Zoho Campaigns vs Zoho Marketing Automation

Zoho has two marketing tools with overlapping names and features, and it's one of the most common points of confusion we see. Here's the short version.

The difference

	Zoho Campaigns	Zoho Marketing Automation
What it is	An email and SMS marketing tool — broadly a Mailchimp competitor	A full marketing suite
Email and SMS campaigns	Yes	Yes
WhatsApp campaigns	—	Yes
Multi-step journeys across email, WhatsApp and SMS	Simpler automation	Yes, with branching, CRM tasks, tags and webhooks
Website tracking, goals and known visitors	—	Yes
Pop-ups and landing pages	—	Yes

Which should you choose?

For almost every business, Zoho Marketing Automation. The exception is a very small business that knows it only wants to send simple email newsletters and wants to keep things as simple as possible.

The biggest difference in practice is the website integration. Marketing Automation can see what someone did on your website after clicking your email, trigger follow-ups from page visits and goals, and run pop-ups and landing pages without a developer. That lets you measure results by actions on your site rather than open rates, which are no longer reliable. See journeys and website tracking for how that works.

How to get it — and check your pricing

You can subscribe to Marketing Automation on its own, or get it through a bundle:

• Zoho Marketing Plus — a marketing bundle that includes Marketing Automation along with apps such as Backstage (events), Zoho Analytics and Zoho Social.
• Zoho One — Zoho's bundle of most of its main apps, generally at their top editions.

If you're paying for several Zoho apps individually, compare the cost against Zoho One. Even with a handful of users on higher editions, Zoho One can quickly work out cheaper. Prices change, so compare Zoho's current UK pricing for your user count.

Already on Zoho Campaigns?

Moving to Marketing Automation means re-creating your lists (ideally as CRM syncs), templates and automations. It's a good moment to tidy up: sync from Zoho CRM rather than importing spreadsheets, keep topics simple, and use segments instead of lots of static lists. Our getting started guide covers how.