7 Marketing Automation Tools That Could Change Your Small Business

By Maulik Patel

08 Jul 2020

The process of turning a small business into a shark in the industry is as good as watching a seed reap into a tree. It can be a lengthy process but as long as you take the measures necessary, you’ll soon be greeted with the fruit of your hardships. While the essentials for a tree are sunlight and water, the secret ingredient to your company’s success could be as simple as hiring a reliable marketing automation agency in Melbourne.

Surely there’s a lot more attached to the process, however, for a small business, marketing automation could be one of the most crucial additions to a digital marketing strategy. After all, the most important and powerful growth strategies for a small business include – market penetration and development, partnerships, market segmentation, product development, and finally, marketing automation.

Why is marketing automation considered to be important for small businesses?

For a small business, it is important to turn every potential customer into a lead. Conversions are possibly the most crucial part of a successful digital marketing strategy for a small business. The reason why marketing automation is so important for small businesses is mainly because each lead needs to be treated as a possible conversion. If a business can attract a customer, it’s equally important to try to make sure that they stay.

Being able to give every customer a personalized approach allows them to feel more connected to the business whilst also allowing you to track the progress of your responses. You’ll be able to see which part of your marketing automation can help in bringing you measurable results and which turns out to be unsuccessful. This is crucial for a business that is trying to grow and improve the volume of its platform. High-quality sales mean high-quality growth.

The marketing automation tools that allow you to grow your business

There are a few tools you need for your start-up. Even though you might not consider marketing automation services to be a crucial part of your start-up, it’s always better to opt for automation from the beginning. Not only does it help you concentrate on the rest of your business’s marketing strategies, but it also gives you the benefit of saving time on what could otherwise grow to be a monotonous task.

If you’re new to the corporate world, it’s especially difficult to deal with the technological advancements being made with every passing moment. Since there are quite a few digital marketing services that need to be caught up with, it’s better to leave marketing automation to the experts – the marketing automation tools available!

Needless to say, we always recommend hiring a digital marketing agency for services. However, we also understand the need for a balanced budget during the starting years of a business, which is why we recommend using the original experts – the marketing automation tools. Not only do these allow you to work on a budget, but they also provide you with the services that you would otherwise be able to acquire only with the help of a digital marketing agency.

#1 Hubspot

A favourite of all inbound marketing services, Hubspot is known to be an excellent choice for its CRM drives. Although the process of using this particular tool can seem to be a little challenging during the beginning, it can be easy to go about the process if you educate yourself about the tool through Hubspot Academy’s services.

The platform of Hubspot itself is one for the books – it handles marketing, sales, and even service software, allowing you to initiate the growth of your business through one convenient spot. With advanced tools available, if you’re able to keep up with the complexities of the digital marketing tools available to you, you can benefit quite a bit from using Hubspot.

Besides its marketing automation tools and services, Hubspot is capable of helping you out with content marketing through blogging, creation of landing pages, email marketing, lead management, thorough analytics, web services, social media marketing, search engine optimisation, online advertising, and integration with the help of Salesforce.

Allowing you to keep a clear track of calls, meetings, and emails, the platform allows you to track all important details about your marketing automation strategy in one location.

The prices of Hubspot’s services range from –

$200 per month for 100 contacts (includes content creation tools, content optimisation, email marketing, social media suite, and marketing analysis)
$800 per month for 1,000 contacts (includes all of the above and marketing automation, goal-based nurturing, custom workflows, Salesforce integration, smart content, attribution reporting, user roles, A/B testing for CTAs and emails)
$2,400 per month for 10,000 contacts (includes all of the above and revenue reporting, custom-event reporting, custom-event automation triggers, contact and company reports, event-based segmentation)

#2 Customer.io

Practically every business works with automated email marketing. Depending on the way that a user interacts with the business’s products and services, an email is sent out to the customer respectively. Customer.io is a marketing automation tool that allows you to personalize and perform this service, easily.

The tool automatically integrates itself with your mobile and website, allowing you to keep live track of the data in real time. The other features of the tool include A/B testing, conversion tracking, and the display of customer profiles.

The costs of the tool vary –

200 users/400 monthly email credits – free
5,000 users/10,000 monthly email credits – $50 per month
15,000 users/30,000 monthly email credits – $120 per month
500,000 users/1,000,000 monthly email credits – $1,250 per month

#3 Klaviyo

With Klaviyo’s powerful email marketing features, you can effortlessly create personalised and targeted email campaigns that drive engagement and boost conversions. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor empowers you to design stunning emails without any coding knowledge. Maximise your campaign’s effectiveness with Klaviyo’s robust segmentation and automation tools, delivering the right message to the right people at the perfect time.

Analyse real-time data and insightful reports to optimise your strategies, unleashing the full potential of your email marketing efforts. Experience seamless integration and forge lasting relationships with your customers, all thanks to the Klaviyo email marketing tool.

Klaviyo’s Price Range

Free for up to 250 contacts.
Klaviyo’s entry-level plan starts at $20 per month for up to 500 contacts.

#4 Constant Contact

One of the most effective email automation tools available in the market, Constant Contact is one of the advanced tools available for marketing automation that has gained recognition from several marketing specialists, including Neil Patel. Recommended for small businesses that are hoping to gain the attention of their customers through effective marketing automation services, Constant Contact can help you build high-converting email campaigns, easily.

With a drag-and-drop service for email responses, it also allows you to access Facebook fan promotion, coupons, deals, and event management.

Their price range:

0 to 500 contacts at $20 per month for email marketing ($45 per month for access to all features)
501 to 2,500 contacts at $45 per month for email marketing ($70 per month for access to all features)
2,501 to 5,000 contacts at $65 per month for email marketing ($95 per month for access to all features)
5,001 to 10,000 contacts at $95 per month for email marketing ($125 per month for access to all features)

All features include – automatic email triggers, customised user messages, email tracking in real-time, building surveys and polls to collect user feedback, building dynamic sign-up forms to be able to attract more customers to the subscription list, and website integrations.

#5 InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft is yet another tool that is considered to be valuable in the eyes of small businesses. Not only do they claim to hold the finest of services for organising data and analytics and increasing sales, but they also claim to save much more time than you would be able to with the help of a foreign tool.

‘Automate your business. Save 47 hours a month.’ – Since the beginning of your digital marketing campaign, InfusionSoft understands how crucial time can be for the success of a smaller business. With the ability to ease up the process of creating a new sales or marketing strategy, you can save time (and money) by automating all of your monotonous tasks – be it follow-ups, billing, management of contacts, or even payments. InfusionSoft can help you go from a small business to a corporate shark.

The price range of InfusionSoft’s services is as follows:

$99 for 500 contacts with 2,500 emails per month
$199 per month for 12,500 emails
$299 per month for 50,000 emails

#6 SendInBlue

Marketing automation is crucial for a small business. However, it is equally important to remember that the point of a digital marketing strategy (even if the main point of concentration lies in the field of marketing automation) is to grow over time. As your business grows, so will your digital marketing campaigns. You will begin to integrate search engine optimisation, PPC campaigns, and much more, when the time comes, you need to be well prepared for it.

SendInBlue is a marketing automation tool that allows you to prepare for a well-sought-out digital marketing campaign well in advance. It is capable of helping you engage your audience, generate leads, and plan all of your future marketing campaigns easily.

Besides its low price range of approximately $25 – $66 per month, there are quite a few services that you receive at SendInBlue. Some of these services can even be received for free! They include

Inbuilt templates for landing pages for easy and impactful website designing
CRM that can help you track all customer details in a convenient location
Integration of personalised custom sign-up forms to help grow your subscription list for emails
Facebook retargeting campaigns to allow you to boost traffic on your website
A thorough email heatmap to allow you to consider the improvements that can be made on your campaign’s designs
Time algorithm setups allow you to send emails at the ideal time according to your requirements.
Helps you integrate tools, plugins, and products onto your website.

#7 LeadSquared

LeadSquared is an ideal tool for both small and medium companies that work towards marketing and sales efforts for all of their clients. With the name of the marketing automation tool speaking for itself, Leadsquared allows you to generate leads from multiple sources.

Through inbound marketing, online marketing campaigns, phone calls, website landing pages, chatbots, lead generation websites, blogs, and events. The price range for their services are:

A free trial followed by $200 for 5,000 contacts
$600 for 25,000 contacts
$1,800 for 100,000 contacts

Marketing automation can be beneficial for businesses in the long run, especially the smaller ones. More than 70% of the top companies continue to use marketing automation services for the following reasons:

Better customer service
Precise and well-managed marketing campaigns
Higher ROI
A lesser amount of workload for employees ensures higher productivity
Helps in recovery of lost revenue
Increases the value of the customer-to-business relationships over a lifetime
Helps in predicting and analysing customer behaviour, furthermore guaranteeing a better insight on how your marketing campaigns can be improved for better impact
Creates space for strategic and creative thinking since almost all of the monotonous work is overtaken by marketing automation tools