5 Best Automation Tools for Small Businesses in 2020
Startups are currently all the rage. Being an entrepreneur is every millennial’s dream. But, often it is forgotten that running any kind of business is a challenge. Right from maintaining finances, paying out salaries and keeping your taxes in check, there are multiple factors involved in running a successful business. While bigger companies have different departments looking into these, small businesses might have to take a big cut into their profits due to these challenges. This is where an automation tool can help.
Business automation is transforming the way brands operate, allowing them to do more with less and scale in ways never before possible. In theory, this means business size doesn’t matter so much and automation can actually give the advantage to smaller brands that are often able to react to new trends faster than their larger rivals. Hence, if you’re not using the right tools, you’re missing out.
Here we present five of the very best applications that small businesses can make use of. Each one gives you an impressive level of functionality, a top-class interface, and cross-platform support (so they’ll work on multiple devices), and they can all make a genuine difference to day-to-day operations – whether you’re a team of two or 20.
1. Hubspot Marketing
HubSpot Marketing is a top-of-the-line inbound marketing software that focuses on growing traffic and increasing lead conversions. With robust tools for blogging, emailing, SEO, marketing automation, lead management, and analytics, this platform can give you the things you need to launch effective campaigns. The system also integrates with multiple CMSs, email service providers, eCommerce tools, and social networks. The vendor offers a free trial plan for those who’d like to try out the key features of the product first. You can easily sign up for HubSpot Marketing free trial here.
For subscriptions, the platform is available in four monthly plans that are priced according to the number of features you will be needing for your operations. To know about this software’s pricing plans, click here.
Why Choose HubSpot Marketing?
a. All-in-One Marketing System:
As mentioned earlier, HubSpot marketing has all the necessary marketing automation features you need to launch your campaign. It lets you generate more traffic, converts leads, and track your marketing funnel without having to spend on other software to back it up. You may, however, choose from their available integrations to further enhance its performance.
b. Personalization Capabilities:
Every business works differently, and it can be difficult to modify your operations to suit a certain platform. To help you save time and money on retraining, HubSpot Marketing allows you to personalize your workflow and prepare your content and marketing strategies however you wish.
c. Reliable Analytics:
As a business owner, you understand how costly wrong decisions can be. With HubSpot Marketing’s analytics tools, you no longer have to worry about making incorrect calculations. This allows you to get accurate, real-time reports that you may refer to whenever you need to make changes to your campaign.
2. SendinBlue
SendinBlue offers services such as email marketing, SMS campaign, and transactional emails.
It requires no specific skill to create email designs or templates. The interface is so simple to use with a drag and drop facility and customized template gallery which helps to create a simple but unique email template. This email template is supported by all types of mobile devices with any version.
SendinBlue offers various plans, the lowest one starts at $7.37 per month. This plan includes unlimited contacts and 40,000 emails. You can get your free trial here!
There are various other features such as importing contacts from another platform, customized contact search, responsive email design, campaign reporting, trigger marketing email as per the user interest, etc.
Why Choose SendinBlue?
a) Design clean and professional newsletters:
Today, newsletters have become a part of every effective marketing strategy. This is because they encourage customers to know about your business, allow you to send personalized messages, drive traffic to your website and eventually increase conversions. To make sure your customers open your newsletter, it needs to be well-designed. This is where SendinBlue’s feature comes to your rescue. All you need to do is just drag and drop the design blocks you want to build a sleek newsletter.
b) Identify and build a target audience:
All your marketing and sales strategies will go in vain if you fail to identify your target audience. A target audience is a group of individuals sharing similar needs or characteristics that your company hopes to serve. And, SendinBlue helps you identify this group and build strong relationships with them. With this platform, you can collect email addresses and contact information from prospective customers and subscribers without any hassle.
c) Send at the best time:
Did you know almost 2.4 million emails are sent every second? Imagine, the number of emails your potential customers receive every hour. In such a competitive market, how do you make sure your prospective customer opens and reads your email? You can do it by sending it at the right time through SendinBlue. This will help you achieve the best possible engagement with your contacts.
3. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a business marketing application designed for small companies. Used by over 100,000 people globally, this all-in-one software has all the tools you need to boost your business from marketing automation and sales CRM to smart emailing and data analysis. Should you encounter problems with their system, they also offer in-depth training and customer support. ActiveCampaign is available in four pricing plans ranging. They also offer yearly subscription options for your convenience. Get your free trial for 14 days here! If you want to know more about this software’s pricing plans, click here.
Why Choose ActiveCampaign?
a) Unlimited Lead Scoring:
Are you looking for a software that can easily adapt to the needs of your growing business? ActiveCampaign supports an unlimited number of lead scores, so you can easily accommodate all your leads without having to upgrade the program. On top of that, the system lets you organize your leads according to your priorities or even automatically distribute them to your sales team.
b) Quality Emailing Tool:
Sending emails to the right people at the right time may be one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of digital marketing. Fortunately, ActiveCampaign has an email management tool that allows you to create personalized and strategically scheduled emails. Additionally, it can support live ecommerce data and videos to create more engaging content for your clients and leads.
c) Over 150 Supported Integrations:
ActiveCampaign can be integrated with a large number of third-party applications. Whether you want to reinforce your platform with accounting, CMS, analytics, sales, customer support, or other auxiliary tools, they have you covered.
4. LeadSquared
LeadSquared was launched in 2012 with a revenue of $3 million in 2016. It is considered to be the best lead management tool, which captures leads from various sources like mails, campaign, phone calls, etc.
It provides a solution in areas such as real estate, education, travel, health, financial services, etc. It has customers like Flipkart, Time Pro, NIIT, Randstad, etc. LeadSquared provides services in around 20 countries. Another great feature is that it sends automated sales notifications to the salesperson.
LeadSquared focuses service in B2C model i.e. Business to Consumer service, in this model products or services, are directly sold to the consumer. You can find various email templates to support different types of devices and its functions are available through the website as well as through mobile apps.
Avail your 30 days free trial here or to know more about this LeadSquared’s pricing plans, click here!
Why Choose LeadSquared?
a) Create automated workflows:
Use this feature to create interdependent workflows. These workflows can work in-sync to automate your complex business processes. One example is this is the automate funnel movement. Here, you can add triggers to start your workflow. You can even change the lead stages automatically or update a lead when a pre-defined activity occurs.
b) Send instant sales notifications:
Do you know if a particular lead is converting into a customer? Now you can, by sending instant sales notifications. Whenever a lead takes a sales-relevant action, this tool will immediately notify the salesperson in your team. This ensures that your sales team is all set to give the leads the right attention and convert them into customers.
c) Personalize your marketing campaigns:
Gone are the days when you could send a standard email to everyone in your subscribing list. Today, everyone wants a unique experience. And to provide your customers with such an experience, you need to customize. This is where you can use LeadSquared. You can use this software to personalize every aspect of your email marketing campaign. This can get you higher open rates, click rates and responses.
5. Paradot
Pardot is marketing automation and lead management platform created by Salesforce for B2B companies. Cloud-hosted and accessible on desktop and mobile devices, this software combines the power of multiple features in one interface. Among the tools included in Pardot are for email marketing, lead nurturing, and sales intelligence. To start incorporating Pardot in your business operations, you may choose from their three annual payment plans, which you can check out here!. You can choose to receive a free demo of how this tool works, before investing in it here!
Why Choose Pardot?
a) Smart Lead Generation:
Make sure your pipeline always has high-quality leads to process. With Pardot, you can efficiently generate more leads through smart email marketing and social media marketing. On top of that, the software can also help you create engaging landing pages and forms.
b) Insightful Reporting:
Get a better grasp of what aspects of your marketing campaign are working and what is not through insightful ROI reporting. With this feature, you can optimize your operations based on data collected straight from your customers and leads.
c) Superior Lead Management:
Reach customers at the right time by using their lead management tool. Using Pardot, you can send emails based on triggers such as time, interactions, and other custom parameters. You may also re-engage dormant leads, identify the hottest leads before your competitors get to them, and create dynamic lead category lists for better targeting.
As a small business owner, you have to be a multitasker. However, that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t automate some of your daily tasks.
6. Drip (COMPLIMENTARY)
With the vast plethora of tools out there, we just had to give more!
A pioneer in sense, Drip is the first e-commerce CRM in the world and is owned by Leadpages. Even though this tool is new compared to established leaders like AWeber and MailChimp, it provides all the necessary features a company could need to efficiently automate their day-to-day processes. Drip offers three pricing plans to suit every business type. Each plan offers a different set of features and a different cost. Depending on the size and business requirements, you can opt for an ideal one from the three pricing plans from here.
Why Choose Drip?
a) Automated Workflows
With this feature, you can send automatic triggers and responses within no time. You won’t have to worry about manually moving your customers to the next stage in the journey. This feature can do it all for you.
b) Personalization
No two customers are the same. Each one has a different interest, experience, and requirements. As each one is different, you cannot create a strategy with the ‘one size fits all’ approach. This is when personalization comes into the picture. Drip encourages you to adopt dynamic marketing strategies that vary for every potential customer.
c) Make Informed Decisions
With Drip’s Analytics and Reporting feature, you can use data to make well-informed decisions. This will help you identify what is working and what’s not for your business. Based on these data and market trends, you can create suitable strategies.
Hopefully, with our list of top 20 marketing automation software solutions for small business and comprehensive marketing automation software 2019 comparison, you were able to find the right platform to help you with your campaigns.
Did we miss any marketing automation software for small businesses that you think should be included on this list? Leave a comment and let us know!
Thanks for sharing this valuable information with us, it is really helpful article!
I would add mailchimp to your list, which is great for automating mailing systems