If your marketing team is currently overwhelmed with the volume of tasks on their plate and missing deadlines, you need to consider investing in a marketing automation tool to get more work done and improve productivity.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation refers to software designed to simplify and automate marketing tasks across multiple channels like email, social media texts and websites. This enables businesses to target their customers with automated campaigns and improves efficiency by reducing repetitive tasks for marketing teams.
Some important marketing processes to automate are: email marketing, lead generation and management, social media and analytics.
How is marketing automation beneficial to small businesses?
Increased efficiency: Marketing automation tools free up more time for marketing teams. By automating admin tasks, they are able to focus on core duties and execute efficiently.
Cost saving: By investing in automation tools you save cost on hiring more people within the team.
Scalability: You can achieve more success in conversions and scale your small business.
Customer insights: Get detailed reports about your customer behaviours. This helps you create better-targeted campaigns to increase conversions.
What to consider in the tool selection process
Ease of use: The tool must be easy to navigate for the team to avoid confusion and delays while working.
Pricing: Can your business afford the monthly or yearly fee of the product? That is a question you must consider to help you decide on the right option. You can set a range that you're willing to spend every month and look for options that have free plans or plans with prices that fall within your range.
Multiple functions: The automation tool you choose must cater to different tasks. That way, you can automate a number of marketing tasks across email, social media, and the website.
Integrations: If you have other tools in your tech stack, such as Slack, it is best to select a tool that integrates with it.
Scalability: Your business will not remain a small business forever. Pick a tool with higher plans that can cater to your needs when the business expands. You do this to avoid shopping for a new tool when the business grows.
5 marketing automation strategies
Start small: Start with basic automation tasks and build your way up to complex processes.
Map the customer journey: Identify touchpoints and know the stages the customer is in, you tend to make better decisions concerning campaigns and follow-ups during the sales process. That way, you know what you're building and what tasks get automated.
Automate social posting: Create and schedule social media posts. Automate responses across different social media channels to keep engagement consistent.
Set up client onboarding processes: Create and implement automated onboarding processes for new clients, then automate re-engagement strategies for inactive leads to improve conversions.
Segment audiences: Segment leads based on behaviour, interests and demographics to ensure higher conversion rates during the automation process.
3 marketing automation tools
There are hundreds of marketing automation tools out there, but, for the purpose of this article, I'll be exploring 3 tools that caters to a wide range of marketing tasks, Brevo, Active Campaign, and Constant Contact.
Brevo
Brevo is a CRM and marketing automation tool for growing businesses. It combines a number of automation features for email marketing, sms and Whatsapp marketing, sales, analytics, lead generation, and loyalty programs.
This tool has a user friendly interface making it an easy to use software. Brevo came up with 6 platforms:
Marketing: Build your email list. Create and send personalised emails to your audience, design emails from scratch with free templates.
Sales: Keep track of deals and automate repetitive tasks like reminders for follow-up or meetings.
Customer data: Import, manage and sync customer data. Clean and reformat data, integrate with analytics.
Loyalty platform: Create personalised loyalty programs, collect customer feedback and analyze buying habits.
Messaging API: Send personalised messages through texts or Whatsapp.
Conversations: Connect with your customers on your website through live chat or chatbot and manage all conversations in one place.
Pricing: The marketing platform has 4 price plans, the free plan, starter plan at $9/month, business plan at $18/month and enterprise plan with a custom price. With the messaging API, you get 300 emails/day for free and custom prices if you want to send more emails per day.
Here's what Simón Gómez, growth marketer at Tributi had to say about Brevo, “Connecting our software with Brevo was super important to us, especially for sending targeted pre- and post-purchase emails. We now have all our client data and targeted communications nicely mapped out.”
All other platforms have two plans, free and pro. For small business owners you can start with the free plan, it offers a number of basic automation functions including:
Customisable email templates
Drag and drop editor
Sms and Whatsapp marketing campaigns
iOS and Android mobile apps
Unlimited conversations
Meeting scheduling
Active campaign
Active campaign is a marketing automation platform for solopreneurs, small, medium sized businesses and enterprises. Unlike brevo, it is a single platform with features including email marketing, omnichannel marketing analytics, audience management and over 900 integrations.
You can set specific goals and build your automation with AI. Create, automate and send personalised email and sms marketing campaigns.
I'm a B2B SaaS writer, so growing my freelance business goes beyond improving my writing skills. The marketing aspect is just as important to keep me in business, outreaching and social media scheduling are ideal tasks I'd automate to reach prospective clients.
Pricing: There are 4 price plans, starter at $15/month, plus at $49/month, pro plan at $79/month and enterprise plan at $145/month.
Active campaign's larger plans are pricey, but for basic personalised email marketing campaigns, you can being with the starter plan. You get access to email campaigns and landing page templates. Site analytics, tracking and all 900+ integrations. If you're a solopreneur like me then the starter plan is just the right option for you.
Active campaign has a 14 day free trial, no credit card required if you want to test the software without commitments.
Constant contact
Constant contact is a lead gen and marketing automation tool. Constant contact has two products:
Digital marketing tool
Lead gen and CRM tool
With the marketing product you can create personalised email campaigns. Connect and engage with customers via SMS marketing. Promote your marketing campaigns on social media. Optimise and grow your website with SEO automation and track your efforts with detailed reports.
The lead gen tool helps you grow your email list with landing pages and forms. Automate multiple sales tasks. Manage campaigns and integrations.
Pricing: There are 3 price plans, lite at $12/month, standard at $35/month, and premium at $80/month. The lite plan gives you access to basic email automation, drag and drop editor, polls, engagement reports, event automation, social media posts and reports, campaign calendar and 300+ integrations.
With the standard plan, you get everything on the lite plan plus more email features including scheduled emails, subject like A/B testing and subject line recommendations.
With the premium plan, you can access every feature constant contact has to offer. A little snag with constant contact is that the SMS marketing feature is available to US customers only.
Which marketing automation tool will you choose?
Choosing and incorporating the right marketing automation softwares for your business can be tough. This guide will get you started on the process so you can make the right decision for your needs.
Appreciate Soibifa-a's candid, unbiased evaluation? Read more from her and join her on LinkedIn!
Bình luận