Increasing competition within the market encourages companies to think of methods to improve productivity and find effective ways to approach customers. Great minds leverage marketing automation. It allows business owners to align the work of their sales and marketing teams, generate more leads, ensure quality customer support, and provide personalized offers at the right time. With its help, they can switch from repetitive to more creative tasks influencing purchasing decisions.
Besides increasing the efficiency of company departments, marketing automation enables businesses to send targeted messages, boost sales, and improve customer satisfaction. Since marketing automation can perform multiple tasks and reduce your team’s workload, it’s worth discussing the platforms in detail.
After testing the five services, we can help you find the right solution for your business. Let’s review these platforms that enable you to nurture leads easily and increase conversions at a reasonable price.
SendPulse and their Automation 360, in particular, enables you to combine multiple channels and successfully reach customers. The software empowers you to develop customized scenarios and send automated messages triggered by an event or action. You can lead your customers through the sales funnel with little team effort by sending automated messages through different channels. After assigning tags to specific customer groups, segment your audience and send them targeted offers.
Without any knowledge of the code, you can send welcome emails, registration emails, abandoned cart notifications, payment details, order confirmations, feedback, and thank you messages to customers. To send messages to clients, you need to set the conditions so that a specific customer action or event can trigger the automation system. The software will react to your trigger and send corresponding messages through emails, chatbots, push-ups, SMS, etc. You can add as many channels as you wish and send a series of messages. For instance, consider sending a “Thank You” message after a customer completes the purchase.
SendPulse allows you to use eight channels when setting up your automation, including email, SMS, web push, Viber campaigns, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp chatbots. In addition, you can connect the automation to the service’s free CRM to optimize your sales pipeline. Your team can track the progress of deals and change their statuses. It helps streamline your team’s productivity. You can create and add chatbot flow with auto-replies to ensure customers receive all the necessary information.
It’s worth nothing that the chatbot builder itself now supports an integration with Open AI platform. This means that users can build their preferred chatbot and power it by one of the available language models for more natural and human-like conversations.
To build an automation flow, select the triggers by dragging the “Start” element. On the right panel, you’ll see a list of events to choose from. Let’s select “Complete course,” for example. Your message flow will be triggered by a student who completes an online course with you.
Once you set the trigger, you can proceed to the series of messages. Add the necessary elements to the editor’s field by left-clicking them. After students complete your course, the service will send a “Congratulations on the successful completion of the course” email and attach the certificate of completion. Besides, you can send notifications in Telegram or Facebook Messenger to inform them that they can download the certificates. The service enables you to send automated messages after a specific period to invite students to join your new event.
See how you can do this in the example below.
Mailchimp’s marketing automation helps increase repeat purchases, retain clients, and boost the number of orders. With the platform’s Customer Journey Builder, you can welcome new subscribers, recover abandoned carts, reactivate customers, celebrate customer birthdays, etc. The service enables you to assign tags to specific clients and send them emails with personalized offers. Adding tags and sending targeted emails can draw your customers’ attention and make them interested in your product.
Consider creating a simple or complex customer journey map based on your goals. Choose a starting point and continue building your workflow. You can see an example of a simple flow, including birthday emails. Add journey points like “time delay,” “send an email tag,” “unsubscribe,” “update contact,” or others. It will help you build a flow that corresponds to your customer behavior.
ActiveCampaign’s automation allows you to use social media, live chat, landing pages, text messaging, and email marketing to send automated messages and monitor users’ engagement. The service offers tags, custom fields, analytics, and performance reporting to make the most of the customer information and improve customer experience. The platform enables you to schedule the sending of emails to new contacts to welcome them onboard. With an engagement score, you can easily identify your loyal customers.
ActiveCampaign also offers to make use of automatic reminders. They help trigger reminder notifications for vital customer dates. The automation sends a reminder to your team about customers’ important dates. This way, you can ensure a small celebration on the client’s birthday, one year with your brand, or customer loyalty. Show your appreciation by providing discounts, special promos, or birthday gifts.
With the platform’s segmentation, you can divide customers based on interests and preferences to deliver highly targeted offers. After defining the segments, send personalized emails with dynamic content.
The service provides site tracking, sign-up forms, migration services (the import of data from other platforms), goal tracking, notification emails, and more. Consider integrating your CRM into ActiveCampaign to monitor users’ actions and behavior on your website. The site tracking feature provides you with customer insights and tailors messaging.
You can create a workflow for various events by dragging and dropping the elements. The example below demonstrates a series of follow-up emails sent during an upselling campaign.
Klaviyo’s marketing automation empowers you to create email flows for every interaction with customers and move them down the sales funnel. The service allows you to build email automation from scratch or use pre-built email automation for more complex scenarios. To comply with your requirements, you can easily change or add conditions to reach your target audience successfully.
Klaviyo has a segmentation feature so you can assign tags to specific types of clients and divide your audience into segments. When your segments are ready, consider sending different personalized email campaigns to different audience groups. This way, you reach out to customers showing that you understand their needs. Klaviyo enables you to send welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and browse abandonment emails.
With the platform’s help, you can create several types of welcome emails to avoid the one-size-fits-all welcome series and focus on customers. Do it by adding a conditional split to your welcome flow to build different flows for new subscribers and returning clients. Since messaging influences purchasing decisions, you need to be wise when writing a message. One of your messages should motivate new subscribers to make their first buys, while the other encourages returning clients to repeat purchases.
You can create two paths for shoppers with abandoned carts. The message you send will depend on the defined value.
Adding a trigger “split” to the pre-built browse abandonment automation lets you communicate differently with customers who focus on a specific product and those who explore several items at once.
The platform has free and paid plans. They differ in the number of contacts, email sends, and SMS. You can get a paid plan for $20 per month for 500 contacts, 5,000 emails, and 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits. A free plan allows you to send 500 monthly emails to 500 subscribers and deliver 50 free monthly SMS/MMS credits.
Sendinblue’s automation helps attain different business goals with its series of emails. You can send welcome emails, anniversary emails, or email responses to certain user activity to improve customer engagement. The service enables you to track customers’ actions and send relevant workflows. By creating a custom series of emails, you can onboard new clients, reactivate existing customers, upsell, and cross-sell additional items. As a result, you’ll establish better relationships with customers and better revenue performance.
You can build a flow by determining rules and conditions that trigger specific actions. Sending a series of emails and SMS messages, organizing contact data, updating information, and others are the activities you can automate with Sendinblue.
With segmentation, you can target smaller customer groups and effectively reach them with relevant offers. A personalized message helps you increase opens and clicks.
See an example of a welcome message you can create in Sendinblue. Your company is ready to welcome new subscribers added to the contacts list in a couple of clicks.
The platform has a free plan, so you can use it to your advantage. However, marketing automation is limited to 2,000 subscribers. If you have more contacts on your list, it’s better to purchase a paid plan. You can reach an unlimited number of contacts with automation for 65$ monthly.
After analyzing automation software for business, we’ve concluded that SendPulse is the best alternative compared to its competitors’ pricing, the variety of channels, and the user experience. It provides users with more features for a lower price. However, the choice is yours. Hopefully, after reviewing the services above, you’ll find the right solution for your company. Remember your main goals when choosing the platform because not all cover the needed channels.
fIND THE PERFECT INFLUENCERS
Scale your outreach and pick the perfect influencers for your brand using our 52M+ influencer database searchable by 30+ smart filters
