Oct 25, 2018

15 Best Marketing Automation Software (That Make Marketing Easy)


marketing automation

Marketing is hard work. Fortunately, marketing automation software can cut your workload in half.
No marketing expertise under your belt? No problem.
Don’t worry if you don’t know where to start.
Truth is, if you saw how bad my first Facebook ad was, you’d be embarrassed for me.
But automation wasn’t as popular back then as it is today.
And those tools can help prevent you from making the same rookie mistakes that I made back when I was starting out.
It’s actually never been easier to complete marketing tasks. Even if you’re a complete rookie.
So if you’re just starting out, try out these 15 awesome marketing automation tools.
In this article, you’ll learn what is marketing automation and what the marketing automation definition is. And why automating your marketing is so important.

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What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is when a software or tool completes a repetitive marketing or sales task instead of a person. This marketing automation definition can apply to any marketing tasks. For example, managing customers with chatbots to running Facebook ads.
The goal is to help businesses get more sales, leads, and customers without needing to hire a bigger team. For instance, an email automation tool might send an email to your customer. On your behalf and at a specific time you specify. While you’ll need to write the email in advance, the tool ensures that the email is sent to every customer that meets your criteria. At the exact time, you request. So, you won’t need to manually send it out at a specific time. Less work for you. Phew!

Why Marketing Automation is Important

Marketing Automation
Automation is important for four key reasons: increasing sales, saving time, maintaining consistency, and improving optimization.
  1. Helps increase sales: Marketing automation platforms can help you increase sales by having your tool act as your salesperson. Tools that automate the delivery of product discounts or create Facebook ads, can help you increase your sales. A human might not recognize the patterns that a machine might be able to see which allows for it to perform better than an expert.
  2. Saves you time: As your business grows these tools can manage higher than usual volumes of work better than a team of people can. For example, a product review app will be able to send automated emails to customers who’ve received their order so that you don’t need to manually track it. Thus, giving you one less thing to worry about.
  3. Maintain consistency: The hardest part of marketing is being consistent with it.Scheduling social media posts every day often gets lost as your workload gets heavier. You only need to automate processes once a week or less to schedule social media posts, create ads or other marketing tasks. It allows you continue to stay active and visible to your customers.
  4. Helps you better optimize your marketing: Of course, automating your marketing can optimize your ads based on its current performance. However, as the tools perform more tasks for more brands, it’ll eventually start to optimize your marketing with your data to better fine tune your business’ sales growth.

15 Best Marketing Automation Software

1. Kit

What is Marketing Automation
Kit is the kind of marketing automation software you’ll use when you’ve struggled to create a successful ad campaign on your own. It’s perfect for people with busy schedules or full-time jobs, especially since they’ll regularly send notifications offering you help so that you make your marketing a priority for your online store.
Kit’s artificial intelligence keeps getting smarter with each sale you receive, perfectly optimizing your product ad for the right customer. They keep adding new marketing features to simplify the process for you like sending marketing emails.

2. Shoelace

Marketing Automation Tool
Shoelace’s retargeting automation tool creates retargeting ads that help recover abandoned carts and win back customers after they’ve left your store without purchasing. There’s a proven formula for creating retargeting ads that work and Shoelace’s team has mastered it. If you have a high abandoned cart rate, you can win back your customers. But keep in mind that your store needs to be optimized and have a professional store design for best results.

3. Postcard Marketing

marketing automation
With online ads crowding up social networks, some marketers have decided to stand out using traditional marketing methods. Marketing automation tools like Touchcardallow you to mail postcards to your customers with minimal labour on your end. Your postcards can include limited time coupon codes to help convert the sale. If you’re looking to stand out from your competitors, marketing automation tools like this one help automate your real world marketing so you can focus on the virtual one.

4. Buffer

Marketing Automation Software
One of the biggest challenges with social media marketing is mastering consistency. With Buffer, you can add up to ten social media posts at a time for free which will go out automatically. So if you find you’re always forgetting to post on social media this is the social media automation tool to try out. My favorite feature about Buffer is the data analytics you get. You can see how many people clicked your link, your reach, and more. Buffer will also let you know what your top posts are. By looking at this data, you can better understand what works well on social to increase social media engagement.

5. MailChimp

Marketing Automation Tool
It can be hard to send emails out at the best time on your own. Fortunately, MailChimp masters email automation by allowing you to choose the time your emails get sent. Want to send an email out on Friday at 10 am while you’re working at your full-time job? You can set it to that exact day and time in advance. You can also create funnels that go out automatically like abandoned cart emails.

6. SMS Marketing and Automation by SMSBump

marketing automation software
With new marketing trends popping up all the time, SMS marketing is one that won’t be going away anytime soon. Marketing automation platforms like SMSBump allow you to send abandoned cart texts, text customers who haven’t purchased in a certain number of days, offer discount codes via text, text deliver updates and much more. If you want to automate your SMS marketing, this is the perfect marketing automation software to try out.

7. Push Owl

Marketing Automation
Push Owl’s automation software automates the delivery of push notifications. If you have a push notification app on your store, your customer can choose to accept it. This which will result in a pop-up appearing on their screen when you send them updates. The best part is that they don’t need to be browsing your website to see these little notifications pop-up. If customers abandon their cart, you can send push notifications to remind them to recover it as soon as they leave your website.

8. LeftBrain

Marketing automation tools
Marketing automation platforms like LeftBrain help you segment your customers into different audience groups. Then, they send those segmented customers different product recommendations with a personalized coupon code to encourage more sales. If you’ve ever wanted a marketing automation software that automates personalization then this automation tool is for you.

9. Gobot

Automation Tool
Gobot has one of the trendiest marketing automation software: chatbots. You can use chatbots to help minimize the customer support work you or your team needs to do. They can collect emails, schedule meetings, and take polls all while handling your customer service. If you struggle to manage customer inquiries this marketing automation tool could save you time. And with a drag and drop functionality, it’s never been easier to automate customer support.

10. Product Reviews Addon

Automation Software
Product Reviews Addon automates the process of collecting product reviews. These reviews help prove to first-time shoppers that your store is the real deal. With emails sent out to new customers, this marketing automation tool does the hard work for you. As your customer base grows, so will the number of reviews your store collects. Customers are able to write their review directly in their email making it an easy experience.

11. Spin a Sale

Marketing Automation
Spin a Sale automates the process of building your email list and offering customers discounts. As email marketing is an effective way to generate sales, growing your email list is an important practice. This tool gamifies the experience by offering customers a discount in return for their email address when they try to leave your store. And hey, you may even be able to generate a few sales from this app.

12. Marsello by Collect

marketing automation tools
Want to encourage customer loyalty or create a VIP program? Well, with marketing automation tools like Marsello it’s never been easier. You can reward points to customers to help encourage customers to keep shopping. Birthday offers can also be sent out to customers automatically. You can even send automated emails to increase your customer return rate. This marketing automation software helps automate customer loyalty to help you maintain your existing customers.

13. Simple Shop Automation by Hextom

automation tool
Hextom‘s tool automates the process of hiding out of stock items, alerting customers of low stock items, publishing newly stocked items and more. If you’re dropshipping a lot of products, it can be difficult to keep track of all your suppliers’ inventory. With a marketing automation tool like this, you can set it and forget it. You won’t need to worry about angry emails from customers who bought a sold out product. Plus, alerting customers of low stock items can actually work in your favor from a scarcity stand point. So it can even help encourage sales.

14. Around.io

Aroundio
Around.io‘s marketing automation software helps you post on social more often by automating those processes but it has an added ecommerce twist. Since the app connects to your store, you can post products to your social accounts to get some sales. It saves you time by allowing you to schedule all of your posts in advance. You won’t forgetting to post on social media anymore. It even allows you to add GIFs and other engaging content to your social accounts.

15. Data Export

automate marketing
It’s not only about automating traditional marketing tasks. It can also be about automating your reports and data. Sure, you could spend hours analyzing and digging through your marketing reports. Or you could use the marketing automation software Data Export to do that for you. Your reports can be emailed to you hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly depending on how many sales you get. You can choose which data points you’d like included in your report instead of having to read through countless reports to compile the numbers for you.

Conclusion

As an online retailer, you’re responsible for marketing and customer support. And that can be time-consuming. If you want to succeed as a solopreneur, using these tools can allow you to focus on what matters. Since you’re automating tasks, be sure to get the upfront work done right. Maybe ask a friend, colleague or mentor to look at your initial email or push notification before committing to it. Marketing automation tools are the way of the future. Your future success has never been easier to attain.

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