Marketing Automation on a Shoestring Budget

Listen, marketing automation tools like Hubspot and Marketo are awesome and all, but who has the budget?! Even if you have the budget, who wants to spend it on automation tools? Here are just a few ways you can put your marketing on autopilot with next-to-no budget.

Free Marketing Automation

Just for context, I was recently listening in on a HRmarketer-sponsored webinar, when someone asked: “What marketing automation software do you recommend that’s NOT HubSpot or Marketo. There’s no budget for those.” To which the panel responded, glibly, “Get the budget.”

Seriously? If you don’t know, just say so. I know. Here goes.

Let’s break what we’re calling marketing automation into three parts: sales force automation (SFA), drip marketing automation, and content marketing automation.

Free Sales Force Automation

Salesforce.com and HubSpot both offer the ability to capture web leads, keep ’em organized, and report upstairs. They are also expensive.

If you’re running a WordPress website, look into WP-CRM. It’s a stripped-down CRM, but it ties directly into your WordPress users database allowing users a seamless online experience. There’s also a cool plugin, ironically by HubSpot, called LeadIn. Both are free.

If you’re not running WordPress or you want something a bit more robust, look into SugarCRM Community Edition. We’ve installed and used this self-hosted tool for numerous clients. Here’s a more in-depth review of SugarCRM. It’s also free.

(Cheap) Drip Marketing Automation

You can get really fancy with expensive tools creating action-response campaigns, but for the rest of us, we just want to send regular emails to a growing opt-in list of potential buyers. That’s pretty much it.

For anyone who has a website that’s on a CMS, it already comes with automatically updated RSS feeds. MailChimp, a fabulous email marketing solution, has an RSS-to-Email feature which will automatically build and send your email campaigns as you post content to your website. As long as you have a list of less than 2000, and don’t send more often than 6 emails to all 2000 per month, MailChimp is free.

Want a little more control/ownership? If you’re running a WordPress website, consider using MyMail. It’s a premium WordPress plugin (on sale from Code Canyon for around $25, one-time). It comes with some basic reporting, automation and a really cool visual editor to make your emails look and perform beautifully. And, since myMail is hosted on YOUR webserver (which you’re already paying for), it’s free – forever.

(Efficient) Content Marketing Automation

All this stuff is great, but even HubSpot and Marketo can’t automate development of engaging content (blog posts, press releases, awards, tweets, updates, videos, etc.). Producing great content is hard–really hard. But, once produced, you can automate it’s distribution and syndication. You just have to piece a few tools together if you don’t want to spend a fortune.

Use HootSuite Pro’s Scheduler to post updates, tweets, etc. according to your editorial calendar ($10/m)

Produce variations on the same research or theme. For example, take one piece of content and turn it into a blog post, a press release, tweets and an infographic. It’s like twice the sex with half the foreplay.

Video production is cheap – if you do it yourself. Think about buying a Flip video camera, or Camtasia to produce screen-capture videos. Remember, the video is going to look like crap, but roll that into its theme and it looks on purpose. For example, see PRweb’s “In Plain English” video series. All are ugly. All produced at almost NO cost. All are very, very successful.

Well, it’s a start… If you have any other ideas or questions, let us know.

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Discussion

Luke Hinchliffe says:

05.13.2013 at 4:48 AM

This is a great post, and something I have been pondering recently myself. I just spent 3 months implementing a marketing automation project for my “day job” – a corporate b2b thing. We chose to use Pardot but it’s still very expensive and totally out of reach for most small businesses/startups. I am looking into setting up something on a shoestring for a friend – the biggest problem I have is replicating the drip campaigns – you could try it via RSS-to-email plugins as you say, but you can’t truly replicate the process of sending people a series of emails. You can send 500 people a series of say, 10 email campaigns, 1 a week, but how to manage new subscribers – that is the problem. You would have to manually send each new one the series in order from the beginning. That’s where it gets complicated!

Justin Downey says:

05.13.2013 at 9:38 AM

Luke, you bring up some great points–particularly on the issue of drip campaigns.

The expensive Marketing Automation platforms allow for lots of 1-to-1 marketing (including action-response emails), but what I didn’t explain very well in my point on RSS-to-email is that you don’t have 1-rss feed going to 1-list.

What I’d recommend is breaking your sales and marketing pipeline/process down into, say, 2-4 parts. Then, set up 2-4 post categories (each have their own RSS feed with WordPress and most of the big CMS). Then, post unique content to each category but each category will be assigned to send to a different list.

For example:

Let’s setup a list for “Suspects” or early-stage buyers. These people are just doing some basic research on the tools and best practices. They’re window shopping. Now we create a category of content explicitly targeting this group and post articles about new research, best practices, etc. Using RSS-to-email this group will be nurtured until they take some action (raise their hand in some way).

Let’s say they attending a webinar all about how to buy the product (what you need versus what you might only want). The moment they sign-up for that webinar, they’re not shopping–they’re gearing up to buy. That’s when you move them from your “Suspect” list to a “Prospect” list where they will receive content from a different category that’s more about, “how to get the budget for this”, “how our product differs from others on the market”, etc.

Anyway. It CAN be done. It’ll take a little more work and a lot more forethought, but at little or no expense, this is a wonderful place to start (on a shoestring budget). You’d be surprised how many businesses we speak to that spend a fortune using Marketo or Hubspot pretty much like a free mailchimp account ;).

Justin Downey says:

06.05.2013 at 4:42 PM

Now THAT is marketing automation for the common man, Matt. It’s Jumplead seems to have everything a small business needs without the bloat (or the high price).

I’m a little confused why everybody tiers their products out by visitors per month and number of users. I get you need a tiered business model, but conversion ratios vary wildly for small businesses. I’d venture a guess that anyone who gets less than 500 hits a month probably doesn’t even need an MA solution…

I do LOVE that all the features are included in all the plans. I just wish there was another way the packages could be tiered.

We’re probably gonna do a little trial run with the product and post our findings here.

Stay tuned Shameless News readers. http://jumplead.com is one to watch!

Matt Fenn says:

06.06.2013 at 3:42 AM

Hey Justin, Your absolutely right, conversion rates do vary quite a bit, there are also wildly different customer and lifetime values… which can make how you charge for a service a difficult question.

At the end of the day we all need to make sure that we don’t end up in a situation where we have pricing points that end up losing money through overuse of resources!

We’re just trying to create a plan structure that gives low volume websites and small teams access to tools the big guys take for granted.

Your right though, we find that the customers on the Basic and Starter Plans tend to use visitor identification and chat as these techniques work better for low volume websites. Ironically, visitor identification is a premium feature on many MA systems…

I’ll look out for your trial, if you have any questions please let me know..

Guy Goldstein says:

07.05.2014 at 3:21 AM

As someone that’s been working with Marketing Automation for the last 10 years, I’ve had the chance to check out a lot of systems. The fact of the matter is, there’s a reason that Marketo is a market leader and there’s a reason that Eloqua can charge stupid amounts of money for it’s product.

The reason is that they have products that are super-targeted for specific business categories, BIG ONEs. A small business can’t even consider having to spare an entire member of the marketing team to devote to managing marketing automation, and I can tell you that what a casual user can do with one of these systems vs what a power user can do is like the difference between frozen pizza and traveling to Rome for the real deal.

If you’re a small business, you’ve got plenty of options out there, and more and more are cropping up every week, each one offers small businesses “the tools big businesses have” for cheap, but really the tool that big businesses have that small businesses don’t is people on the team with backgrounds in data analysis, marketing automation, process design, and a few other skills that you need to implement a solid MA platform.

One thing that small businesses should be doing when selecting marketing automation platforms is to figure out what their specific needs are, not what the big businesses do, not what they would do if only they had 3 more people and an extra million dollars, but their real needs over the next year or 2. Based on those needs they can check out a number of systems (It’s worth including systems such as Ontraport, Infusionsoft, and Autopilot in that list) and figure out which system will support their needs.

Small businesses should also remember that the big businesses achieve a lot of success by identifying a problem, finding an expert that can help them solve that problem, and then throwing money at the problem until it goes away. Small businesses may need to be more frugal, but if you work with an expert implementer that can help you design and implement your marketing automation system to support your business needs, you can save yourself time and money, and fast-track your success.

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