Are you looking for the best marketing automation tool for your startup? Whether you are an early stage startup, an established company or a scaling business, the tools on this list are worth considering.
Here are the best marketing automation tools for startups.
HubSpot — Best Overall Marketing Automation Software
- VISUAL AUTOMATIONS EDITOR
- STARTS AT $50 PER MONTH
- $800 FOR FULL AUTOMATION FEATURES
- UP TO 90% OFF FOR STARTUPS
HubSpot is one of the most well-known names in the marketing world. This inbound marketing software has everything you need to automate dozens of tasks at scale.
It allows you to customize sophisticated and highly targeted workflows using a visual editor. You can use this tool for simple follow-up messages or even complex campaigns with multiple touch-points throughout the customer journey.
HubSpot also gives you pre-set triggers, conditions, and customer actions. This makes it easy to automate your emails with drip campaigns.
The HubSpot Marketing Hub starts at $50 per month. However, that package doesn’t give you the full automation benefits.
Pricing for marketing automation features from HubSpot starts at $800 per month, billed annually.
It’s a bit pricey, especially for smaller businesses with lower budgets. But when you buy a product from HubSpot, you’re getting more than just software. You’ll also benefit from HubSpot’s exceptional customer support team.
If you’re a startup, you might be eligible for up to 90% off through the HubSpot for Startups Program. Contact the HubSpot sales team to request a free demo.
#2 – Constant Contact — Best for Warming Up Leads
- EASY AUTOMATION BUILDER
- AUTOMATED WELCOME SEQUENCES
- FINE-TUNE DRIP CAMPAIGNS
- STARTS AT $45/MONTH
If you’ve spent any time in sales, you know that few leads are raring to go from the moment they’re acquired. It takes time and nurturing to get a lead warmed up for a sales interaction. Constant Contact’s email automation capabilities go a long way to helping you do just that.
It’s a persistent question—once you have some good leads, what’s the best way to push them further along their sales journey? The stumbling block, for a long time, has been that not all leads respond the same way to the same messaging.
Thus, personalization is paramount. Constant Contact’s drip campaigns give you surgical control over the emails that leads get and when they get them.
It starts with setting up automated welcome sequences. Not only can you preschedule a set of emails for when someone joins your list, you can tailor these automated sequences based on demographics or custom attributes that you set.
That means you can have individual welcome sequences for totally cold leads, local leads met in the field, senior VPs and C-suite leads… any way you want to slice it.
From there, your drip campaigns allow you to keep segmenting audiences and tweaking the messages and timing. Constant Contact allows you to juggle as many campaigns as you need to get your targeting pitch perfect. Plus, you can even use dynamic content in your emails so that aspects are personalized to the recipient, based on qualities you set.
In tandem with the platform’s behavioral triggers, you can create an elaborate web of automated sequences that are timed perfectly whenever leads show any interest towards a purchase. Everything can be set up ahead of time, for nearly any situation—so, you can create campaigns that are so well-segmented that all of your leads get warmed up equally well.
These features are all in Constant Contact’s Email Plus plan. Pricing for that scales based on your number of contacts:
- Up to 500 contacts: $45/month
- 501 – 2,500 contacts: $70/month
- 2,501 – 5,000 contacts: $95/month
- 5,001 – 10,000 contacts: $125/month
- 10,001 – 15,000 contacts: $195/month
Pricing continues upward to 50,000 contacts for $335/month, plus Constant Contact can set up a custom plan for anything over 50,000.
Boost your ability to warm leads for your sales team. Get with Constant Contact to build impressive, personalized, automated campaigns and so much more.
GetResponse — Best Features For Marketing Automation
- STARTS AT $15 PER MONTH
- $49 FOR ADVANCED AUTOMATIONS
- LOTS OF FEATURES
- 30 DAY FREE TRIAL
GetResponse is a powerful and affordable marketing automation solution.
From capturing new leads to generating sales, recovering abandoned carts, and driving engagement from your site traffic, GetResponse offers tools to meet your needs.
It’s easy to set up an automated customer journey by applying conditions, actions, and filters that will automatically trigger users through a pre-defined journey based on their behavior.
You’ll benefit from advanced segmentation and lead scoring, which will ultimately improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.
GetResponse helps you understand your customers’ buying habits, browsing behavior, and targets abandoned shopping carts. They automatically recommend relevant products too.
Pricing for GetResponse starts at $15 per month. This comes with basic automation features like welcome emails, drip campaigns, click and open followups, and contact tagging.
To get the most out of GetResponse marketing automation, you’ll need to sign up for the Plus package, starting at $49 per month. The upgrade gives you custom workflows, the automation builder tool, lead scoring, abandoned cart recovery, site tracking, event tracking, and automated segmentation. However, you’ll be limited to just five custom workflows at this rate.
For those of you who need more than five workflows, you’ll have to upgrade to GetResponse Professional, which starts at $99 per month.
It’s worth noting that the feature-rich automation software from GetResponse can be a bit difficult to navigate through. For anyone who is just looking for simple automation tools, you might find GetResponse to be a little overwhelming.
But if you’re looking for as many automation features as possible at an affordable price point, look no further than GetResponse. Try it free for 30 days.
Moosend — Best For AI-Powered Sales Campaigns
- BASIC PLAN IS FREE
- AUTOMATION TEMPLATES
- 100+ INTEGRATIONS
- AI-POWERED ECOMMERCE
Moosend is an excellent—though understated—email marketing solution. They provide your business with all you need to set up automated email campaigns with ease.
They have a great segmentation tool that helps you target your customers with the right products and campaigns. Their drag-and-drop email builder is also a standout feature since it’s great for beginners or those of you who don’t know how to code but want to make a beautiful email.
Where they really shine is their ecommerce AI. It analyzes your customers using machine learning to target them with products and services they might like. The AI draws on your customers previous shopping habits as well as the shopping habits of similar customers to do this.
They’re the only email automation service that I’ve seen do this. It’s an incredibly useful tool especially if you’re just starting out and want to learn how to segment and target better.
They also have a pretty intuitive interface that shows you how to do the basics of email automation well.
Pricing starts free with their basic plans. That comes with unlimited emails, sign up forms, and limited reporting. I highly recommend going for their Pro plan at $8/month. With that you’ll be able to set up landing pages and transaction emails. Well worth it in my opinion. Try Moosend for free today.
OptinMonster — Best For Landing Page Lead Generation
- STARTS AT $9 PER MONTH
- BEST FOR LEAD GENERATION
- AUTOMATED LANDING PAGE CAMPAIGNS
- 14 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
OptinMonster is a bit different compared to some of the other options on our list. This software is not really a full-service or all-inclusive marketing automation solution.
They offer a lead generation and customer acquisition tool for your website that leverages marketing automation to grow your email list, reduce cart abandonment, and increase sales. More than one million websites use OptinMonster, making it one of the most popular solutions on the market today.
OptinMonster gives you tools to help you design high-converting landing pages, popups, and website campaigns designed to generate leads.
Then you can create automated and campaigns for website visitors based on their behavior and actions.
For example, you can create campaigns for new vs. returning visitors. Trigger a popup or offer based on the amount of time that visitor has spent on the site or the number of pages they’ve viewed.
Their tools allow you to trigger landing pages based on user behavior.
OptinMonster is undoubtedly one of the best lead generation tools on the web. But it lacks in other areas of marketing automation. You’ll need to integrate OptinMonster with your email or CRM software—it does not offer these features.
But with prices starting as low as $9 per month, it’s a cheap add-on to your existing solution.
Try OptinMonster risk-free 14 days. If you’re unhappy for any reason, you’ll get a 100% refund; no questions asked.
ConvertKit — Best Marketing Automation Software For Beginners
- STARTS AT $29 PER MONTH
- SIMPLE VISUAL EDITOR
- PRE-BUILT AUTOMATION TEMPLATES
- 14 DAY FREE TRIAL
ConvertKit is a very simple marketing automation software.
If you’re a beginner to digital marketing, ConvertKit should be near the top of your list.
ConvertKit is branded as an email marketing software, but its marketing automation features are much more advanced than just basic email functionality.
Create powerful automated funnels that trigger after your subscriber does an action (e.g. downloads a file). It ensures that you send targeted content to the right audience at the perfect time.
ConvertKit is simple to use. You can set up basic automation rules that trigger a specific campaign, without having to go through complex workflows and settings. The visual editor is easy for anyone to use, even if you have zero experience with marketing automation.
Whether you’re running a content site, ecommerce business, or selling SaaS, ConvertKit has the marketing automation tools that you need to succeed.
One of the best parts about ConvertKit is the pre-built automations. That means you don’t have to start from scratch.
For example, they have automations for hosting a webinar, launching a new product, and surveying your subscribers.
For new businesses, ConvertKit does a free forever plan for up to 500 subscribers. But that doesn’t come with any of the visual automation funnels.
To access all of the features and benefits of ConvertKit, paid plans start at just $29 per month. You can get two months for free if you sign up for an annual contract. Try it free for 14 days.
Conclusion
There are so many marketing automation tools out there it can be difficult to choose one. You have to find the right tool that will save you time, improve your customer acquisition and offer enough analytics data to provide insights into your prospects. There are hundreds of email marketing tools but few are cost effective with great features for startups.
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