Learn B2B SaaS Marketing

The Best Marketing Automation Tools for B2B SaaS

by 

Lauren O'Bryan

Last updated: May 1st, 2024

You know that in today’s competitive landscape, using the right marketing automation tool can dramatically increase the productivity and success of your B2B SaaS team. The challenge, however, is finding that perfect automation solution that’ll help empower your team.

There’s no need to scour the Internet; we’ve selected 9 of the best marketing automation tools for B2B SaaS. As we go over their features and benefits, you’ll surely find one or more tools that fit the unique demands of your marketing team, so let’s get right into it.

HubSpot

HubSpot has gained significant recognition in the marketing industry, primarily because of its remarkable marketing automation capabilities. This tool allows you to precisely tailor offers and attract high-quality leads, which ultimately results in more revenue.

While it is a super powerful tool, many B2B SaaS businesses hit roadblocks with it, mainly due to the extensive range of tools and functionalities it offers. To avoid making the same mistakes, we can help you set up HubSpot, migrate data from any tools you’re currently using, and configure it to your requirements.

Feature highlights include:

• Form builder
• Live chat function
• Campaign analytics
• Customer profile management and segmentation
• Email marketing

Pricing

While HubSpot is super popular, it is an investment. The professional plan starts at $800/month and the Enterprise plan starts at $3,600/month. These plans are customizable, so you can add or remove different features as you wish and alter the price accordingly.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a powerful and well-known CRM platform that offers a user-friendly marketing automation tool with powerful features. With it, you can rapidly scale customer engagement and grow revenue by automating everything from lead generation to analytics functions or sales alerts. The platform also utilizes AI for enhanced customer analysis and segmentation.

Feature highlights include:

• Automated lead generation and segmentation
• AI-powered lead scoring
• Analyze prospect’s interactions and conversion potential
• Set sales triggers and alerts when a priority lead is ready to make a purchase
• Account-based marketing dashboard

Pricing

There are four pricing options:

• The Growth plan costs $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts
• The Plus plan costs $2,750/month for 10,000 contacts
• The Advanced plan costs $4,400/month with 10,000 contacts
• The Premium plan costs $15,000/month and allows up to 75,000 contacts

All four plans are only available on an annual contract.

Marketo Engage

Marketo Engage seamlessly connects marketing and sales so you can have enhanced lead generation and better conversions. You can also get more by integrating Marketo with other Adobe products, like Adobe Analytics or Adobe Workfront.

Feature highlights include:

• AI-powered customer segmentation
• Connect all your marketing channels through one dashboard
• Set content triggers to precisely match content to different audiences
• Get real-time behavioral and demographic data
• Get the full picture from customer journey insights
• Develop a generative chatbot that matches your brand

Pricing

There are four pricing plans – Growth, Select., Prime, and Ultimate. For pricing information, you must submit a customized request.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign marketing automation offers everything from email sequences and data collection, saving you precious time. Another benefit of ActiveCampaign is that they frequently update their range of tools and plan bundling options.

Feature highlights include:

• Email triggers, including for abandoned carts
• Lead analysis
• A variety of integrations
• Automate segmentation and personalized content
• Develop effective drip campaigns
• Analyze your customer’s entire engagement lifecycle

Pricing

ActiveCampaign has several pricing streams. The Marketing stream, which includes only email and marketing automation tools, starts from $29/month to $149/month or $259/month for the enterprise-level plan. If you want to incorporate sales CRM with your marketing automation, prices start at $93/month.

Keap

Keap is a small sales and marketing automation platform that helps businesses accelerate growth in record time. It allows you to set up advanced marketing automation that could save you up to 10 hours per week.

Feature highlights include:

• User-friendly automation builder
• Automated email sequences
• Integration with other apps
• Processing information from signup forms
• Scheduling appointment reminders

Pricing

Keap offers three pricing plans – Pro, Max, and Ultimate.

• The Pro plan costs $159/month, billed annually, and allows up to 1,500 contacts.
• The Max plan starts at $229/month, billed annually, and allows up to 2,500 contacts.
• The Ultimate plan starts at $279/month, billed annually, and allows up to 2,500 contacts..

Drip

Drip marketing automation focuses on customer relationships and engaging audiences to fuel growth. Using the simple visual workflow builder, you can customize workflow templates as you please and run evergreen marketing strategies with an easy point-and-click setup.

Feature highlights include:

• Connect your favorite e-commerce platforms
• Analyze customer behaviors for the best sales and marketing outcomes
• Sync various social channels
• Unlimited email sends
• Easy-to-use workflow builder

Pricing

Drip has a super simple pricing system – there is only one plan, and the price changes according to the number of contacts in your email list. For up to 2,500 contacts, you will pay $39/month.

Eloqua

Eloqua by Oracle is a marketing automation tool for nurturing leads at every stage of the sales pipeline. It’s designed purely for B2B marketers and allows a wide range of helpful integrations.

Feature highlights include:

• Create adaptable campaigns based on customer behavior
• A simple drag-and-drop interface
• Optimize email send times
• Merge behavioral and firmographic data to intuitively target customers
• Set triggers and automations for retargeting.

Pricing

You’ll have to contact the sales team to inquire about pricing info.

SureTriggers

SureTriggers gives you the ability to automate your business tasks and connect all your apps for smoother communication. Using the drag-and-drop builder, you can easily create multi-step automations, customize automation with specific conditions, set up recurring schedules, and more.

Feature highlights include:

• A wide range of integration options, including WordPress plugins
• Set triggers for whatever conditions or schedule you want
• Send or receive data from third-party apps without coding knowledge
• Easily transform dates, text, or currency to whichever format you need
• Collaborate with team members

Pricing

SureTriggers is one of the most affordable marketing automation tools available.

• Free plan – automate 1,000 tasks per month.
• Pro plan – automate up to 5,000 tasks for $12/month.
• Business plan – automate up to 10,000 tasks for $24/month.

These prices get even lower if you sign up for annual billing as opposed to monthly billing.

EngageBay

EngageBay gives you all the necessary functionality to automate the repetitive tasks involved in content management and lead generation.

Feature highlights include:

• Email marketing templates
• Highly detailed customer segments for direct targeting
• Predictive lead scoring to identify high-priority leads
• Set up email and SMS auto-responses or push notifications
• A/B split test landing pages and marketing campaigns
• Integration with a range of popular apps

Pricing

EngageBay has four pricing plans available for the all-in-one package.

• The Free plan gives you a wide range of marketing automation tools, but only for up to 250 contacts.
• The Basic plan costs $14.99 a month per user, and you can have up to 500 contacts.
• The Growth plan increases that significantly with up to 5,000 contacts for $64.99 a month per user.
• The Pro plan costs $119.99 a month per user, and you can have unlimited contacts.

Sage CRM

Sage CRM is a customer relationship management software designed to help businesses improve customer interactions and streamline workflow to boost team efficiency. With the marketing automation functionality, you can automate repetitive sales tasks, like creating quotes or lead nurturing through email campaigns. Small business owners especially prefer the interface because it’s so easy to use.

Feature highlights include:

• Easy-to-use dashboard to track sales, customer engagement, and opportunities
• Integrate Mailchimp for enhanced email marketing abilities
• Set up lead nurturing automations
• Collaborate with your team from different devices
• Create automated drip campaigns to maintain engagement and contact with customers on an ongoing basis

Pricing

Sage CRM doesn’t list their prices on the website. You will have to request a callback for more details and a price quote for your specific business needs.

Act-On Marketing Automation

Act-On is a highly specialized marketing automation platform competing with big names like Pardot and HubSpot. One thing they really work to their advantage is their ability to provide personalized customer service that their larger competitors cannot. You can monitor leads in real-time and customize reports to show exactly the information you need.

Feature highlights include:

• AI-powered marketing campaign builder
• Develop separate funnels for specific customer segments
• Automate lead scoring, data collection, and analysis
• API access to ensure integrations with your favorite platforms

Pricing

There are only two pricing plans, professional and enterprise. The enterprise plan is customizable, so you’ll have to contact the Act-On team for a quote, while the professional plan costs $1,375/month for a contacts list of 10,000 active contacts.

Creatio

Creatio is a highly customizable marketing and workflow automation platform for improving engagement and lead nurturing. The visual workflow automation builder is easy to use, and the platform integrates with many other tools. In addition, you can easily create lookalike profiles from existing audience segments.

Feature highlights include:

• A dashboard that gives you a complete view of your contacts and accounts
• Highly customizable platform without the need for coding knowledge
• End-to-end lead lifecycle management
• Advanced marketing campaign management and analysis
• Track marketing KPIs in real time

Pricing

The Creatio pricing is quite interesting. They have a do-it-yourself package builder where you select a platform plan as the base cost and then select the products you want, the user types, and the level of customer support you need.

There are three platform plans to choose from:

• Growth: ideal for SMB businesses from $25/user/month
• Enterprise: best for corporate businesses from $55/user/month
• Unlimited: a flexible solution with limitless automation from $85/user/month

Each product package – sales, marketing, and service – costs an additional $15/user/month. And if you want the business level of customer support, which includes phone and email support, that’s an extra 10% of the total cost.

Acquia

The Acquia Campaign Studio is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses create personalized experiences for their customers. It enables the creation of targeted campaigns, email marketing, and customer journeys, leveraging data and insights to deliver tailored and effective communication across various channels.

The platform was named leader in marketing for 2023 and leader in digital experience for 2024 by G2. The real-time data and wide variety of possible integrations make the product very useful. It can also handle complex workflow automations with ease.

Feature highlights include:

• Easy audience segmentation
• An out-of-the-box lead scoring system you can customize to suit your needs
• A drag-and-drop email builder with smart automations to personalize emails for each audience segment
• A visual customer journey that you can easily adapt to personalize or improve the customer experience

Pricing

The pricing structure of Acquia is a little confusing, with the pricing plans clearly displayed for the Cloud Platform, but not the other products. However, you can request a demo and get in touch with customer support for more details.

Omnisend

Omnisend is a well-known email marketing automation tool built for e-commerce with an easy-to-use interface and a drag-and-drop campaign builder. The platform has a range of pre-built workflow automations you can select from, like a welcome series, cart abandonment, or order confirmation. Better still, all your campaigns and communication from different channels are housed in one platform.

Feature highlights include:

• A diverse template library to make building campaigns faster and easier
• A drag-and-drop workflow builder
• A/B split testing
• Advanced reports on automation performance

Pricing

Omnisend has three plans to choose from and prices increase incrementally as your number of contacts increases. The three pricing plans available are:

• Free plan: for up to 250 contacts, send up to 500 emails per month.
• Standard plan: $44/month; for up to 2,500 contacts, send up to 30,000 emails per month.
• Pro plan: $59/month; for up to 2,500 contacts, send unlimited emails per month.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the most recognizable all-in-one marketing platform that helps businesses and individuals manage their email marketing, advertising, and customer relationships. It allows you to create workflows with built-in automations that are flexible and can be personalized to specific marketing goals or your target audience. The tool also returns a set of useful metrics to use as a basis for improving campaign performance.

Feature highlights include:

• The ability to set behavior triggers for a website or landing page visitors
• Appealing and easy-to-use UI
• Contact import function
• Prebuilt automation templates
• Survey builder

Pricing

Mailchimp has four pricing plan options to choose from, including a free plan. However, the free plan is only available for small contact lists of no more than 300 individuals. With no more than 2,500 contacts, the three paid plan details are as follows:

• Essentials plan: $45/month to send 25,000 emails
• Standard plan: $60/month to send 30,000 emails
• Premium plan: $350/month to send 150,000 emails

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is another powerful marketing automation tool that allows you to collect essential customer data and optimize your marketing based on the data. Unlike other email campaign builders, Klaviyo gives you three choices – a drag-and-drop builder, a simple text editor, or an HTML code editor. The marketing automation features work with both email and SMS marketing channels, and there are a ton of pre-built templates.

Feature highlights include:

• The ability to set a mixture of email or SMS notifications with a trigger behavior
• Customizable forms and pop-ups that you can insert into your website or landing page
• Unlimited conditions on customer segments
• Reports that can be scheduled
• Custom dashboards to display the metrics you want to keep track of

Pricing

There are two paid pricing plans and one free plan. The free plan only allows a maximum of 250 contacts and 500 monthly email sends. However, with up to 2,500 contacts, the other two plans are priced as follows:

• Email plan: $60/month, allowing 25,000 monthly email sends
• Email and SMS plan: $75/month, allowing 25,000 monthly email sends and a customizable number of SMS notifications

Campaigner

Campaigner is a great tool for small to mid-sized businesses that need 24/7 support and a wide range of options and flexibility. The tool uses a drag-and-drop automations builder, but you can also tinker with the HTML code if you wish.

Feature highlights include:

• Two different autoresponder templates – trigger and recurring
• Advanced audience targeting by location, behavior, or engagement patterns
• Messaging that is customizable by funnel stage
• Chatbot style guidance to help you correctly set up automations
• Real-time conversion metrics

Pricing

Campaigner has four pricing plans for either email only or email and SMS campaigns. There is no free plan available, but you can test out the tool for 30 days.

The pricing plans are as follows:

• Starter plan: email only $59/month; email and SMS $104/month
• Essential plan: email only $179/month; email and SMS $224/month
• Advanced plan: email only $649/month; email and SMS $649/month
• E-Commerce plan: $79.95/month for both options

In Summary

Using B2B marketing automation tools is all about enabling your business to grow to its full potential and convert more customers. But to do this, you also need a quality demand generation strategy.

A demand generation strategy will help you identify right-fit customers, optimize PPC, pinpoint your content marketing, and automate your marketing lifecycle, so you can have a steady stream of high-quality leads.

Powered by Search can help with this! We will analyze your current marketing systems and customer engagement success rate to give you a tailored strategy.

You can also get a head start by calculating your SaaS scalability score. This self-assessment looks at 9 different revenue accelerators and will give you an idea of where you currently stand against the competition.