Email marketing is the best tool in marketing automation software’s belt. Creating fun, informative and engaging email campaigns is one of an inbound marketer’s most effective methods for gathering leads and retaining customers. As such, a dynamic email service provider is key to the success of your email marketing. But which is the best enterprise email marketing software? Let’s take a look!

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Table of Contents

• What is an Enterprise Tool?
• SMB vs Enterprise Tools
• Key Features and Requirements
• Best Enterprise Email Marketing Tools
  • HubSpot
  • ActiveCampaign
  • Pardot
  • Eloqua
  • Marketo
• Next Steps

What is an Enterprise Tool?

In SaaS, enterprise software enables large-scale organizations with a variety of user roles to support multiple goals. Organizations such as schools, clubs, governments and, of course, businesses are the most common adopters of these tools.

The key word here is ‘large-scale.’ Businesses today have many employees with various user roles such as analyst, manager, executive and more. In the world of email marketing automation tools, ‘large-scale’ refers to not just customer-facing, such as the number of subscribers, but also internal, such as user roles.

An organization with over 250 employees is generally defined as a large organization.

SMB vs. Enterprise Tools

Email service providers like MailChimp and Constant Contact are great tools for mid-market and small businesses alike. However, global organizations and larger companies need more specialized enterprise email marketing platforms to handle the large data sets and subscribers that enterprise marketers manage.

For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $42. In 2020, the valuation of the email marketing category stood at $7.5 billion and is predicted to rise to $17.9 billion by 2027.

The difference between email marketing platforms designed for SMBs and enterprises comes down to the available features. As you can imagine, enterprise email platforms offer a wider variety of features than those designed for SMBs. Additionally, these features are often more powerful, e.g., they can handle a greater volume of data. They typically come at a higher price point because enterprises can afford the powerful engine they provide.

One of the most common differences is the number of leads they can store. Since enterprises generally market to many more people, they need greater storage capabilities than their SMB counterparts.

Similarly, this higher quantity of leads requires segmentation in order to send the right messages to the right people at an appropriate phase in the sales funnel. Although some SMB email marketing solutions offer segmentation features, those in enterprise platforms are often better due to the simple factor of resources.

Other features commonly found in enterprise email marketing solutions include A/B testing, dynamic content and automated lead scoring, letting users understand accurately and cater to their unique followers. Enterprise email software also generally offers more diverse and robust reporting capabilities, including the ability to create custom reports.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Key Features and Requirements

Enterprises need an application that connects marketing and sales teams seamlessly. Also, it should handle large numbers of customers and leads while scaling the number of leads as your business expands.

A few must-have features of an enterprise email marketing tool are:

• Integration: One of the most important features is the integrations your email marketing tool supports. Data should flow from one software to another without loss of data and human intervention.
• Lead and Customer Management: The tool should be able to handle large volumes of leads and customers and should scale as your business grows.
• Analytics: A strong analytics suite is essential for any enterprise tool as it lets managers view their team’s performance and strategize marketing efforts.
• Personalization: It is essential to personalize marketing messages to engage customers. Personalized messaging drives revenue, increases brand loyalty, improves customer experiences and helps maintain consistency across channels.
• User Profiles: Segmentation and profiling are required to send personalized messages and get the most bang for the buck. Information on user activity, such as clicks, geolocation, email opens and device used are some more factors used to create user profiles.
• A/B Testing: Conducting A/B tests is an important aspect of all email marketing. At the enterprise level, testing emails is important to increase conversions.
• Lead Management: Your enterprise solution should be able to manage leads and customers at high volumes. The tool shouldn’t be a limiting factor.
• Support: When your team needs support, the software you choose should have quick turnaround times.
• Automations: Sending automated emails when triggered is an important aspect. This feature lets companies nurture leads to convert them into paying customers.
• Account Manager: The enterprise vendor should provide a dedicated account manager who is an expert in the platform plus your accounts, plans and businesses.
• Templates: Pre-existing templates ease the process of creating personalized content. The system should support customizing pre-existing templates to speed up marketing plan implementation strategies.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Best Enterprise Email Marketing Platforms

Now that you know what makes enterprise email software specifically suitable for an enterprise, let’s look at the top vendors. We gathered a shortlist of the best enterprise email service providers so you can start your search to find your best-fit software. Here are the top five in no particular order:

HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular name in the running for best enterprise email marketing platforms. This powerful automated marketing system consolidates your marketing efforts to improve workflows and ROI.

HubSpot’s marketing hub enterprise edition is ideal for large-scale organizations that need scalable inbound marketing functionality. It offers sophisticated analytics and revenue reporting on forms, landing pages, email marketing, SEO and more. HubSpot also comes with a CRM module that provides all the essential features users need to build deeper relationships with their clients.

HubSpot’s intuitive dashboard lets you track which channel leads came from.

HubSpot’s email marketing functionality gives you the ability to personalize emails for targeted users, integrates RSS email subscriptions and lets you save multiple customized CAN-SPAM email footers to manage multiple locations or brands from a single interface.

The A/B testing features let businesses test different campaign versions to identify best practices, increase their campaign engagements and improve overall ROI. Users creating campaigns can launch landing pages or attach forms to an email template with a single click, and less clicking around across different screens is always better. With the addition of drag-and-drop functionality, HubSpot is one of the most user-friendly options on this list.

Limitations

• Learning curve may be steep.
• Integrations are not seamless.
• Customization of forms needs improvement.
• Doesn’t let users change their pricing tier before the end of the annual contract.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

ActiveCampaign

While ActiveCampaign may not be a name-brand platform, it’s just as capable of improving an enterprise’s email marketing. One of ActiveCampaign’s most unique and powerful features is its contact data collection.

It can find and store a person’s age, gender, location, social media profiles, interests and more based solely on their email address. This accessibility means you don’t have to create an extensive subscription form; all you need is their name and email address. You can increase the number of opportunities willing to fill out these forms, which means more leads.

Speaking of subscription forms, ActiveCampaign comes with forms that you can add to your website to collect your website visitors’ contact information. After a visitor fills out the form, their information automatically imports into your email lists so that they’ll receive your campaigns. Little manual work is involved in the process, which makes collecting and marketing to new leads a much less painstaking process.

Color-coded workflows keep you organized.

In addition, ActiveCampaign constantly analyzes campaigns to help prevent your emails from being identified as spam. Specifically, they compare good senders vs. bad senders and relay that information to you so you can adjust your campaigns accordingly.

Limitations

• Doesn’t let users upload emails in batches.
• Selecting text campaigns is buggy.
• Font changes in pre-set emails happen erratically.
• Not easy to add images to forms.
• Doesn’t support native integrations with third-party tools.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Pardot

It’s rare to find a list of best enterprise email marketing solutions that doesn’t feature at least one Salesforce product. This list is no exception.

Salesforce’s Pardot is an all-in-one marketing automation solution that provides lead management, ROI reporting and data analytics. It’s predominantly marketed towards B2B companies, although there are plenty of B2C companies that use it successfully.

Now let’s focus on what you came to this article for in the first place: the enterprise email marketing features. Pardot helps you manage your email campaigns from beginning to end. Its email builder tool allows you to create custom email templates with a responsive, intuitive design. This email builder uses a visual editor, making it easy to learn and use even if you don’t have design experience.

Pardot’s email statistics dashboard lets you sort and scan through opportunities.

As you probably know by now, personalization is key to effective email marketing. Pardot’s enterprise email marketing platform customizes your messaging to create more personalized interactions. For example, it can change the content shown to leads in campaign messages based on their previous engagement while automatically segmenting the rest of your customers. Additionally, Pardot includes spam filters to optimize your email deliverability.

Limitations

• Email editor doesn’t have an Undo button.
• Built-in connectors are limited.
• Customer support isn’t helpful.
• Updates are not frequent.
• Implementation is tedious.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Eloqua

Eloqua by Oracle is a powerful marketing automation tool that helps you optimize cross-channel campaigns, nurture leads at all stages of the buying cycle and manage tight-looped marketing activities. It supports features such as real-time descriptive data of leads, lead scoring and campaign design for sales enablement.

You can create adaptable campaigns, deploy faster and engage with SMS campaigns with its campaign design features. Its targeting, segmentation and lead management capabilities are scalable and powerful. It lets you create and manage assets with content blocks, design editors and forms.

Eloqua lets you create campaign templates with automation workflows.

It also provides profiler insights, creates and delivers email campaigns and integrates with sales extensions such as 6thSense, LinkedIn and ABM vendors. It has a powerful analytics dashboard that lets users view engagement and generate reports with CRM activity, page views and form submissions.

Limitations

• Doesn’t have a mobile app.
• A/B testing cannot always be executed properly.
• Updates aren’t frequent.
• The user interface is outdated.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Marketo

Marketo is one of those software products that fulfills the needs of a range of business sizes. Although it offers affordable options for small to mid-sized businesses, it’s no slouch when it comes to robust enterprise email marketing capabilities.

Marketo emphasizes learning about your customers. They want to make sure you don’t make the mistake of sending a generic bulk email to your entire email list. Rather, they want to help you segment your customers and leads so that you can send them the most relevant content possible.

Marketo lets you manage lead interactions with your campaigns.

Thanks to the “smart marketing database,” you can collect data on your clients to get a 360-degree view of each individual customer. This, in turn, helps you segment them based on their demographics, interests and behavior.

Automation is at the core of an enterprise email marketing platform. After creating emails for your various campaigns in Marketo, those emails are triggered to be sent to your customers at various points based on their behavior. The system also provides real-time reporting and A/B testing features so you can update your campaigns whenever you want.

Limitations

• Very expensive.
• Requires training to implement properly.
• Steep learning curve.
• Not very user-friendly.
• Customer support is not efficient and timely.

Compare Top Marketing Automation Software Leaders

Next Steps

This article is a great starting point, but there are more steps before you can finalize a solution. Assess your needs carefully, separating the “must-have” from the “nice-to-have” features. Gather your requirements to ensure the products you shortlist meet your needs, and make sure you don’t focus too much on shiny new features that you’ll never actually use.

Once you know what you’re looking for, you can compare top vendors based on features or break them down by price. Whether you choose one of these providers or not, make sure you keep your focus on one thing and one thing only: finding the best enterprise email marketing platform for your business.

Do you still have questions? Let us know in the comments!