It’s hard to admit that you’re not able to do everything yourself, doubly so when you’re a small business owner. Outsourcing is one option, but another is taking advantage of marketing automation software that can take a lot of your busy work and run with it. You simply tell it what needs to be done in a very basic way, and it will continue to perform those jobs until your specified stop date, or until you manually stop them.
Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? You still get to look like you’ve got 12 extra hours in your day, and in reality, you can actually eat your lunch away from your desk on a regular basis.
As a small business owner, it’s important to keep nurturing your leads and finding new ones so you can maintain reliable income. The problem is that both of these things are incredibly time-consuming. You may feel like you spend more time marketing than you do running your business.
Let’s take a look at some of the best marketing automation tools out there for small businesses so you can determine the right one for your needs, get more done, and see your business thrive.
1. SharpSpring
There’s a lot to love about SharpSpring if you’re a marketing consultant or if you have a thriving small business. It offers behavior-based email marketing, CRM integration, blog, and landing page builders and will integrate with tons of the scattered apps you’re using right now. For SMBs, pricing starts at $550/month, which puts this tool on the higher end of the pricing spectrum.
2. Keap
When numbers matter, Keap has your back. It offers standard marketing technology like lead capture and follow-ups based on your users’ actions and personalization options. Where it shines is in the analytics department, with reports that get to the bottom of what’s costing more than it’s worth and what efforts are succeeding. It even has the ability to calculate the ROI for any given campaign. It starts at $24 per month plus a $99 one-time payment for expert coaching, but there’s a 14-day free trial option if you’d like to try before you buy.
3. Salesforce Pardot
Salesforce is an undeniable leader in the CRM world, and Pardot does not take that legacy lightly. If you can dream it, as they say, Pardot can do it. This tool works hard to keep marketing and sales aligned, speeds up pipelines, and drives real revenue gains. Automated lead nurturing and real-time sales alerts make it easy for you and your team to focus on the next thing while Pardot handles the details. Read reviews from real users, and check Pardot pricing (4 different plans) and features. At $1,250 per month, a small business may find that pretty steep.
4. BenchmarkONE
Don’t forget about us! BenchmarkONE helps you do anything and everything you need in regards to small business sales and marketing. Our platform makes building emails a breeze and provides you with tools like landing pages and pop-up forms to collect leads. You can automate your email marketing, which saves you tons of time and moves your leads through the funnel faster. You can set tasks for yourself so you don’t forget any follow-up, and you can access detailed analytics to see how well your efforts are paying off. Our easy to read dashboard makes it super simple to see where your customers are in the buyer’s journey, too! We offer a 14-day free trial, so you can test our software out before making a purchase, and from there, our packages start at just $39 a month.
5. ActiveTrail
Are your email campaigns proving less than stellar these days? ActiveTrail may be able to help. This all-in-one email marketing automation package could be all you need to get back on track. It sends SMS messages, helps you build better landing pages, and even integrates surveys into the process. ActiveTrail may not do everything you need for your marketing, but it does a lot of the most time-intensive things. And at $8 per month, it’s an incredible value.
6. Adobe Campaign
Multi-device or multi-media campaigns can be difficult to track, especially when you’re running several at once. That’s not a problem for Adobe Campaign. Unlike many packages that struggle to capture data across many different channels, this is exactly what Campaign was made to do and what it does best. It also integrates with the Adobe Experience and Creative Clouds, meaning that you can create a graphic in Photoshop, place it on a flyer in InDesign, then send that PDF out to your customer base with fewer clicks than ever. You’ll have to talk to sales to get a firm price, but if you do a lot of cross-channel marketing, the cost of this SaaS may be a super value.
7. Drip
Sometimes it’s hard to see how an email marketing campaign fits together, no matter how many whiteboards you cover in ink. Drip was designed to solve that problem once and for all. It’s a fully visual email campaign automator that integrates with most of today’s popular marketing applications. You get dozens of triggers and actions for email audiences, as well as up to 500 contacts for just $19 a month.
8. Moosend
Some days you spend your working hours finessing software with very grown-up sounding names like “Word” or “Google Docs,” and other days, you’re managing email campaigns with the help of a bovine-inspired automation tool. When it comes to Moosend, there’s a lot to like for the price. Manage multiple email campaigns, mailing lists, and create responsive newsletters like a pro, then watch the analytics fill in the blanks. Their free forever plan includes unlimited emails, sign-up and subscription forms, and reporting and analytics.
Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Tool
It’s no small task to choose the right automation software for your company or your clients, but with so many on the market, it’s likely you’ll find exactly what you need with prices and configurations that work for you. Before you commit to a lengthy contract, be sure to demo the software you’re considering. That way, if there’s a difficult to manage interface or awkward function that you really need, you know about it right away.
If you’re interested in seeing what BenchmarkONE can help your small business achieve, set up a personal demo at your convenience, and we’ll be happy to show you around!