13 Best Marketing Automation Software for Small Business

Are you looking for the best marketing automation tools for small business to effectively streamline your marketing process without breaking the bank? 💸

There are too many different marketing automation tools for varying needs. Whether it is for email marketing automation, content marketing, or sales automation, the BEST is always the one that works for YOUR business needs and budget.

In this article, you will find budget-friendly small business marketing automation software that you can start using to grow your business and save time.

Here are the top 10 picks for the best marketing automation tools for small businesses:

1. Popupsmart
2. MailChimp
3. ConstantContact
4. SendinBlue
5. Moosend
6. ChatBot
7. Intercom
8. HubSpot
9. Buffer
10. PipeDrive

Feel free to jump through the content from the table of contents below.

Why Small Businesses Need Marketing Automation

Marketing is a highly dynamic industry with repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, ad campaigns, and even onsite marketing.

The technology of marketing automation simplifies such tasks and makes your workflows run smoothly.

And it’s not just for efficiency, but marketing automation software also creates more personalized experiences for users and saves time.

For example, if you set up an autoresponder email series, adding a chatbot to your website or using a sales CRM tool organizes your leads and improves the user experience.

To help you find the one you’re looking for easily, we have organized the best tools for marketing automation for small business under the following categories:

• Email Marketing Automation
• Onsite Marketing Automation
• Content Marketing Automation
• Social Media Marketing Automation
• Sales Automation (CRM)

13 Affordable Small Business Marketing Automation Tools

Automation Tools for Email Marketing

As a business owner or marketer, email newsletters are essential to keep your customers engaged. However, what you also need is autoresponder leads.

Email automation tools help you send autoresponders to every new prospect that joins your list along with other automated emails.

1. MailChimp

MailChimp’s automation feature allows you to create targeted emails that send when triggered by a specific event, date, or activity.

It comes with a powerful set of design, scheduling, segmenting tools so you can effortlessly inform, reward, engage your contacts through automated emails even if you are offline.

Email automation features:

• Send time optimization
• Trigger-based messages about purchases and account activity with MailChimp API
• Build personalized purchase paths
• Behavior-based automation
• RSS-to-email
• Transactional emails

Perks of using MailChimp:

• Delivery by timezone
• Pre-built journeys like welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and product recommendations
• Offers a free plan with limited features to beginners

Pricing:

• Free plan available for 2,000 contacts per month
• Marketing Essentials starts at $10/mo based on 500 contacts.

You can calculate your monthly sending limit and cost on their pricing page.

G2 Rating: 4.3/5 (11,420)

2. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the best email marketing services for small businesses. You can set up email sequences and send them automatically to your contacts.

Just like MailChimp, you can set up specific triggers and your emails will go out based on user actions.

Features:

• Drag and drop builder
• Sign-up forms
• Integration with top e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Etsy, eBay, and more: Sync contacts drag and drop products directly to emails, and track reporting.
• Abandoned cart emails for Shopify and WooCommerce
• Dynamic content and automated email series

Pricing:

The Email Plan starts at $20/mo for 500 contacts - best for small businesses. Pricing depends on the number of contacts.

G2 Rating: 4 / 5 (4,682)

3. SendinBlue

Another all-in-one marketing automation software for small business is SendinBlue. It provides a great service for both email and SMS marketing.

SendinBlue allows you to build custom workflows that send out emails automatically. You can set up triggers to send emails based on the subscriber action on your website.

Features:

• Drag and drop builder
• Shared inbox to keep your team organized
• Transactional email
• Segmentation
• Signup forms

G2 Rating: 4.6 / 5 (1,315)

Pricing:

• Free plan available for 300 contacts
• Paid plans start at $25/mo and pricing depends on your monthly email volume.

Are your marketing emails going into the spam folder? Here’s why: Why Do Emails Go to Spam Instead of Inbox.

4. Moosend

Moosend is an easy-to-use, all-in-one marketing automation software. Similar to Constant Contact, Moosend comes with features like A/B testing, list segmentation, and user/website tracking in addition to email marketing.

Features:

• Drag and drop builder
• Personalization and product recommendations
• Behavioral analytics
• Autoresponders for reminders, cart abandonment, lead scoring, and more

G2 Rating: 4.7 / 5 (355)

Pricing:

• Free plan available up to 1,000 subscribers, including the core features
• Paid plans start at $10/mo

Onsite Marketing Automation Tools

Onsite marketing automation tools are the ones that you can directly use on your website to market your service or product effectively.

5. Popupsmart

One of the best marketing automation software for small business is Popupsmart (👋) popup builder. If you are looking for a simple way to keep generating email leads, driving traffic to your products or campaigns, then Popupsmart can do the hard work for you.

What can you do with this no-code tool?

• Create modern popups and opt-in forms
• Generate email leads and send autoresponders to subscribers
• Promote your products with video popups
• Collect customer feedback and surveys
• Increase your campaign conversions by targeting the right audience with advanced triggers and targeting options
• Build product promotion popups

G2 Rating: 4.4 / 5

Pricing:

• Free plan available
• Paid plans start at $29/mo

Create a Free Popup with Popupsmart

6. Tidio Chatbot

Tidio is one of the best live chat tools that are both efficient and budget-friendly. This software allows you to create chatbots that work like a virtual assistant that answers users’ questions 24/7 even if your live chat agent is offline.

Perks using Tidio:

• Free plan available up to 3 chat operators 100 unique reachable visitors. We recommend upgrading to at least the Chatbots plan that covers everything on the Free plan and chatbots.
• Automate lead generation and customer service with chatbots.
• Create custom chatbots or use templates like “abandoned cart” or “welcome new visitor” bots.
• Natural language processing

G2 Rating: 4.7 / 5

Pricing:

• Free Plan available
• Chatbots Plan: $39/mo
• Communicator Plan: $15/mo

7. Intercom

Intercom is often considered a live chat tool, but it does more work than that. For example, you can:

• Send automated in-app messages
• Use images, videos, emojis, or even apps to market efficiently
• Automate work with chatbots
• Deliver outbound messages on website or app
• Integrate with 300+ apps and use them in conversations or on your Messenger home screen.

Intercom can be a bit over your budget. If your website doesn’t get much traffic yet, we recommend going for a cheaper chatbot tool like Tidio.

G2 Rating: 4.4 / 5 (1,736) Pricing: Contact sales.

Social Media Marketing Automation

Social media marketing can bring high-quality leads to your website but it can also be time-consuming. Luckily, there are marketing automation tools for social media that can lift the burden off your shoulders.

8. ManyChat

ManyChat lets you send automated Instagram direct and Facebook messages so that customers can purchase products directly from Instagram Direct Messages and Facebook Messenger.

It’s very straightforward to build a bot with ManyChat’s drag and drop visual editor and automate interactive two-way conversations.

Features:

• Integrate with tools like Shopify, MailChimp, Klaviyo, HubSpot, and more.
• Build your own bot or use ready-made templates.
• keep the conversation going by combining the tool with SMS and email.

G2 Rating: 4.6 / 5 (117)

Pricing: Free plan available up to 1,000 contacts. The pro plan starts at $15 per month.

9. Buffer

Buffer is a social media scheduling tool that is designed to schedule your content ahead of time and automate your posts for social networks, including Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and Pinterest.

With over 160,000 small businesses using it, Buffer saves time and effort spent on social media marketing.

Features:

• Skip to important comments with the help of labels and hotkeys.
• Social media analytics
• Collaborate and plan your social media campaigns

G2 Rating: 4.3 / 5 (847)

Pricing: Free plan available for up to three channels. The Essentials plan is $6/mo with a monthly payment.

10. HootSuite

HootSuite is one of the most popular social media marketing tools on the market that lets you manage all your social content in a single app.

What you can do with HootSuite:

• Schedule all social media posts
• Create content and share across multiple channels
• Keep a track of the latest trends, brand mentions, and social conversations.
• Quickly respond to comments from the HootSuite inbox and save time

Features:

• Social analytics dashboard
• Collaborate with your team

G2 Rating: 4.1 / 5

Pricing: Paid plans start at €19/mo.

Additional tools: 6 Most-Used Content Management Systems (CMS).

Content Marketing Automation Tools

So, you have put effort and published tons of content, what now? In order to make sure more people see and engage with your content, you’ll need to market them to the right audience. That’s where content marketing automation tools come in.

11. Zapier

Zapier is one of the best marketing automation tools out there. It is designed to connect two or more of your apps and software and automate different workflows.

It is an excellent way to move your content from one place to another. For instance, you can create a “Zap” to automatically create a story on Medium or publish your content on WordPress.

Apart from these, you can also automatically share content on social media, add new leads to a database or Spreadsheet, and more.

G2 Rating: 4.5 / 5 (742)

Pricing: Free plan available up to 5 zaps. Paid plans start at $19.99/mo.

Sales Automation (CRM)

If your sales team isn’t closing as many sales as you would like, despite the time spent on the campaigns, sales automation tools can help you increase your bottom line. With CRM (customer relationship management) tools, you can:

• Streamline processes
• Build better customer relationships
• Increase profitability

12. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading CRM software tool that offers a suite of all-in-one marketing. This tool lets you organize your content, view your entire sales pipeline on a visual dashboard.

Free features:

• Email tracking and notifications
• Meeting scheduling
• Prospect tracking
• Live chat

You can use HubSpot CRM for live chat, schedule automated emails, and use chatbots to automate your live chat.

G2 Rating: 4.3 / 5 (7234) Pricing: The basic HubSpot plan is free. Their premium Sales Hub plans start at $45/mo.

13. PipeDrive

PipeDrive is another CRM that is designed to help you prioritize and manage leads, track communications, automate repetitive administrative tasks, and more.

Features:

• Create visual pipelines to organize and close deals
• Pool all your leads in one place, follow up, and qualify new leads
• Label and filter leads
• Chatbot and live chat
• Create and embed web forms

G2 Rating: 4.3 / 5 (1384)

Pricing: PipeDrive’s price plans start at $15 per month when billed monthly.

Bottom Line

We tried to bring together the best marketing automation software for small businesses to help you find the most cost-efficient tools.

Note that you can get the most out of your automated workflows by combining different marketing automation tools.

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