11+ Best Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business Growth in 2024

L ooking for the best marketing automation tools for small businesses?

First, let me congratulate you on this important step in your growth as a small business owner. When you’re ready to scale, the great marketing automation tools I share in this article will help take your business to the next level.

You’ll also learn how other marketers use the tools to save time and nurture leads and, of course, how you can do the same.

If you want to skip ahead to the tool you’re interested in, just use this handy table of contents:

Key Takeaways on the Best Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Before we dive into the list, though, let’s ensure we’re on the same page with a simple overview of marketing automation and how it can help small businesses.

What Is Marketing Automation For Small Business?

Marketing automation helps program your digital marketing tasks so you can focus on the bigger picture.

The best marketing automation software can help you connect with your target audience at scale while maintaining your unique brand voice. It also lets you send automated email messages that help you run smooth online marketing campaigns, helping you grow even further.

Automating your repetitive tasks can save you countless hours. And since all your marketing tasks are well-managed with tools, there’s less chance of human error, and you can work on other priority tasks.

Automation helps generate new leads, build customer trust, and take your business to the next level with an average return of $5.44 on every dollar spent.

It also helps create reports to identify patterns over time and streamline your marketing processes even more so you can focus on the right automation features that help scale your growth strategy

Training your marketing and sales teams to use marketing automation software to save time is necessary.

Now that we’re clear on all that – let’s examine the top marketing automation tools for growing your business.

1. OptinMonster: Best Marketing Automation Tool To Boost Business Leads

OptinMonster is the best lead generation and conversion optimization software for all kinds of websites. It offers powerful Exit-Intent® technology to turn your abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers.

What Does OptinMonster Do?

OptinMonster is the most flexible and user-friendly software to build powerful email optin campaigns. It allows you to test and adjust your marketing strategy in real time.

You may already have traffic from content marketing, but OptinMonster ensures users won’t abandon your website without taking action. It’s the perfect tool to convert your abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers.

OptinMonster has a drag-and-drop builder and multiple campaign types, which allow you to launch your marketing automation campaign with a few clicks.

Choose from campaign types like lightbox popups, fullscreen welcome mats, floating bars, slide-in scroll boxes, inline forms, yes/no popups, and more. You can use one of the pre-built automation campaign types to attract users or design your own from scratch.

It also comes packed with advanced features like onsite retargeting, geo-location targeting, InactivitySensor, and onsite follow-up campaigns, which allow you to create highly personalized offers.

Why You Need It

OptinMonster is a MUST-HAVE tool for your business website. It helps you run laser-targeted marketing campaigns that can grow your business exponentially.

Here are a few reasons why you need OptinMonster:

• Complete control of your marketing campaigns
• Drag and drop canvas to design your own campaign types
• Professionally designed campaign templates
• Automated messages to users
• Seamless integrations with hundreds of your favorite tools
• Actionable insights to improve your campaigns
• Real-time behavior automation
• A/B testing to generate more leads
• And more…

Pricing:

It offers multiple pricing plans starting from $9 – $49 per month (billed annually). OptinMonster Pro plan is recommended for SMBs websites. It comes with powerful features and integrations to grow your business.

2. Constant Contact: Great Email Marketing Automation Platform

Constant Contact is a powerful email marketing platform and automation tool. It automates all email campaigns to let you focus on the growth of your business.

What Does Constant Contact Do?

Constant Contact is an easy-to-use marketing solution to build beautiful, high-converting email campaigns for your subscribers. It also has tools to help you grow your email list.

Their drag-and-drop email builder makes it easy to design emails in minutes. You can also customize their ready-made email templates to send emails quickly.

Constant Contact allows you to trigger emails based on user behavior and actions on your website. You can segment your audience to send the right message at the right time. Their marketing automation features also track non-responsive subscribers and automatically resend emails.

Why You Need It

You can completely automate your email marketing strategy with Constant Contact. It works perfectly for all kinds of websites, including eCommerce stores.

Check out some of the key reasons why you need Constant Contact:

• Triggers emails at the right time automatically
• Customized messaging to users
• Helps improve segmentation
• Offers powerful marketing automation workflows
• Track your email automation results in real-time
• Includes surveys and polls to collect user feedback
• Creates dynamic sign up forms to help grow your list
• Powerful integrations

Pricing:

Constant Contact costs $12 – $80 per month based on the number of contacts/subscribers. The first month is FREE, so you can test the service and understand how it works.

3. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue): Email, SMS, Social Media, and More

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, offers several digital marketing tools to automate your marketing strategy. It has a powerful toolbox to engage your audience, generate leads, and plan marketing campaigns easily.

What Does Brevo Do?

Brevo has a great set of tools to communicate with your users. It includes email, SMS marketing, landing page templates, ads, and more services. Everything is automated so you can focus on the growth of your business.

It sends targeted messages to your audience automatically. You can deliver transactional emails to the inbox of your subscribers without spending a minute.

Brevo is one of the best marketing automation tools for email, SMS, and live chat marketing automation.

Why You Need It

Brevo is a great all-in-one solution to stay in touch with your target audience via email newsletters, live chat, and text.

Take a look at the important aspects to know why you need Brevo:

• Landing page templates dedicated to each campaign
• CRM integration to track customer details in one place
• Enhanced automation functionality
• Integrate custom sign up forms to grow your email list
• Allows Facebook retargeting to boost traffic
• Email heatmap to improve campaign designs
• Time algorithm to send emails at the perfect time
• Integrations with tools, products, and plugins

Pricing:

Brevo offers multiple plans, including a FREE plan. The paid plans cost $25 – $65 per month. You can also ask for a customized enterprise offer with premium marketing features.

4. Drip

Drip is a marketing automation tool for eCommerce websites. It allows you to automate personalized marketing campaigns for every step of the customer journey.

What Does Drip Do?

Drip is a customer relationship management (CRM) software for online shops and businesses. It collects customer data and lets you create a marketing automation strategy that actually works.

You can track every action of your subscribers on your website and customize your email marketing campaigns based on their actions. Drip also connects with other eCommerce marketing tools to give you even more insights into your customers.

Why You Need It

If you run an eCommerce store, Drip can improve your sales and grow your business beyond imagination.

These are some of the key reasons you need Drip:

• Relevant personalization for each subscriber
• Reach out to your audience from inbox to Instagram
• Revenue optimization and analytics
• Integrates with popular services
• Split testing to improve your campaigns

Pricing:

It’s a premium marketing automation platform that costs $39 – $1,899+ per month, depending on your subscribers (the high-end being an email list of 170,000) – with custom enterprise plans and features for those with subscriber lists above that range.

And you can also schedule a demo and start with a 14-day free trial to test the software.

5. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular inbound marketing and sales software for startups and small businesses. It gives you email marketing automation and CRM features that allow you to plan your marketing campaigns.

What Does HubSpot Do?

HubSpot is a marketing hub, sales, and service software to automate your business strategy. It has powerful resources that you can use to learn marketing automation from experts. They also offer courses and certifications.

HubSpot has advanced tools to monitor the customer journey in real time. You can track the behavior of your website visitors and follow up with personalized emails to share offers and discounts with them.

HubSpot offers contact forms and opt-in popups to capture new leads. With easy integrations, you can also use third-party tools to generate leads and store them in HubSpot for further action.

Why You Need It

HubSpot allows you to create robust marketing campaigns with a few clicks. It also completely automates your marketing and sales plan with personalization software.

Let’s go through some of the important reasons why you need HubSpot:

• Free email marketing tools
• Quick and personalized follow-ups with potential customers
• Impressive customer support features
• Improved lead nurturing and lead management
• Live chat and conversational bots
• Automated lead scoring
• Analytics and insights to monitor your campaigns

Pricing:

You can start free and upgrade as your business grows. However, HubSpot can become very expensive when you add advanced automation and smart content features. The plans cost $50 – $3,200 per month, depending on the services you use.

Other Notable Marketing Automation Software

1. Salesforce: is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps with automating marketing tasks.
2. Pardot: is an extension of Salesforce. Pardot provides marketing automation solutions that are targeted towards B2B clients.
3. Marketo: is a SaaS platform that helps business automate their marketing efforts and engagement.
4. ActiveCampaign: is a marketing automation tool that targets all businesses. It also helps with creating meaningful connections through email and social media marketing, and chat clients.
5. Eloqua: is a SaaS platform for B2B business that’s worth including. But the reason it’s not higher on this the list is that it’s just not user-friendly.
6. Keap (formerly known as InfusionSoft): is a marketing automation service that offers email marketing and sales platform for small businesses.
7. Mailchimp: is a marketing automation software that is mostly popular for its email marketing services.

How Can Marketing Automation Help Small Businesses?

Using any of the tools recommended above will help you save time and money on repetitive tasks.

You’ll be able to take care of:

• Set up automated email campaigns,
• Create and schedule social media posts far in advance,
• Segment leads,
• Automate follow-ups for abandoned carts or customer questions,
• Automate customer feedback collection,

And all the rest you need to attract, nurture, and fulfill your ideal customer.

And you’ll probably even get better results than if you spent the time on everything yourself. That’s because you’ll avoid frequent burnout and decision fatigue.

Of course, the initial setup for any of these marketing automation tools and processes will take some time and effort – but the longterm results will more than make up for it.

Choose The Right Marketing Automation Tools For Small Business & Your Needs

That’s all! I hope this article helped you find the best marketing automation software for small businesses.

Getting set up with tools like those above will absolutely help with your workflow automation and may even help bring you into a new tax bracket.

And to help you even further – check out our guide on best SEO tools to explode your traffic.