Who Really Uses Marketing Automation?

Any company of any size can use marketing automation, and many do. From startups to small businesses, mid-size companies (SMB marketing automation), larger brands, and even Fortune 500s, marketing automation has become rampant. Business-to-business or B2B companies were among the first to take on this form of automation. Specifically, their B2B marketing automation included the business services, manufacturing, and software and tech industries. Now, more B2B companies have come aboard, as have business-to-consumer or B2C companies. In retail, entertainment, media, finances, and healthcare industries, B2C marketing automation provides valuable insights. For instance, these industries can study their average customer lifecycle, review the customer’s progress in the sales funnel, and track engagement per customer. Better yet, they can do all this in real time. Whether you’re a company in the starting stages or one that’s better established, there’s no reason to avoid marketing automation.

Do Small Businesses Need Marketing Automation?

Yes, you need marketing automation even as a small business or startup. Most small businesses pinch pennies until they can bring in consistent revenue. Extra expenses also often get put off until that time. Investing in marketing automation in the early days can help your small business in several ways. For one, you’re strengthening your marketing approach from the get-go. That means more leads, fewer missed opportunities for conversions, and—hopefully—more sales. Also, given that you’re a small business, you probably have only a handful of employees, right? That’s the standard for companies of this size, after all. You plan to hire more employees when you can afford to pay more people. In the meantime, automation can fill in the gaps. You can use it to send emails, start and manage campaigns, post to social media, and track campaign success, to name a few purposes. Marketing automation makes you feel like you have more employees than you really do. It also simplifies the lives of the employees you do have. No longer do they have to sit in front of the computer to send that one email or post on social media at a specific time. They can schedule messages and then get back to other important tasks.

Is Marketing Automation Useful for Growing My Business?

Absolutely, marketing automation can help you grow and succeed in your business ventures. There are three main areas in which you’ll benefit most from using marketing automation. These include the retention of customers, lead nurturing, and inbound lead generation. The customers you do have make up the backbone of your business. That becomes especially truer if you’re a small business with an equally small audience base. You want each customer you do have to stick around while making new customers from lead conversions. With marketing automation, you can create profiles for each of your customers. These offer you a comprehensive 360-degree view into all parts of your customer and who they are. That includes their behaviors, firmographics, and data like their gender, age, location, sometimes even their job title and income. From there, you have the freedom to organize your audience into buckets and then market towards them with targeted campaigns. Marketing automation can also assist you in generating more leads for your small business. With inbound marketing, in which you rely on social media, websites, landing pages, blogs, and more, you can capture the attention of more leads. By personalizing these pages, you appeal to the interests of your lead segments. After you gain their interest, you can use lead nurturing services through marketing automation to maintain it. Besides that, you may also open up lead communications, often through several channels. With lead scoring, you can determine which of your leads would make the most ideal customers and then gravitate towards them. It’s then up to you to convert them.

What Is the Best Time to Invest in Marketing Automation?

You shouldn’t delay in getting good marketing automation systems going for your business, whether big or small. Here’s several points to sit down and seriously consider before you buy a marketing automation software: If you’re already using lead nurturing but you’re considering increasing the size of your operations, you’re ready for marketing automation. If you want more means of connecting with and tracking your leads, you need marketing automation. If you want to more closely study your buyer’s journey from start to finish, you’re ready for marketing automation. If you have a lot of leads but you’re not necessarily converting them all, then it’s time for marketing automation. The same applies if you’re getting a sudden influx of leads but you’re not sure how to manage them all.

What Is the Purpose of Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation has many purposes, which we’ll talk about now. They include the following: Preventing the need to hire more staff to take care of tasks that automation can do for you. Reducing the need to sit in front of a computer to send emails or make posts on social media at optimal times for the most engagement. Eliminating any reason for us people to do tasks that we deem too repetitive or time-consuming. Providing proven methods for capturing and segmenting leads. For instance, you can score leads to find the best fit for your business’ products/services and then market towards them. Understanding your customers’ respective journeys while nurturing relationships and boosting customer retention. Linking a marketing and sales team together so they work in tandem rather than accidentally opposing each other. Boosting open and click-through rates with emails as well as enjoying higher engagement rates, conversion rates, and sales. Reporting and analytics on data like ROI and marketing campaign success rate that let you replicate your success or take a fresh approach for next time.

How Can You Identify the Most Suitable Marketing Automation Platform for Your Business?

Almost countless marketing automation platforms exist, making it hard to narrow down your choices. We recommend you consider the following questions as you decide: Does the automation service include features you’ll actually rely on or does it come with a bunch of stuff you can’t envision yourself trying? How helpful and responsive is the marketing automation vendor? What’s their customer service like? Do they have nine-to-five hours or can you reach out to them 24/7? Can you contact them online as well as by phone? Is it an all-in-one software or do you have to use web services and outside tools to make the most of it? How time-efficient is the software? Do you find yourself saving or losing time by using it? Do you have to accommodate for delays if you transfer information and data from one system to another, such as to customer relationship management or CRM software? Will the automation software provide detailed analytics with metrics that matter to you? How simple is it to start and deploy a marketing campaign? How easily can you add extra users if need be? What’s the learning curve like? Can you and your staff quickly pick up the system and figure it out or does it take longer to fully understand? How much will it cost you per month or per year to use the software?

Zapier Integrations

Zapier Integration Overview

With the EngageBay - Zapier integration, you can now connect to hundreds of apps using triggers and actions to automate work between EngageBay and other apps. Save time, move data/information between apps automatically, and improve productivity.

With the EngageBay - Zapier Integration, you can:

Add new Engagebay contacts to a MailChimp list as subscribers
Add new Shopify customers to EngageBay as contacts
Create EngageBay contacts from Gravity Forms submissions
Update or create EngageBay contacts for new MailChimp unsubscriptions
Create or update EngageBay contacts from new Facebook Lead Ads leads
Add new or updated EngageBay contacts to Google Contacts
Add new Google Contacts to EngageBay as new contacts
Add new EngageBay contacts to Google Contacts
Create EngageBay contacts from Typeform form submissions
Add ManyChat subscribers to EngageBay Marketing forms
Add new Teachable customers to EngageBay sequence

EngageBay-Zapier Integration Features

Connect all your apps

Connect your EngageBay marketing software with hundreds of other powerful apps to achieve better business efficiency, enhance workflows, generate more revenue, and improve your business.

Choose what to automate

EngageBay is closely integrated with Zapier providing several integration points also known as Zaps. Send marketing data from EngageBay gathered from your email marketing and marketing automation campaigns, landing pages, popups to your other apps. You can bring the data from those apps into EngageBay as well.

No coding required

Zaps are extremely easy to set up. Just select the zap you need from the readily available ones listed in the Zapier directory and build automated workflows across different apps. No coding or developer intervention needed.

Save time with automation

By setting up automated workflows with Zapier, you can cut out manual effort and tedious copy-pasting, and apply that time to your customers and for more important work.

Scale your productivity

Zapier workflows go beyond copying information. You can look up data across multiple tools before feeding it all into your central repository. Work can be scheduled, delayed, summarized, and parsed. Your info can be transformed, formatted, sliced and diced as needed. With the ability to have any event in your system signal a sequence of updates and actions across all your tools, you'll be able to set up processes you didn't even think possible before.

Zapier connects and integrates with these EngageBay features

CRM

Contact activity Forms Ticketing

Marketing

Social Media Workflows

Rated #1 CRM Software for Small Business on G2

What 46,000+ Small Businesses Say About EngageBay

"Engagebay works pretty well with my business. I was using ActiveCampaign but the costs were adding up quite quickly. I tried other platforms but the automation sequence offered by ActiveCampaign is not easy to find, until, I got Engagebay. The platforms offer an awesome automation platform for emails, plus landing pages and forms. It works quite well and can be a perfect substitute."

Leonardo W.

Founder, Wolff Consultoria

"The software is easy to set up and implement. I feel EngageBay is quickly becoming a marketing automation competitor to the premium SAAS offerings. EngageBay's customer support has been very responsive and helped me resolve an implementation issue almost immediately."

Shawn L.

Marketing Manager, List Biological Laboratories, Inc

"A full-featured marketing platform. With this, you have all you need to get started and succeed. Having all in one platform make any marketer job much easier."

Santiago B.

Southern Europe Director, Triptease

"EngageBay has everything I need when it comes to managing customer relations and sales activities. The features I most frequently use are automation for sending emails, managing sales, and marketing automation. Plus, having a built-in live chat and help desk tool makes it really easy to engage with customers."

Hongkiat L.

Editor-in-chief