Marketing Automation Tools For Fast Small Business Growth

Marketing automation is a batch of programs, actionable tactics, techniques, and general expertise that a company uses to run its brand promotion and selling with minimal manual labor. In other words, automation means that computers do major - not to say all - routine tasks, while employees are charged for rather critical thinking and other intelligent jobs. Marketing automation tools are a gold mine for making money, as well. Here, SaaS giants like HubSpot earn billions of annual revenues, and global market volume will account for $25 billion by 2023. Curious about how marketing automation can assist your organization? - The magic formula is in this article.

How can Marketing Automation help your business?

Business processes’ automation plays a crucial role for both large entities and small business growth - nearly 68% of companies state that this is what gives them a “green-light” for goal achievement. Organizations experience automation advantages from different standpoints - here just a few pieces of statistics on winnings, published by Invespcro:

“Businesses claim to experience clear-cut advantages from marketing automation”, says Start-up bonsa.

We’ve broken down the 4 broadest and most apparent-looking gains that a company may encounter if it accurately implements marketing automation.

Increase in Productivity

Lead generation and nurturing, regulating multi-channel paid campaigns, content management, not to mention efficiency tracking, reporting, and allying efforts and data with Sales - all these are very burdensome tasks if performed by hand alone. Automation programs that are enhanced with AI and machine learning can run hundreds of marketing campaigns at once and never get tired or sick. Thus, workers become more unloaded and can get busy with coordination and creative thinking. Small business growth statistics confirm this fact - 2 out of 3 employees claim that automation helps them be more productive and perform better than usual. 

Generation of revenue

Companies that use marketing automation software experience higher ROI from promotional efforts - roughly a half (44%) get yields from spendings as soon as during the first 6 months. As so, the organization can benefit from the economies of scale and sell disproportionately more, compared to the running costs it takes.

Customer retention

Marketing automation raises the efficiency of all operations. This turns into that incoming inquiries from clients are processed faster and - at no sacrifices in customization or speed. For consumers, a feeling of a “personal touch” is central nowadays, with as many as 80% of people indicating that getting an instant response influences their loyalty to a particular brand. Thanks to automation, a company can retain customers even if it scales up.

Tracking and Measuring

“Automation programs, like HubSpot, give remarkably visualized statistics”, says Hubspot.

Of course, informative dashboards and reports stand in the foreground among automation's major advantages. Some tools, e.g. Google Analytics, allow tracking of how campaigns perform in a close to real-time mode. Other, e.g. email marketing automation tools, entirely take over campaigns’ administration - from scheduling to calculating results.

Marketing Automation best practices

Social Media Outreach

Say, one wants to execute digital marketing to generate more leads. This implies numerous “know-hows”:

Guess what? - You can shift almost all these issues to marketing automation tools. These will autonomously manage email address search, mailings, ads, and content distribution among Social Medias.

Forecasting for Lead generation

By automating leads' scoring you can better distinguish qualified ones. Utilize pre-designed Buyer personas’ profiling or customers’ journeys mapping that most marketing automation programs do offer. Thus, you’ll be able to learn users’ behavior, create more precise lead & sales funnels, and adjust sales pipelines.

Personalized Content

Marketing automation brings a lot to segmentation quality. Segments are not trifling charts anymore - they become vivid and robotically adjustable data sources that one can use for adapting messages.

Decide on the information that is relevant for the profiling goals:

Then create specific content for every segment, depending on the:

Behavior-based emails

An email search is not all that smart mailing tools can equip one with. You shall only arrange sequences scenario, prepare subject lines, and email body texts - and let the software take care of the rest:

Chatbots

Although there are dozens of inflated articles answering the “How to...” question, people become overwhelmed with poor-quality information. Around ⅓ complain that they experience impersonal advice and can’t find answers to simple questions. At the same time, the request for immediate response has grown significantly.

A trending way out of this vicious circle is chatbots. These are rule-based or AI programs that are set up according to the dialogue purpose - to support, acknowledge, record an order, etc.

“How a rule-based chatbot works” from Drift.

Chatbots are fast, tireless, work 24/7, and relatively affordable. These make them a good remedy for client-based businesses, e.g. banks, delivery, e-commerce, and others. The niche significantly outperforms the growth of other Internet marketing tools, like email marketing or SMM. During a single year, from 2019 to 2020, the usage of chatbots grew up to 13%.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

VR has been a trend of the last 5 years and particularly resonated with sellers of high-value items - real estate, robotics, automotive, and many others. People got accustomed to AR sooner than anyone could ever predict - according to the Smartinsights recent survey, 72% of shoppers insist on purchasing goods just due to the influence of Augmented reality.

Top Marketing Automation Tools in 2021

Marketing automation programs originate from the 1980s - in the era of the first CRMs. During the 2000s, innovative Eloqua, Salesforce, Pardot, Hubspot, Marketo have occurred. They demonstrated a revolutionary approach for marketing data proceeding. Now as we come to 2021, the nature of automation tools has become determined by 3 technological phenomena - Artificial Intelligence, neural networks, and machine learning. Below you can check out some of the best marketing automation tools - to grow one’s small business and not only.

OptinMonster

source: OptinMonster.com

This is a lead gen & personalization tool that is purposeful for those operating in online commerce, client business (agencies), and SMEs. OptinMonster offers functionality for:

The latter is possible due to high-grade tracking technologies: Inactivity Sensor, Exit Intent, and Signature MonsterLink. OptinMonster is a complete instrument for website analytics - it tracks on-site time, detects users’ IPs, and “resumes” reactions. The program also includes many ready-to-use templates for pretty any marketing purpose: pop-up ads, welcome/regular/retention emails, scroll boxes, etc.

Constant Contact

source: Constantcontact.com

The developers stand for it as an ultimate program for small businesses and nonprofits. As the name suggests, Constant Contact is perfect for leading customers through the funnel’s steps - up to making a deal. With this one can:

EngageBay

EngageBay offers marketing, sales, and customer support – all packed into a single affordable software. The software’s USP is its affordability. With EngageBay, you get a powerful, multi-step, visual automation builder with tons of pre-built actions, conditions, triggers, and templates. 

EngageBay is an ideal solution for small businesses, startups, and solopreneurs. 

EngageBay also offers:

Snov.io

source: Snov.io

This program will become an all-out solution for email marketing, indeed. It can assist in:

Snov.io has an email finder tool that scrapes leads’ contact from their profile pages in Social Media, websites, and other nooks and crannies of the Web.

Experienced email marketers know - there is nothing worse than an email database containing misspelled, not-existing, spammy, or temporary emails. These nullify ROI expectations. If you knock on a door that doesn't exist, why will you expect conversions? Moreover, infinite delivery errors can spoil the sender's domain reputation.

You can upload to or construct email content with the help of Snov.io. Use email builder to cast addressing, e.g. names, job titles, company names, or - to include customized offers.

The dashboard will display how many opens & clicks there were, what was the average open ratio, and how many recipients have unsubscribed or closed emails without reading. Use these figures to adjust settings & timely detect errors.

Aside from marketing purposes, Snov.io can also be utilized by Sales and HR - to accelerate and narrow down a lead generation or quick search for prominent candidates.

Sendinblue

source: Sendinblue.com

The whole bunch of solutions for automating Facebook Ads, email & SMS marketing, chatting, and transactional messages - this is what Sendinblue stands for. The program’s proclaimed advantage is flexibility. With knowing the lead's contact, you can track his or her web behavior, hence, - automate targeting operations.

Sendinblue is a good choice for big companies - the service is enhanced with support, convenient UI, and reporting analytics of all sorts.

Drip

source: Drip.com

This is a good choice for email marketing automation purposes. Drip’s “zest” lies in a workflow builder that contains hundreds of pre-built campaigns to choose from. Thus, even novices or ones with a limited budget can still benefit from proven mailing best practices. Drag & drop features for constructing campaigns, customization instruments, user-friendly interface, and good support - what else do you need for a trouble-free interaction with the program?

HubSpot

source: HubSpot.com

Yes, we know - without HubSpot, the list would seem incomplete. And for a good reason - this is a true “dinosaur” that, nevertheless, remains the best all-in-one solution on the market.

HubSpot serves perfectly for Inbound marketing:

Moreover, generous developers have cared for a lot of free stuff, have a look:

Regardless of the company size you manage, bringing automation in marketing affairs is a secret formula of high KPIs and ROIs. Try various software to see what works well before purchasing a license. And don’t forget to sink money into employees’ professional advancement.

This article is a guest blog written by Yulia Zubova. To contribute a guest post to Workast.com, please complete the expression of interest form here.