Marketing involves a lot of steps from ideation to execution. Many of these steps are repetitive tasks that can be eliminated with automation. Using marketing automation tools allows you to streamline your marketing processes and workflow so you can save time, get more work done efficiently, and reduce costs.
Automation can help a business increase customer satisfaction, ROI, and overall growth. So in this article, we will highlight the different marketing processes you can automate and the best marketing automation tools for each one.
Let’s get started.
1. For email marketing automation — Omnisend
Omnisend is an email and SMS marketing service for eCommerce businesses. Most email marketing services offer few features for their free plans, but Omnisend offers most of its features in its free plan. The free plan includes powerful features like pre-built automations and workflows, subscriber segmentation, customer analytics, performance reports, A/B testing, professional email templates, and forms.
Omnisend integrates with popular eCommerce platforms and website builders. It also integrates with other business tools like live chat software and conversion rate optimization platforms. Omnisend’s automation workflows include emails like cart abandonment emails, welcome series emails, cross-sell emails, and more. Omnisend also offers SMS marketing built-in and allows you to send messages to any country.
Cost/month: As your contact list grows, you need to upgrade to paid plans. $16 for growing and medium-sized businesses. $59 for high-volume senders.
2. For social media automation — Sendible
Sendible is a comprehensive social media management tool that makes it easy for brands to manage social media at scale. It offers different solutions from publishing, collaboration and analytics, to social listening.
Sendible’s publishing solution allows you to automate your social media content. You can schedule posts in bulk or individually as far in the future as you need. You can also group social media posts into queued campaigns and schedule them to be posted on specific days and at optimal times.
Sendible’s social listening solution makes it easy to monitor your hashtags, relevant keywords, your brand comments, and competitors on social media. You can also generate in-depth reports that can be automatically sent to team members and clients.
Cost/month: $29 for freelancers. $89 for startup agencies and brands. $199 for growing agencies and brands. $399 for large teams and agencies.
3. For PPC ads automation — PromoNavi
PromoNavi is a digital advertising platform that provides you with PPC tools that allows you to automate your online ads. PromoNavi has features to suit eCommerce businesses, marketers, and agencies.
For eCommerce store owners, PromoNavi will fully automate your Google Shopping, Search, and Display campaigns. They will also handle feed approval support and offer you insights on how you can improve your campaigns. Marketers and agencies can also use it to launch and manage Google, Microsoft, and Facebook Ads.
PromoNavi offers end-to-end automations on their Shopify Apps so store owners can run ads without knowing anything about online marketing. You can also use the competitor analysis tool to uncover the PPC strategies of rivals and the keyword research tool to find suitable keywords for your ad campaign.
Cost/month: They offer two plans. Shopify app pricing offers a free plan and a $19 basic plan. Standalone platform pricing starts at $49 for the business plan and $79 for the agency plan.
4. For customer service automation — Help Scout
Help Scout is a help-desk software that allows you to manage all of your customer conversations on one platform. The main features that Help Scout offers are a shared inbox, live chat, knowledge base, reporting, in-app messages, and integrations.
With the shared inbox, teams can collaborate with ease, create automatic workflows that handle repetitive tasks, and automatically organize/assign conversations. In-app messages allow you to automate promotion by using customer properties and events to reach them with targeted notifications.
Help Scout integrates with other business tools like WooCommerce, Salesforce, and WordPress. Along with analysing important KPIs like track volume, response time, and resolutions, you can also use tags and custom fields to track custom data points valuable to your business.
Cost/month: $25 for growing teams. $45 for advanced collaboration and organization.
5. For sales automation — EngageBay
EngageBay is an all-in-one CRM platform that allows you to automate your marketing and sales. Their CRM software allows users to store unlimited contacts and keep track of all customer details in one location. Features of the CRM software include contact management, deal management, sales automation, and appointment scheduling.
The marketing automation software allows you to automate your marketing processes and also send personalized messages to your target audience. Some of its features include form & landing page builders, web analytics, email template builder, email sequences, and lead nurturing tools.
EngageBay also offers help desk software and live chat software so you can resolve customer queries faster.
Cost/month: For the all-in-one package – $0 for the free plan with 500 contacts. $11.99 for the basic plan with 1000 contacts. $39.99 for the growth plan with 10,000 contacts. $79.99 for the pro plan with unlimited contacts.
6. For Social Proof automation — Nudgify
Nudgify is a user-friendly Social Proof platform that allows you to easily showcase real-time Social Proof and FOMO notifications (a.k.a Nudges) on your website or eCommerce store. After setting up the Nudgify connection to your website once, you can forget about it. Nudgify will automatically monitor your website for new Social Proof data and will display it to visitors in real-time. You can also customize the Nudges to match your brand and add custom links to help increase conversions. The Nudges available are:
- Social Proof Nudges allow you to display your best reviews on your website and also build trust by showing recent sign-ups, live visitor counts, and recent purchases. You can pull data from your favorite apps, such as WooCommerce, MailChimp, and Trustpilot.
- FOMO Nudges: Create a sense of scarcity and boost visitors’ desire to buy by displaying which products are selling fast or low stocked.
- Urgency Nudges: Use time limits and deadlines to drive action. For example, “want it delivered by tomorrow? Order within 3 hours”
- Frictionless Nudges: These Nudges help you reduce bounce rate and cart abandonment in your store. For example, a Free Delivery Nudge that says “you are only $5 away from getting free delivery” can help reduce cart abandonment, as well as increase average spend.
- Custom Nudges: You can also create custom Nudges for your website. Showcase your unique selling point, display your return policy, and give your visitors hints and tips at critical moments of the customer journey.
Nudgify also offers pre-configured Nudge templates for eCommerce, SaaS, Travel, etc. Nudgify will also track key metrics like visits, impressions, and conversions. It integrates with popular eCommerce stores or site builders like Shopify, ClickFunnels, and WordPress.
Nudgify fully supports 32 languages.
Cost/month – Nudgify offers a 7-day free trial and a cheap $0.99 Lite plan. $9 Plus plan for bloggers and new businesses. $29 Genius plan for SaaS and eCommerce websites. $89 Agency plan for large websites and agencies.
Conclusions
As you can see, there are different marketing automation tools you can choose from. Whether you want to manage your social media efforts or optimise your sales process, these platforms will give you the tools needed to automate your workflow so you can get more tasks done faster.
Which of these marketing automation tools will you add to your process?