Marketing Automation (MA) Vendors That Are “Small Business Friendly”
Periodically, we release a report called MarketingAutomation.com’s Top 20 List of “Small-Business-Friendly Vendors”.
What is a Small-Business-Friendly Marketing Automation Vendor?
Number one… Small-Business-Friendly Vendors need to have clear pricing, easily available on their website. If they do, they make the next cut.
We then check if they offer reasonable terms, no or low start-up fees, and affordable fees? 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 vendors are open source projects which are free, so I’ve included some of those as well (assuming they are well maintained and actively developed). Those that make the cut (The Top 20) are in alphabetical order. We think they all bring something to the table. UPDATE: We’ve added a new criteria to the List. It is “small business outreach“. There are few vendors who practice what they preach. Even if their prices are a little higher than others, they are generous with information and ideas. We decided that this deserves recognition. It’s been helpful to me and I think it’s helpful to small businesses in general.
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 the process. Please understand that judgements are made, in many 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 many cases I have first-hand experience with vendors and their products. Of course we’re improving the criteria over time. Some of the vendors reach out to us and help us to understand their offerings better as well over time and we think that’s small business friendly too.
To get your free copy, please use our contact form and check the box that says, “Please send me MarketingAutomation.com’s List of Small-Business-Friendly Vendors!”
What is Small-Business-Unfriendly?
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.
- Believe it or not, I think there are a few who don’t really want to speak to people at all.
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 80 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 80 salespeople to find the best marketing automation providers.
