Marketing is the lynchpin of a successful organization. After all, it connects your product with customers. Earlier, the process was manual. Lately, it has become mobile and social.

The evolving paradigm has also led to a change in the type and nature of tools used to measure marketing efforts. For example, marketing automation has replaced manual modes of marketing with good reason. You can these apps to automate your marketing processes. They streamline your processes, operations and enables you to quantify your efforts. What’s more, it enables you to connect across multiple platforms including the web and social media. In turn, SaaS marketing automation apps have changed the role of apps.

For example, consider the case of a smartphone app that can be used to track a user’s location and activity. Using the app, major retailers can tailor products and messages for the customer. In addition, they can, also, offer add-on services and products based on the user’s interests.

If all of this sounds complex and expensive, you are not alone. Most small businesses still prefer the old (and safe) method of marketing. However, SaaS applications make it simpler and easier for you to make test runs or conduct trials using their freemium pricing strategies. Listed below are five marketing automation apps that will help you decide whether marketing automation is good for your small business.

Infusionsoft

InfusionSoft works across four channels: customer relationship, marketing, and automation. The last-mentioned feature is baked into the solution. Pretty much most, if not all, marketing touchpoints and processes have been automated. For example, you can use the automation process to nurture leads by sending them email reminds. Similarly, you can streamline the marketing workflow by making it easier for your marketing agents to get in touch with each other as well as with their customers. Finally, the solution’s automation of project management activities helps manage your sales and marketing processes.

Pricing: $199.00/month

Marketo

Marketo is a complete marketing platform. The solution has incorporated a plethora of features to enable marketers to connect with their subjects. For example, you can use the solution’s drip marketing feature to begin your campaigns and, subsequently, move onto more sophisticated approaches. They are one of the few solutions to take an incremental approach to marketing. The idea behind the incremental approach is to minimize work and enable you to focus on strategy instead of the mechanics and technical nuts and bolts of the campaign. For small businesses, this should be an optimal route as it enables them to scale based on their budget and resources.

Pricing: $1195.00/month

Marketing Optimizer

As its name denotes, Marketing Optimizer helps you optimize campaigns on a continual basis. This means that you can continually improve your campaign experience by integrating it with popular website testing, web analytics, and landing page optimization software. What’s more, the solution has a patent pending for a call tracking feature that integrates calls with web analytics software. This means that you can conduction actionable A/B testing to make decisions based on your kep performance indicators.

Pricing: $49.00/month

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the pioneers of marketing automation. It is also one of the more popular solutions in the market. It has over 400 plus templates for email marketing. The good part is that the choice comes with ease-of-use as you can customize these templates with one-click editing. Social media is an important major component of Constant Contact. Using the solution, you can see who has shared your work product across social media and, also measure return of investment on your solution.

Pricing: $15.00/month

Evergage

Evergage should have been called engage. This SaaS solution helps create personalized user experience for customers. Using Evergage, you can optimize your website artifacts such as landing pages to better engage users and boost conversion rates. Evergage does this by promoting timely, relevant actions to visitors based on their actions and preferences. The solution has true behavioral targeting that takes into consideration all aspects of user behaviour, and not just the ones defined by major analytics solutions. Plus, it is rich with analytics to track pretty much everyone who visits your website.

Pricing: Freemium