Affordable Marketing Automation For Your Small Business

Is Affordable Marketing Automation a Pipe Dream

If you are a small business owner, like myself, you’ve probably looked at marketing automation solutions and thought: “aren’t there any affordable marketing automation solutions out there?”. The quick answer is YES! You just need to figure out what your real business needs are, before you commit to a particular solution. Here are just some of the instances where an affordable marketing automation solution can truly make an impact:

Online Store

We are living in the digital age, where customer information is essential to running successful marketing campaigns. I should probably pause here and say that if your email marketing list consists of only email addresses, then you have a fair amount of leg work to do. Keep in mind that any platform out there is only as good as the data you “feed” it. Having said that, an affordable marketing automation platform can also help you in the process of adding more valuable insights to your list.

Let’s take a look at the typical interaction of a client with your online store:

Step 1

The customer buys a product or subscribes to a service on your site.

Step 2

Ecommerce platform sends order confirmation email. Hopefully, you have setup your solution to allow customers to opt into your newsletter at checkout.

Step 3

The customer either receives the product immediately (digital download or service) or they receive a shipping confirmation email for a physical product.

Endless Possibilities with an Affordable Marketing Automation Solution

Assuming that your customer opted into receiving email communications from you, it won’t be possible to keep track of that customer’s behavior on your website until they make another purchase. This is particularly relevant to businesses selling actual products or services that can be upgraded. How can you tailor specific promotions (or special events) for that client, if you don’t know what they are looking at? That’s where an affordable marketing automation solution fills in the gap left by a regular email marketing service provider. By using a marketing automation platform, you will be able to:

• Get the “bigger picture” by tracking a customer’s activity on your website
• Initiate conversations after a client has visited one of your product pages more than once
• Send email campaigns tailored to their specific product interests (which can be obtained through an automated workflow)
• Send email campaigns based on product category interest
• Send automated cart abandonment emails

Service-Based Business

Say you are a small business providing a service (that would be me) and you have a small list of clients. You can still take advantage of marketing automation by setting up some of the following automated workflows:

• Welcome email series for new subscribers
• Text-based emails triggered when past customers have browsed your home/services pages more than once
• Text-based email triggered when clients haven’t opened your emails for awhile

As you can see, affordable marketing automation is a reality and your small business should definitely take advantage of all its benefits. One of the companies leading the charge in affordable marketing automation is ActiveCampaign, which provides a service with full marketing automation and even CRM w/ Sales Automation, depending on the plan selected. In the interest of transparency, I should mention that I’m an ActiveCampaign Partner Reseller, but as a current user I can honestly say that their product is truly amazing. It doesn’t hurt that their plans are comparable to those of regular ESPs.

Would you like to talk more about affordable marketing automation for your business?

I also provide marketing automation services to businesses (regardless of size or industry). If you’d like to learn more about our affordable marketing automation services, as well as our turnkey solutions, please visit our marketing automation service page.