Top 20 List of “Small-Business-Friendly” Marketing Automation Vendors

Marketing Automation (MA) Vendors That Are “Small Business Friendly”

Today, we released our report, MarketingAutomation.com’s Top 20 List of “Small-Business-Friendly Vendors”.

There are thousands of people with small businesses today wading through an ocean of enterprise solutions who want little to do with them.  Many marketing automation vendors are “small-business-unfriendly” for the following reasons.

• They do not have clear pricing on their web sites and force you to search or inquire about pricing.
• They don’t offer free trials or demos.
• Their start up fees and prices are prohibitive to small businesses.
• Their web sites are not clear and they provide very little user education.

If we look at their reasons (the vendors), I suspect that they are primarily interested in bigger customers. That’s fine for them.  But we must demand more and make our decisions for our reasons. So we looked at over 70 marketing automation vendors and disqualified those whose web sites were out of date, out of business, out of touch, or out in space, then we prioritized the rest…

People with small but growing businesses don’t have time to wade through 60 web sites or talk to 60 salespeople to find the best marketing automation providers.

What is a Small-Business-Friendly Marketing Automation Vendor?

Number one… Small-Business-Friendly Vendors need to have clear pricing easily available on their web site.  If they do, they make the next cut.

After that, we look for reasonable pricing and terms.  Do they require contracts, start-up fees, and high monthly rates?  Many providers offer free services for beginners. This is smart because it’s easy to get hooked once you see the power of marketing automation.  But most important, it is small-business-friendly. Some of these vendors are open source projects which are free, so I’ve included some of those as well (assuming they are they are well maintained and actively developed).  Those that made the cut (The Top 20) are in alphabetical order.  We think they all bring something to the table.

Our matrix represents those vendors who espouse these simple premises so you can save time deciding on their offers and learn about marketing automation in minimal time.  Please understand that I the values are based, in some cases, on a cursory look at their web sites (something that you would have to do if you wanted to evaluate these things) but in some cases I have first-hand experience with vendors and their products.

To get your free copy, please use our contact form and check the box “Please send me MarketingAutomation.com’s List of “Small-Business-Friendly” Vendors!”