Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

small businessmarketing automation for small business
marketing automation for small business

Maybe you’re a small business just getting started. Or perhaps you’re a small business who’s been established for a few years and are trying to compete with the larger big box and chain stores for customers. You’ve been trying to promote and market your business in an effort to achieve this, but so far, you just haven’t been able to reach quite the level of your competitors who have much more capital to spend and many more resources than you.

Does this sound familiar? Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to.

Marketing automation for small businesses is the answer!

Marketing automation for small businesses can help you level the playing field and compete with the larger enterprises without breaking the bank and without stretching your resources to their limits. A marketing automation platform can provide you with the tools and ability to create engaging marketing campaigns; disseminate these campaigns to your current customers; as well as help with monitoring engagement with new leads and prospects!

Easy marketing campaign creation

A marketing automation platform contains a multitude of tools you are able to use to create and design the various communications you are sending to contacts and subscribers. Depending on the software you choose, the creation of these communication campaigns can be extremely intuitive and easy to do. With the use of drag-and-drop editors, design templates, and other creation tools, marketing automation for small businesses software can help you create a sophisticated-looking message in minutes.

form marketing software

form software elements

Instead of spending countless dollars paying a team of designers to help you create eye-catching marketing communications for your business, it’s easy to create your own campaigns in-house that are just as good with marketing automation software (and less expensive!).

Perhaps your business sends out a monthly email newsletter to let subscribers know about the next month’s deals and specials. Instead of creating this email from scratch every month in your email client, a marketing automation solution allows your business to create the email and design it however you like using your own branding and colors. Then, once you are happy with the newsletter you’ve created, you are able to save that design as a template you can re-use each month and just switch out the content! This process, though maybe a little labor-intensive for the first month, will ultimately save your small business time as well as money in the long run.

Personalized communications

Marketing automation for small businesses also allows you to leverage personalization and customization options in a way that may not have been previously possible without it. Before marketing automation, businesses used to rely on genericized content if they wanted to send bulk messages to their contacts unless they wanted to send individual messages on a contact-by-contact basis – which could eat up lots of time and resources for a small business. However, through the use of marketing automation software, this doesn’t have to be a huge time-waster.

Your small business can personalize your messages to each individual as easily as inserting a merge tag into your messages.

What’s a merge tag you ask?

A merge tag is essentially a piece of placeholder text that a member of your team can insert into the body of a message where information specific to a recipient would normally go. This text is connected directly to specific columns found in your contact manager, and when it comes time to send the message to your contact lists, the marketing automation system will pull the information stored in that particular column for each contact record and replace the merge tag text with this information.

Here is an example of how merge tags could be used in an SMS messaging campaign:

Merge tagsPersonalized text message

As you can see, merge tags are just one of the very simple ways that marketing automation for small businesses can help customize and personalize your communications.

Lead capturing and management

One of the main purposes of a business’s website is to gather conversions from prospective leads. The sales team can then take these conversions and reach out to the prospects and hopefully turn them into sales.

If your website doesn’t have any way for contacts to sign up to receive additional information from your business or even just a way to gauge what elements of your site visitors are engaging with the most, a marketing automation platform can help with that.

An automated platform can provide signup form capabilities, facilitating the signup and conversion processes by allowing small businesses to build forms they can embed on their websites to collect opt-in consent, as well as general data collection regarding website visitors.  

Signups received through these embedded website forms can then be sent targeted communications from your business in an effort to generate more interest surrounding your products or services by offering signups exclusive deals and offers.

Signup forms created through marketing automation software do not have to be fancy. As long as they serve their purpose for collecting contacts’ signup information, that should be enough to increase your number of conversions.

Update form example

Improve and optimize website and communications

There are other ways in addition to signup forms to gather information about those who visit your small business’s website.

For example, does your business have any mechanism in place for tracking what each user does on your website and which pages they visit?

This is called web tracking and it is a useful tool for garnering useful information regarding how to optimize your business’s website to appeal to a wider audience.

Marketing automation for small businesses can help business owners with the web tracking process. The software can provide them with the tools they need in order to track where every visitor lands on their websites as well as collect additional information about the way each visitor engages with the elements of the site.

Web tracking is not just for tracking website visitors either.

Web tracking can also be used to monitor client and subscriber engagement with any messages sent to your leads and contacts. In the message report, you can use this tool to see exactly which areas of your message your contacts interacted with the most – allowing you to come up with strategies to better play off of this engagement and hopefully increase conversions and sales of your products.

How to get started with marketing automation

If you are wondering how to jump on the marketing automation for small businesses train, look no further than SimplyCast! Our marketing automation platform has more than 20 different tools to help your small business compete on the larger stage while still saving you time and money with your marketing. For more information, check out our blog on how our CRM can boost your small business.

Contact us today to learn more about what we can offer your small business and don’t forget to sign up for a free 14-day trial of our automation platform!

Interested how else you can build up your small business? Check out our blog on the most underrated tools for small businesses and find out how many you knew about!

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