8 Best Marketing Automation Tools For Small Businesses

Does running a small business entail any less work on the marketing front? If you are a small business owner, you know the answer is an emphatic “NO”! You’re absolutely correct!

Running a small business needs the same kind of marketing efforts on a lower scale. That still means you will send emails to prospects and customers, track their buyer journeys, post on social media channels, and do a hundred other repetitive tasks that take your focus away from what you love doing—building your business! So, what’s the solution?

Marketing automation, of course! Many marketing automation software come with affordable pricing plans targeted specifically toward small businesses looking to obtain better outcomes faster in email marketing, content marketing, social media, and sales.

In this blog, I will be talking about the benefits of a marketing automation platform for your small business and then introducing you to 8 industry-best options that can help you save time and resources that you can invest and direct toward growing your small business.

Put your learning glasses on. Here we go! 

What are the benefits of implementing marketing automation tools?

Here are some benefits you can avail yourself of when you implement a marketing automation tool for your business.

1. Save time and resources

Businesses can use marketing automation software to quickly automate their regular marketing chores, freeing time to focus on other marketing strategies. 

Using these software solutions, you can set up auto-responders for daily follow-ups, automate messages for various social media platforms, and even arrange drip email campaign sequences.

This doesn’t just allow you to allocate your time to more important business activities. Still, it also saves you the cost of hiring an individual simply to track and proactively execute these tasks. 38% of marketers concur that marketing automation enables better use of the staff’s time dedicated to doing repetitive but necessary marketing functions.

2. Foster lasting client relationships

Businesses can use marketing automation software to build strong relationships with their clients. Regular data inflow on everyday customer activities helps personalize and enhance your interactions. It enables you to provide more valuable communication to prospective buyers and existing customers while also building strong relationships.

3. Improve customer experience

Building onto the last two pointers, marketing automation helps you improve your customers’ experiences with your brand. 34% of marketers agree that it is one of the top reasons to warrant the implementation of a marketing automation tool for your business

Software such as the ones listed below provide a unified platform through which businesses can simply monitor multiple customers across multiple channels. You can use them to understand and monitor your prospective customers' web activities and purchasing behavior, record and react via any or all communication channels, and send timely marketing messages to your customers. 

Marketing automation software helps you learn more about your clients and improve their brand experience based on those insights.

4. Create reports and detailed client personas

Marketing automation tools can help you create campaign reports, as well as detailed client personas—both of which can help your marketing campaigns perform better.

These software solutions assist you in tracking and monitoring all channels. Using the information you receive via omnichannel monitoring, you can generate comprehensive reports and save them in the software. You can use those statistics and graphs from different campaigns later to determine which campaign performed best. You can also arrange and share these reports with other teams or team members.

In creating your ICP, these tools use email open rates, web behavior, and social media responses to enable you to build detailed customer profiles, ideal for your small business. Various contact channels will assist you in gathering new customer information. After analyzing this data, you can add more points to your customer profiles and hit a targeted niche market for better conversion results.

Now, let’s give you what you came for. Below are 8 industry-best marketing automation tools to help your small business thrive.

8 Best Marketing Automation Tools For Your Small Business

These 8 tools are categorized based on their marketing automation functions into four sections covering most of your digital needs. Let’s dive into your list now.

Email Marketing Automation tools

1. Drip

Drip is a highly-rated email marketing automation tool with a great WooCommerce integration, making it a great software, especially for e-Commerce businesses.

Drip's email marketing automation is one of its many assets. As a result, it can aid you in creating emails, automation workflows, and targeted email marketing.

Furthermore, the platform includes a robust analytics dashboard that lets you see precisely how your marketing strategies perform.

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Key Features:

• Smart email segmenting
• Lots of support through live chat as well as webinars, courses, and detailed documentation
• Analytics and benchmark reporting

Pricing:

Drip offers a free 14-day trial on all of its plans. Plans start at $39 for 2500 people and can go up to $1899 for 165000-170000 people.

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp comes with a powerful marketing automation feature for creating targeted emails that can be triggered to send based on a specific event, date, or activity.

It includes a robust set of design, scheduling, and segmentation tools, allowing you to easily educate, incentivize, and interact with your contacts via automated emails, even when you are away.

It integrates seamlessly with popular tech stack products like LinkedIn, Shopify, Stripe, WordPress, Typeform, and many more. 

‍Key Features:

• Pre-built email templates, ready for customization
• 24/7 live chat support
• Integration of data from apps and websites
• Campaign manager
• Customer journeys pre-built and enhanced to engage your community

Pricing:

Mailchimp has a free plan with limited features.

Paid plans start for 500 users as listed below:

• Essentials Plan: $9.25 per month
• Standard Plan: $13.82 per month
• Premium Plan: $276.32 per month

Website Marketing Automation Tools

3. Chatbot

This software simplifies customer service for your business. ChatBot is a smart, automated bot that can interact with people in the same manner that a live chat agent would. It is similar to having a virtual assistant for your website who is accessible 24/7 and can respond immediately.

ChatBot can accept bookings, schedule calls, and even sell goods directly from the chat window. It works in tandem with LiveChat, meaning that if the user requires additional assistance, a live agent can enter the discussion.

Chatbot integrates seamlessly with popular marketing and sales tools like HelpDesk, Shopify, Slack, WordPress, Airtable, and many more.

‍Key Features:

• Pre-built templates to set up your chatbot
• Smart audience segmentation
• Drag-and-drop chatbot builder with a testing tool and a customizable chat widget
• Analytics and reporting
• Lots of support offered through ChatBot Academy

Pricing:

ChatBot offers a free 14-day trial for all of its paid plans.

Paid plans are available as listed below:

• Starter Plan: $52 per month billed annually (1 active chatbot)
• Team Plan: $142 per month billed annually (5 active chatbots)
• Business Plan: $424 per month billed annually (unlimited active chatbots)

You will have to contact the sales team for a quote for enterprise plans.

4. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is primarily super useful for audience retargeting. Its on-site retargeting feature maximizes your advertising budget and personalizes promotions for visitors returning to your website. 

OptinMonster can also assist you in creating attractive lightboxes, landing pages, and popups that collect a large number of leads. You can simply embed your custom newsletter signup forms and lead capture forms using the WPForms block. In addition, the fantastic ChatBot function allows you to automate social media campaigns.

You can also simply segment leads and customers using OptinMonster's behavior personalization feature to automatically funnel people into your campaigns while you sit back and observe.

‍Key Features:

• Optin forms to boost conversions
• Predicted location targeting to localize content based on geography
• Drag-and-drop builders for landing pages, contact forms, etc.
• Campaign managers and triggers like exit-intent, scroll-stop, etc.

Pricing:

• Basic Plan: $16 per month billed annually
• Plus Plan: $32 per month billed annually
• Pro Plan: $49 per month billed annually
• Growth Plan: $82 per month billed annually

Social Media Marketing Automation Tools

5. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that enables companies and individuals to schedule and publish content across numerous social media networks.

You can schedule posts in advance, watch public channels and private messages, and much more.

If your small business has a social media team, HootSuite is extremely useful because it provides robust team management and permissions. You can also use HootSuite's analytics feature to obtain detailed reports on how your posts work across various networks.

Key Features:

• Unlimited posts with advanced scheduling
• Access to messages in one inbox
• Analytics and reporting across multiple channels

Pricing:

Hootsuite offers a free 30-day trial for its Professional and Teams plans, while you can request a free demo under the Business and Enterprise Plans.

• Professional Plan: $23.19 per month (for 1 user and 10 social media accounts)
• Teams Plan: $91.28 per month (for 3 users and 20 social media accounts)
• Business Plan: $544.75 per month (for 5 users and 35 social media accounts)
• Enterprise Plan: Contact for pricing (for 5 users and 50 social media accounts)

6. Tailwind

Tailwind is a highly useful social media marketing tool for Instagram and Pinterest users, and it primarily helps in the advanced scheduling of posts.

It will recommend hashtags for Instagram. In the case of Pinterest, it allows you to schedule 10 pins with a simple click. You can use Tailwind's analytic tools to see what's working and when to plan your content for maximum engagement.

Tailwind also provides Power-up features, which allow you to do even more with your social media profiles. The SmartLoop Power-up will enable you to reshare pins, including seasonal content, at the appropriate moment.

Key Features:

• Create and schedule Pinterest pins
• Create and schedule Instagram posts and stories
• Create and schedule Facebook posts and stories
• Analytics and reporting

Pricing:

• Pro Plan: $8.99 per month
• Advanced Plan: $19.99 per month

Content Marketing and CRM Automation Tools

7. Zapier

Zapier is the perfect marketing automation tool for automating and simplifying workflows across your organization.

It connects two or more apps and is instrumental in moving content from one app to another. 

In Zapier, you can create " zaps " workflows that automatically generate a story on Medium or publish a post on social media channels. Some new products like Zapier Transfer lets you move data in bulk on-demand, while Zapier Interfaces create custom pages that power your workflows. 

Key Features:

• Thousands of 3rd party app integrations
• Automates workflows and saves time
• Personalization enabled to help users set up complex workflows

Pricing:

Zapier has a free plan that accommodates 100 tasks a month.

• Starter Plan: $20.26 per month (for 750 tasks per month)
• Professional Plan: $49.67 per month (for 2K tasks per month)
• Team Plan: $404.49 per month (for 50K tasks per month)
• Company Plan: $809.99 per month (for 100K tasks per month)

8. HubSpot

One of the most popular CRM software used worldwide, HubSpot serves customers with an all-in-one marketing suite, complete with multiple impressive features.

The HubSpot CRM (customer relationship management) tool, for example, allows you to organize your content and view your complete sales funnel in a simple visual dashboard.

It has a visual board on which you can create email drip campaigns depending on specific conditions. You can also organize your contacts by deals gained or lost, appointments, time periods, and more.

The HubSpot CRM integration allows you to plan automated emails, live chat, and more. You can also use chatbots in HubSpot to automate your live chat messaging.

Furthermore, you can automate many other tasks in addition to email marketing. You can use workflows to set up webhooks, trigger internal notifications when contacts take key actions, and much more.

Key Features:

• Store, monitor, and manage marketing data
• Ticketing, calling, live chat, and mobile inbox
• Lots of support through courses and videos available inside the HubSpot Academy

Pricing:

HubSpot offers a free plan with limited features.

Paid plans are available, listed below:

Pricing:

• Basic Plan: $45 per month (for 1000 contacts)
• Professional Plan: $800 per month (for 2000 contacts)
• Enterprise Plan: $3200 per month (for 10000 contacts)

Now that you have automated the marketing functions of your small business—what’s next?

In a nutshell, marketing automation software has become an essential component of contemporary businesses. It aids in streamlining business processes and saving time and resources.

Using one of the 8 marketing automation tools listed above, or a combination of a few, can make a huge difference in how you run your small business. However, there is no one-size-fits-all” strategy when choosing software solutions; and your company's unique requirements determine the finest automation software. And it doesn’t end!

Once you implement your marketing automation tool of choice and begin generating a steady stream of inbound leads, the next step is to track each lead, nurture them adequately based on the profits they can generate for you, and establish proactive communication so that your leads feel comfortable contacting you at any time. You need to do all of this in order to optimize your conversion rates.

If you are wondering how you can do all of this simultaneously, I have the perfect software for you—introducing RevenueHero! But what is that?

RevenueHero is a software that qualifies and distributes leads coming through your sales funnel in a manner that correlates the reason for your website visitor completing your "Contact Us" form with your budget and other lead qualification criteria.

Your leads will get qualified and distributed automatically. Your prospects and customers can even schedule meetings between potential customers and sales reps from anywhere on your website, whether it's the webform on your landing page or any other webpage—using this tool. The leads are then evaluated, and communication is prioritized based on their ability to generate revenue for your small business.

Using RevenueHero, you can double your form-fill to meeting booking rates in record time.

Here are some other features of this extremely useful lead qualification and demo booking scheduling tool:

• Round Robin meeting scheduling enables you to automate meeting allocation amongst members of your sales team and build your own distribution algorithm in seconds. It prioritizes prospects for your most experienced sales representatives, resulting in a shorter sales cycle and higher conversion rates.

• Meeting process automation helps you send out automated notifications and reminders with complete context at each step of the sales funnel. It increases meeting attendance and removes no-shows.

• Seamlessly automated CRM synchronization: that automatically correlates the results of each prospect meeting to the CRM. It allows you to keep track of each lead at any point of the sales funnel, saves time chasing non-viable leads, and enables more proactive discussion and nurturing of qualified leads.

• Product integration with your GTM stack: that ensures better implementation of your sales practices and communication tactics, especially with high-value leads (which it qualifies with its powerful lead scoring system), and ensures you cater to all prospective leads at every stage of the sales funnel.

Do you want to learn more? Schedule a demo and explore their product for your small business TODAY!