Do you want to spend less time on an email marketing campaign in your small business? Using marketing automation software to handle repeated tasks for you is key to growing your website.

In this article, we’ll share the best marketing automation software for small businesses so you can save yourself time and money with your online marketing efforts.

• What is a Marketing Automation Software?
• How Do I Choose a Marketing Automation Software?
• What is the Best Marketing Automation Software?
• How do you Automate a Small Business?
• Who needs Marketing Automation?
• What is the Difference Between CRM and Marketing Automation?
• How can I Learn Marketing Automation?

What is a Marketing Automation Software?

A Marketing Automation Software is a technology platform and service that automates repetitive online tasks. It’s designed for marketers and organizations to more effectively market their brand over websites, email, and through social media.

Read Also: Email Marketing Software for Small Business

Companies using automated lead management tools see a 10% increase in revenue, so it’s important to use marketing automation software, even in small businesses.

How Do I Choose a Marketing Automation Software?

Ready to start automating your online marketing but not sure which solution is best for your small business? These 8 tips can help you narrow down your choices:

1. Create a Plan. Set goals and map out your marketing funnel. The more clear your strategy is, the simpler it will be to find a software with features that support it.
2. Ask Around. Ask people you know with similar websites what they use and recommend. If they’ve got a successful business online, chances are they’re already using a fantastic marketing software for small business.
3. Consider Cost. A marketing automation platform provides a ton of value, so it’s not free. Make sure you check the pricing page for any setup or extra fees so there are no surprises.
4. Look at Feedback. Make sure to see what customer reviews say about their experience using the software and the support.
5. Check Availability. Down-time for tech companies happen, so find out if the platform you want has a backup in place. Read the Service Level Agreements and look for a commitment to availability.
6. Build a Short List. Get your list down to just a few choices so you can take a deeper look into your favorites.
7. Test Drive Demos. Sign up for trial demos and get a feel for the software by actually using it. You may instantly find the one you want once you’re inside the software.
8. Be Thorough. The more research you put into picking your software, the better off you’ll be later on. You don’t want to pick a platform that can’t continue to meet your needs as your website grows.

So now that you know how to choose a marketing automation software, let’s move on to our list of the top marketing automation software.

What is the Best Marketing Automation Software?

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading growth platform. Since 2006, we have been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, over 68,800 total customers in more than 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers.

Comprised of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM, HubSpot gives companies the tools they need to Grow Better. HubSpot Marketing Hub has everything you need to run successful inbound marketing campaigns that make people interested in your business and happy to be your customer.

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign’s category-defining Customer Experience Automation (CXA) Platform helps over 120,000 businesses in 170 countries meaningfully engage with their customers. The platform gives businesses of all sizes access to hundreds of pre-built automations that combine email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text.

Over 70% of ActiveCampaign’s customers use its 300+ integrations including Shopify, Square, Facebook, Eventbrite, WordPress and Salesforce. Pricing starts at $9 a month. ActiveCampaign was built on the idea that an excellent customer experience must go beyond the traditional marketing touchpoints, like email.

Delivering a personalized, high-touch experience is easy in the very beginning, but as a business grows— adding channels, additional teams, locations, customer segments, etc.— the complexity of managing relationships is too much, and that personalized connection doesn’t scale (this is why we’ve all received sales emails for products we already own, been asked to review a product we returned or had disjointed experiences across success reps while trying to resolve a support ticket, etc.)

This is why email marketing, marketing automation, service and support tools, and CRMs end up wasting time for organizations instead of supporting their growth. With ActiveCampaign, and the Customer Experience Automation (CXA) category, we are removing the silos between data sources, communication channels, and teams, and helping businesses scale their 1-1 personal customer relationships through connected experiences that span the customer lifecycle.

This enables businesses to automate a truly personalized experience that feels authentic, so their customer relationships can scale, no matter how large that business grows.

3. SharpSpring

SharpSpring is a comprehensive marketing automation platform with robust features, functionality and performance. SharpSpring is one of the most flexible platforms on the market, offering powerful, behavior-based email marketing, native or 3rd party CRM integration, dynamic forms, landing page and blog builders, social media management, universal CMS compatibility, and integration with hundreds of applications.

SharpSpring is usually less than 1/3 the cost of the competition, is the easiest company to work with and the easiest platform to use. Marketing agencies should inquire about SharpSpring’s special partner program.

4. Klaviyo

What do sophisticated D2C brands like ColourPop, Huckberry, and Chubbies all have in common? They rely on Klaviyo to supercharge their growth. Klaviyo is a growth marketing platform that helps you deliver more personalized experiences across owned marketing channels like email, SMS, in-app notifications, and web.

And the results speak for themselves—brands have made more than $3.7 billion in revenue through Klaviyo in the last year alone. Creating deeper, higher-value customer relationships has never been more seamless. There’s a reason why 67 brands move to Klaviyo every day.

5. Omnisend

Join fellow e-commerce businesses who choose Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing to increase their sales, not the workload. Full integration with e-commerce platforms, pre-built automation workflows, and intuitive, no-code editing make it easy to get up & running without diving into the gritty details – unless you want to. More than 50,000 e-commerce brands use Omnisend to grow their businesses on autopilot, converting their customers with quick-to-build, highly-relevant emails & texts.

Send newsletters and targeted campaigns Create beautiful, shoppable emails in minutes using our drag & drop email builder and a variety of ready-made email templates. Add coupon codes, automatically pick & insert products and automatically resend campaigns to the non-openers – all without any tedious manual work! Drive sales on autopilot with e-commerce automation Win (back) lost sales with pre-built workflows for cart abandonment, welcome series, transactional emails, and more.

Get pre-built, revenue-generating automation running in minutes or easily build your custom workflows using our no-code, drag & drop Automation Editor. Improve your targeting with robust segmentation Segment your customers based on their shopping behavior as well as other properties to improve conversions with well-targeted, personalized emails, and texts. Create segments for high-value customers, for specific category/product shoppers or those that need to be reengaged, and personalize your messaging.

Combine email with SMS and more channels Add SMS and push notifications right next to your emails using the same platform and provide a consistent, omnichannel customer experience. Save time and costs – there’s no need to pay for separate email, SMS, and push apps anymore! Build your email & SMS lists Collect new subscribers using our mobile-friendly, fully customizable forms.

Choose from popups, signup boxes, landing pages, or a wheel of fortune to seamlessly collect email and/or SMS opt-ins. Capture your visitors with exit-intent forms and improve popup engagement using form targeting options, all available within Omnisend.

24/7 Support We give you stellar support and helpful advice anytime you need it. We’re available 24/7. Try all Omnisend features free on a 14-day trial. After 14 days, you can decide whether to keep paid features or keep using our Free plan that helps you grow.

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform helps small businesses market smarter so you can grow faster. As the backbone for your customer relationships, they provide AI-powered, user-friendly tools anyone can use to be successful.

Mailchimp puts your audience at the center so you can send marketing emails and automated messages, create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, facilitate reporting and analytics, and sell online.

Millions of businesses and individuals – from community organizations to Fortune 100 companies – trust Mailchimp to connect with their audience with the right message, at the right time, in the right place. Founded in 2001 and based in Atlanta, GA, Mailchimp has 1000+ employees and is privately held.

7. Drip

Drip is the world’s first ECRM–an Ecommerce CRM designed for building personal and profitable relationships with your customers at scale. Ecommerce marketers around the world are starting to see their customers in full color with Drip features like, comprehensive tracking, hyper-segmentation, and robust email marketing automation. They’re graduating from typical email platforms, bloated CRMs, or overhyped marketing automation tools, and making more money with Drip.

8. Thryv

Thryv is an end-to-end client experience platform built for small businesses. Software that helps you get the job, manage the job and get credit, all from a single screen. Helping small business owners meet today’s expectations, from one simple platform. Include best in class support, available anytime – unlimited 24/7, with business specialists who understand the goals and unique needs of small business owners.

Thryv automates tasks and puts customers at the center of your business, with one easy-to-use software, making it easy to reach more customers, stay organized, get paid faster and automatically generate reviews.

Thryv makes it easy for customers to:

• Find you online through ratings and reviews, social presence and accurate search results.

• Interact easily and instantly, receive reminders, send texts and emails and schedule appointments.

• Pay you effortlessly, receive receipts instantly, know it’s safe and secure and choose how to pay.

• Stay engaged with automated messages that ask them back, stay in touch and request reviews.

Thryv’s award-winning software is helping over 40,000 businesses transform how they do business and manage their customers.

9. GetResponse

GetResponse is a comprehensive marketing software platform that helps you create content, boost sales, and increase traffic to your website. Integrated email marketing, autoresponders, and landing pages let you automate essential tasks and launch effective marketing campaigns. Advanced analytics make it easy to track conversions, leads, and ROI, and learn what your customers want. Customizable template scenarios do the work for you – no coding necessary.

10. EngageBay All-in-One Suite

EngageBay All-in-One Suite is a simple, affordable, all-in-one CRM and marketing automation platform built for small businesses and startups.to acquire, engage, nurture web visitors and convert them to happy customers.

Acquire leads through lead generation forms and popups, engage web visitors through beautiful landing pages, nurture them through engaging emails and automate your marketing funnel through marketing automation. Track the leads and convert them to customers using an inbuilt CRM system.

How do you Automate a Small Business?

1. Choose which tasks you’re going to automate

If this sounds obvious or simple, think again. Choosing the right tasks to automate is absolutely crucial and this is where most businesses get off to a false start with automation – so don’t make the same mistake.

First, you need to understand how automation works and what it’s truly capable of because the majority of tasks you can automate, you probably shouldn’t. There are tonnes of tools for automating translation, web design, content writing and everything else you could do as a marketer or business owner – but most of them fall way short of the mark.

Translation technology, for example, is basically useless for most business purposes and it’s difficult to know whether the technology will ever be able to replicate the complex cognitive processes human translators are capable of.

So what kind of tasks should you be automating?

Well, you want to automate tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming and easy for algorithms to handle 100% accurately without your input. Tasks like:

• Publishing WordPress posts to Twitter at specific times
• Bulk image resizing and optimisation
• Analytics reports
• Sending invoices once tasks are completed
• Scoring leads based on user actions
• Automating email responses for different lead scores
• Reaching out to existing customer

What you don’t want to try and automate are tasks that require creative thinking and a lot of human input – ie: content creation, design processes or problem solving. Start simple by connecting platforms together with tools like Zapier and IFTTT and aim to take out as many repetitive tasks out of your workflow as possible.

For example, do you really need to import spreadsheets between Excel and Google Sheets six times a day when you could automate this process?

Once you get a feel for what automation can/can’t do you’ll start to come up with some more ambitious strategies that don’t simply save you time and money but transform your business entirely. Before long, you’ll be writing success stories like these:

2. Choose your automation tools

Once you know which tasks you’re going to automate, it’s time to choose the tools you’re going to use to make things happen. There are so many automation platforms available now that it’s difficult to know where to begin, thankfully, we have mentioned some of them to you above. So it is now easier for you to choose.

3. Set your automation targets

It’s no good spending money on automation tools and investing time in creating new workflows if they don’t make your business more profitable. So before you put any workflows in place, make sure you set specific targets that you can use to gauge success and refine your processes.

In some cases, your goal might be to simpy match the performance of your team and then use that time elsewhere. For example, you may automate your social posts so that blog articles are automatically published on Twitter three times per day for a week. If your team is already doing this, automating this workflow isn’t going to improve results, it’s simply going to free up time that you can spend on other things.

The question is: what are you going to do with this time that adds value to your business? The goal of this automation is to allow you to do something else – so what is it? Define your goal and make sure it’s measurable so you can see the impact of even minor automations like these (they all add up).

For other workflows, setting goals will happen naturally. For example, when you’re creating an automated lead generation process, you’ll set a target number of leads and other KPIs while your sales automation will set targets for closing more leads and retaining more customers.

Be specific, set targets for each quarter and use these as a benchmark to gauge success.

4. Track results and refine your processes

Without setting targets and choosing the right KPIs, you’ll struggle to measure how much of a positive impact automation is having on your business. More importantly, you won’t be able to pinpoint opportunities to refine your automations and improve results.

When automation allows you to multiply tasks almost infinitely, a simple tweak to your workflow can add thousands or even hundreds of thousands to your profit margins. Our automated webinar strategy increased leads by more than 300% in less than a year because we set our targets, measures results and optimised our processes.

That’s just one marketing automation strategy that’s made a serious impact to our business and we know we’re getting close to the best results we possibly can from it. Without tracking results and refining our workflow, we’d have no idea how much more this strategy could be adding to our annual profit margins.

5. Create an automative culture in your workplace

Once you get to grips with automation, you’ll realise it’s a state of mind as much as a technology. You’ll look at everything and think can we automate that? and you’ll look at every existing automation you’re running and think how can we improve that?

This is the kind of automation culture you want to build in your workplace, across your entire team. This mindset is all about efficiency, making the most of your resources and maximising results with what you have – everything you want your team to be thinking about when they’re completing tasks.

You want your team members to recognize when they’re repeating the same tasks over and again, tasks that could be automated and free up more time for ones that can’t. This kind of mindset doesn’t come automatically (how ironic) so make this a constant presence in the workplace and reward your team for turning automation into better results.

Who needs Marketing Automation?

Whether you should use marketing automation or not is fairly straightforward to determine. If you need to improve your lead generation, nurturing, and overall inbound marketing and sales performance and are looking to save time, then marketing automation might make sense for your business.

You know you need automated marketing when…

• you spend more time building and updating standard operating procedures for different tools than you use the actual tools
• you don’t nurture leads
• you send each email campaign, response, and blog post manually
• you can’t connect your activities to trackable metrics
• your website doesn’t generate enough leads and sales
• your website isn’t nurturing visitors
• you would like to increase your online sales
• you would like to stop outbound sales
• you would like to stop cold call rejections
• your sales team is need of more qualified leads
• your sales team would like to better understand their prospects
• your company would like predictable monthly leads
• you would like to maximize your email list
• you would like to grow your email list
• you think social media can help your company
• you are not sure your content marketing is working

The highest performing companies, marketing teams, and marketers use marketing automation to build campaigns, analyze performance, and feed their sales teams good leads to achieve a better return on investment.

These companies aren’t 10 times better, smarter, or more capable than you. They simply take advantage of the right tools; tools that empower them to make better decisions, streamline processes, and view the entire marketing and sales funnel. The marketing environment is dominated by digital, making these abilities essential to your success.

As marketers, you care about more leads (volume), qualified leads (quality) and, most importantly, more revenue for business growth. Not to mention, you want to save time by systemizing repetitive tasks, have accurate data and analytics for your reports, and make your job easier rather than harder.

So, do you need marketing automation?

The answer is based on your business model, your needs, and the team you have in place. Marketing automation is the center of a digital, system-oriented, and result-driven marketing department, that allows a business to accelerate campaigns, reach more prospects, generate more qualified leads, and demonstrate a return on marketing and sales investment. These are all positive outcomes that can allow you to grow and thrive.

What is the Difference Between CRM and Marketing Automation?

One of the main differences between these software types is who they target. CRM software is primarily sales-focused, while marketing automation software is (aptly) marketing-focused.

• Marketo—a leading marketing automation software provider—describes marketing automation software as a system that “allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows.”
• Salesforce—a leading CRM software provider—defines CRM as: “A strategy for managing all your company’s interactions with current and prospective customers.”

Marketers typically use marketing automation software to schedule and track marketing campaigns—especially email campaigns and mass business-to-customer communications.

Benefits of marketing automation software include:

• The ability to segment prospects into appropriate mailing lists based on past interactions with your company or their interests and preferences.
• Lead nurturing functionality, letting you automatically send triggered emails at the time a person is most interested in your product or service. You can also schedule a series of emails in a “drip” campaign, so your company stays top-of-mind with prospects.
• Once a campaign has ended, the system generates analytics showing how successful the campaign was.

Marketing automation software helps foster leads and get them ready for your sales team. Once the lead has progressed to the bottom of the funnel to become a qualified sales lead (and eventually a customer), that’s when companies typically start tracking interactions with a CRM tool.

CRM software stores information including how long a contact has been a customer, past purchase records, the dates and notes of any phone conversations with a contact, a record of inbound emails they’ve sent to your sales and/or customer service teams, and more.

Sales and customer service teams use CRM data to optimize one-on-one interactions between companies and their clients to increase sales and customer satisfaction.

According to recent research conducted by Capterra, 56% of small businesses already have CRM software.

Benefits of CRM software include:

• Sales personnel can see where a customer is in the sales process and help close the deal.
• Your business can offer targeted promotional material that’s more likely to lead to a sale and build good faith between you and your customer.
• When speaking to a customer, you can have a full picture of who they are and their history with your company, which helps make the conversation as personal and successful as possible.
• Many CRMs can also sync with social media platforms so you can keep track of which channels are driving the most traffic, and what people are saying about your company.
• CRMs can send internal alerts when a call is scheduled when a client’s account is set to renew, or even when a customer’s birthday is coming up so that your sales and service reps know to reach out.

Simply put: CRM systems help secure sales by making the sales process a more personal experience for the customer.

Most marketing automation solutions let you sync your data with your CRM so all of a prospects’ activities are accessible through one solution.

Companies can sync the information both ways, so their marketing team knows what’s going on in sales while their sales and customer service teams know the marketing history of each prospect or customer they interact with.

If your don’t want to buy two separate systems, many CRM software vendors have developed or acquired marketing automation software, so there are a handful of single systems out there that include the functionality of both.

How can I Learn Marketing Automation?

Know Sales Well Enough to Attain Alignment

If you have worked in Sales before, at any level, then you can help Marketing align with Sales. If you haven’t worked in Sales, then it is important to understand a few key things about salespeople.

• Sales cares about revenue booked before end of month, end of quarter, and end of year. They will do anything within the rules to attain that number.
• Revenue booked means commissions in the paycheck and salespeople keep their jobs this month.
• Sales will think you are amazing if all they do is receive emails and phone calls from people who have a check today.
• Salespeople will find leads from anywhere if they do not get them from you.
• Salespeople rarely care about permission marketing.

Thus, salespeople are motivated by commissions on revenue. Revenue comes from closed-won sales from high quality leads either Marketing finds or they find themselves. Salespeople will do what they can to win business. This situation is neither good nor bad, so just work with it.

Attaining sales-marketing alignment is a process better discussed elsewhere, however, do know that Sales likes it when you listen to their needs they see and feel you removing friction from their sales process.

Know Marketing

Someone once said that all of marketing is an experiment. Some experiments work, some do not. We feel that while individual tactics are experiments, there are principles and processes that are timeless, even if the words change. If you are a B2B marketer like me, you should be familiar with these disciplines:

• Inbound Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Outbound Marketing
• Permission Marketing
• Direct Marketing/Demand Generation
• Measuring success or failure

Know Technology Systems

At this point, you know some technology, whether it is your iPad, your laptop, or just how to find things on the internet. Here are a few key technologies you should be more familiar with to become a Rockstar:

• Database Concepts: Understand what a database is, how it can be used, the different forms it can take. Also, know the difference between an interface and the underlying data table.
  • Fields
  • Picklists
  • Triggers
  • Apex Code
  • Unique ID
  • Tables
  • Objects (like SFDC Lead, Account, etc.)
• Flow Charts: know the four key icons: Choice, Action, Process, Database. Know you can use Visio or Lucidchart to help map out nurture flows and more.
• Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) like Marketo or Eloqua.
• CRMs: Salesforce, MS Dynamics
• The Principles of Data Cleanliness

Understand Basic Logic

A marketer these days must know Boolean logic well enough to target audiences effectively. Most MAPs use Boolean logic operators to help you find the right people. Keep in mind this is not SQL or complex programming – you are likely already familiar with it from Google or math class.

In Marketo, each operator works like so:

AND/ALL: both filters are true, so the lead(s) returned must have both true.

OR/ANY: either filter can be true, so the lead returned can have both, or just one true.

NOT: the lead must not have this criteria true. This one is hard in Marketo because there are two ways:

• Member of Smart List NOT IN “X” – means the lead did not qualify for that list. This is the “positive” version where we include a group, but then exclude it.
• NOT WAS Sent Email IS “X” – means the lead was never sent that email. Be careful because it will often return a very large group of people.

Help Others

And, of course, a Marketing Automation expert helps others get up to speed and shares the knowledge. If you keep the knowledge to yourself no one is going to know how awesome you are and you don’t become an expert. Marketing is also about marketing yourself, but always through service to others.

A few ways you can help others grow in marketing automation:

• Actively participate in the Marketo Community
• Write a blog about cool things you can do.
• Train your colleagues to do their jobs faster with new skills.
• Write documentation for your instance.

Treat Your Audience the Way You Want to be Treated

Marketing automation is just like any other computer: garbage in, garbage out; it can do good things fast and bad things faster. In this day of real time marketing, you must be vigilant in ensuring proper marketing automation.

Read Also: Marketing Automation for Agencies

First, you must always provide something helpful to your audience. This comes before automation.

Second, you must always test your campaigns in the system before sending them. Always fail in private, never in public. Think of the times you received spam or that huge New York Times email failure where 8 million incorrect messages went out. Avoid infamy through process and testing. If something doesn’t feel right, fix it.

Third, always honor unsubscribes. Even if it hurts. You are not a low life spammer who annoys people or breaks the law.