Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Marketing automation for small businesses refers to the software and tactics that are used to develop, execute and track marketing campaigns. It allows marketers to automate repetitive marketing processes and campaigns such as emails and social media.

The ultimate objective of a small business is to generate revenue. To do this, you need to drive more traffic to the website, generate leads and convert the leads into customers. Marketing automation helps in every stage of the marketing funnel, from lead generation, nurturing, scoring and measuring the ROI of your marketing campaigns.

What this article covers:

What Are Marketing Automation Systems?

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

Who Are the Top Marketing Automation Software Providers?

What Are Marketing Automation Systems?

With marketing automation systems, small businesses can target their current and prospective customers with automated messages across marketing channels such as social, web, email and text. It allows marketers to capture leads, engage with contacts in a relevant, personable way and create a simple, scalable marketing process.

Instead of bombarding your customers with the same message, marketing automation systems allows you to reach the right person with the right message. By focusing more on delivering strategic, organized communication, you can focus on increasing customer engagement and building brand loyalty.

Some of the most important features of marketing automation systems for small business owners include:

Lead Scoring and Management

This allows businesses to rate their prospects against a scale that represents their perceived value. You can use your lead scores to segment a list to identify hot, warm and cold leads, trigger alerts to the sales team and send targeted email alerts.

Email Campaigns

Marketing automation allows you to schedule relevant personalized messages to a targeted audience in a timely manner. The targeted email campaigns improve clickthrough and open rates while lowering the opt-outs and spam complaints.

Social Media Automation

With marketing automation systems, you can incorporate your social media with the software to track and analyze the activities and social presence of your customers.

Landing Pages

When interested prospective customers, click on an add, they need somewhere to land. The page they land must be simple to understand, optimized for conversion, have a prominent call-to-action button and be aesthetically pleasing. By combining these elements, automation software is able to create landing pages that can get high conversion rates.

All-In-One Dashboard

Marketing automation systems provide a customizable dashboard that can be modified on your priorities. Interests and workflow processes

A/B Testing

A/B testing refers to the process of testing various elements of marketing emails to determine which works best for the target audience. This feature makes it easy to test templates, subject lines, photos, content, CTAs, or other factors

Analytics

Marketing automation systems provide insights into different marketing metrics such as open rates, clickthrough rates, conversions, bounce rates and unsubscribes. Analytics are key to making adjustments to your marketing strategy.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

The reasons why companies are looking into marketing automation to grow their businesses include:

• Improves productivity by eliminating repetitive manual processes and substituting it with automated solutions
• The software automates processes, activities and documentation that makes the marketing workflow smoother and reduces errors
• It provides relevant insights into the buying intent of existing and prospective customer. This allows businesses to predict customer needs and decisions and target them accordingly
• By adopting relevant strategies that include lead qualification, lead scoring and nurturing, trigger marketing campaigns and alignment with the sales process, marketing automation tools allow businesses to personalize their relationships with every customer
• Along with expenditures, marketing automation software helps in tracking responses to marketing campaigns based on specific parameters for success and failure

Who Are the Top Marketing Automation Software Providers?

Hubspot

Instead of using scattered solutions for marketing automation, Hubspot provides an all-in-one solution for small business owners. It can be used for creating landing pages, blogging, email marketing, lead management, CRM integration, CTA testing, website design, social media, SEO and ad tracking.

One of its standout features is the campaign builder feature which builds and chronologically segments multiple campaigns. This is a key aspect of the marketing workflow as follow-up campaigns and actions lead to lead nurturing.

Infusionsoft

If you’re a small business owner, then the automation features of Infusionsoft such as lead scoring, CRM integrations, lead nurturing, tagging and branching, personalized content and conversion funnel analysis can be extremely useful for attracting and retaining customers.

Its all-in-one e-commerce feature allows you to monitor the entire sales funnel, right from creating special promotions to following-up on cart abandonment.

ActiveCampaign

An affordable alternative to popular automation tools like Hubspot, ActiveCampaign has a number of attractive features including a comprehensive list of CRM integrations and support, in-depth split-testing tools, great tracking and reporting functionality.

Targeted towards small-to-midsize businesses, the CRM suite allows businesses to build their contact lists, create professional emails, manage campaigns, track customer behavior and measure their marketing campaign performance.

MailChimp

MailChimp is an easy-to-use and reasonably priced marketing automation system with powerful features which allow you to get new customers, boost loyalty and re-engage inactive customers.

This platform allows you to create emails with drag-and-drop templates, landing pages, Google remarketing ads and social media ads. The analytics features enable A/B and multivariate testing and provide standard and comparative reports. MailChimp can also be integrated with popular CRM tools such as Salesforce, WordPress and Shopify.

GetResponse

Free onboarding, quick setup and advice, post-purchase help and loyalty programs, make this marketing platform one of the best options for small business owners. The platform also has a host of attractive features such as a simple drag-and-drop visual workflow editor, e-commerce capabilities and tracking online activities of customers.

Apart from having useful features, marketing automation tools for small businesses should be affordable and offer value for money. When used properly, these systems can help you improve your revenues and allow you to gain a competitive advantage.

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