10+ SaaS Marketing Automation Tools you need in 2020

We’re lucky to be living in a world where marketing automation exists.

Let’s face it: if you want to grow your SaaS company, you’re going to need to put in a lot more work. Too much work, in fact. No human could do what a simple SaaS marketing automation tool gets done in a matter of seconds.

Be that emailing your leads to turn them into prospects, or merely re-engaging customers whose lifetime value you want to increase, marketing automation can get it all done.

And in today’s guide, we’re going to show you 13 SaaS marketing automation tools that your company can use to fuel success in 2020.

Why Does Your SaaS Need Marketing Automation?

Time savings are a no-brainer. We all know that a human can’t get done 5% of what an algorithm can.

Let’s take a peek at the numbers, too:

• Companies that use marketing automation experience a 451% increase in qualified leads (Source)
• Marketing automation increases sales productivity by 14.5% and reduces marketing costs by 12% (Source)
• Marketing automation makes lead nurturing a piece of cake. And when you nurture leads, you can expect a 20% increase in sales opportunities, as opposed to non-nurtured leads. (Source)

The future of SaaS is in customer satisfaction. It’s the only way to get rid of that pesky churn, or at least reduce it to a manageable level.  

Your company needs to be able to stay in touch with your customers and ensure that they’re getting the best experience possible.

What’s even more important is that you don’t forget to nurture your leads.

Leads that are a part of your funnel but never receive further communication from you tend to drop out of the process, even if they need your product.

Marketing automation helps you:

• Reduce your costs
• Improve your profits
• Increase the value of your deals
• Generate more sales opportunities
• Retain customers and increase their LTV
• Nurture your leads and turn them into customers
• Target the right customers with the content and offers they want to see

It’s a win-win.

So, how do you get all these benefits?

We’ve got a few tools to help you out. ;)

Not all of these tools market themselves as marketing automation tools.

However, they will help you streamline your organizational processes, marketing efforts, and so much more.

1 Drift – Conversational Marketing

We’re starting with Drift because we believe Conversational Marketing is going to be one of the hottest SaaS trends in 2020.

Oh, and we’ve just become an official Drift partner – more on that very soon.

So what is Drift?

Imagine having a sales rep that is online 24/7, always saying the right thing and qualifying your leads perfectly.

That’s what you get with Drift.

It enables you to shorten your sales cycle, better understand your customers, and create a more human buying experience.

We’ll be helping SaaS and B2B Tech companies implement Drift this year so if you’d like to hear more about that please get in touch!

Pricing: Drift plans with custom bots start from $400/month

2 PandaDoc

Paperwork is the bane of every company’s existence. Not only do you have to warm up leads, but you also have to send proposals, offers, and other sales documents just to close that deal.

Fortunately, there is a SaaS marketing automation tool that streamlines sales paperwork: PandaDoc.

You can create professional documents much faster than before: choose from numerous proposal, quote, and contract templates, integrate your CRM data, and hey presto!

You’ve got yourself a sales document that will close the deal.

You can automate internal processes to create, track, and electronically sign the documents. You can even use their payment system to streamline payment from closed deals.

We use PandaDoc with all of our customers at Hey Digital and we love it!‍

Pricing: PandaDoc pricing for plans that will help you automate deals starts from $49/month/user.

3 HubSpot Marketing Automation

HubSpot is definitely one of the automation powerhouses of the 2010s, and judging by their progress into the new decade, they’ll stay on top.

While SaaS companies primarily use HubSpot for their CRM, they have a powerful marketing automation tool.

You can create entire workflows to avoid repetitive tasks; from email drip campaigns that allow you to set lead nurturing on autopilot, to triggering actions and notifications. Your marketing team will have their work cut out for them.

Your SaaS marketing team can finally return to what marketing is all about: creativity. Not tedium.

HubSpot Marketing Automation tool also offers other powerful features:

• Ads
• SEO
• Integrations
• Social media
• Lead management
• Behavioral outreach
• Email testing and targeting
• Landing page testing and targeting

Pricing: HubSpot has a freemium option. Plans that include marketing automation start from $800 per month.

4 Pipedrive

Pipedrive is essentially a sales CRM and pipeline management software. That alone would help you skyrocket your SaaS’ revenue.

However, it one-ups competitors by adding marketing and sales automation to the already extensive feature array.

You can create workflows to automate repetitive tasks your sales and marketing teams have to take care of. Additionally, you’ll store the most important customer information in the CRM.

When you want to review your results, you’ll quickly gauge insights from Pipedrive’s powerful analytics, and make better, data-driven decisions in the future.

Finally, Pipedrive uses artificial intelligence to monitor your performance and give you suggestions for improvement.

Another reason we love Pipedrive is because they’re based here in Tallinn, Estonia with us‍

Pricing: Pipedrive automation starts from $28/user/month.

5 Customer.io

Customer.io is a SaaS marketing automation tool focused on messaging.

It will help you deliver automated and targeted emails, push notifications, and SMS messages to your customers.

Ultimately, this will help you personalize your offer and reduce churn.

Customer.io will show you all the relevant customer data:

• Activity history
• Page view history
• Order/subscription history

After that, crafting an engaging message becomes a piece of cake!

Customer.io also offers automated workflow features, comprehensive segmentation, and much more. ‍

Pricing: Customer.io plans start from $150/month.

6 Opteo – Automate AdWords Campaigns

There’s no way around it: marketing is pay-to-play.

But if you’re paying for advertising campaigns, you don’t have to spend extra time and resources on managing them.

Opteo will help you manage and optimize AdWords account performance, diagnose issues, and make improvements.

You don’t have to worry about staying out of the loop.

Opteo comes with numerous integrations; you’ll automate your work and know when to celebrate your successes.

We love using Opteo as it often uncovers data points that would take a human hours to find!‍

Pricing: Opteo plans start at $97/month.

7 ActiveCampaign – Integrated SaaS Marketing Automation

A great customer experience is a combination of a few things: data, tools, and unicorn juice.

Wait…

Okay, maybe not unicorn juice, but you get the gist.

You need an integrated marketing automation tool for your SaaS to be the most successful it can be. And that’s precisely what ActiveCampaign provides:

• Marketing automation: Site and event tracking, automation goals and maps, split action, attribution
• Email marketing
• Sales CRM
• Messaging
• Machine learning

There’s no way around it: ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation powerhouse.‍

Pricing: ActiveCampaign plans start from $9/month

8 HotJar – Behavior Analytics

HotJar is well-known in marketing circles because of their heat maps.

They allow you to see how your users interact with your website, from the number of visits to the paragraphs they linger on the most.

But with great knowledge comes great responsibility, so HotJar has an integrated solution to help you boost your revenue:

• Heatmaps with clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior
• Visitor usage recordings
• Conversion funnels with drop-off recordings
• Form analysis
• Feedback (target questions and surveys to customers based on their behavior)‍

‍Pricing: HotJar has a freemium option. If you want advanced features, plans start from $99/month for up to 20.000 page views per day.

9 Unbounce – Landing Page Builder

Unbounce is primarily a tool that will help you streamline the creation of landing pages, pop-ups, and other content.

However, their offer also includes powerful targeting triggered by specific actions.

So if Joe visits your site and clicks on your “Contact form,” wanting to hear more about how excellent your product is, you could trigger the appearance of a special offer, pop-up, or a chatbot.

Unbounce is a great marketing automation tool if you want to meet that quota and improve your website performance!‍

Pricing: Unbounce plans start from $79/month.

10 SEMrush – Your SaaS Marketing Toolkit

If you’re tired of paying for dozens of different tools, raise your hand.

Whoa, not that many! We can’t count that far!

All jokes aside, if you want an all-in-one marketing toolkit, check out SEMrush.

While primarily a tool for search engine marketing (SEO and Google Ads both), they’ve upgraded their offer to help you manage and automate your social media marketing, email outreach, and even content marketing campaigns.

Seriously. Their offer is so expansive it’d take us hours to cover just about 20% of it. They give you everything you need to optimize your performance and conversion, as well as reach the coveted top spot on Google.

‍Pricing: SEMrush plans start from $99.95 per month.

11 UpContent – Better Content Marketing

Content marketing is the BEST way to promote your SaaS company. But we know how tedious and time consuming finding the right content to share can be.

Fortunately, there is UpContent. And hoo boy, don’t they make things easier!

They streamline content curation and collaboration:

• Step 1: Find, filter, and curate content
• Step 2: Collaborate and approve content
• Step 3: Promote your content and analyze engagement‍

Pricing: UpContent plans start from $15/month.

12 Outfunnel – Sales-Centric Marketing Automation

The real innovation happens when sales and marketing come together. And if you want only the best for your SaaS company’s customers, you’ll take a look at Outfunnel.

With it, your email marketing is synced with your CRM. Forget about manually importing or cross-referencing data. Action and analytics are happening in the same place.

You’ll also see which leads are visiting your website, and which part of your website. This helps you target them with the right content and ensure you’re steadily converting, as well as fighting churn.

Outfunnel also offers powerful lead scoring. Identify your best opportunities and funnel your way to SaaS success!

Outfunnel seamlessly integrates with Pipedrive, MailChimp, and many other services you’re already using.

Another exciting company coming out of Estonia!‍

Pricing: Outfunnel plans start from $19/month.

13 Encharge.io

If you’re all about that (work)flow, you’ll love Encharge.io.

It’s a marketing automation tool that keeps SaaS companies in mind:

• Sync customer data with marketing data
• Create powerful workflows
• Segment and target your customers

They even offer a complete walk-through on how to set up your SaaS marketing automation strategy with their product.‍

Pricing: Encharge.io plans start from $49/month.

Ready to Automate?

Life is easier with automation.

Think about all the times you wished there were 27 hours in a day when your team were overworked, and you still couldn’t defeat your rising churn rate.

Trust us: there is a much better way.

If you use SaaS marketing automation tools, you’ll know exactly what to improve, without spending precious time on tasks software can handle.

So why not give one of these tools a go? The majority of them come with free trials and significant discounts.

It’s time to automate your success!