Marketing automation can be called many things...a necessary evil, a means to an end, the thing that keeps you up at night because it accidentally unsubscribed your entire audience. It's one of the few pieces of software that modern marketing teams truly can't live without. It enables marketing teams to save an exponential amount of time by automating routine tasks and triggered workflows in addition to allowing them to track and evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns.

And yet, 70% of marketers say marketing automation software is critical to their success. So what is it, anyway?