management, and operations. While it’s popular with larger businesses, it also has one of the best free CRMs available.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub has multichannel marketing automation with email, SMS, and social media messages and ads.

HubSpot’s visual workflow builder is one of the most user-friendly available. As with HubSpot in general, the interface is well-designed. It’s clear, well laid out, and with great use of color and icons. This helps you find tools and navigate options easily. It’s especially good for anyone new to building automation workflows.

HubSpot has invested heavily in AI. Its Breeze software underpins everything from analytics to content creation to personalization.

One of HubSpot’s biggest strengths is its modular design. Marketing automation isn’t just a standalone product within a larger suite; it’s a tool you can link directly with other ‘hubs’. You can connect the Marketing Hub directly to sales or service CRMs. HubSpot also offers an impressive 1,200 integrations with third-party platforms.

HubSpot pricing plans start at $20 a month for the CRM Suite Starter plan. This plan includes the Starter plan for each hub with 1000 contacts. The free CRM includes basic automation tools. Read HubSpot pricing plans to find out which plan is the best for your business.

Verdict: HubSpot is the best for businesses seeking a full CRM platform. It’s great for small businesses looking to connect marketing with sales. It also has plenty of advanced CRM and automation features for larger businesses.

3. Engagebay: Best for Solopreneurs and Small Businesses

EngageBay is a CRM platform with marketing, sales, and customer service tools. Its strengths are its affordability and simplicity. It’s ideal if you want a CRM that does the basics well.

For a platform that prioritizes simplicity, EngageBay’s automation options are impressive. Everything is based on a well-designed workflow builder. One great thing about it is that options for what to add pop up contextually. This keeps the screen clutter-free and lets you focus on the workflow.

The choice of triggers and actions for automations is impressive. You can automate lead scoring, lead nurturing, and contact segmentation. It supports conditional logic for building multiple paths.

Beyond marketing processes, the CRM includes sales automation tools. So you can automate things like how deals and follow-up tasks get assigned to team members and how deals move through pipeline stages.

Another EngageBay strength is its free plan. Free features include email sequences, email templates, sales pipelines, and automated data entry. It’s an excellent no-cost introduction to CRM.

EngageBay’s All-in-One CRM starts at $12.74 per user per month. This includes 500 contacts. The Marketing Bay starts at $11.04 per user per month.

Verdict: EngageBay is the best CRM with marketing automation for solopreneurs and microbusinesses. It’s a great starting point for anyone new to CRM and marketing automation.

4. GetResponse: Best for eCommerce SMEs

GetResponse is a marketing automation platform with CRM features. You can build and automate email and SMS campaigns, integrate Facebook advertising, build forms and landing pages for lead capture, and build websites and host webinars.

Conversion funnels in GetResponse are dedicated workflows that directly link marketing to sales, or more precisely, map out the customer journey from lead capture to conversion and offer automated workflows to help move things along.

A big strength of GetResponse is lead capture. You can create special ‘lead magnet’ funnels with incentives to get people to sign up, or use exit-intent pop-ups that ask people to leave an email address before they leave your site. You can also start lead capture from Facebook ads.

GetResponse plans are structured by use case. At the cheapest level, it offers basic but solid email marketing. Then its Marketing Automation tier unlocks advanced automation tools, including a great workflow builder that includes simple sales funnels. At the top is the Ecommerce tier. This is where you can connect a web store and get the CRM features.

GetResponse starts at $13.30 a month. But to access the sales funnel features, you need the Marketing Automation plan, starting at $40 a month. There is a free plan that includes simple list building and email marketing tools. For more details about pricing plans, check out GetResponse pricing plans.

Verdict: GetResponse is great marketing automation software for small and midsize businesses. It’s especially good for small ecommerce businesses.

5. Brevo: Best for Small Business Marketing Automation

Brevo describes its mission as creating an ‘approachable’ CRM platform. If approachable means user- and beginner-friendly, it’s doing a great job.

Brevo has a dedicated sales CRM, a multichannel marketing automation platform that covers email, SMS, and WhatsApp, plus an API for transactional emails, and tools for chatbots and loyalty programs.

In short, Brevo is a great all-rounder, and it’s consistently easy to use. It’s most impressive as an email marketing and marketing automation service. The Brevo’s workflow builder is very user-friendly, but you can still build sophisticated automations. You can connect a website and use tracking to trigger workflows, and it has conditions.

The sales CRM is a good introduction to building and working with sales pipelines across a team. You can integrate video conferencing and arrange and host calls. There are some basic sales automation tools for assigning tasks and moving deals.

Brevo is also well known for its excellent free plan. Email campaigns, basic automated sequences, and sales pipelines are all included.

Brevo’s Starter plan costs $12 per month. You need the Business Plan at $16.17 a month to unlock all marketing automation features. The Sales Platform (CRM) costs $12 a month. Check out Brevo plans and add-on for details about each Brevo plan and add-on.

Verdict: Brevo is the best CRM with marketing automation for small businesses. Its free plan and competitive pricing are also ideal for start-ups.

6. Pipedrive: Best for Sales Teams

Pipedrive is a specialist sales CRM. Its main features include pipelines and deals management, sales automation, and sales analytics/forecasting. It also has some impressive lead generation tools. Another strength is its email marketing features. Templates and a drag-and-drop email builder make creating HTML emails easy.

This is where Pipedrive crosses into marketing automation territory. Plenty of sales CRMs offer email sync and basic tools for sending sales emails to leads. Pipedrive goes further. Its email features are on a par with the kind you find on Mailchimp. And you can build automated marketing campaigns, too.

Pipedrive’s Campaigns platform works closely with its sales CRM. Pipedrive uses CRM data for campaign segmentation. You can trigger campaigns from any point in the customer journey. So things like a deal dropping out can trigger a re-engagement campaign, or a certain amount of time passing since the last purchase. Pipedrive also tracks responses to emails and will automatically move engaged leads into the right stage.

Across all of this, Pipedrive is both user-friendly and flexible. It uses drag-and-drop editors for its pipeline, email, and workflow builders. You can customize pipelines however you like so they match your sales process. It also uses AI to suggest automations that have the highest probability of success.

Pipedrive’s Essentials plan starts at $14 for basic lead and deal management. The Campaigns add-on starts at $16 a month for 1000 contacts. There is a 14-day free trial.

Verdict: Pipedrive is ideal for sales teams that want to improve lead nurturing. It’s also good for any business that wants to connect sales and marketing automation capabilities.

7. Freshsales: Best Small Business CRM

Freshsales is the sales CRM of Freshworks, a CRM platform with sales, marketing, and service tools, similar to HubSpot and EngageBay.

Freshsales is notable as one of the cheapest sales CRMs on the market. Cheap usually means basic, but that’s not the case with Freshsales. And the Freshsales Suite combines sales CRM with marketing automation tools.

Sales process views are detailed and flexible. You can build pipelines to suit exactly how your business works, including creating your own custom sales activities.

Freshworks’ own AI engine, Freddy, adds in-depth analytics. Lead scoring is powered by intent and sentiment analysis. ‘Weighted pipelines’ predict deal closures and forecast revenue.

Along with analytics, sales automation is a real strength of Freshsales. You can build workflows that assign tasks and send personalized messages, or qualify leads and move deals. Freshsales’ workflow builder isn’t the most visually appealing, but you can build advanced event-based sequences with conditional logic. There are pre-made templates covering many common sales processes.

In the Freshsales Suite, the workflow options cover marketing tasks, such as lead nurturing through personalized marketing campaigns. Channels include email, SMS, and chatbots. And with the Zoom, WhatsApp, and Messenger integrations, you can add more channels. Check out Freshsales to see if it made the cut among other top CRMs.

Both Freshsales and the Freshsales Suite start at just $9 a month. There is a free plan with 3 users.

Verdict: Freshsales is the best CRM with marketing automation for small teams. It’s got all the tools needed to support growth without stretching your budget.

8. Zoho CRM: Best for Choice of CRM and Marketing Automation Features

Zoho CRM is a sales-focused CRM. It’s got one of the biggest feature lists on a CRM, and it’s part of a much bigger app suite.

Automation sits at the heart of Zoho CRM. You can map out your sales processes and customer journeys using a visual workflow builder. This includes a no-code software builder for custom-building your own processes. Then Zoho lets you automate pretty much everything.

Zoho’s sales automation tools include task allocation and account management. You can automatically segment audiences and personalize emails using CRM data. The marketing campaign tools include special workflows for events and surveys.

Alongside automation, Zoho’s Zia AI takes data use to a new level. It makes conversion and churn predictions for every workflow. Even more impressive, you can ask it to custom-build predictions for any function in the CRM. It can suggest optimized workflows to increase success.

Zoho CRM is a truly omnichannel platform. It supports email, SMS, social media, live chat, and phone.

Zoho offers a huge list of 40+ business apps. In the sales category alone, there are another 9 products alongside Zoho CRM, including a stripped-down CRM for starters and a standalone sales journey mapping tool.

Zoho’s Standard plan costs $14 per user per month. Features like Zia AI and custom journey mapping aren’t unlocked until the Enterprise plan, which costs $40 per user per month. There’s a free plan with basic CRM tools with 3 users.

Verdict: Zoho CRM is great for anyone who prioritizes choice and flexibility. Its feature set is already impressive and you can connect other Zoho apps for what you need. It’s a great platform for growing your business over time.

9. Monday.com: Best CRM with Workflow Automation

Monday.com is best described as a workflow management platform. Its focus is shared task management for teams. It covers CRM, sales, and marketing, but it can also be used for project management, IT, development, and HR.

Monday is built around the Kanban concept of ‘boards’. Boards are shared visualizations of tasks and workflows. Sales CRM pipelines are a familiar example.

Monday CRM is one of the 4 tools Monday.com offers. It comes with pre-made boards. These cover functions like pipelines, lead capture, contact management, and marketing. There are also specific boards for different sectors.

All boards are fully customizable. The board editor is easy to customize and user-friendly. You can build workflows for just about anything, with as many steps or stages as you like.

Automation layers onto the Kanban board concept. You don’t need to build workflows the way you do in most marketing software. The boards are the workflows. You simply set the rules for how and when a task or action gets completed.

Available automations include common ones like moving deals through pipeline stages, or triggering emails and allocating tasks. One more unique example is you can set tasks to be created automatically, too.

Monday CRM includes AI tools. These can be linked into dedicated AI workflows. You can use this for things like sorting through email responses to identify engagement levels. Then the AI will suggest and generate the most appropriate responses. For Monday.com alternatives, check out Monday.com alternatives.

Monday.com starts at $8 per user per month, for a minimum of 3 users. Its free plan gives you a basic contact management board for 1000 contacts.

Verdict: Monday.com is well suited to larger teams seeking greater efficiency. But it’s also cheap enough and easy enough to suit a smaller sales and marketing team. It’s a great introduction to the world of workflow management and automation.

10. Keap: Best for B2B Sales Funnels

Keap positions itself as a full sales and marketing platform for small businesses. Its main USP is a pretty unique approach to pricing: there are no tiered plans, no paying more to unlock more features. Every subscription comes with everything included. The cost varies by number of users and contacts.

Keap combines a sales CRM with email and SMS marketing tools. Its strength is that it covers the whole customer journey.

There are drag-and-drop builders for pipelines, emails, sign-up forms, and landing pages. Linking marketing activity to sales is easy and intuitive. For example, it offers special ‘blueprints’ for converting new leads quickly. These involve offering suggested incentives to get people signing up, clicking, and buying.

Automation is threaded through the whole platform. It offers what it calls ‘lifecycle automation’. This means complete automated workflows for lead nurturing, sales conversions, and referrals. The latter involves automatically requesting existing customers leave reviews after they buy. Again, creating workflows is pretty simple with a drag-and-drop builder, and there are plenty of customizable templates to help you automate key processes.

One other plus with Keap is that it has tools for managing payments. This includes the ability to automate invoicing and track payments. That’s a big benefit for B2B businesses.

Keap starts at $249 a month for 2 users and 1,000 contacts. There’s a 14-day free trial.

Verdict: Keap is great if you want a complete CRM with marketing automation for B2B sales funnels. But you have to have the budget to make it work.

6 Features to Look for in a CRM with Marketing Automation

We’ve picked out 10 platforms that we think nail the CRM with marketing automation mix. But what should you look for when deciding the right software for you? Here are 6 features every good CRM with marketing automation should have.

Visual Workflow Builder

Marketing automation can sound daunting for non-tech people. But it doesn’t have to be, not with a good workflow builder. A user-friendly visual builder should be top of the list for marketing automation. It makes automation accessible to everyone and shortens the learning curve. Even if you’re experienced, it speeds things up dramatically.

Email Marketing

CRM tools are great for understanding customers and tracking interactions. But what do those interactions look like? Marketing brings proven methods of communication to the table. And the most effective of all is email. Email marketing offers fantastic reach, conversion rates, and ROI. If you don’t need advanced automation, check out email marketing software.

Lead Management

The most basic CRMs will offer ways to log, store, and view customer data. But the best CRMs with marketing automation go much further than that. They will help you find new potential customers (lead generation), and engage with leads to turn them into customers (lead nurturing). They will help you identify the best prospects to focus your campaigns (lead scoring).

Analytics & AI

Data is key to effective CRM. After all, CRM is about knowing your customers. Data is what gives you that intelligence. So a good CRM with marketing automation should offer strong analytics tools. Increasingly, AI is setting the standard for how data is used, especially for linking data directly to automated actions and intelligent decision-making.

Collaboration Tools

CRM software is widely used by sales and marketing teams. Converting leads and closing deals often require a long series of tasks, tasks that need oversight from several people, even when they are automated. Look for features like shared calendars and inboxes, task allocation and management, and, as best demonstrated by sales pipelines, shared visual workflows.

Pricing

The best CRM for you is the one that delivers the most value. That’s not necessarily the cheapest; it’s the one that offers all the features and tools you need at the best price. It’s important to look through feature lists for software plans carefully and decide whether the cost of the features you need is a good fit for your budget.

CRM with Marketing Automation: Which is the Best for You?

Choosing the right CRM with marketing automation software is crucial for bridging the gap between sales and marketing. The leading platforms in this category empower businesses to understand the complete customer journey, save time, enhance sales team efficiency, and build flexible workflows tailored to their unique operations.

Here’s a short recap of some of the best tools:

FAQs about CRM with Marketing Automation