What to Include in a Marketing Automation Software RFP

A marketing automation software RFP should tell vendors what your team needs to achieve, which systems the software must connect with, what data must move into the new platform, how security and privacy should work, what implementation support you expect, and how you will compare pricing and vendor responses.

The more specific you are, the easier it becomes to compare platforms fairly. Asking whether a product has “email automation” or “lead scoring” tells you very little. Asking a vendor to explain exactly how it would handle one of your real campaigns gives you a much clearer answer.

Here is what to include in a marketing automation RFP in 2026.

1. Start with your business goals and current setup

Vendors need to understand what you are trying to fix before they can explain whether their software fits.

Open the RFP with a short description of the project. Explain whether you are replacing an existing marketing automation product, consolidating several tools, supporting a growing database, improving lead management, expanding into new markets, or giving marketers more control over campaigns.

Then describe your current environment.

Useful details include:

• Approximate number of contacts or customer profiles
• Average monthly email volume
• Number of marketing users and administrators
• Number of brands or business units
• Countries or regions you operate in
• Current CRM
• Data warehouse or customer data platform
• Website CMS
• BI and reporting tools
• Webinar, event, advertising, and sales tools

These numbers affect product fit and pricing.

A company with 150,000 contacts, one marketing team, and one Salesforce instance has a very different setup from a global business that manages 10 million customer profiles across several brands and regional CRMs.

State what you expect to improve as well.

For example, you may want to reduce the time needed to launch campaigns, improve lead routing, get cleaner attribution data, reduce manual list work, create more targeted campaigns, or make it easier for sales and marketing teams to share customer information.

Use measurable goals where you have them. “Reduce campaign setup time from five business days to two” tells a vendor far more than “improve marketing efficiency.”

2. Describe the marketing workflows the platform must support

The functional requirements section will probably take up the largest part of your RFP.

Avoid filling it with hundreds of yes-or-no feature questions. Ask vendors how users would complete the actual work your team performs.

Email marketing

Describe how your team creates and manages email campaigns.

Questions may cover:

• Responsive email creation
• Reusable templates
• Dynamic and personalized content
• A/B testing
• Campaign scheduling
• Subscription management
• Suppression lists
• Send-time controls
• Deliverability reporting
• Domain and sender management

If different teams manage different brands or regions, explain how you want permissions, templates, and content separated.

Audience management

Explain how marketers need to build and update audiences.

You may need segmentation based on demographic information, company attributes, account membership, website activity, purchase behavior, email engagement, CRM activity, product usage, or combinations of several data points.

Ask how quickly audience membership updates after customer data changes.

This becomes especially relevant when campaigns depend on recent behavior. If somebody requests a demo at 10:00 a.m., you may not want them receiving a generic prospecting campaign three hours later because the audience only refreshes overnight.

Journey and workflow automation

Ask vendors to explain the automation tools available to marketers.

Your requirements may include:

• Visual workflow builders
• Event-based triggers
• Branching rules
• Wait periods
• CRM updates
• Sales notifications
• Frequency limits
• Audience removal rules
• Testing tools
• Journey-level reporting

Try to describe real workflows instead of abstract requirements.

For example:

A prospect downloads a report, attends a webinar, reaches our lead-score threshold, and belongs to a target account. Explain how your platform would update the prospect's journey, synchronize the change with our CRM, alert the appropriate salesperson, and remove the prospect from campaigns that are no longer relevant.

A question like this shows you what the platform actually does. It can also expose steps that require custom work, external tools, or manual intervention.

Lead management

If your organization uses marketing automation to qualify and route leads, explain exactly how the process works today and what you want to change.

Questions may cover behavioral scoring, demographic scoring, account scoring, score decay, qualification thresholds, lifecycle stages, lead recycling, sales alerts, routing logic, and CRM synchronization.

Ask whether marketers can change scoring rules themselves and how the platform records those changes.

3. Be specific about CRM and other integrations

A marketing automation product usually depends on several other systems. Treat integrations as their own part of the RFP instead of placing them under a general features section.

List every system the new platform must communicate with.

For the CRM, provide the exact product and edition where possible. Do not ask whether the platform “integrates with Salesforce” if you use Salesforce Sales Cloud with custom objects, several business units, and a particular data model.

Ask vendors:

• Which standard objects can be synchronized?
• Are custom objects supported?
• Is synchronization one-way or bidirectional?
• How quickly are records updated?
• How are field mappings managed?
• What happens when a synchronization fails?
• Can administrators retry failed records?
• Are API limits likely to affect synchronization?
• Does the connector cost extra?

Apply the same level of detail to your other systems.

These may include your customer data platform, data warehouse, CMS, ecommerce platform, webinar software, advertising platforms, BI tools, consent-management system, sales engagement software, event tools, support software, or internal databases.

For every integration, ask whether it is native, built by a partner, API-based, or dependent on middleware.

That distinction affects implementation work and long-term maintenance.

A vendor may say it “supports” a particular application when the connection actually requires Zapier, MuleSoft, Workato, custom development, or another paid product.

4. Define exactly what needs to move from your current platform

Migration becomes difficult when teams assume that years of data, campaign history, templates, and workflows can simply be copied into the new system.

Spell out what you expect to migrate.

Depending on your current setup, this may include:

• Contacts and accounts
• Custom fields
• Subscription preferences
• Consent records
• Suppression lists
• Lead scores
• Campaign history
• Email templates
• Landing pages
• Forms
• Automated workflows
• Audience definitions
• Campaign assets
• Historical engagement data

Ask the vendor to separate items that can move directly from items that need to be recreated.

You should also ask how the vendor handles data mapping, cleansing, test migrations, validation, reconciliation, final cutover, and rollback.

One useful question is:

Identify any data, campaign assets, workflows, or historical records from our current platform that cannot be migrated with full fidelity. Explain what would be lost or changed and recommend an alternative approach.

That wording makes it harder for vendors to give a broad “yes, we support migration” answer without explaining the limits.

If historical data matters to your reporting team, state how much history you want to preserve. Migrating two years of campaign activity can be very different from importing a contact table with current field values.

5. Tell vendors what you actually need to report on

“Advanced reporting” is too vague to be useful in an RFP.

List the questions your marketing, sales, finance, and leadership teams expect the system to answer.

You might need reporting on:

• Campaign performance
• Funnel conversion
• Lead progression
• Pipeline contribution
• Revenue attribution
• Account activity
• Email engagement
• Form conversion
• Database growth
• Deliverability
• Channel performance

If attribution matters, ask each vendor to explain its models.

Two products can both claim to offer multi-touch attribution while calculating results in very different ways. Ask how each model assigns credit, what data it requires, whether users can create custom models, and how offline activity is treated.

Reporting questions should also cover data freshness, dashboard creation, custom reports, raw-data access, APIs, historical retention, BI integrations, scheduled exports, and user permissions.

Ask which reports marketers can build without technical help.

A platform may have extensive reporting options, but that does not necessarily mean a campaign manager can create those reports without an administrator, analyst, or paid services engagement.

6. Give security and privacy their own evaluation section

Marketing automation platforms store large amounts of customer and prospect data. Your RFP should explain the security controls your organization expects.

Questions may cover:

• Single sign-on
• Multi-factor authentication
• Role-based permissions
• User provisioning
• Audit logs
• Encryption
• Vulnerability management
• Penetration testing
• Backup procedures
• Business continuity
• Incident response
• Subprocessors
• Data residency
• Retention
• Data deletion

If your security team uses NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 or another security framework, tell vendors how you want their responses mapped.

Privacy requirements should reflect where your business operates and what information you collect.

For organizations subject to California privacy requirements, for example, the CCPA includes consumer rights related to access, deletion, correction, and opting out of certain uses involving sale or sharing of personal information.

Your RFP can ask how the platform records consent, processes deletion requests, updates preferences, applies suppression rules, retains customer information, and exports records when a consumer submits a request.

Email compliance deserves separate questions as well.

FTC guidance on CAN-SPAM covers requirements that include accurate sender information, non-deceptive subject lines, postal-address disclosure, opt-out mechanisms, and processing opt-out requests within the required period.

Your legal and privacy teams should decide which laws apply to your business. The RFP should then test whether each product gives your team the controls needed to follow those requirements.

7. Ask specific questions about AI

By 2026, most large marketing software vendors describe some part of their product as AI-powered. That label tells you very little about how the feature works.

Create a separate AI section and ask vendors to explain each feature in practical terms.

You may see AI used for:

• Content generation
• Subject-line suggestions
• Audience creation
• Lead scoring
• Recommendations
• Forecasting
• Send-time optimization
• Campaign optimization
• Personalization

For each feature, ask what customer data the system uses.

You should also know whether data goes to an external model provider, how long prompts and outputs are stored, whether your information is used to train models, and which AI functions administrators can turn off.

Other useful questions include:

• Can users review generated content before publication?
• Are AI-generated recommendations recorded?
• Can administrators restrict which users access AI functions?
• How does the system treat sensitive customer information?
• Can the vendor identify the model or service behind each AI feature?
• Can AI-generated outputs be deleted?
• Does AI usage carry separate fees or usage limits?

If your privacy program uses the NIST Privacy Framework, you can use it as one reference point when reviewing how vendors collect, process, store, and remove information used by AI features.

8. Define implementation responsibilities before you compare proposals

Software capability means little if nobody has agreed on who will configure and launch the system.

Ask every vendor for an implementation plan.

The response should explain the main stages, responsibilities, dependencies, expected customer resources, and proposed milestones.

Make vendors state who handles tasks such as:

• CRM configuration
• Data migration
• Domain setup
• User provisioning
• Campaign recreation
• Workflow rebuilding
• Integration testing
• User acceptance testing
• Administrator training
• End-user training

Do not assume these services are included in the subscription.

Some vendors perform implementation directly. Others use certified partners. Some include limited onboarding and charge separately for migration or technical work.

Ask who will own each part of the project.

Support should receive the same treatment.

Request details on support hours, response times, communication channels, escalation procedures, technical support, account management, training materials, consulting, and premium support packages.

If 24/7 support requires a higher-priced plan, you want that information before final negotiations.

9. Ask for pricing in a format you can actually compare

Marketing automation pricing can become difficult to compare because vendors use different billing models.

One platform may charge by contacts. Another may price by active contacts, email volume, users, business units, features, API usage, or combinations of these factors.

Give every vendor the same assumptions.

For example, you could ask for pricing based on:

• 500,000 marketable contacts
• 25 users
• 5 administrators
• 3 business units
• A defined monthly email volume
• A three-year contract
• Specific integration requirements
• A stated level of support

Then ask vendors to separate each cost.

Your pricing sheet can include software subscriptions, implementation, migration, user fees, database charges, premium support, sandbox environments, API fees, AI usage, training, consulting, and optional modules.

Ask vendors what happens when usage grows.

If your database increases from 500,000 to 750,000 contacts, what changes? If you add another brand or double monthly email volume, how does the bill change?

Those answers give you a better view of total cost than an introductory annual subscription figure.

10. Decide how vendors will be evaluated before proposals arrive

Create your evaluation method before you read the final responses.

Otherwise, teams can start changing the criteria after seeing which vendors perform well in certain areas.

A sample model might look like this:

Evaluation area

Example weighting

Functional requirements

25%

Integrations and data architecture

15%

Security and privacy

15%

Implementation and migration

15%

Reporting and analytics

10%

Usability and administration

10%

Support and vendor services

5%

Total cost

5%

These percentages are examples. Your own weighting should reflect what your organization needs.

A company replacing a difficult legacy platform may place more weight on migration. A regulated business may give security and privacy a larger share. A small marketing team may care more about administration and ease of use.

Some requirements should sit outside the weighted score as mandatory conditions.

If SSO, a particular CRM connector, data residency in a specific region, or another requirement is non-negotiable, classify it that way. A high overall score should not hide the fact that a vendor cannot meet a required condition.

Give each vendor the same instructions, deadlines, demonstration scenarios, pricing assumptions, and scoring criteria.

You can also ask vendors to classify every major requirement using a fixed response format:

Native | Configuration required | Custom development required | Third-party integration | Roadmap | Not supported

This simple structure removes much of the ambiguity found in standard yes-or-no RFP answers.

RFP response platforms vendors may use

The products below are RFP response platforms. They are not marketing automation products.

They are relevant here because software vendors often use these systems to prepare responses to procurement documents, security questionnaires, DDQs, RFIs, and RFPs.

1. Inventive AI

Inventive AI is an AI-powered response platform used for RFPs, RFIs, DDQs, security questionnaires, and proposals. Its product materials describe response generation based on approved company knowledge, with source citations, confidence scores, and review workflows to help teams check answers before submission.

The platform supports files such as Word, Excel, and PDF, as well as workflows for procurement portals. It can connect with company information stored in systems including SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, and Notion.

For teams that answer large numbers of software procurement requests, Inventive AI focuses on reducing the time spent searching for previous answers and internal documentation. Reviewers can still check, edit, and approve responses before they are sent to buyers.

1. Loopio

Loopio is an RFP and proposal response platform built around reusable content, AI-assisted drafting, collaboration, and response project management. Its product materials describe automated first drafts created from approved library content, along with support for Word, PDF, and Excel documents.

The platform also includes content-review processes, answer libraries, contributor collaboration, and integrations with common workplace software. Teams can use it for RFPs, RFIs, DDQs, security questionnaires, and related requests.

For organizations that already maintain a large collection of approved answers, Loopio provides a central place to manage that material and reuse it across responses. Teams can assign sections to contributors, review proposed answers, update outdated content, and manage the response before submission.

1. Responsive

Responsive is an AI-powered response management platform for RFPs, RFIs, DDQs, security questionnaires, and similar information requests. Its product materials describe source-backed drafting from approved company information, requirements analysis, collaboration features, content management, reporting, and security questionnaire workflows.

The platform integrates with systems that include Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft applications, and Google Workspace. It can combine response intake, drafting, answer management, subject-matter review, and reporting in one environment.

For organizations managing several types of questionnaires and procurement requests, Responsive gives teams a structured way to reuse approved information, involve internal specialists, track response work, and review answers before submitting them to prospective customers.

What should you include in a marketing automation software RFP?

At minimum, your RFP should cover business goals, your current technology setup, functional requirements, integrations, migration, data management, reporting, security, privacy, AI, implementation, support, pricing, and vendor evaluation.

The best questions ask vendors to explain exactly how their software would handle your real workflows.

Instead of:

Do you support CRM integration?

Ask:

Explain how your platform synchronizes contacts, accounts, opportunities, campaign activity, and custom objects with our CRM. State the synchronization frequency, direction, error-handling process, API dependencies, and any additional licensing required.

Instead of:

Do you support AI?

Ask:

List each AI feature included in the proposed package. Explain what customer data it uses, which model or external service processes that data, how long prompts and outputs are retained, whether our data is used for model training, and which features administrators can disable.

Those questions force vendors to explain capability, limitations, cost, and implementation effort instead of checking a box.

Your RFP should give every supplier the same problem, the same assumptions, and the same response structure. When vendors answer specific workflows, disclose limitations, quote against identical usage levels, and complete the same demonstration scenarios, your team has a much cleaner basis for comparing marketing automation software.