5 Marketing Automation Platforms for Your Business

A business that is just starting out has the challenge of attracting clients. However, as time goes on, retaining customers and staying in touch is a greater challenge.  There are different marketing platforms that can automate some tasks allowing you to build a personalised marketing campaign that can attract new customers or keeping the ones that you already have. This marketing automation helps you maintain and grow the relationship with your customers depending on their interests and their online behaviour.

Here are some alternatives of platforms that you may integrate in your marketing campaigns:

  1. Sumo– is a platform that provides a few products useful for automate and capture customer data for lead conversion. It can set pop-ups/exit triggers to capture user attention to gather email addresses/redirects to Bookings or Vouchers, etc. This starts as a free account and next are the paid accounts where you have some additional features which are quite useful (like A/B testing, unlimited subscribers, click triggers, push notifications).
  2. Autopilot HQ - this is a really interesting platform to be used for automated Customer Journey and retention. Basically, you create Journeys for your customers and automate processes in between. For example, if you’d like to provide a discount to your existing customers, you can display heads-up message with a specific promotion code only to those users. Or you may provide a delay email notification (after 1-2 days) or send a text message to remind them to continue a purchase or their abandoned carts (in e-commerce platforms). Prices are starting from 1000 contacts and go up depending on how many contacts you add.

Autopilot HQ and Sumo offers Zapier integration. Using Zapier you can integrate Sumo with Autopilot, so in the end you can use the best features of both platforms.

There is also an increase in Marketing Automation platforms for specific industries, for example:

  1. HotelChamp– most of this platform functionality is based on pop-ups and storing customer information:                         

             - Voucher option - free gift for your guests (sending an email to customers with a promotion code);
             - Online Support Chat – fast and easy contact with your customers;
             - USP Comparison - shows what is best so your customers can choose what they like;
             - Abandoned Booking – it reminds the existing customers to return and finish their booking (you may offer them a discount as well);
             - Floating Tab / Flash Sale / Welcome / Review Tools / Exit Tools - similar to USP Comparison,  there are popups to display headups with flash Sale, welcome messages for clients on specific actions, get your reviews, remain your visitors;
             - Smart Notifications - display urgency and scarcity.

  1. MailChimp– they now provide campaigns for automating your email marketing, especially for building your brand or e-commerce platforms:

           - Build your brand - promote your business and grow your audience with social media ad campaigns that help you reach the right customers;
           - Connect with your new contacts – make a great first impression, showing customers everything you have to offer by setting up an onboarding series. Let people know you're thinking about them by creating an annual "Happy Birthday" email or maybe just a warm welcome to new contacts;
           - Sell more stuff - put your purchase data to work for you. Connect your e-commerce store with MailChimp to improve the shopping experience for your customers and generate more revenue (turn website visitors into customers, recover abandoned carts, customise order notifications, follow up on purchases, personalise product recommendations);
          - Boost loyalty – nurture lasting relationships by showing customers you appreciate their support (thank first-time shoppers, reward your top spenders with discounts triggered by their shopping behaviour);
         - Win people back - re-engage lapsed customers or inactive subscribers by creating a win-back email series or targeted ad campaign;
         - Customise, test, repeat - you can create the automation for any situation - provide educational resources to get new clients, share blog updates from your RSS feed, remind people to renew their membership and reward your top supporters) .

  1. Hubspot- their famous CRM can be now integrated with their new Marketing features that can improve the automation on specific B2B / B2C companies. Some of their marketing features include:

           - lead analytics dashboard and lead flows;
           - contact activity/management and company insights;
           - blog and content creation tools;
           - phone and email support, SEO and content strategy, social media and mobile optimisation;
           - email marketing and calls-to-action;
           - some advanced packages can include contact/company/events reporting.

Here is how Hubspot is thinking of using the marketing tools to grow traffic, convert leads and track the entire funnel in one place:

  • Build and modify your website without IT, being ready for your visitors from any device because the templates are responsive out of the box;
  • Get your content in front of the right people using real-time SEO suggestions, posting to social at the optimal time and sharing your content with the right followers;
  • Drive more traffic to key landing pages by designing calls-to-action that visitors can’t help but click and using personalize messaging based on location, traffic source, device and more;
  • Convert more visitors into qualified leads by launching professional-looking landing pages, attaching a form with a single click and run A/B tests to increase conversions;
  • Turn leads into customers with less effort by giving them a personalised path to follow using drip campaigns so that every interaction with your content can trigger next step automatically;
  • Track customers, record and organise every of their interaction with your brand, creating reports on how each marketing campaign and asset contributes to sales.

Marketing automation helps you generate high-quality leads that can successfully turn into customers. It gives you great visibility into what the visitors and leads are actually doing, and you can easily find what content they are looking for, how are they responding to the emails or how they are moving through the sales funnel. This way you can monitor and measure how the marketing automation system is performing and where you might need to make improvements to get better results.

We all want to see our companies succeed. And by observing the use of marketing automation in the last year we can all notice incredible results. Explore all options and find a platform that gives you flexibility and a proven track record to help you reach your marketing goals.

If you need any help, get in touch and Phaeria team will do its best to help you achieve your goals.