“Not implementing a marketing automation solution may be the ultimate career limiting move for today’s marketers. If you haven’t gotten started you’re already behind the 8-ball.” - IDC Group
You hear these kinds of axioms all around you as a marketer.
But pray, if you please, are you sure you need a marketing automation tool?
In case you’re in a dilemma, I suggest you go through the following signs. That will help you understand if you really need a marketing automation tool or not for your retail business.
After all, I do not want you to get locked in :) So, check if you exhibit one or more of these signs below. If yes, then explore the top 10 marketing automation tools I’ve listed for you under separate use cases.
Table of Contents
1. You’re Small But Ready to Grow
If you want to achieve growth and reach revenue targets, you need to have a streamlined process to generate, nurture, and convert your leads.
With a marketing automation tool, you’ll be able to drive more inbound traffic to your e-commerce store or brand website. What’s more, you’ll be able to understand visitors’ activity on-site to follow up with them and distribute content that engages them.
This way, you could remain on top of your visitors’ minds and at then at the right time, draw them to your store to make a purchase.
2. You Leverage Disparate Marketing Tools
Maybe you are working with costly marketing tools, need expertise, do not integrate, or are difficult to maintain.
If that’s the case, investing in a marketing automation tool would be a good move. It will help you replace existing tools and bring them all under a single hub. A marketing automation tool can offer you integrations that you need so you could cut down on cost, and reduce the time spent in gleaning reports out of disparate tools.
3. You Use A CRM to Send E-mails
CRM is different from marketing automation. They do not mean the same thing. You see, they basically work to tighten the chord between sales and marketing.
So, you need to understand that the purpose of CRM is to house the information about a prospect and it’s not for the batch email. While yes, your CRM might allow you to send e-mails, it cannot help you nurture your leads by sending them content based on their behaviour.
If you’re caught in this situation, then integrating your CRM with a marketing automation tool would be your best bet.
4. Less Data to Segment Your Customers
Without segmentation, it’s hard to fine-tune your marketing messages. However, a marketing automation tool would help you divide your lists by location, behaviour, demographic, etc.
And this way of segmenting your leads can hold a big impact on your brand. It will help you convert leads and close sales.
5. Your Leads Are Falling Through Cracks
As I mentioned earlier, it’s hard to nurture leads without marketing automation. And on top of that, it’s harder still to nurture unengaged leads.
Only with the right marketing automation tool, you’ll be empowered to deliver relevant content based on lead behaviour.
Now, friend, I’m sure you know if your retail business needs a marketing automation tool or not. Let’s now take a look at the list of top 10 marketing automation tools under specific use cases.
1. Ingage for A Wholesome Marketing Automation Suite
Ingage is the kind of marketing automation tool that will help you house all disparate marketing automation tools under one unified hub. If you are an omnichannel retailer, then Ingage could be your first choice.
Unlike other marketing automation suites, Ingage follows a three-staged streamlined approach - Understand, Engage, Measure. So, this marketing automation product helps you understand your customers. In turn, it gives you features to engage your customers at the right time every time. Then, through its powerful analytics, you could measure whether your marketing activities are accomplishing its goals.
Features
- Marketing automation
- App-based loyalty program
- Unified customer data platform
- Cross channel engagement
- AI-powered customer segments
- Comprehensive business dashboards
- Customer feedback surveys
- Referral programs for customer acquisition
- Dynamic vouchering
Pricing: Connect with Loyaltyics to get a quote.
2. Drip for E-mail Automation
Drip is exclusively for eCommerce businesses. And of course, it will work well with the other eCommerce tools you use. Drip’s e-mail automation is built to create personalized content to automate campaigns based on your customer behaviour.
This way, all your messaging would stay consistent and would work in sync to drive your customers to purchase.
Features:
- Customer data
- Personalization
- Engagement
- Optimization
Pricing: Between $49 to $122+ per month (Varies by active subscribers)
3. Sprout Social for Social Media Automation
Sprout Social has individually tailored solutions for social management, marketing, customer care, and employee advocacy. It’s publishing wing would make it easy to collaborate on both strategy and execution for your team.
Features:
- Engagement
- Publishing and scheduling
- Analytics
- Listening
Pricing: Between $99 to $246 per user, per month (Varies by features and number of social profiles)
4. Lead Squared for Customer Journey Automation
Lead Squared is custom-designed for lead nurturing. It will help you move leads fast through your sales funnel. It has triggers, conditions, and actions, to automate your drip campaigns. So, you’d never miss your chance to encourage leads towards purchase.
Features:
- Trigger engagement
- Journey visualization
- Lead capture
- Analyse intent
Pricing: Between $150 to $ 2500 per month (Varied by contacts and features)
5. Prisync for Price Automation
Prisync is the best pricing automation tool for your eCommerce business. Since your eCommerce businesses are oftentimes targeting price-conscious consumers, your brand must have competitive pricing.
And Prisync automated this process so that you’re always on the upper rung of competitor pricing.
Features
- Data and analytics
- Reports and consistent notification
- Recommended price suggestions
- Repricing or dynamic pricing rules
- Price violation detection
Pricing: Between $59 – $229 per month (Varies by features and the number of products)
6. Trapica for Advertising Automation
Trapica primarily focuses on social media ads automation. It leverages AI to assist you in discovering the targeted audience to spend your ad budget on. Its algorithms help in gleaning in-depth insights into who your audience really is.
Trapica would be a great choice considering its robust targeting features that reach the right audience at the right time to encourage a purchase.
Features
- Ad campaign automation and optimization
- Creative A/B testing
- Bid optimization
- Predictive targeting
- Budget management
Pricing: Connect with Trapica to get a quote.
7. Referral Rock for Referral Campaign Automation
Referrals are a great way to augment foot traffic and attract new customers. But unless and until you are proactive about encouraging your customers to give referrals, you might not be able to capitalize on it.
With an automation tool like Referral Rock, you’d be able to set up the right retail referral program. It could be a refer-a-friend campaign, or an influencer marketing, or any other form of referral marketing. You can set it with Referral Rock and it would roll on auto-pilot.
Features
- Referral program builder
- Integration
- Optimization
- WOM marketing
Pricing: Between $200 to $800 per month (Varies by number of members, programs, and other factors)
8. Antavo for Loyalty Automation
Antavo is a dedicated loyalty automation platform for the fashion retail folks. It allows you to reward all customer actions that impact your brand positively. So, other than rewarding customers for shopping with you, you could appreciate them for other actions that are valuable to your brand.
For instance, if you are an eco-conscious retailer, you might want to reward your customer for bringing old clothes to you for recycling.
Features
- Loyalty logic
- Gamification
- Customer profiling
- Reporting
Pricing: Connect with Antavo to get a quote.
9. Autopilot for Automated Customer Segmentation
Oftentimes, retailers struggle to understand their customer base. And here is where Autopilot’s customer segmentation feature helps in grouping customers by their behaviour and other attributes.
Autopilot would thus help you craft compelling content in sync with the customer journey.
Features
- Personalized marketing
- Audience fine-tuning
- Trigger journeys
Pricing: Between $49 to $249 per month (Varies by the number of contacts)
10. Survey Monkey for Survey and Feedback Automation
Survey Monkey renders 15 different types of question types that you could use in your surveys. Right from multiple-choice, to Likert scales and open comments, Survey Monkey has it all.
Its customer feedback tool is best for one-off surveys. But this might not be your suitable tool to measure overall satisfaction or surveying your customers after some time.
Features
- Pre-built survey templates
- Powerful analysis
- Fast survey creation
- Easy to share
- Customization
Pricing: Between $28 to $53 per month per user (Varies by team members)
Bonus: MobileMonkey for Instagram Marketing Automation
All right, folks, thought I'd give you a bonus marketing automation tool, and so we have MobileMonkey for Instagram marketing automation.
There are a lot of things that you can do on Instagram to market your brand. An Instagram bot platform is a must for marketers, sales professionals, customer support representatives and even Instagram influencers and creators.
With MobileMonkey’s Instachamp, you’d be able to set up an auto-reply bot that will send automated responses to your followers. It even has an Instagram comment bot feature that allows you to send a message to all users who comment on your posts.
Features
- DM autoresponder
- Props for story mentions
- Comment autoresponders
- Build campaign funnels based on DM keywords
Pricing: $19.95 per month
Well, friend, now you know the various options you have at hand. Choose well, and scale your business momentously!
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