Owning and maintaining an effective small business comes with many challenges. Small business owners are faced with the non-stop juggle of workload, staffing, cashflow, market conditions and competitor pressures. Although being a small business owner can be highly rewarding, finding creative solutions to the balancing act of these areas, and more, is paramount to success.
Automation offers small businesses many benefits, including the ability to alleviate manual workloads and ensure teams can remain focused on the core outputs required to achieve success. As any business owner knows, consistently delivering powerful marketing messages to your target markets is a critical element of engaging existing clients and introducing yourself to new prospects.
Marketing automation creates the power to streamline customer communications, achieved through replacing repetitive manual tasks with automated workflows. For example, instead of manually sending a potential lead follow-up messages a week after your first pitch, marketing automation allows you to โset and forgetโ โ that customer will receive a predefined automated email that continues to market your business to them.
Marketing automation is as wide and varied as the businesses that choose to employ its tactics โ by identifying areas in your marketing workflows where automation can be of service, youโll stand to gain back valuable hours of manpower whilst ensuring marketing is prioritized without fail.
MARKETING AUTOMATION APPS FOR SMALL BUSINESS
Thereโs a huge range of marketing automation options available in the market, so weโve rounded up some of our highlights in order to take a closer look at the benefits they offer.
AGILECRM
AgileCRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an all-inclusive CRM system that allows businesses to automate sales, marketing and services within the same platform. It includes features such asโฆ
- Contract Management
- Project Management
- Telephony
- Deal tracking
- Appointment Scheduling
- Gamification
- Marketing Automation via workflows
- Landing Page Builders
- Social Suite โ social media integration
- Email Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Email Tracking
HUBSPOT
HubSpotโs software is focused on inbound marketing and sales, with the goal of enabling companies to attract more visitors and convert leads into paying customers. Its inbound marketing focus sets it apart from its competitors in its singular focus on harnessing the power of inbound marketing to lead to increased profits and business growth. Services offered within the HubSpot platform includeโฆ
- Website Management
- SEO
- Marketing Automation
- Landing Pages
- Analytics
- Social Media
- Blogging
INFUSIONSOFT
Infusionsoft is another market player offering sales and marketing software thatโs set up for integration with a wide variety of apps. With features such as sales management and automation in the area of follow-up emails, tasks, appointments and more, Infusionsoft has the ability to extend beyond marketing automation into other areas of customer relationship management. Its features includeโฆ
- CRM
- Marketing Automation
- Sales Automation
- Integrations
- Online Sales/Store
- Analytics
- Mobile
- Payments
Infusionsoftโs customizable CRM system allows for businesses of all sizes to benefit from its flexibility, tailoring its services to serve business function on a case-by-case basis.
INSIGHTLY
Insightly holds another piece of the competitive CRM landscape, offering marketing automation abilities alongside a host of other features. Its marketing automation can assist businesses in areas such as engaging with new leads, automatically sorting leads into different categories, and tying into existing web presences to capture customer engagement and feed information back into new and existing database records. It also offers direct integration with MailChimp, a popular EDM (Electronic Direct Mail) management tool.
Insightlyโs features are listed asโฆ
- Relationship Links
- Automated Lead Capture and Distribution
- Sales Pipeline Management
- Workflow Automation Tools
- Project Scheduling and Management
- App Connectivity
- Open API
With such a wide range of marketing automation and CRM tools on the market, thereโs sure to be a fit for your business that positions you for increased growth and smoother workflows.