5 of the Best Marketing Automation Tools for Small Businesses
Marketing automation software can be your small business’s secret superpower. It can change the way you run your business and the results you get – and certainly for the better.
Read on for our comparison of the best marketing automation tools for small businesses to help you choose the right tools for your team and boost your results.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation uses the data you have about your contacts and their behavior alongside your ideal lifecycle journey to deliver the most relevant content, emails and messages.
These are sent at exactly the right time for each contact, without any action required from you. You can use marketing automation alongside sales automation, such as lead scoring and task creation, for results across your organization.
Why is marketing automation worth it?
Automation scales your marketing with minimal time and effort from you. You can nurture leads to customers without any extra work once your workflows are set up.
For small businesses, this means getting better results than your small team could otherwise achieve manually. In essence, you can perform like a much larger company without the budget and team size.
To identify if you need marketing automation, ask if your marketing results depend entirely on you and your team’s hustle and grind. Manual work for repetitive tasks doesn’t scale!
There are countless marketing tasks you can automate, from email workflows to team management and lead generation. And there are a lot of marketing automation tools out there to help you implement it. However, some are just too complex for small businesses.
We recommend ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Prospect.io and Sendinblue as five of the best tools for SMBs to automate their marketing. Keep reading for our comparison of these platforms.
The best marketing automation platforms for small businesses
1. HubSpot
Choose HubSpot if: You have the budget and want a great all-round CRM with strong automation features.
HubSpot is one of the best CRMs for small businesses, and it’s one of the best marketing automation platforms, too.
HubSpot pros
Email automation is made simple – HubSpot is a really handy tool to create unique workflows for email nurturing. What makes it even better is that these workflows are customized around lead behavior and properties. Once a contact gets to the end of a workflow or reaches its goal, they can be automatically moved to another workflow. This makes it simple to guide your leads down the funnel and towards converting.
Build (nearly) anything you want with workflows – HubSpot’s marketing automation goes way beyond just email. Workflows allow you to create nearly any “if this, then that” sequence you want. An external workflow could send an email to a lead that views your product and feature pages. An internal workflow could assign new leads to reps based on geography or annual revenue, as collected via custom properties in website forms.
You can also use workflows to assign tasks, trigger internal notifications, send internal emails or SMS, and much more.
Scaling – HubSpot is designed to grow with your small business, and you can choose to upgrade your Marketing Hub plan as you need more features, or also add their Sales and Service Hubs. However, this doesn’t come cheap, which is the main drawback of the tool.
HubSpot cons
Cost – The HubSpot CRM is free, but for HubSpot marketing automation you will need their Marketing Hub add-on (Professional Plan), which starts at $800/month for 1,000 contacts. For full sales automation, it starts at $400/month. Even if you can get their startup program discount, HubSpot Marketing Hub is unlikely to be in the budget range of most small businesses.
Limited workflow functionality per Hub – With the Marketing Hub you get marketing automation, and with the Sales Hub you get sales automation. While there is some overlap, it can quickly get expensive if you need both.
HubSpot integrations
There are many tools you can integrate HubSpot with to make your marketing team’s job easier. Here are some of our favorites:
- Mailchimp: Sync your latest leads between HubSpot CRM and your email marketing list in Mailchimp.
- Google Contacts: Keep a backup of your clients in an easy-access Google Contacts account. You’ll also know exactly who’s calling your phone.
- Outlook: Keep contact data changes reflected in real time in both Outlook and HubSpot.
- ActiveCampaign: Take your marketing automation further by connecting the two tools. Or, just use HubSpot’s free CRM and sync all contacts with ActiveCampaign to handle automation.
2. ActiveCampaign
Choose ActiveCampaign if: You want powerful marketing automation features at the best price point.
ActiveCampaign’s goal is to provide “true marketing automation” and we love how powerful its features are. This is the reason it’s one of our top recommendations for small businesses looking for easy-to-set-up automation software.
ActiveCampaign pros
Strong marketing automation features – ActiveCampaign is designed with automation as the top focus, which differentiates it from most of the other tools on this list. If that’s your top priority, we’d recommend you start their free trial.
You can do a lot more automation with ActiveCampaign than email tools like Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Not only does it cover all the core parts of email automation, but it also enables automation of your contacts, list management, and ‘Deals’ in their CRM system. With Deals, you can streamline sales appointments, direct messages, and notes.
High email deliverability – In tests by EmailToolTester, ActiveCampaign was the tool with one of the highest deliverability rates (90.2% in Feb 2020, compared to Mailchimp’s 81.6%).
Price – Automation starts on the Lite plan, which is $9 month/paid yearly for 500 contacts. For the CRM and sales automation, you’ll need to opt for the Plus plan for $49/month paid yearly for those same 500 contacts. As your contacts increase, you’ll pay more – but that has advantages, too. You pay only for what you really need.
ActiveCampaign cons
The CRM is quite simple – ActiveCampaign is automation-first, and their CRM might not fit all of your requirements. It’s simpler than alternatives like HubSpot, which offers a strong CRM and automation features (albeit at a much higher price point). If you love ActiveCampaign’s automation but want a better CRM, consider using integrations to solve your problem.
ActiveCampaign integrations
Boost the power of ActiveCampaign’s automation features by integrating your team’s other go-to tools. Some PieSync customers love these connections:
- Pipedrive: Connect your ActiveCampaign contact data to Pipedrive, the popular CRM for small businesses.
- Teamleader: Share your contact data between one of the most complete CRM solutions on the market and ActiveCampaign’s automation software.
- Intercom: Keep all customer data in sync across both Intercom and ActiveCampaign.
3. Prospect.io
Choose Prospect.io if: Your focus is on lead generation and prospecting and you already have a strong CRM.
Although Prospect.io is geared towards “sales automation for modern sales teams”, this might align more with your goals than some of the other tools on this list. With Prospect.io, you can speed up your email prospecting and automate outreach to these new leads.
Prospect.io pros
Lead generation – Prospect.io is designed for email prospecting and helps you to find contact details in a fraction of the time you would traditionally need. You can do this by using their handy Chrome extension on any website or social profile.
Drip campaigns – After you’ve collected and verified new email leads with Prospect.io’s email prospecting tools, send drip campaigns to engage with them. Once they reply, click or convert, you can sync them with a list in your CRM. If they unsubscribe or aren’t interested, you can end the process there without cluttering your CRM.
Prospect.io cons
It’s not a standalone tool – For best results, use Prospect.io alongside a strong CRM like HubSpot, Pipedrive or Teamleader to organize your contacts. We recommend qualifying contacts with a Prospect.io drip campaign before syncing them to your CRM with specific properties or a list membership alongside source so you can customize communication.
Prospect.io integrations
Sync Prospect.io with your other marketing tools and keep everything connected for better results.
- HubSpot: Feed HubSpot CRM with fresh leads after they have been collected with Prospect.io and qualified via a drip campaign.
- Mailchimp: Update contact data or list membership in Mailchimp and Prospect.io based on activity or categorization in either app.
- Zoho: Immediately connect new contacts with your favorite Zoho apps, including Zoho CRM.
4. Mailchimp
Choose Mailchimp if: Your main goal is email marketing automation, such as nurturing and event-based workflows.
Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing tool on the block, and it’s the ideal solution for small businesses with a low budget. Their free plan can fit the email marketing needs of many small businesses – and it offers basic email automation, too.
Mailchimp pros
Free email marketing automation software – The biggest advantage of Mailchimp is value for money. You get a huge amount from its feature set, including marketing automation, without paying a cent.
User experience – Mailchimp has a great brand experience and is very intuitive to get started with as a smaller business.
Mailchimp cons
Limited to email automation – While email marketing is a big part of automation, it’s not the whole story. With Mailchimp, you won’t be able to automate tasks or notifications like you can with HubSpot or ActiveCampaign, for instance.
Email deliverability – Mailchimp’s delivery rate isn’t the best in the market, but for SMBs this is unlikely to cause problems. If you experience issues and cleaning up your email marketing strategy doesn’t fix it, consider alternatives like Constant Contact or ActiveCampaign that tend to have better deliverability.
Mailchimp integrations
To make Mailchimp even more powerful, integrate it with the other tools used by your marketing team, such as:
- Nimble: Enrich your Mailchimp contacts with Nimble’s social data, or update lead status based on email engagement.
- HubSpot: Connect your HubSpot CRM contacts with Mailchimp to handle automation with Mailchimp instead of via paid HubSpot automation features.
- Pipedrive: Keep lists and labels updated across both Pipedrive and Mailchimp based on contact engagement, behavior and data updates.
- Zoho: See the full picture in either app and trigger actions in Zoho CRM based on a contact’s email activity.
5. Sendinblue
Choose Sendinblue if: You want to automate transactional emails or maintain a highly personalized relationship with your contacts.
Sendinblue is designed for relationship marketing. Relationship marketing is about using marketing tactics and actions to create and maintain a personalized relationship with your prospects.
With relationship marketing, you focus on your customers the whole time – right from the very first touchpoint with your business, through the conversion and purchase process, and on to long-term loyalty.
Sendinblue pros
Easy-access marketing automation – “Do more with less using automation”, says the Sendinblue website. Sendinblue breaks down the common barriers to setting up automation as a small business and keeps things simple.
Transactional automation – Sendinblue is a great tool for transactional emails and its workflows take this further. It’s easy to create workflows based on product purchases, page views, or engagement with transactional email types.
Sendinblue cons
Starting price for automation – Sendinblue has affordable (and free) plans for email marketing, but for marketing automation, you will need to be on their Premium plan (starting at $66/month or $52.80 with annual payment). However, this is still a cheaper alternative to platforms such as HubSpot and Pardot.
Sendinblue integrations
To get even more results from Sendinblue, integrate it with your most-used marketing tools:
- HubSpot: Add contacts to Sendinblue email lists based on lead score. Or, update HubSpot based on email actions, campaigns and behavior.
- Capsule CRM: Keep a 360-degree view in both Sendinblue and Capsule and avoid duplicate data or errors.
- Salesforce: Use Sendinblue to send newsletters and drip workflows while syncing contact data two ways to Salesforce.
- Intercom: Update both Intercom and Sendinblue as contacts interact with either app, keeping you and your team up-to-date.
