Automation feeds on the data from interactions between a company and its clients to understand their behavior, gain insight, and improve the entire process. For example, small businesses can carry out personalized communication with their clients with the help of marketing automation for SMEs(Small and Medium Enterprises).

Marketing automation software simplifies and shortens the marketing process seamlessly. As a result, conversions happen a lot quicker. You can optimize your email marketing automation efforts to drive targeted visitors to your website.

Choosing to use CRM can transform your business. CRM boosts your sales by helping you understand your customers, how to keep and maintain them, putting in place optimal processes for your sales reps and lead scoring.

The Best Marketing Automation Software For Small Businesses

1. MonkeyPesa

MonkeyPesa is an all-in-one marketing software for fast-growing companies. It provides all the marketing tools your business needs under one roof. The CRM aids businesses in getting prospects, and insights, converting more leads to become customers and managing customers across several channels. At the same time, they go through the selling process.

Monkeypesa Marketing price starts from $9.99 per user billed monthly. It integrates Email, SMS, social, and push notifications all together under one powerful CRM to ease automating marketing for small and medium enterprises.

Advantages of MonkeyPesa

• Ideal for small and medium enterprises.

• Integrates with local African SMS providers, allowing you to send SMS messages to clients in your country, the rest of Africa and the world.

• Integrates with local voice call providers. Dial directly from the browser.

• Flexible integration with several Ecommerce platform providers in Africa and beyond.

• It has a native CRM integration that unifies sales and marketing data in one place.

Other MonkeyPesa Features:

• Team collaboration

• Contact management

• Pipeline management

• Data security

• Insights, analytics and reports

• Human Resource and payroll

• Inventory and stores

• Bulk SMS and emailing

Automate your workflows with Monkeypesa to increase the efficiency of your team, reduce the errors in repetitive tasks and boost your team's productivity. MonkeyPesa possesses an email marketing service for SMEs that helps you build an email list. You can use your email marketing service to manage your email list in one place. It will also allow you to create email campaigns and send them to your email list at once.

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign caters to all businesses with mega automation that integrates email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text. Over 70% of ActiveCampaign's customers use its 300+ integrations, including Shopify, Square, Facebook, and Salesforce. Pricing starts at $49 a month.

Why should you use ActiveCampaign?

• Customizes sends based on parameters.

• Automates individualized experiences across all your customer touchpoints

• Uses customer lifecycle to choose content, send time and delivery channel for each customer.

• Keeps track of client's interests and behavior

• Creates customized campaigns with minimal effort

ActiveCampaign Prices: Get started at just $49 per month for the Plus plan (unlocks CRM features, advanced integrations), $129 per month for Pro, and $229 per month for Enterprise Plan.

ActiveCampaign effortlessly combines and integrates with other software, applications and tools. These include; Microsoft, Shopify, Facebook, Salesforce and more. ActiveCampaign provides a perfect customer service experience that surpasses the traditional touchpoints, for instance, emails. Instead, the service software offers a personalized, high-touch experience for businesses.

ActiveCampaign eliminates silos between data sources, communication channels and teams. This aids businesses in scaling their customer relationships via connected experiences that span the customer lifecycle. In addition, ActiveCampaigns’ customized expertise helps companies to computerize a truly personalized experience that is real so that clients can widen their relationships.

ActiveCampaign features include;

• unlimited sending

• email marketing

• sending newsletters

• subscription forms

• marketing automation

• landing pages

• Facebook custom audiences

• lead and contact scoring

• conversation

• attribution reporting

• predictive content with machine learning

• custom domain

• dedicated account rep and more.

3. Hubspot

This is one of the best CRM software tools for all businesses, from startups to large business ventures. In addition, Hubspot offers free tools for teams and best manages customers’ contacts well.

Hubspot CRM enables you to do many valuable things with your contact base, such as centralizing all contact information (including internal notes) and automating different reminders.

Hubspot CRM is software built for marketing and sales companies that want to use proven techniques for ushering in new clients and customers, especially businesses that generate customers via online marketing and sales.

In your quest to identify a CRM perfect for your business, chances are high you have come across HubSpot free CRM. You can store up to a million contacts in your HubSpot database with the free CRM. Furthermore, an unlimited number of your team can access your database, Integration with Gmail and Outlook, Email and Meeting Scheduling, Capture, Store, and track sales leads.

Hubspot’s CRM is a tool that teams find friendly to use, and more so, it automates the number of administrative tasks to concentrate on. In addition, Hubspot gives visibility into the sales pipeline in real-time through the visual dashboard.

Hubspot CRM allows you to access real-time sales performance reports and individual performance. This allows business managers to review and identify potholes so that teams can lay strategies for achieving success where it has failed.

Hubspot has solutions for small, medium and big businesses. However, Hubspot works better for everyday business transactions since it is easy to use, captures customers, manages data, records calls and meetings, manages sales pipelines and also aids sales reps in monitoring contacts with customers and deals. In addition, Hubspot aids managers in getting an insight into the sales activities, marketing tools and activities.

Small businesses and startups commonly use Hubspot and medium companies but also serve large enterprises. Hubspot provides a free trial version that supports small businesses and startups through their growth stages. Packages that can be accessed at a cost include; a starter package for $45 a month, a professional package for $450 a month, and a package for big enterprises for $1200 per month.

Hubspot is one of the CRM software commonly used by businesses in Rwanda. It has unique benefits it delivers to its users, such as; being easy to use, a free forever trial version, and cheap packages.

Hubspot features include;

• Free CRM software

• Free versions of sales Hub

• Combination of Gmail

• Outlook calendars and Email

• Deal stages

• Pipeline and opportunity tracking

• Website chats and bots

• Email tracking

• Reporting and tracking meetings

4. Freshsales

This software is run by Freshworks and is best meant for small, medium and large enterprise businesses. Freshsales has inbuilt tools you need to manage your business, for instance, in-built phone and email, dashboards, customizable visual reports, visual deal pipelines, intelligent workflow automation, and artificial intelligence based on lead scoring. Some of the features of Freshsales include; sales sequences, integrations, territory management, deal management and many others.

Freshsales puts all your prospects/leads’ information in one central place to accelerate performance and sales by following up on conversations, demographic information attachments, tasks, and appointments. In addition, Freshworks employs AI automation to boost teamwork, enable communication, chat with leads, know your customers’ behavior and close deals.

Freshsales integrates with; Pure360, LeadsBridge, MSB, Docs, 3CX, Microsoft dynamics 365, Hubspot CRM, Mailchimp, Freshdesk and many more.

Their billing rates are; growth is for $15 per user per month, pro goes for $39 for each user per month, while enterprise goes for $69 for each user per month, but there is also a free version for trial.

It would help if you boosted your email marketing campaigns to improve your revenue through marketing and sales. In addition, email marketing promotes customer service, which enhances retention. This comes along with continuous support.

Fresh sales email marketing software improves a company's revenue through context-driven sales. The tools help you manage customer relationships better. In addition, the email marketing software allows customization of client engagements which eases the sales cycle and promotes the growth of the business.

Freshsales include; sales sequences, integrations, territory management, deal management, bulk emails, formula fields, mobile app, email integration, sales analytics, sales sequences, workflow automation, sales activity management, multiple sales pipeline, and web forms.

The software gives you a complete view of customers' interactions to deliver a personalized experience. This lets you close deals faster with a 360-degree view of your customers. In addition, the software promotes efficiency by aligning the sales process since most time-consuming activities are automated and more time is spent on selling.

Freshsales, email marketing software, reduces business costs due to automation, boosts adoption, is more straightforward to use, is easy to implement, and boosts employee morale to deliver.

Freshsales gathers all the essential customer information and details under a single depository to make it accessible. In addition, Freshsales email marketing software uses AI automation to boost teamwork, enable communication, chat with leads, understand customers’ behavior and close deals.

5. Customer.io

Customer.io tool is suitable software for email marketing automation. With customer.io, it's easy to create flows that trigger at different times of the day/week or whenever a user performs a particular action.

With access to your real-time behavioral data, create personalized and relevant messages that engage and retain your customers. Send an email, push notifications, text messages, and more through an intuitive and powerful visual building experience. Built for scale, Customer.io is used by over 4,100 companies, sending over 8 billion messages annually. It is made for developers. Integrate their API to your application to deliver SMS (to the USA and Europe) and email. The basic package starts at $150 per user monthly.

6. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a full-featured email marketing solution with capabilities such as social media integration, drag-and-drop editing, and real-time reporting. It is a bulk email tool designed for SMB customers. While it is most widely known for its email marketing capabilities, it also provides services about website management, such as a website builder, ecommerce tools, and logo design assistance.

Key Email Marketing Features

• Email templates

• Marketing Automation

• Facebook & Instagram ads

• Google ads

• Ecommerce integrations

• Email campaign ideas

Advantages

• Great fforeature set for event-based email marketing

• Easy to use drag and drop email builder

• Extensive template library with premade email forms and designs

• Consistently among the highest email deliverability rates that we’ve tested

Constant Contact Prices: Constant Contact offers an essential service starting at 20/month for up to 500 contacts (and then scaling up) OR their new Email Plus option, which starts at $45/month for up to 5oo contacts (then scaling up).