There are many different marketing automation tools for different needs, and many marketers make the mistake of simply picking the first tool they come across instead of matching the right software to their particular use case and needs. Then again, there are so many automation platforms out there, it can be difficult to decide.
To help you avoid this common pitfall, this article outlines 10 cost-effective marketing automation solutions that you can use to grow your business, including the category, use case, and pricing for each.
Spoiler alert, they include:
- SendPulse
- Moosend
- Aritic
- Hubspot
- Buffer
- Intercom
- Freshworks
- Pipedrive
- Omnisend
- User
10 affordable small business marketing automation tools
Just as marketing has many different channels, there are automation platforms that can streamline processes in a number of different areas—social media marketing, webinar marketing, email marketing, lead management, prediction, scoring, and more. Let’s dive in and see if there are any platforms that match your business’s goals and strategies.
1. SendPulse
Category: Email marketing automation
Nature of tool: SendPulse is an email and messenger marketing platform that is built for sending emails and SMS, as well as creating chatbots for Telegram and Facebook.
What you can do with it:
- Send transactional emails (in addition to email marketing).
- Scale your (already successful) email marketing efforts by automating tasks.
- Send follow-up emails to reduce eCommerce cart abandonment.
Pricing: Starts at $6.40/month
2. Moosend
Category: All-in-one marketing automation
Nature of tool: Moosend is an all-in-one marketing platform designed to help businesses grow. Wes Herman’s Woods Coffee is a great case study example of using ecommerce and email marketing to grow from a single coffee shop startup to now owning over 19 locations with a large online presence. In addition to email marketing automation, it also has features such as website and user tracking, data analytics, advanced reporting, list segmentation, and A/B testing.
What you can do with it:
- Use data to grow your mailing list around the clock.
- Find cart abandonment using advanced list segmentation.
- Gain instant real-time analytics to better inform your marketing strategies.
Pricing: Starts at free
3. Aritic
Category: All-in-one marketing automation
Nature of tool: Aritic is a full-stack marketing, sales, service, and productivity tool that will help you grow a deeper relationship with your customers.
What you can do with it:
- Collaborate and coordinate different teams across various departments using one central database platform
- Automate much of your business’s ecosystem, including leads, workflows, and emails
- Build a cohesive customer experience using powerful customer relationship management software
Pricing: Starts at $59/month
4. Hubspot
Category: All-in-one marketing automation
Nature of tool: HubSpot is designed to help businesses grow without compromise. It’s a CRM platform with all the tools and integrations you need for marketing, sales, content management, customer service, and more.
What you can do with it:
- Automate more of your email marketing tasks.
- Scale your marketing operation in a cost-effective way.
- Experiment with additional channels or avenues for marketing.
Pricing: Starts at free
5. Buffer
Category: Social media automation
Nature of tool: Buffer offers a full stack of simple brand-building tools so you can tell your story and build authentic engagement with your audience on various social media platforms. Maximize engagement by scheduling content to be published at the right time of the day.
What you can do with it:
- Automate content publishing, monitoring, and analytics on social media.
- Use analytics to help you grow your social media audience.
- Coordinate teams working on different tasks, such as customer support, paid advertising, etc.
- If you use this tool in conjunction with tools to increase efficiency, like those that focus on Linkedin message automation, your brand growth can be significant.
Pricing: Starts at free
6. Intercom
Category: Conversational marketing automation
Nature of tool: Intercom is a business messaging software designed to help you build relationships with your customers by focusing on conversational support, conversational engagement, and conversational marketing.
What you can do with it:
- Use personalized messages to convert website visitors to loyal customers.
- Reengage current customers with targeted messages and email campaigns.
- Boost customer satisfaction with human, proactive, and self-serve support.
Pricing: Starts at $59/month
7. Freshworks
Category: All-in-one marketing automation
Nature of tool: Freshworks provides all the enterprise-grade tools and services that you need to scale your business’s customer (and employee) satisfaction.
What you can do with it:
- Deliver the best omnichannel customer service using a unified platform.
- Engage and delight customers via web, mobile, and social messengers.
- Align sales and marketing teams for better experiences.
Pricing: Starts at $15/month
8. Pipedrive
Category: All-in-one marketing automation
Nature of tool: Pipedrive has features to help you prioritize deals, track your performance, and predict sales and revenue. It’s an all-in-one platform designed to help businesses automate and grow.
What you can do with it:
- Manage leads and deals around the clock using custom web forms and chatbots.
- Track communications, emails, contact history, etc. for full control over your schedule.
- Automate repetitive administrative tasks and learn from AI (artificial intelligence).
Pricing: Starts at $12.50
9. Omnisend
Category: All-in-one marketing automation tool for eCommerce
Nature of Tool: Omnisend is an eCommerce marketing platform that offers way more than email campaigns. It allows you to expand on your newsletters so you can increase sales with automated emails and segmentation, as well as the added potential of SMS.
What you can do with it:
- Win back sales with prebuilt marketing automation for cart abandonment.
- Improve targeting by segmenting customers based on shopping behavior.
- Stay relevant and boost conversions with personalized emails and texts.
Pricing: Starts from free
10. User.com
Category: All-in-one marketing automation
Nature of tool: User.com is a single workspace that provides you with a robust set of tools for marketing, sales, content management, and customer support.
What you can do with it:
- Boost engagement and improve conversion using a single data source for your customers.
- Fully automate lead generation, sales, and reports for all teams.
- Boost your brand’s communication with customized customer journeys across all channels.
Pricing: Starts at $49/month
Save time and money with these marketing automation tools
Of course, while these automation tools can make life easier for marketers, many businesses land themselves in a position where they’re using more than one, and therefore only losing time with disjointed efforts. It is for this reason that most of the platforms mentioned in this post are all-in-one.
However, if you’re a new business, you may not know what kind of capabilities you need, and as you scale, bringing on additional platforms is hard to avoid. This is where digital platform development can help, where you’d get help integrating your different platforms into one interface (with the ability to add more as you grow_ so you can more efficiently carry out and measure the success of your various marketing strategies.
As you have seen, marketing automation covers a wide range of areas, including:
- Social marketing
- Email marketing
- Lead management
- Campaign management
- Landing page creation
- Prediction and scoring
- Creating webinars
- … and much more.
The trick is to know when your business is ready for marketing automation and understand your business’s use case and needs. You can then choose from the tools listed above, or other helpful tools you find, to help you propel your business toward its ultimate success.
Over to you. Which of these marketing automation tools do you think will work best for your business and why? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
About the author
Ron Stefanski is an online entrepreneur and marketing professor who has a passion for helping people create and market online businesses. You can learn more from him by visiting OneHourProfessor.com.
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WordStream’s guest authors are experts, entrepreneurs, and passionate writers in the online marketing community who bring diverse perspectives to our blog on a wide range of topics.
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