When it comes to truly scale your small business, marketing automation is essential. Not only can you take a step back and gain a bird’s eye view of your campaigns using specific automation tools and techniques, but they can also free up time so you can focus on more vital elements of your organization.
Although most companies’ sales teams are responsible for creating new revenue, marketing departments are becoming increasingly crucial in the sales process. Marketing automation for small and medium businesses has transformed the way marketing teams can reach out to new customers by giving small businesses more options.
These modern marketing technologies can assist in generating more and better leads, improve communication efficiency, and build strong client relationships.
Individual sales reps had to manage each customer and lead in the past. Small business marketing automation software now allows businesses to manage their client interactions neat, logical, and highly tailored.
Marketing automation software for small businesses allows businesses to focus on potential clients and turn them into prospects through a targeted approach. This is also a platform known for collecting and evaluating quantitative data, tracking marketing campaigns’ performance, and increasing sales quality.
Small business marketing automation technologies help organizations with limited staff resources run sophisticated campaigns and manage their time more effectively. Large organizations may also communicate with each of their clients individually with these powerful tools, which is incredibly tough to achieve manually.
Adopting a solution in the early phases of your organization is advantageous since it allows you to streamline your marketing activities according to industry best practices and build a robust customer database straight away.
If your current firm relies on marketing notepads, spreadsheets, and informal emails to communicate with customers, there’s a good chance your customer experience isn’t up to par. At the absolute least, a centralized contact database for all leads and customers is required.
How to Choose the Best Marketing Automation Software for Small Businesses?
You will never have all of the data you require to make the best option for your company, in order to make informed decisions?
- Recognize your needs: It might be difficult to choose the right tool with so many options available. With so many options, it’s easy to become perplexed about which tool would meet your needs. You might even develop feature fatigue. In order to be safe, ensure the characteristics you’ll need to carry out your marketing strategy before you start looking. That way, you won’t be distracted by solutions that have a lot of bells and whistles but aren’t necessary.
- Keep time and return on investment in mind: Less expensive isn’t always better. You’ll want to know how much time you spend on marketing duties and how much time you’ll save by automating them. It’s an excellent bargain to pay a little more for a tool that saves you time.
- Look for a simple-to-use solution: It makes no difference how vital a tool is if it is too difficult to use. People will revert back to how they did things previously if there is a steep learning curve and your team has to go through months of training to accomplish the most straightforward activity.
- Pay attention to customer service: Even if you’re a technically savvy customer who doesn’t require much assistance, the quality of service is still a reliable sign of a positive culture. You want to know that your service provider is trustworthy and prioritizes your needs. It’s worth sending some inquiries over just to see what kind of answer you get.
- Look for the proper product DNA: Many various tools have a lot of the same impressive features listed on their feature pages. To tell them apart, you need to understand the company’s priorities. Please spend some time on their website, read their blog, and figure out what sets them apart. As a result, you can be more confident that they will continue to be a good fit for your company.
- Confirm how it will work with your current stack: In our daily lives, we all rely on a variety of instruments, and the best outcomes are achieved when they all work together. You’ll want a solution that connects with the other tools you use unless you want to spend half your day copy-pasting data from one app to another.
Ultimate List Of Marketing Automation Tools For Small Business
Here is a list of some of the best marketing automation tools for small businesses that can grow your overall revenue and boost sales.
1. HubSpot Marketing Hub | Best Inbound Marketing Automation Software for Small Business
Hubspot is one of the most important inbound marketing apps for small business owners and users. You can plan your marketing campaigns, and also make use of free email and CRM facilities. If you want to automate your company’s strategy and processes, Hubspot is the app for you.
Hubspot offers training and certifications for newbies so that you can figure out the app better. There are tons of material for learning automation from renowned specialists. You can make use of sophisticated tools to track your customers on the platform journey. You can use this app to gauge your customer’s online behavior and the special offers and discounts too.
Thanks to simple integrations, you can also use third-party tools to generate leads and store them in HubSpot for further action.
Features:
- Tools for email marketing that are free
- Follow-up with potential consumers in a timely and personalized manner
- Customer service qualities that are impressive
- Lead nurturing and management have improved.
- Conversational bots and live chat
- Lead scoring software that is automated
- To keep track of your campaigns, you’ll need analytics and insights.
Pricing: You can begin for free and upgrade as your company grows. When you add marketing automation and intelligent content tools to HubSpot, it may get costly. The price ranges from $50 to $3,200 depending upon the plans you need.
Pro Tip: This tool can be a little confusing at first, but HubSpot Academy is there to assist you.
2. ActiveCampaign | Best Customer Experience Automation Software
ActiveCampaign is one of the best marketing automation software, which starts at $9 per month and includes unlimited emails with all of its plans, third-party connectors, and a range of auto-responders; it is a one-stop email marketing solution with a lot to offer.
This results in a cluttered interface that can be difficult to understand at first look. ActiveCampaign (which starts at $9 a month) likewise has a 14-day free trial, whereas most competitors give at least 30-days (though at least it isn’t credit card required). ActiveCampaign features a huge online support library and onboarding services, and you can get help via live chat but not by phone.
Features:
- Single-view Automations: See all of your marketer’s automation tasks in one place. This allows you and other marketers to make quick changes to the system without disrupting the productivity of others.
- ActiveCampaign, like EngageBay, allows you to segment your small business audience in order to understand them better. For further personalization and a higher engagement rate, your marketing team can customize the communications that go out to each category.
- Easy automation: Using ActiveCampaign’s automation services is as simple as clicking a few buttons. To choose what becomes automated, they, too, use a drag-and-drop process builder.
Pricing: ActiveCampaign offers four pricing levels, although the costs vary depending on the number of contacts you have. The Lite plan costs $9 per month, the Plus plan $49 per month, the Professional Plan $129 per month, and the Enterprise plan $229 per month for 500 contacts.
At 5,000 contacts, the prices increase as follows: $69 for the Lite plan, $135 for the Plus plan, $199 for the Professional plan, and $359 for the Enterprise plan.
The Lite plan is now $179 per month, the Plus plan $319 per month, and the Professional plan $479 per month if your small business grows to 25,000 contacts. The Enterprise package would have bespoke pricing if you were interested.
Pro Tip: The Lite plan includes some marketing automation services, allowing your small business to save money.
3. Omnisend | Best Email Marketing & SMS Software for Small Business
It isn’t easy to find a more comprehensive marketing automation product than Omnisend. The omnichannel capability of this platform sets it different from the others on this list: you can add many channels to the same automation workflow, such as email, SMS, push notifications, Facebook Messenger, and more.
This means you can give your consumers an immersive omnichannel experience by automatically sending them messages via the channel they’ve chosen. Omnisend is a marketing automation platform worth looking into, with powerful targeting, split automation, and a simple drag-and-drop builder.
Features:
- Follow-up on Engagement
- Marketing Metrics for Multi-Channel Campaigns
- Analytics Reporting & Statistics Reporting in Real-Time/Analytics Search/Filter
- Template Control for Social Media Integration
- Integrations with a third party
- Activity on the API Dashboard
- Alerts/Notifications
- Campaign Management and Analytics
- Management of Contacts
- Management of Content
- Branding that can be customized
- Templates that can be customized
- Import/Export of Data
Pricing: Standard, Pro, and Enterprise are the three pricing tiers for Omnisend. Standard strategy: 0 – 500 subscribers per month, 15000 emails: $16,501 – 1000 monthly members,
15000 emails: $20 1001 – 1500 members each month, 18000 emails: $25 1501 – 2000 monthly subscribers, 24000 emails: $30,001 – 2500 members, 30000 monthly emails: $36 Pro plan:
Starts at $99 per month, depending on the size of your subscriber list. Plan of action for the business: For more information about custom pricing, contact Omnisend.
Pro Tip: Omnisend is pre-integrated with popular eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Woocommerce, and others, making it ready to use right away.
4. SendinBlue | Best Relationship Marketing Software Tool for Small Business
Sendinblue is a marketing automation software for small businesses that provides a number of tools to help you in your marketing efforts’ automation. There is also a toolkit provided which will help you in creating leads, engaging audience growth, and creating marketing campaigns for the future.
It provides a comprehensive collection of tools for communicating with your customers. Email, SMS, landing page layouts, advertisements, and a host of other features. The processes are automated so that you can focus your resources on other business activities.
Want to reach out to your intended audience? This app will help you in doing the same by distributing content to your audience, and will also send transactional emails to your users, within a few moments.
One of the best email marketing automation solutions is SendinBlue. Marketing automation for the SMS feature is also provided by the app. If you want to target your audience via mail, text, and chat features, you can always rely on SendinBlue. It is an excellent solution for businesses looking to do these things.
Features:
- CRM connectivity to maintain client details in one location with landing page templates specific to each campaign
- Enhanced automation capabilities
- To expand your email list, integrate unique signup forms.
- Allows for Facebook retargeting to increase visitors Email heatmap for better campaign design
- To send emails at the optimal moment, use a timing algorithm.
- Tools, products, and plugins are all integrated.
Pricing: Sendinblue offers a variety of plans. It has a plan that is free for users. You also have paid plans which start from $25 all the way up to $66 a month. A custom plan can also be requested which has an enterprise package and additional benefits.
Pro Tip: They provide an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder that allows you to construct fully automated email campaigns quickly. You may also use Sendinblue with WP Mail SMTP to ensure that transactional emails are delivered reliably.
5. ManyChat | Best Messenger Bot Marketing Software Tool for Small Business
ManyChat is the world’s most popular chat marketing platform and marketing automation platform for small businesses. Hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide have utilized ManyChat to automate their Facebook Messenger Experience for their Facebook pages since 2016.
Businesses can now develop comprehensive automation sequences and contact their customers across many platforms thanks to the ability to send SMS and Email directly through ManyChat. This is what Chat Marketing and ManyChat are all about.
ManyChat makes it easier to engage with customers by providing interactive and personalized information. Sales and marketing teams can use Messenger to offer items, arrange appointments, nurture leads, collect contact information, and establish relationships. Customers may make purchases all within Facebook Messenger thanks to dynamic dialogues that guide product selection. It aids in the continuous promotion, marketing, and sale of products.
ManyChat features include:
- Enhancing ROI by replying to buyers immediately.
- Processing payments quickly.
- Connecting with Shopify to recover missed sales.
- Leveraging social media conversations and consumer reactions to promote products, among others.
Features:
- Multiple features facilitate live chat activities and the creation of entertaining bots.
- Support chatbots for a variety of platforms, including Facebook Messenger, email, and SMS.
- A/B split testing is an option.
- Report bot performance on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, including the number of messages sent, open rates, click rates, and conversion.
- A pleasant user experience
- Smoothly integrate with Facebook Messenger.
- Installation is simple.
Pricing: Free plan is available, and the pro plan starts from $1o per month.
Pro Tip: ManyChat offers a variety of simple to advanced growth tools to entice interactions with configured bots in the program and extend the business’s customer base, in addition to a variety of flow builder tools.
ManyChat allows retailers to send leads to their bot through a variety of methods, including Facebook comments, website widgets, QR codes, and landing pages.
There are a total of 8 ways to start a discussion between potential clients and your bots. In other words, there are various instances when your bots can connect with prospects automatically (for example, by liking or responding to customer remarks).
6. Mailchimp | Best Email Marketing Automation Software for Small Business
Mailchimp is transitioning from an email marketing platform to a full-fledged marketing automation platform. Mailchimp is one of the first email marketing tools, and they’ve converted that expertise into a rock-solid and capable email automation solution that’s simple to use.
Mailchimp has long been the market leader in email marketing. Now, the business is expanding its offering to include turnkey e-commerce, improved automation, and even embedded customer relationship management (CRM) features. Mailchimp’s most recent edition also includes website hosting and design. What’s even better is that all of these new functionalities are contained within Mailchimp’s familiar app framework. A framework that is as simple and familiar as possible.
Features:
- Reports from the Email Designer
- Social Sharing Custom Forms in MailChimp Editor
- Testing of Email Clients
- Forms for Mobile Signup
- RSS-to-Email MailChimp Mobile
- Archive of MailChimp Coupon Scanner Campaigns
- Merge Tags
- Snap Automation in MailChimp
- Integrations of Social Profiles
- VIPs SMS from MailChimp for Events
- Geolocation Groups and Segmentation
- Accounts with Multiple Users
- A/B Time Zone Delivery Testing
- Diagnostics for Spam Filters
- Profiles of Email Beamer Subscribers
- Email Templates for Delivery
Pricing:
If you send 12,000 emails for 2,000 subscribers every month, MailChimp is completely free. MailChimp offers monthly and pay-as-you-go subscriptions for users with more than 2,000 subscribers:
- $10.00/month for 1,000-1,500 subscribers with unlimited emails each month
- $25.00/month for 1,501-2,000 subscribers with unlimited emails each month
- $20.00/month for 2,001-2,500 subscribers with unlimited emails every month
- $35.00/month for 2,501 – 2,600 subscribers with unlimited emails per month
- Add $199.00 for a pro membership.
Pro Tip: Creative Assistant — This is the first AI-powered design tool for marketers to help them generate multichannel designs. The Creative Assistant uses colors, fonts, images, and other elements from the marketer’s website or landing page to create custom designs. With the brand personality options, marketers can easily alter the information within the design or their brand.
7. Marketo | All-In-One Marketing Automation Software for Small Business
Marketo is an Adobe-owned Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing automation platform designed to assist businesses to automate and measuring marketing interaction, tasks, and workflows. Marketo software, which is based in San Mateo, California, seeks to help B2B and B2C marketers target quality leads, generate lead-to-revenue opportunities, and run automated, tailored marketing campaigns across numerous digital channels.
Features:
- Lead nurturing, lead management, and lead scoring
- CRM synchronization in both directions
- Marketing via email
- Marketing to Consumers
- Personalization of a Website
- Web Activity Monitoring
- Customer Relationship Marketing
- Marketing on the Go
- SEO
- Marketing using social media
- Integration with CRM
- Dashboards and Reports for Campaigns
- Calendar of Marketing Events
- Advertisements on the Internet
- Analysis of Programs and Campaigns
- Retargeting using anonymity
- Modeler of Opportunity Influence
- Builder of Advanced Reports
- Attribution of Revenue
Pricing: You can make use of a free trial that is available, and plans start from $895 per month.
Marketo Engage offers bundles for Lead Management, Email Marketing, Consumer Marketing, Customer Base Marketing, and Mobile Marketing, with pricing based on the tools and features required.
Pro Tip: Other Adobe products, such as the Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Manager Assets, are naturally compatible with Marketo Engage. Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google are just a few of the roughly 550 applications it connects with.
8. Drip | Best Ecommerce Marketing Automation Software for Small Business
One of the best eCommerce marketing automation platforms, Drip lets you create customized marketing campaigns for your consumers. The automated marketing strategy is created by gathering client information and a user database. It’s an online store and business customer relationship management (CRM) software.
You can track each of your subscribers’ activity on your website and tailor your email marketing accordingly. Drip allows you integration with other ecommerce platforms as well, so you can know more about your consumers.
Features:
- Personalization that is relevant to each subscriber
- From your inbox to Instagram, reach out to your fans.
- Analytics and revenue optimization
- Connects to well-known services
- To improve your campaigns, do split testing.
Pricing: It’s a high-end marketing automation tool that costs between $49 and $122 per month. You can request a demo and begin a 14-day free trial to evaluate the program. There’s also an enterprise plan with further features.
Pro Tip: The platform also includes a powerful analytics dashboard that allows you to track the progress of your marketing campaigns.
9. Pardot | Best Sales Communication & Marketing Automation Software for Small Business
Pardot (now owned by Salesforce) is another marketing automation application designed specifically for B2B marketers, with features such as B2B analytics and account-based marketing solutions. Pardot is now part of a comprehensive suite of tools from Salesforce which helps a firm’s sales and marketing teams effectively.
Features: Streamlined lead management, smart lead generation, easy email marketing, seamless sales alignment, social media integration, and comprehensive ROI reporting are just a few of Pardot’s features.
You can generate high-quality leads, improve follow-up with lead grading/scoring, streamline the workflow, and organize utilizing tags for improved lead follow-up with Pardot’s features. Pardot also allows you to track the performance of your content, allowing you to see how engaging your material is with your leads and compare engagement levels to acquire insight into current prospects. You can improve your messaging and distribution by using the information you’ve gathered about your content.
Pricing:
- Growth: $1,250/month
- Plus: $2,500/month
- Advanced: $4,000/month
- Premium: $15,000/month
Pro Tip: It enables you to visualize and test each component of your marketing programs for understanding consumer experience and optimizing campaign success using metrics and statistics.
10. GetResponse | Best Inbound Marketing Automation Software for Small Business
GetResponse is a comprehensive marketing automation tool for small businesses, that helps in increasing sales and marketing campaigns for a firm’s profit. You can create cool newsletters with its editor, without any prior coding experience. GetResponse’s email-drafting section also contains templates for creating beautiful emails as well as free graphics to save on graphics-related costs.
Users may create 100% responsive web forms and landing pages with GetResponse’s landing page generator. Over 180 professionally designed, ready-to-use landing page templates are included. Without touching a single line of code, marketers can design web pages for various uses in a short amount of time.
Users can utilize its marketing automation feature to track subscriber activity in real-time using stacking processes. Automation segmentation, lead scoring, cart abandonment, activity tracking, and scalable autoresponders are among the features.
Features:
- Allows you to import mailing lists of subscribers
- a number of different e-newsletter templates
- functions of an autoresponder
- pages of landing
- funnels for sales and leads
- Ad management solutions for Facebook and Google
- a tool for creating websites
Pricing:
GetResponse offers four price options:
- Basic – for $15 per month, you can send unlimited emails to up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Plus, for up to 1,000 subscribers, prices start at $49 per month.
- Professional — for up to 1,000 members, starting at $99 per month.
- Max – a one-of-a-kind price.
Pro Tip: Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are automatically emailed to your subscribers at predetermined intervals.
Roundup
That was a lowdown of the capabilities that marketing automation software has to offer. As a result, before making a buying decision, you should figure out what aspects are most important to you.
We found no flaws in any of the tools we examined. Each of them will give you more power than your regular email marketing platform. Some will provide additional client information, increasing the likelihood of a transaction. You might like some more than others, hence some are better at allowing you to adapt your workflows to meet your firm’s future needs and demands.