So your website is ready to go live. After countless meetings and months of hard work, you have successfully put together some great content and design, incorporated feedback, and made necessary iterations. You also want to set up some basic automations to give that extra zing to your website experience. However, it would seem that most automation tools are expensive and require extensive knowledge of coding.
Contrary to popular belief, marketing automation doesn’t have to be costly from the word go. Most tools offer free trials with some limited but neat functionalities, which are usually easy to use and set-up without any coding or technical knowledge.
To help you get started, we have compiled a list of 5 easy automations that you can deploy today at zero cost and spruce up your consumer experience game! We have also included some of our favorite apps as examples, which are an excellent place to start building these automatons.
1. Collect visitor information with pop-up forms
Pop-up forms are a great way to convert visitors into subscribers or contacts. These forms can be triggered on exit intent, 50% page scroll, etc. You can also choose to display the form on all pages or specific pages. Some apps even allow you to customize triggers based on visitor demographics and behavior data and attribute the forms to specific campaigns. These apps come with robust out-of-the-box reports and insights which can be used to tweak the form content, design, or offer, and increase conversions.
Apps we like for pop-up forms:
- Privy (free up to 5000 pageviews)
- Hubspot (included in Free tools & CRM)
2. Use chat to engage site visitors
Your visitors will have questions, and they may not always know where to look for the answers. Installing a live chat app on your website is a great way to connect with prospects, respond to visitor queries, and qualify leads, all in real-time. Chats are also the most preferred medium for customer servicing. If you don’t have the manpower, you can use human hybrid chatbots to design conversation flows based on your lead qualification process. These bots can then extract information from visitors, thereby automating the lead qualification process so that you spend time only on the qualified leads.
Our favorite chat apps are:
- Snatchbot (free)
- PureChat (free plan)
3. Collect feedback with online user feedback tools
Who better to give you feedback on your website experience other than your visitors? Online user feedback tools do precisely that by collecting customer experience data in a plethora of ways – heatmaps, surveys, polls, feedback forms, visit recordings, etc. Triggers can be automated based on profile and behavior criteria, or within conversion funnels with options to collect visual feedback. The main utility of feedback tools is in their ability to provide insights on conversion behavior. The tweaks you make based on these insights have the potential to skyrocket your conversion rates and create evangelists of your customers.
Get started with user feedback with either of these apps:
- Hotjar (free for up to 2000 pageviews/day)
- Freshmarketer (free for 5000 monthly visitors)
4. Create personalized engagements with auto-responders
Kick-off your email marketing program with auto-responders. Automate interactions with your consumers based on a range of profile and behavioral triggers such as product sign-ups, form submissions, cart abandonment, contract renewal, reminders, promotions, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Besides saving time and monetizing your email list, auto-responders help build trust with new contacts given the personal nature of this mode of communication.
Once you have set up auto-responders, you can move to sophisticated, modular, and personalized email campaigns such as subscription and nurture programs.
Some apps to help you get started:
- Moosend (free for 1000 contacts)
- Zoho Campaigns (starts at ~ INR 1000)
5. Go vocal. Automate social.
Be active on social with the help of automated publishing and listening tools. If you find yourself struggling to find 3rd party content to post on your social channels, take a look at content curation apps. These apps will create a pipeline of posts based on specific keywords related to your business. Some social apps offer both curation and publishing capabilities, thereby automating the entire supply chain. You can also use native integrations or zaps to connect content curation tools with publishing and listening tools. All social apps also come with a combined inbox to help you keep track of various conversations across platforms.
Our favorite social apps are:
- Quuu (free for three social accounts)
- Friends+Me (starts at $7.5 per month)
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