Running marketing campaigns for a business is definitely not easy — it calls for doing multiple tasks simultaneously and requires you to do certain tasks that accelerate your business on a daily basis. This is even more challenging for small businesses that run on tight budgets. The good news is, even small businesses can utilize marketing automation software and perform efficiently without worrying about their budgets. Read on for more information about marketing automation for small businesses.

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Small businesses require a lot of marketing effort, including managing people and follow-ups to make sure to meet a particular goal. The responsibility that comes with making a small business success can never be taken out of the business equation, but what can make your life easier is the perfect mix of technology and people in your organization’s ecosystem.

Marketing automation for small businesses can eliminate regular, repetitive, mundane tasks and allow the workforce to focus on things that truly require skill and effort. This saves time and promotes maximum efficiency within a company.

Executive Summary

• Businesses should use automation tools to reduce staffing costs, improve accuracy, target customers and more.
• Small businesses can increase user engagement, sales funnels, develop qualified leads and more with automation.
• Top marketing automation tools for small businesses are easy to use, send personalized messages and generate reports to bolster the bottom line.

What This Guide Covers:

• What is Marketing Automation?
• Benefits to Small Businesses
• Five Small Business Problems that Automation Can Solve
• Best Marketing Automation Software for Small Businesses
• Conclusion

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation automates digital marketing campaigns and initiatives. The primary focus of marketing automation software is to personalize all audience communication, increase reach and send effective messages.

How can a small business handle something as pivotal and broad in scope as marketing? That’s where the marketing automation software comes into the picture. These tools eliminate repetitive tasks, identify potential customers, capture and nurture leads, run effective and personalized marketing campaigns, monitor sales funnels and more – everything that a successful small business needs.

All of this allows your professionals to focus their attention and efforts towards efficiency and outcomes. Automation takes over and performs all menial marketing tasks.

With automation tools, you can set up a workflow or process, and the tool sends personalized messages without human involvement. For example, you may set up a chatbot on your website, and it will reply to the messages prospects send you.

The following are types of automation you can use for your business:

• Email Marketing Software
• Content Marketing Software
• CRM (Sales Automation)
• Social Media Marketing Software

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Small business marketing automation becomes seamless with these tools. Let’s now look at the many benefits of marketing automation.

Benefits to Small Businesses

There are conclusive benefits of marketing automation that larger enterprises consistently report. But what about small businesses? Small businesses too can utilize marketing automation to the best of their ability and make the most out of their marketing campaigns.

Here are five main reasons why marketing automation for small businesses is beneficial.

Reduce Your Staffing Costs

Small businesses run on tight budgets which demand optimal utilization of resources. Introducing marketing automation software can work wonders in reducing labor costs by eliminating repetitive clerical tasks. Entering data, creating and running campaigns, gathering data, drawing reports and performance analytics and many such tasks can be handled more efficiently by allocating just one resource to them.

One employee dedicated to marketing automation can improve results for the whole marketing department, increasing productivity.

Improve Accuracy

Having dedicated marketing software in place to track and measure your campaigns can eliminate the risk of human error. Marketing automation automatically provides insights on which campaign is performing better and which needs to be improved, beyond the scope of miscalculations.

It gives a clear bird’s-eye view of performance, saturations and scope of improvement, providing greater visibility and accountability into measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Better Target Customers

Marketing automation allows businesses to reach and convert customers more successfully. Small businesses can identify potential customers, target them, capture them and nurture those leads, all at the right time. The insights help identify which customer is the perfect fit for your business. Attracting more potential customers and improving customer retention, what else can a small business hope for?

More Creativity

Creativity may be a soft skill, immeasurable and with an intangible effect, but it does have a huge impact on your business goals. When most of the more repetitive tasks are taken off their plates through automation, employees have more space for creativity. They can invest time and energy into more creative marketing ideas and efforts that will benefit your business in the long run.

Automation on All Fronts

Marketing automation not only eliminates clerical and manual data work but also takes care of other important marketing tasks that can be time-consuming. One such example is maintaining a social media presence. Marketing automation allows you to automate, pre-schedule and post-schedule posts.

It also sends automated emails and pre-drafted messages to provide suggested content and more. Automation across all marketing arenas helps result in time and cost savings across the board – and since time is especially valuable for small businesses, this can be a must. Although often confused, marketing automation and CRM tools serve different purposes.

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Small Business Problems That Automation Can Solve

Small businesses have their own set of struggles when it comes to marketing: tracking engagement, capturing unqualified leads, scaling business through awareness and outreach, delivering personalized communications to the right customers, aligning sales efforts, measuring effectiveness… and the list goes on.

Marketing automation can help small businesses deal with all of these problems and many others. Some common small business problems that marketing automation can solve are:

Optimizing Utilization of Time and Resources

Marketing automation cuts down the input of human hours by almost half. Companies that adopted marketing automation state that their 70 hour work week was cut short to 40 hours by leveraging marketing automation software for repetitive and clerical tasks.

Automation allows professionals to better use their skills, make space and time for more detail-oriented tasks. This strategy helps small businesses derive better outcomes in the same amount of time or less.

Tracking or Increasing User Engagement

User engagement is an important aspect of marketing. Marketing automation allows businesses to track, capture, manage and score leads – all with the help of an automated and dedicated sales funnel. This promotes the marketing process and conversion across online and offline channels.

It also allows retargeting customers who qualify as potential leads based on data captured. It helps increase engagement by providing the right type of content for each customer and delivering it through the right channel.

Leaky Sales Funnels

Lead generation is a pain point for decision makers. In most cases, a lead that doesn’t qualify is due to a leaky sales funnel. Marketing automation allows businesses to customize and connect with customers based on their buying journey.

It allows businesses to touch base with customers and take charge end-to-end, right from connecting with the lead to converting and sales. This process leaves absolutely no room for leaky funnels.

Developing More Qualified Leads

It isn’t a good idea for businesses to simply focus on the top-of-the-funnel leads. Businesses are required to build awareness, develop strategies and meet customers where they are. All of this may seem time-consuming and require a lot of effort, but it’s worth it in the end – it helps buyers ultimately make a decision to support your brand and ensures better leads in your sales funnel.

Marketing automation assists your business by developing brand awareness to generate more qualified leads. It empowers users with data and analytics that can be used for lead scoring and lead nurturing.

Operational Inefficiencies and Technical Errors

Automating repetitive manual tasks eliminates glitches in technical and operational workflows and allows more time for your employees to focus on strategic outcomes. With the right efforts in the right places, businesses can improve overall work processes, innovate new marketing campaigns and boost outcomes.

Marketing automation takes over all mundane tasks right from follow-up emails to targeting customers with the right content, keeping in mind buyer personas. Personalized delivery of emails, messages, content and all forms of communications can be automated, reducing the chance of technical errors.

Best Marketing Automation Software for Small Business

So far we’ve understood how and why marketing automation for small businesses can be beneficial. But how do we decide which software is the right fit for your business? A small business should take into consideration not only the compatibility of the software with its needs and how much sales it can generate but also what it has to offer for its price. Our research analysts have curated a list of the top five marketing automation solutions for small businesses with a detailed overview of what each software offers.

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Zoho Marketing Automation

Zoho Marketing Automation is a business growth solution that helps manage marketing activities across various channels. It helps users manage leads, conversion and customer retention. Web behavior marketing helps you understand audience activity to offer a more personalized experience to your customers.

It empowers marketers with a marketing planner to analyze insights, makes better marketing decisions and examines planning stages, ROI and more for effective campaign outcomes. Additionally, it allows you to run tailored campaigns through multichannel marketing.

Top Benefits

• Auto Responders: Sends automated messages on behalf of the organization, such as welcome series messages, recurring messages, or seasonal greetings with the help of the calendar. These messages are sent based on leads’ interaction with previous emails.
• Marketing Calendar: Visualize, plan, schedule and reschedule social media campaigns through a unified calendar. It assists with scheduling posts for future dates and content editing for final touches and also provides drag-and-drop spacing of content across the calendar.
• Web Assistant: Tracks and identifies leads and anonymous visitors as well as their activities on the website. It connects the website through a web assistant and tracks who visits individual web pages as well as user activities on each page.
• Campaign Planning: Users can plan and execute end-to-end marketing campaigns. It allows objective setting, as well as tracking and calculating marketing costs based on budgeting and ROI.
• Integrations: Integrates with other available services to simplify marketing activities. It allows importing content, images and lead information from any third-party or built-in application, including social media platforms.

Primary Features

• Dashboard: It offers customizable dashboards to visualize data; add, move, or remove widgets directly through the dashboard. It enables users to carry out various functions directly through the dashboard such as lead generation multi-channel marketing, in-app tracking, website tracking and more.
• Campaign Scheduling: Schedule campaigns based on different time factors such as fixed time, time zone variables, the recipient’s time zone or optimal open time and more.
• Lead Stage Qualification: Assist marketing teams in qualifying leads based on in-depth insights such as lead score statistics, lead growth insights, lead stage distribution charts and more.
• Sign-up Forms: Create and customize sign-up forms for gathering information on leads and website visitors who can enter their details, give consent, generate coded signup forms, create URLs and more. It offers pop-up forms, custom pre-built form templates, embedded forms, email sign-up forms and more to choose from.
• Multichannel Marketing: Reach out to customers through various channels based on where they are at a particular time. It provides various channels such as touchpoints, SMS, email marketing and social media.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide live chat support.

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HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is an easy-to-use and personalized platform that helps eliminate repetitive tasks and provides customer-centric solutions for marketing campaigns. It offers unparalleled alignment with sales and provides ROI that helps businesses grow. It allows users to back marketing efforts with contextual customer data, CRM, blogging, social media, ads and more. It attracts the right audience, converts visitors and runs complete inbound marketing campaigns – all from a unified dashboard. It offers landing pages, email, marketing automation, ABM and more.

Top Benefits

• Live Chat: Helps your sales team or support team live chat and connect with visitors on the pricing page. Add a live chat section as a widget on website pages for starting a real-time conversation with representatives.
• Conversational Bots: Provides a chat widget on the visitor’s website page for them to start a conversation. It helps register and qualify leads, book meetings and create a support ticket through a chat flow series of questions and automated responses.
• Multiple Currencies: Add, edit and do business in multiple currencies; great for organizations operating in different countries. It sets an automated exchange rate in comparison to the primary currency to accurately track and convert the amount of a deal.
• Single Sign-on: Allows single log-in credentials across all systems for team members. It supports single sign-on through providers that use SAML 2.0 such as Okta, Microsoft Azure and OneLogin which is available in CMS Hub, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub at the Enterprise tier.

Primary Features

• A/B Testing: Test two versions of the same page with the same URL to analyze which page performs better with customers. Leverage A/B testing to optimize campaigns and pick the most engaging page with the most open and click-through rates.
• Marketing Automation: Provides marketing automation and a visual editor that helps with workflow automation, email campaigns, webhooks set-up, lead scoring, directing leads to sales and more. It assists with bulk data management by updating various properties and copying values based on conditions and triggers which can be used without requiring coding.
• Roles and Permissions: Create a different set of permissions for existing and new users within an account. It also grants access to levels for customization including restricted edit access and assigned content access to specific users.
• Analytics and Reporting: Generate custom reports based on campaign and attribution. It measures the performance of marketing campaigns by tracking KPIs such as revenue, site performance and website metrics from all marketing channels.
• Partitioning: It allows the assigned teams to view and edit users based on content partitioning. This helps in keeping assets separated based on departments or teams to stay more organized and focused. All users have access to new assets until they are assigned to specific team members.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support external landing pages for campaigns.
• Doesn’t provide a user-centric audit trail for tracking user activities and actions.

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ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based marketing service solution that offers flexibility and automation to businesses of all sizes. It provides email marketing, automation, CRM, contact segmentation and personalized targeting across all channels. It offers machine learning with the help of data that can be used for phone calls, email marketing and sales. It helps predict win probability and uses predictive sending for better customer interaction. It enables tracking contact engagement using tags, analytics, custom fields and performance reports. Additionally, it offers the assistance of certified consultants to help clients resolve issues.

Top Benefits

• Predictive Sending: The data model predicts the correct time of a lead’s availability based on their usual active time and then uses this data with the help of a machine learning algorithm for automating and sending emails.
• Automation Map: The automation tool provides a view of how automation connects each task and allows viewing page maps, link maps, and shelf maps, all on the same page.
• Win Probability: It predicts the win and loss probability on deals based on data, which helps in aligning sales efforts. It also allows personalizing content based on campaign requirements and runs marketing campaigns at the most suitable time increasing the chances of lead conversion.
• Predictive Content: Assists in creating and sending custom content based on customer interests. It provides a suggested list of content and helps deliver the most suitable message based on the customer’s click history, which is identified and stored as data through a natural language processing model.
• Contact and Lead Scoring: Scores leads based on interests, interactions, site visits, forms submitted and user actions such as webinar registration, cart abandonment and more. Simplified lead scoring allows users to automate the scoring process when a score reaches a designated point.

Primary Features

• Email Campaigns: Create email campaigns that include broadcast, triggered and targeted emails along with autoresponders and automated emails with the help of an email funnel and email scheduling. Leverage and customize dynamic content and over 25 pre-built email templates.
• Facebook Custom Audiences: Builds target audiences by adding people to Facebook custom audiences based on clicks and quiz results, personal interests and more. It supports an automated setup. Audiences can be targeted based on behavioral aspects such as geographic location, website visits, job function, industry, purchased products, customer value and more.
• Subscription Form: Helps create and customize sign-up forms to capture contact information and to tag people based on interests. This assists in starting welcome conversations and sends follow-up notifications to respective teams. It offers inline forms, floating bars and boxes, and modal pop-ups, and supports offline forms to capture details such as email ids and add tags. It can include automated triggers that automatically sync when an internet connection is available.
• Conversations: It offers conversational messages and connects email and chat information to respective contact records. Engage with customers in real time through live chat, unified inbox and automated chatbots.
• Attribution: Customer attribution assists in identifying top-performing marketing channels and creates attribution reports for measuring the effectiveness of each touchpoint to help with lead conversions.

Limitations

• Email templates do not include the subject line.
• Doesn’t offer in-app help for users.

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SharpSpring

SharpSpring is an all-inclusive growth platform that offers robust sales and automation for better functionality and enhanced performance. It offers powerful behavior-based email marketing, native and third-party integrations, dynamic forms, landing pages and content builders. It helps with a content management system for social media and universal CMS compatibility.

It assists with marketing tasks through email automation, ads, visitor identification and landing pages, and provides marketing analytics for data-backed actions. It allows writing, designing, managing and publishing content with company branding.

Top Benefits

• Pre-Built Templates: Offers a library of pre-built, pre-indexed and customizable templates applicable for various marketing communications such as email campaigns, content pages, blogs and more.
• Visitor ID: Identifies anonymous website visitors and tracks anonymous leads via visitor IP addresses, important pages, important contacts, and filters. This data can be used for targeting and retargeting marketing efforts.
• Integrations: Integrates with third-party solutions, an open API and Google Ads and offers native integration with various tools such as Litmus, Shutterstock, PieSync, Salesforce CRM, and more. It also enables businesses to utilize Webex and GoToWebinar through forms for the purpose of promoting, sharing, and improving web conferencing capabilities.
• Platform Automation: Track multiple devices and optimize website information and design. Additionally, it offers CMS compatibility, different user roles for enhanced security, native and third-party integrated forms, an API to manage and message leads based on the information stored in the CRM and data systems, and single sign-on for access to different accounts.
• Customer Relationship Manager: It allows users to integrate with their native CRM or third-party CRM software to build and retain customer relationships. Users can utilize Smart Mail, custom deals, social notes, real-time lead scoring and reminders. It also provides actionable reports, touchpoints and end-to-end reporting of leads to drive business growth.

Primary Features

• Social Media Scheduling: Offers a content calendar with a complete view of social activity, email scheduling and blog posts. It also provides tools for social listening, social media management, lead identification and CRM integration for client retention.
• Email Marketing: Offers a range of email templates completely optimized for all devices; runs responsive email marketing campaigns without the need for coding. It helps create templates, personalize email campaigns, store documents and organize emails in respective folders – all in one place.
• Automation: Automate marketing efforts with its workflow builder, lead scoring, segmentation and lead nurturing. Monitor cart abandonment, create dynamic lists, identify and capture buyer personas, and enable automation triggers where they’re needed.
• Analytics: It provides email analytics, campaign analytics and tracking, behavior-based tracking, device tracking, site tracking and campaign tagging. Build custom reports that allow marketers to analyze and improve campaign performance and website traffic.
• Blog Builder: Enables users to set up blogs, publish posts, create and publish website blogs and more. It also provides a library of indexed and editable responsive content templates.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide native text messaging.
• Doesn’t offer a free trial.

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Omnisend

Omnisend is an all-in-one, easy-to-use automation solution for eCommerce businesses. It assists in engaging, reactivating and converting customers with multichannel targeting. It drives sales through autopilot across various channels through a single, eCommerce-centric automation platform. It provides pre-built, omnichannel workflows for a consistent and personalized customer experience through email, messages and web push notifications.

Top Benefits

• Landing Pages: Create, customize and optimize landing pages separately for each campaign. This helps boost subscriptions and run target-specific campaigns.
• Repeat Buyers: Drives repeated buying by sending customers order follow-up messages, reactivating inactive customers and sending cross-selling offers.
• Live Chat: It offers live chat via integration with Zapier and Tidio, as well as Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Twitter, without the need for coding. Create custom live chat events based on triggers.
• Advanced Reporting: Provides access to advanced reporting of workflows and campaigns with various filters to view performance and trends in detail – all within the dashboard. It enables filter reporting and generating reports for different communication channels based on metrics such as sales, clicks, open rates, unsubscribes across various domains.
• Integrations: It integrates with customer support, specific tools and eCommerce platforms, along with adding custom features through integrations via its API. It offers single-click integration for over 30 eCommerce platforms.

Primary Features

• Content Editor: Helps create newsletters, campaigns and automated emails based on recommendations and provides a product picker for newsletters. Adjust layouts and templates through the editor, which is connected to the Adobe Creative Cloud – edit, fix or adjust images within the dashboard.
• Campaign Clickmaps: Monitors and tracks the distribution of clicks in newsletters based on buttons and products that users click on; this helps gain insights about customer engagement. Visually presents statistics to facilitate understanding of how to adjust and improve the placement of products, call-to-actions, images and links to boost customer engagement.
• Website Tracking: Allows users to track website visitors on which pages, product categories, or items are being viewed in real-time. It provides a Live View to track anonymous visitors, as well as Customer Profile tracking that monitors the activity of subscribed users.
• Marketing Automation and Reports: Construct automated workflows, reach customers through multiple channels and create a personalized customer journey. View workflows and create reports via the automation dashboard, which provides a general overview of marketing automation efforts. It also provides automated reports.
• Dedicated Account Manager: Assigns a dedicated account manager to each client to resolve issues and help them reach campaign goals. Account managers also help new users migrate and onboard, and provide priority resources and support for enterprise plan users.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide built-in RSS integrated email features for blog posting.
• Doesn’t offer email or chat support services for the free plan.
• Doesn’t include social media management features.
• Doesn’t have a native mobile app.

In Conclusion

Whether an established company or a budding brand, every business deserves an equal opportunity to perform at its best. Marketing automation software is a stepping stone that can help small businesses achieve and perform to the best of their capabilities. It allows small businesses to address and overcome challenges and limitations that can otherwise seem daunting. Marketing automation for small business can provide great support in orchestrating and delivering results for day-to-day marketing activities.

How are you managing marketing for your small business? Are you currently using or planning to use marketing automation for your small business? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.