Small Business Marketing Automation Ultimate Guide
Marketing automation is not only for industry giants, it can be a cookie for small business like yours as well.
Days are long gone, when you need to sit before a computer sending follow-up emails to clients, reply to messages from leads, and inform about your vacations individually. Moreover, automation in not only email marketing across all channels including social media, text messages, etc., you can reap the fruits of automation.
In this blog post, we will walk you through the benefits, use cases, tips & tricks of marketing automation for small businesses. Let’s dive in.
1. Benefits of Marketing Automation for Small Businesses
Marketing automation is revolutionizing the way small businesses promote their products, streamlining processes and opening up a world of possibilities for entrepreneurs. Through automated email campaigns and website analytics, it’s easier than ever to engage customers on both an individual basis as well as with mass campaigns.
Take advantage today – your business won’t regret it!
Increased Efficiency
One of the primary benefits of marketing automation for small businesses is increased efficiency. Marketing automation software can help to automate repetitive tasks, such as email marketing, social media posting, and lead generation. This can free up time for small business owners and employees to focus on more important tasks, such as growing the business.
Improved Customer Relationships
Another benefit of marketing automation is improved customer relationships. Marketing automation software can help small businesses to better segment and target their customers, which can lead to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, automated marketing campaigns can help to keep customers informed about new products or services, special offers, and other important information.
Cost Savings
Marketing automation can also help small businesses to save money. Automated marketing campaigns are often less expensive than traditional marketing campaigns, as they require less manpower to execute. Additionally, marketing automation software often comes with a variety of features that can help small businesses to save money on other marketing tasks, such as lead management and email marketing.
Increased Sales
One of the ultimate goals of any small business is to increase sales, and marketing automation can help to achieve this goal. Automated marketing campaigns can reach a larger audience more efficiently than traditional marketing methods, which can lead to more sales. Additionally, automated campaigns can be better targeted to specific audience, which can further increase sales conversion rates.
Improved ROI
Another benefit of marketing automation is improved return on investment (ROI). Because automated marketing campaigns are often more efficient and cost-effective than traditional campaigns, they tend to have a higher ROI. This means that small businesses will see a greater return on their investment in marketing automation software than they would from other types of software or traditional marketing methods.
Greater Reach
With marketing automation, you can also reach a larger audience with your marketing messages. By automating the distribution of your content, you can ensure that your message reaches a wider audience than would be possible with manual methods. Additionally, many marketing automation platforms offer features such as lead scoring and segmentation that can help you to target your messages more effectively.
Improved Lead Generation
In addition to increasing sales and ROI, marketing automation can also help to improve lead generation for small businesses. By automating lead capture and nurturing processes, you can generate more qualified leads in less time, making it easier to convert them into customers. Additionally, by using lead scoring and segmentation features offered by many marketing automation platforms, you can prioritize leads based on their likelihood of conversion, making it easier to focus your sales efforts on the most promising prospects.
Enhanced Reporting and Analytics
Most marketing automation platforms offer reporting and analytics features that allow you to track the performance of your campaigns and measure their ROI. This data can be extremely valuable in helping you to optimize your campaigns for better results. Additionally, by understanding which channels are performing best for your business, you can allocate your resources more effectively and focus your efforts on the most effective channels.
2. Various Use Cases of Marketing Automation
Automation can be implemented in various departments. It saves your time and efforts spent on repetitive tasks.
Automation in Email Marketing
By implementing automation in your email marketing activities, you can send pre-drafted emails to your lists with regard to specific triggers or timeframes. No matter whether you’re present at work or not, emails will be delivered to the recipients as you scheduled.
What emails can be automated?
- Welcome messages
- Demo/tutorials
- Lead nurturing
- Reminders/follow-up messages
- Responses to form submissions
All these emails follow a specific scenario which will be triggered when such actions take place. On the other hand, there are few other behavioral actions that require different triggers for emails.
Let’s say, you’re announcing a small giveaway for users who have subscribed to your premium newsletter plans. This email should be sent only for those subscribers and not for other users. If you’re doing it manually, it would be tedious, as you’ll have to search in the list of subscribers and send unique emails.
But with the help of tools, you can setup a behavior campaign signifying the subscribed users.
Email Marketing Automation Tools
MailChimp – Pricing
- Free version is available
- Essentials – $9.25/month
- Standard – $13.81/month
- Premium – $276.22/month
- Click here to know more about pricing
Sendinblue – Pricing
- Free version is available
- Starter – $25/month
- Business – $65/month
- Enterprise – $1000/month
- Click here to know more about pricing
ActiveCampaign – Pricing
- Lite – $29/month
- Plus – $49/month
- Professional – $149/month
- Enterprise – Custom
- Click here to know more about pricing
Automation in Social Media Management
For a small business, social media is a treasure. Nevertheless, managing various channels and accounts manually will be overwhelming.
As you invest in automation, you need not every time log-in to a different channel and post things. Instead, you can set-up a calendar and schedule the posting dates and even timings too. It will be streaming online without any hassles.
With sales automation, you can schedule posts at your peak engagement hours, respond to messages/comments through bots, and more.
Social Media Automation Tools
Hootsuite – Pricing
- Trial version is available
- Professional – $23.14/month
- Team – $90.01/month
- Business – $543.69/month
- Enterprise – Custom
- Click here to learn more about pricing
Buffer
- Free version is available
- Essentials – $60/year
- Team – $120/year
- Agency – $1200/year
- Click here to know more about pricing
SproutSocial – Pricing
- 30-days free trial version available
- Standard – $24/month
- Professional – $399/month
- Advanced – $499/month
- Enterprise – Custom quote
- Click here to know more about pricing
Zoho Social – Pricing
- 15-day free trial available
- Standard – $7.25/year
- Professional – $20.84/year
- Premium – $31.35/year
- Click here to know more about pricing
Automation in Lead Generation
With sales automation, you can easily identify leads that have higher possibilities to convert. This saves your time and effort spent on users having a low chance of qualifying and focuses more on hitting target users with the perfect deal at the perfect time. This is more for a small business.
How does sales automation actually work?
In sales automation tools, there is this concept called – lead scoring, where the tool assigns a number to every lead based on engagement, demographics and behaviors. Leads with high scores represent their proximity toward conversion and low-score leads are the least possible to qualify.
Sales Automation Tools
Zapier – Pricing
- Free version is available
- Starter – $19.99/month
- Professional – $49/month
- Team – $399/month
- Company – $700/month
- Click here to know more about pricing
HubSpot Sales – Pricing
- Starter – $45/month
- Professional – $450/month
- Enterprise – $1200/month
- Click here to know more about pricing
Salesforce – Pricing
- Free version is available
- Essentials – $25/month
- Professional – $75/month
- Enterprise – $150/month
- Unlimited – $300/month
- Click here to know more about pricing
Tips for Effective Marketing Automation
Here, we’ve rounded off a few proven techniques for marketing automation. As you try out all these tips consistently, there are possibilities for growth in your small business website traffic.
Setup Your Goals
Being a small business, as first things first, you should set clear & attainable goals. Only if you set a goal, say, for example, increasing your visitors’ count for one of your e-books, you’ll know what nature of campaigns can drive users towards action.
So, before everything comes goal-setting.
– Determine a goal
– Decide on the nature of the campaign
– Send the targeted emails to the intended audience
Build Your Contact List
Target audience? Who are they? Where can you find them? Target audience are the people whom you wish to be your customers.
Many services are selling a ready-made list of users with their contact details. These are too expensive for a small business. As these are not intended audience, acquiring a win-win is quite hard.
Whereas when you prepare a list on your own, you’ll be including all intended audience. Here there are greater possibilities to win leads to your pipeline.
Segment Your List
In this step, you’ll be ready with a list of the intended audience. It’s time for segmentation. Depending on demographics, interests and behavior patterns, target users might differ. There is never a one-size-fits-all.
Based on the criteria, you can segregate the audience and drop mails into their inbox. But, one very important thing to note is, your mail content. Make small tweaks on and off, so the content doesn’t sound too robotic, repetitive and irrelevant.
It would be great if you bring that human touch into your body of content. It should be a bit hard for your users to even recognize that they are conversing with a bot.
– Entry point of your users
– Buyer personas
– Behavioural patterns
– Lead score
Conduct A/B Testing
In small business email marketing campaigns, A/B testing is an interesting experiment. You will be creating two different email content and sharing it with similar groups. Further optimizations are made to the one which works better than the other.
Split testing in its pure form helps you to make data-driven decisions about what’s working and what’s not. CTRs, conversions, unsubscribe rates and number of opened emails can support your decision-making.
Marketing Automation – The Gamechanger in the Small Business World!
Marketing automation – It’s not something you setup once and leave untouched, you’ll need to consistently monitor the performance and experiment with new ways!
For a small business, marketing automation can be a fountain of waters! If you wish to consult a leading small business marketing automation company, we’re here with you. At Small Business Web, we’re so passionate about automation marketing and experiment new ways. Feel free to reach us via call – +919442789110 or message.
We’ll together build campaigns that grab traffic to your small business website!
About the Author - Pavithra Samuel
I'm a passionate copywriter at Small Business Web sharing a special bond with digital marketing. I aim at delivering masterpiece content for which my research helps a lot. I always search for unique inspirations and write them all down to use in my blogs & content. I make the best use of the upgraded tools & technologies that greatly assist in content writing. Other than reading & writing, my other two friends are food & music. On and often, I do write blog posts, to get regular updates, stay tuned with us.
