You name the problem, and there will be a tool to help you solve it. Yet many companies find it challenging to get their hands on the best automation tool for their business.
Mainly because the software space is noisy.
SaaS marketing automation tools help businesses streamline their marketing tasks and operations. Every tool boasts of being the best with "seamless integration," "best automation features," "robust analytical reports," and many other big terms that confuse buyers.
And most of the time, these apps fall short of expectations. However, there are tools on the market that are super valuable, with amazing features and guaranteed results.
After trying hundreds of marketing automation tools for our SaaS business, we can strongly call out the best marketing automation tools we have discovered.
All these SaaS apps will help fill in the gaps in your operation, have no learning curve, offer what they promise, and are super affordable.
Without further delay, let's get started.
What is SaaS marketing automation?
SaaS marketing automation self-operate different marketing activities such as lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. Such tools let you reach the right people at the right time through the right channel at scale. Most businesses today use marketing automation to improve customer engagement, reduce manual tasks, and increase the number of leads they capture.
Why do you need SaaS marketing automation tools?
Whether you are a one-person team or run a fully-scaled SaaS business, you cannot manually monitor users' behavior and signups. So, here are some examples of where you can use marketing automation tools for your Saas business-
- You can increase customer engagement through chatbots, personalized emails, interactive surveys, and quizzes. These tools customize the user's experience and increase the chances of getting them to sign up for your SaaS product.
- Through marketing automation, you can imply better marketing strategies personalized according to users' actions on the platform leading to lesser churn.
- Marketing automation tools let you integrate your favourite SaaS apps, leading to better operational efficiency and less time wastage.
And the list goes on…
8 Best SaaS Marketing Automation Tools Every SaaS Company Needs in 2022
For further organization, we have divided the tools into various categories where marketing automation is most used. So it's easy for you to choose and plan your automation.
Email marketing
Today, a majority of marketers use email automation to send automated drip campaigns. Sending targeted emails is part of lead nurturing, user onboarding, and retention. Email automation in SaaS is an excellent way to engage users and stop them from slipping away.
- Intercom
Intercom is an automated tool for customer support and lead generation for SaaS companies. The SaaS customer journey is a long process with multiple touchpoints. Intercom helps manage each of these touch points to improve communication and strengthen a long-term relationship.
Features of Intercom-
- The Live Chat helps to touch base with the Customer at the right moment to increase interactions.
- Integrate on-site Chatbots to offload your customer representatives and offer faster resolutions.
- Support bots offer Q&A sessions and articles to resolve customer queries.
- Easily share product updates, announcements, and promotional emails, attract traffic and let them take action.
- Guide first-time customers and give them a product tour. Guide them through different product features.
Pricing:
The tool has three pricing ranges, so you can choose what works best for your team. Contact the sales team for pricing.
- Customerly
If you are looking for a cohesive platform that lets you converse, support and learn from your customers, then Customerly is what you need. This SaaS marketing automation tool helps build meaningful relationships with your customers by helping them solve their problems through real-time texts and videos.
Features of Customerly-
- Use advanced audience segmentation to niche down your contacts at scale.
- You can automate your marketing strategies and convert more people through behavioural automation.
- Customerly CRM software keeps track of all your customers and tells you exactly what they are doing on your SaaS platform.
- Customerly work best for improving customer service, marketing automation, and customer satisfaction.
Pricing-
Customerly has one free plan and three paid plans starting at $24 per month.
Social Media posting
Social media is the second-most automated channel (47%) after email marketing (65%). It is no surprise that companies save much time by automating social media and ads. Here are the best social media automation we highly recommend-
- Buffer
Buffer helps with publishing and analyzing your social media content across channels. It customizes campaigns, social publishing, and social analytics. The content calendar is handy; it helps the team schedule content on a timeline. It automates the content approval process.
The shared inbox is a useful feature that lets you get customer messages from different channels and put them all in one place. Use the campaign planning feature to categorize your campaigns easily.
Features of Buffer:
- Buffer can monitor your social media performance. Users can track performance and create reports for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedln to measure post insights, account analytics, and audience demographics.
- It lets you create, manage, and post content across various social media channels.
- The social media calendar helps you schedule social media content.
- It automates the content publishing process so that the managers verify the posts before getting posted.
Pricing:
You can use a free Buffer account for limited features or buy a subscription starting at $6 per month per channel.
Lead generation
Lead generation is a never-ending task. By automating your marketing and sales processes, you can keep your pipeline filled with leads and avoid dry spells. Instead, your team can focus on other crucial tasks like closing deals, looking for better opportunities, and investing time in new strategies.
- MarbleFlows
MarbleFlows is a no-code, first-time user experience app that lets you create interactive forms in seconds. It offers an array of templates that you can use while onboarding customers. You can customize these templates according to your needs and add questions that help you better understand your user's journey.
Features of MarbleFlows:
- You can A/B test various survey templates to select the best onboarding flow for your SaaS tool.
- You can embed MarbleFlows anywhere via widget, link, or iFrame to where you need it.
- MarbleFlows offers 1000+ design variations and 100+ templates to target customer journeys, usage, and demographics.
- You can add custom branding and logo to match your company's style.
Pricing:
MarbleFlows is extremely cost-friendly at just $12.99/month. You can also try its free plan to learn more about the product.
Marketing research and analytics
Automating marketing research and analytics helps meet customers' demands in real-time. Brands can easily understand customer trends and use data to derive new strategies. Market research automation tools also derive productivity by providing solutions to common, repetitive problems, allowing researchers to focus on real issues.
- Semrush
Ask any marketer what their favourite marketing research tool is, and most likely, you will hear SEMrush. SEMrush is an online visibility management tool that has over 55 different products and tools. The tool has many capabilities, from keyword search to content management to social media management. It will measure session length, page views, scrolling time, and many engagement features.
Features of Semrush:
- Leverage the SEO-related tools for rank tracking, on-page SEO, keyword research, link building, and more to improve your website ranking
- Derive reports on your social media campaigns
- Manage your social media content across channels
- Analysis of different metrics for digital analytics. You can also automate your reporting daily, weekly, or monthly, and Semrush will send them to you directly via email.
Pricing:
There are four pricing plans, starting at $119.95/month. You can explore SEMrush with a free account.
User research and feedback
If you want to know what your customers think about your products at scale, then opting for a feedback tool is a must. This marketing automation tool saves time on user research and gives correct data at the speed of light.
- Typeform
Typeform is one of the best SaaS marketing automation tools because it is easy to use, gives faster results and is budget-friendly. The platform lets you create quizzes, surveys, forms, polls, and tests. With Typeform's videoask, you can record your questions and talk to your audience face-to-face while building stronger business relationships on a large scale.
Features of Typeform:
- Typeform offers a custom, no-code layout with pre-build templates and skips logic to create interactive forms, surveys, and quizzes.
- Typeform offers integrations with your favourite tools like Google Forms, Notions, Canva, Slack, Salesforce, Zapier, and many others.
- Typeform can get feedback, do market research and generate leads.
- The tool has an array of templates that you can choose from order forms and HR surveys; Typeform has it all.
Pricing:
Typeform offers three paid plans, starting at $29 per month.
AI content writing assistant
Writing and editing can be a long and tedious process. That's why most writers and editors now use AI content writing assistants that help them write great content in less time. These tools give writing suggestions and find grammatical errors.
- Grammarly
Grammarly is the writer's best friend. It's one of the most popular marketing automation tools that checks grammar, plagiarism, spelling, and more in real-time on different platforms. Once you download the Grammarly app or add its extension, you will get suggestions as you move across apps. It checks for more than just grammar and spelling mistakes. It also makes suggestions based on the tone, citations, and style of the text.
Features of Grammarly-
- Grammarly works with various emails and messaging tools (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and Slack), documents and project manager apps (Google Docs, Word, Notion, Salesforce), and Social media (Linkedln, Facebook, Discord, and Twitter).
- Grammarly works well with Windows, Mac, Browser extension, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, MS Office, iPhone, iPad, Edge, Google docs, and more.
- Grammarly's plagiarism checker detects plagiarism by comparing the content with billions of other online content. It provides a plagiarism score that helps editors remove or edit similar parts.
- You can easily customize your editing according to your language preference (American, British, Canadian, Australian), style, and tone of the content. Its suggestions are specific and quite helpful for writers to edit their mistakes.
Pricing:
Grammarly offers both free and paid versions. The free version works excellently, but you can use their paid plan starting at $12/month for more advanced suggestions.
Design and Graphics
Designing looks fascinating, but it's often a monotonous task. So, instead of manually creating designs from scratch, you can use designing tools that provide flexible templates and a gallery of media to turn your vision into reality.
- Canva
Canva is one of the best graphic design tools that lets you create professional designs in minutes. It has thousands of pre-made templates, images, and videos that make it easy for users to make their ideas come to life. Canva is a platform that lets you make beautiful designs without having to know how to code.
Features of Canva-
- With Canva, you can create logos, flyers, banners, posters, resumes, invitations, intro videos, memes, and everything else you can think of. Besides, you can make whiteboards, presentations, social media content, videos, and websites.
- Canva's video cutter lets you cut, time, slice or split your videos into parts to give users the best storytelling experience.
- Canva offers online screen recording, video resizing, video to gifs, images to video, video transitions, rotating video, adding text to videos, and many more features. You can customize your videos to the core with this design tool.
- Canva's image enhancer fixes blurry, dark, oversaturated photos using a free photo enhancer tool.
Pricing:
Canva offers both free and paid plans starting at $119/year.
Wrapping up
The right SaaS automation tool can cut your efforts and time in half. They automate monotonous tasks, integrate with your favourite tools, and personalize according to your needs.
This list is a goldmine if you are looking for a marketing automation tool in the following categories: You should definitely give them a try.
Written by Rashi Jaitly.
