Automating the marketing process is an important component of any business. By creating a system that can capture leads, nurture them and convert them into customers all by itself, businesses can spend more time growing their business. Unfortunately though, marketing automation does not come cheap. Industry leaders like HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot have a starting price of at least $100/month. Also, with many of the advanced features only available at higher priced plans, most of these tools are simply not meant for SMBs.
As a small business, you may not even require all the fancy automation tools that comes packaged in the higher-priced products. Small business owners look for automation tools, not because they are the new shiny thing, but because they want to save time on very specific tasks that take a lot of time to be done manually.
As Jacek Zmudzinski, the Team Lead at MakoLab says, “what small and medium businesses need is a no-frills tool that can do away with all the fluff and can accomplish the most essential automation elements at low cost”. Do one thing, and do that perfectly is what small business customers look for.
In this article, we will take a look at five of the best such marketing tools that target small businesses.
Small and local businesses typically deal with customers over both email and text messages. Hubbion is a great tool for SMBs who need to automate their various channels of marketing over SMS, email, voice, fax and posts. Users have the ability to specify certain triggers to add new subscribers to the list and may also schedule autoresponders to reach out to their list. Besides the features and the the ability to reach customers over multiple platforms, another reason for small business owners to prefer Hubbion is the pricing structure. This is a pay-as-you-go service that charges businesses based on the volume of messages sent. What this means is that businesses can get started on their outreach for as little as a dollar or two without having to pay a monthly subscription.
Moosend serves as the all-in-one marketing automation tool for online businesses. With Moosend, you can set up trigger alerts for specific user events like when they sign up, add a product to cart, clicks on a link, places an order, etc. and choose how to automate your response to it. For instance, you can send up a welcome email when a user signs up, share a discount coupon if a user has not checked out a product they have added to cart even after 24 hours, or confirm shipping details to a user who has placed their order.
Moosend integrates with dozens of third party services that lets you build sophisticated automation campaigns with just a few clicks.
Leadsius is a marketing automation tool for email marketers. Like Hubbion, Leadsius too comes with behavior based triggers and workflow rules that enable an automated system of user engagement across the business website, landing pages, social media and email marketing. The good thing about Leadsius is that it comes with a free plan that has a contact list limit of 2500. However, the features here are limited and this plan does not allow advanced workflow rules and dynamic smart lists.
Spokal is an inbound marketing automation plan that comes with features like event based segmentation, email nurturing, A/B testing and social media calendar. The tool is not free by itself and costs a monthly fee of $49/month. This makes it vastly cheaper than the popular marketing automation tools in the market. Do note however that Spokal is not a complete tool by itself and you may need integration with MailChimp or ActiveCampaign to see your emails through.
JumpLead is a wonderful marketing automation tool for website nurturing. It comes with features that lets businesses to trigger targeted marketing activities based on the page visited or the web form completed. These subscribers may then be nurtured and converted into customers via email marketing. JumpLead is free to small businesses that have monthly visitors of less than 200 and need to send less than 100 emails in a month. If you have a website with a larger traffic, you may have to pick one of their paid plans starting at $49 per month.
The WebEngage marketing automation suite makes it possible for businesses to get a 360° view of their users, events, cross-platform (Web, Mobile) & cross-channel (Email, SMS, In-app, Push, On-site) campaigns. Its USP is the “Journey Designer” which allows businesses to manage customer lifecycle engagement in real-time, backed by deep behavioral data. The WebEngage Marketing Automation Suite provides a marketer friendly framework to create-execute-analyse targeted, contextually personalized campaigns – for websites & mobile apps. Other features of the suite include user segmentation, cohort analysis, data management & analytics.