No matter your industry or the goods or services you offer, if people aren’t aware of them, they’re not going to buy them. So what’s a person to do?
You already have a schedule full of meetings, demos, networking events, and actual work. How are you supposed to make time for lead nurturing and engaging with people on your business’ social media pages?
Thankfully, marketing automation software makes it a lot more manageable. But, how do you know if it’s time to get one? What exactly does it do? And what are the best marketing automation tips for a business owner?
The goal of marketing automation is to leverage software to automate repetitive marketing tasks. This supports marketing teams in various efforts to help reduce manual output and improve productivity.
Marketing automation software takes prospects’ data you’ve collected through website visits, landing pages, emails, and newsletter and blog subscriptions, and helps you segment your contacts. This way, you can customize communications automatically based on their stage on their buyer’s journey or other characteristics.
Marketing automation software provides all kinds of tools to support a variety of tasks, including:
These automated messages are triggered based on specific user behavior, sending them relevant information that’s specific to them. This kind of software also measures metrics, such as the number of emails sent to each contact, open rates, click-through rates, website traffic, and behavioral triggers, among others.
At a time when marketers often run dozens of campaigns at once, it’s not surprising that so many software programs are stepping in to facilitate the process. You can create campaigns and control every aspect of your marketing strategy in one easy-to-use platform. Many of them even include drag-and-drop functionality to make the process as easy as possible.
When your business is new, you may be able to track all of your contacts and keep in communication with them in a personalized way. However, as it starts to grow, it’s impractical to think you’ll be able to do so. This is especially true if you’ve just started a new campaign.
Think about it. How much fun would it be to keep a tally of every website visitor and person who emails you — and of all of the follow up communications? You’d never have a single moment left to actually do your job.
In addition to making things less complicated and stressful, automated marketing can help you achieve a greater ROI, since the data helps you know which prospects are more likely to turn into sales qualified leads, and which of those leads is getting closer to making a purchase.
It’ll water those plants, if you will. Send those that are ready to bloom directly to your sales team.
A lot of marketing automation tools have similar features, give or take a few that may be more useful for a particular industry. However, you want to make sure that the software you’re considering includes the following features:
There are many marketing automation software options that can make your business more efficient and profitable. The most popular ones include the following:
The following 10 platforms are built as all-in-one solutions, providing a full suite of tools that cover all your marketing needs.
Is this even a shock coming from us?
When it comes to marketing automation, HubSpot is the hands-down leader. It not only provides tools for inbound marketing, it is inbound — and its software is carefully crafted to automate all aspects of a great campaign.
Design your site, enhance SEO, develop content, and drive users to key landing pages with powerful calls-to-action. HubSpot brings it all together like no other.
Iterable has been built from the ground up to be marketer-friendly.
It has a particularly versatile approach to market segmentation, and offers multi-channel campaigns that can move flexibly from one platform to another — for example, SMS messages triggered by cart abandonment.
ActiveCampaign takes some of the best ideas from marketing and sales enablement, combining them in ways that make perfect sense.
It functions as a CRM with integrated communication between your team, but also provides email marketing, site messaging, and SMS to keep contacts warm. By centralizing data into a single source, it breaks down old sales and marketing silos.
Formerly known as InfusionSoft, Keap targets small businesses in the process of scaling.
It takes care of the day-to-day nurturing of prospects throughout the entire lifecycle. What normally can take hours of work can be automated in a few minutes; and it has excellent customer service with multichannel support.
Constant Contact lets you create a website, set up an online store, and conduct email marketing, while also integrating with Facebook and Instagram. It has hundreds of email templates that are mobile-optimized and includes user-friendly editing tools.
And if you’re at a loss and don’t know where to start (or don’t have time), its Website Builder feature will create a personalized website for you based on your answers to a few questions.
In addition to the basic features included in all-in-one marketing automation software, Autopilot automates communications to new subscribers, follows up with sales leads, and books appointments.
It also integrates with Pipedrive, Salesforce, Slack, Typeform, and HubSpot. You can even leave annotations and check a timeline of every change done to all communications.
Net-Results made its name as the marketing automation software of choice for those switching from another solution.
It’s extremely extensible — full API access means you can go under the hood and crank your customization up to 11 if you choose. It integrates easily with the top enterprise CRMs. Plus, your team will benefit from contextual tools to ensure each message is as good as it can be.
If you're looking for a simple marketing automation that's also affordable, you might be interested in SharpSpring.
With easy-to-use email marketing, CRM, and social media integrations, there isn't much more SharpSpring is missing. Even if you are a non-professional, SharpSpring might just be the cure to your marketing automation needs.
Campaign Monitor is where companies turn when the famous email brands with the lower-cost monthly plans no longer meet their needs.
Not only can you design snappy emails in a few seconds, but you get remarkably granular customer journeys that can keep building the relationship for months without intervention. It has an ambitious plan to expand behavioral data implementation, too.
If you feel like you’ve rung every little bit of value out of Google AdWords’ native tools, then WordStream Advisor is where you want to go next.
This digital advertising software can act as a key addition to your toolset, and when used together with WordStream's other tools, you can build a full marketing automation platform customized for your unique needs.
Thanks to elegant, powerful tools combined with weekly alerts, you can manage a full portfolio of campaigns, fast. Cutting-edge cross-platform performance means you can access the integrated analytics dash anywhere, any time.
These five tools listed are primarily used for email marketing purposes, acting as essential additions to your tech stack.
Mailchimp leads the pack for email marketing automation.
And it’s certainly affordable — if you have up to 2,000 subscribers, you can opt for the basic, free plan (it goes all the way up to Premium, for businesses that have more than 100,000 contacts). It’s also very user friendly, since it was specifically designed for people who aren’t necessarily tech savvy.
With LeadSquared, you get a two-for-one: email marketing automation and a CRM software.
Easily track consumer behavior, such as pageviews and CTA clicks, and use drip marketing tools, like a visual builder, to sketch out conversations and define their journey. Simply put, you can automate your entire sales funnel.
Act-On brings together inbound and outbound marketing so your brand stays agile. Everything from SEO, social media, contact forms, and landing pages is included.
Lead nurturing, scoring, and list management can all be fully automated. Plus, it comes with a full suite of tools for email and is one of the only options out there with its own webinar toolkit.
Automizy is a marketing automation tool specifically designed to improve your emails’ open rates. It first lets you create landing pages to increase your contacts list.
It also makes it easy to create emails using their drag and drop email editor. And when you create A/B testing communications, it tracks performance and sends the ones with the highest open rates.
Customer.io automates marketing emails, as well as sends push notifications, text messages, and communications via Slack.
It even automates sending postcards to customers. You can set them up to wait until a user does a specific action to trigger the communications. Plus, it has no limits on contacts segmentation and can do ad targeting without cookies
The following options are excellent tools for automating your social media marketing efforts.
Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. LinkedIn. Maybe you have two of them; maybe all of them. Hootsuite lets you schedule posts across all of your social media platforms from one single place.
You can also keep an eye on engagement in each of them — every like, comment, and share. In addition, you can set up your account to respond to comments. The analytics dashboard lets you see which content is performing the best, and it gives you insights to let you know why they’re working.
Agorapulse offers social media management in an easy-to-use platform with affordable plans.
It also filters content by type and offers support for Facebook Groups. You can separate scheduled posts by queue categories, and use their inbox filter assistant to filter out spam.
In addition to managing your social media content, the Semrush Social Media Toolkit lets you track competitors to see what they’re posting, what’s working, and what isn’t.
It integrates well with Facebook and its related networks, such as Messenger and Instagram. Additionally, Semrush is known primarily for their SEO and content marketing tools, so if you're looking for a comprehensive software to support all your marketing efforts, this is an excellent option.
Sprout Social has a feature called ViralPost, which analyzes all relevant factors to deliver content at a time when it’s most likely to have the most impact.
It also prioritizes messages in your inbox and has suggested replies for incoming messages, cutting your response time down immensely. Depending on the solution you purchase, you can manage up to 10 social media profiles at a time.
Sendible integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, and Pinterest, making it the social media automation software that integrates with the most social media platforms.
It can also be used to support blogging platforms, such as WordPress, Medium, Blogspot, and Tumblr.
Once you decide on which platform would work best for your business, you should keep in mind several automation tips.
You don’t want something as preventable as lack of training or simple human errors to get in the way of a great campaign. Review every feature and all of the processes.
Most of these platforms have instructional videos on their website, as well as customer service, and additional content on YouTube. If no one on your team is tech savvy, opt for an intuitive platform with easy to use drag-and-drop features.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Not everyone is on the same stage of their buyer’s journey. And not everyone who looks at your About page is ready to fill out a form.
By categorizing your customers and automating communications based on certain triggers and behaviors, you will get better open rates, click-throughs, and ultimately, more purchases and repeat customers.
No matter how seamlessly you schedule everything to occur, you still need to create useful, relevant, and interesting content. Write for your audience, always keeping in mind their buyer persona.
And once you do, make sure that those headlines and subject lines are compelling enough to get your audience to keep reading.
Marketing automation software exists to help you manage your business. It is not meant to substitute human experiences, so be mindful of also including regular people available to assist customers. Chatbots can only do so much, and if a user gets frustrated, they’ll go to a competitor.
With hundreds of marketing automation platforms to choose from, it's easy to get overwhelmed by all your options. This rapidly growing market shows an increase in interest for business software tools that reduce manual tasks and improve productivity in marketing.
Find the best solution for your business and start automating your efforts now. The longer you wait, the faster your competitors are accelerating their efforts. Get ahead of them now with the best marketing automation software that suits your needs.