With more than 200 marketing automation platforms available—covering a wide range of features and budgets—how do you choose the one that’s right for your business? The good news is that you don’t need to spend a fortune getting powerful tools and advanced features.
We’ve worked with a variety of platforms over the years, including:
- Marketo
- Act-On
- Sharpspring
- Eloqua
- Hubspot
- Mailchimp
- Campaign Monitor
- Constant Contact
Some are quite complex while others are a bit more intuitive, but all of them help you achieve the same goal–greater customer engagement, leading to higher revenue.
Why use smaller marketing automation platforms?
In one of our recent blogs, we talked about how the current economy affects marketing budgets, which means we have to be flexible and look for ways to cut back. Just because you can’t have the biggest, shiniest marketing automation platform available doesn’t mean you can’t have one at all. So, why use smaller marketing automation platforms?
- The obvious reason is cost. Platforms like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor can be more cost-effective, especially for smaller businesses or those who use email marketing as one of many tools. You can select the necessary tier based on the number of contacts within your target audience and scale from there.
- Related to cost, add-ons can add up. It varies depending on the platform, but some bigger platforms charge hidden fees like onboarding, setup, and integration.
- With smaller marketing automation platforms, the interface can be easier and more intuitive simply because it focuses on its core purpose–email. While they still offer valuable tools like forms, landing pages, or integrations, they’re designed for ease-of-use, so you don’t need a larger IT team to get up and running.
- They are also resource-efficient. It doesn’t take a big internal team to train, understand, integrate, and maintain them continually. It can often fall on a small internal team or your ad agency partner who is fluent in many platforms.
- Smaller platforms are fast to set up and deploy. When we work with our clients, we can implement and begin using a platform like MailChimp within just a few days after sender address authentication.
