Small businesses all have one thing in common- the lack of robust resources. This lack often makes it a bit of a challenge to compete in the market. But with AI automation tools, this challenge is melting away. AI automation tools are providing solutions for small businesses to help them scale.
These tools automate many business operations: sales and marketing, customer relationship management, and other workflows. The resulting experience is that businesses can then dedicate more of their resources towards high-value tasks.
This blog details the various automation tools small businesses can use to streamline operations. Let’s get started.
Marketing and Sales AI Automation Tools
1. HubSpot Marketing Hub (Automates Email Marketing and Customer Experience)
HubSpot Marketing Hub does what it sounds like. It’s an all-in-one customer relationship solution for a small business. Its process entails helping small businesses attract, engage, maintain, and grow a customer base.
Key Features and Benefits:
Email Automation Sequence: Once you go through a setup phase, HubSpot will automatically send emails to customers. The emails will be based on segregation and customer browsing history. The email sent to a new customer will differ from one sent to a customer with an abandoned cart.
Lead Nurturing & CRM Integration: HubSpot allows you to create forms and landing pages to capture visitor information. These can be embedded on your website or used as standalone pages for specific campaigns.
Chatbots & Live Chat: You can attend to customers while asleep with this feature. Customers will be engaged through live chat or automated AI chatbots. All you need to do is set the chatbot up with the FAQs. You might also need to brainstorm a little to come up with an exhaustive list of questions.
Take caution not to become overly reliant on this feature. In the end, customers want to talk to a human to address unique complaints.
Ad Tracking & Automation: HubSpot monitors ad performance while you’re away working on other things. It’s activated when you link your social media pages to your HubSpot account. HubSpot then collects data from monitoring the performance of your ad.
The automation feature can come in by turning on certain settings relating to your ad pages. For example, you can set HubSpot to turn off an ad when the cost per conversion exceeds a set threshold.
Social Media Automation: Use this feature to schedule posts across all your social media platforms.
2. Mailmodo (AI Email Marketing Automation)
Mailmodo is an email marketing platform that makes emails interactive and engaging without human involvement. Right in the mailbox, it presents emails as mini web pages that users can interact with, without visiting a webpage. Email recipients can fill out forms, take surveys, browse products, and even make purchases without ever leaving the mailbox.
This is possible with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology, which gives emails the look and functionality of web pages. The selling point here is that Mailmodo effectively reduces the awareness-to-conversion lifecycle by eliminating multiple clicks and website visits.
Key Features and Benefits:
Automated Email Workflows: You can set up automated email sequences with specific triggers. The common triggers are sign-ups, web visits, and abandoned carts.
Drag-and-Drop Email Builder: The mini websites don’t require technical expertise to set up. To curate an engaging email, simply use the drag-and-drop builder.
Personalization & Dynamic Content: Mailmodo’s AI takes email marketing automation to the next level. Aside from inserting names, it data gleaned from user behavior to customize email sequences. It’s like marketing tailored to each user. This leads to increased engagement and conversion.
A/B Testing & AI-Driven Insights: Mailmodo can be used to test subject lines, word placement, and email content in A/B split testing. You can use audience segregation for this purpose: your audience is split randomly and assigned to different test groups. You can also perform the test with a subsect of your audience.
Select the specific metrics you want to track (e.g. click-through rates) and Mailmodo will monitor these metrics and collate data. Then, it might automatically shift more traffic toward the winning variation as the test progresses.
CRM & Third-Party Integrations: Mailmodo connects with third-party apps like HubSpot, Zapier, Pipedrive, Google Sheets, and others through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The point of this integration is to allow for a smooth flow of data across the platforms.
When an activity is initiated on one of the platforms, it triggers an automated workflow. For instance, when a new lead is added to your HubSpot CRM, Mailmodo is automatically triggered to add the lead to a specified email list category. Mailmodo could then follow up the lead with a sequence of emails that primes the lead for a purchase.
3. Hootsuite (AI Social Media Automation Tool)
Hootsuite is an AI tool that’s dedicated to automating social media posts and management. It helps small businesses save, schedule, and analyze social media posts across all platforms from one dashboard. It eliminates the hopping around and constant switching between platforms.
This gives a huge amount of clarity on the rewards of your social media efforts. It also helps collate data on working strategies for future adjustments.
Key Features and Benefits:
Automated Social Media Scheduling: Use Hootsuite to plan posts weeks and even months in advance. It doesn’t stop there, it also suggests optimal post time. Hootsuite analyzes the audience’s behavior, engagement patterns, and performance of your past posts to determine the best times to post.
Automated Content Ideation: Hootsuite uses social listening to source for trends your brand can key into to increase awareness. It also analyzes trends, popular content within your industry, and your own past performance to generate new content ideas. The time that would otherwise go towards brainstorming would be freed up for other uses.
Auto-Engagement & Inbox Management: Hootsuite combines engagement (comments, mentions, direct messages) from all your social media accounts into one inbox. This simplifies the process of juggling social media management across multiple platforms.
Chatbot Integration: Hootsuite provides a chatbot that can be trained using a large knowledge base about your brand and FAQs to deal with customers directly. As time goes on, the chatbot can be updated to provide answers to new FAQs.
Suggested Replies: Based on previous knowledge, Hootsuite can analyze incoming messages. It then suggests appropriate answers for your customers. This can prevent excessive time spent digging for information prospects.
Automated Filtering and Prioritization: Hootsuite’s AI can analyze incoming messages and categorize them based on priority. This ensures urgent messages are sorted before less pressing ones. This act of promptly addressing customer issues helps build a reliable brand image.
Customer Service AI Automation Tools
4. Tidio (AI Chatbot)
Tidio is a customer service automation tool that helps brands respond to customer queries quickly without the luxury of a full support team. It helps mall businesses engage with website visitors, automate responses, and improve support using chatbots and live chat. Tidio also integrates with other platforms to help create comprehensive customer communication.
Key Features and Benefits:
AI Chatbots for 24/7 Support: Tidio makes its AI chatbot, Lyro available for your use. You then train the chatbot by providing it with FAQs and its complementary answers. You can also import FAQs from your existing support pages.
Lead Qualification: Not all leads mature into paying customers. Lyro eliminates the guessing game through lead qualification. The lead qualification process is all about asking website visitors qualifying questions to identify possible customers. The sales team can then take it from there and concentrate their efforts on converting the leads to actual customers.
Live Chat with Automation: Tidio understands that not all queries are to be handled by AI chatbots. It is therefore fitted with a system that automatically identifies and routes complex queries to human agents.
E-commerce Integration: Tidio integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopify. It notes customer behavior and will automate follow-up in cases of abandoned carts.
5. Drift (A Conversational Marketing Chatbot)
Drift is another AI chatbot that engages with prospects, answers queries, and guides them down the sales funnel on your behalf. Its strength lies in engaging website visitors and qualifying them as leads.
Key Features and Benefits:
Lead Qualification: Drift uses an automated questioning process to qualify website visitors as leads. The chatbot engages website visitors through questions that reveal their unique needs, interests, and the business’s own requirements for paying customers.
Drift then collates each visitor’s responses and computes a score that ranks them according to potential.
Routing High-value Leads: Drift then routes the highest-ranking leads based on scores to human agents for direct interaction. Since these leads have already been marked as high value, human agents can funnel major efforts into conversion.
Email & Chat Integration: Drift connects the Email and AI chatbots for prospect follow-up. For instance, if a high-value lead fails to schedule a call with a human agent. The lead is automatically added to a specified follow-up list. This triggers a future email that will remind them to schedule a session with a sales rep.
Workflow & Productivity Automation
6. Zapier
Zapier is a workflow automation tool that connects all other work platforms and tools. It works this way: Zapier sends ‘Zaps’ to the next tool in the sequence once an activity is triggered on one tool. The sequence is pre-existing, having been set up prior to Zapier’s full adoption.
The work only exists in the set-up phase. For instance, you could integrate your entire sales funnel in Zapier. As soon as a new lead enters, it sets off a ‘chain reaction’ till the lead becomes a customer.
Key Features and Benefits:
No-code Automation System: Zapier allows the creation of automated workflows called ‘Zaps’. A drag-and-drop interface replaces the code. All you have to do is choose the apps you want to connect, the triggers, and the actions you want done. You can also trigger actions with a schedule.
You can further customize your Zaps with conditional logic and filters. This means giving Zapier instructions in natural language about the workflow. E.g. ‘Only route orders above $200 to a human agent’. This reduces noise, ensuring that irrelevant actions don’t trigger a workflow. It also increases work output.
AI-generated Workflows: Zapier can suggest ideas for your automation process. It offers a great starting point for newbies or anyone wanting inspiration. The suggestions vary. Sometimes, Zapier could suggest automation ideas for popular uses like nurturing leads.
Other times, Zapier collates information from its past uses by others to identify effective automation patterns. It then uses the data to inform its ideas. There are also app-specific suggestions, Zapier will analyze the APIs of connected apps to understand the app’s capabilities. The new insight then forms the base of its suggestions.
Automatic Data Transfers: When apps are linked, Zapier can automatically access the data in them, cementing the workflow. Once a workflow is triggered, Zapier goes into the corresponding app to fetch the required data. It also passes data along.
There’s a preliminary step to this process, which’s called Data mapping. This is where you give Zapier instructions about data transfer. It involves “mapping” the fields from the trigger app to the corresponding fields in the action app.
The Bottom Line
Small businesses often face the challenge of getting by and scaling with limited resources. But with these automation tools, smaller businesses can compete and effectively scale. Automation tools provide time-saving and cost-saving benefits for tasks that will ordinarily take up huge chunks of time. And the payoff is significant- more time can be dedicated to tasks that actually move the needle.
Also read: Exploring the Top 12 AI Tools for Businesses
FAQs
1. How Can AI Be Used in Small Business?
AI can help small businesses automate tasks across several business operations. That includes customer relationship management, marketing, and workflow efficiency. Popular AI tools used are chatbots, marketing automation platforms like Zapier, content creation (Jasper), and targeted marketing.
2. How Do I Automate My Business With AI?
Business automation with AI follows a step-by-step process:
- Identify repetitive tasks (e.g., customer support, scheduling, email marketing).
- Do some research nd settle on AI tools that fit your needs (e.g., chatbots, CRM automation, AI analytics).
- Integrate your chosen AI tools and platforms with your existing softwareand workflows.
- Train AI models with business data for better accuracy. Regularly update training data as time passes.
- Monitor and optimize AI automation by collecting data routinely and identify opportunities for improvement from conclusions.
3. Which AI Tool Is Best for Automation?
- Zapier– Connects apps and automates workflows.
- HubSpot– Automates marketing, sales, and customer support.
- Tidio– AI chatbot for customer service.
- Hootsuite– Social media automation.
- Drift– AI-driven sales and lead generation.
4. What Are the Top 5 Generative AI Tools?
- ChatGPT– AI chatbot for content ideation and generation. It can also inform content strategies.
- Jasper AI– This is an AI writing assistant that helps with marketing and sales copy.
Also read: A Jasper AI Review: A Cheat Code for Writing?
- MidJourney– A tool that generates images with natural language prompts.
- Synthesia– Uses AI to create professional video avatars and voiceovers.
