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9 SaaS Marketing Tools Every Startup Needs [Tested in 2021]

Akram Krayem

SaaS startups usually run on a limited marketing budget, making every tool you use valuable to keep your costs low and return on investment positive.

What SaaS marketing tools can help you grow at low costs?

You’re at the right place, I’m going to show you:

How to run marketing campaigns at the lowest costs
Maximize the performance of your tools to increase revenue

Here’s what you’ll learn reading this guide:

6 reasons why you need marketing tools for your SaaS startup
The 9 SaaS marketing tools we use at Automizy and how we use them

6 Reasons Why you Need Marketing Tools for Your Startup

Your objective is to keep your expenses as low as possible while trying to stretch your revenue as a small business.

And by keeping your expenses low, we’re talking about:

Saving your time
Automating repetitive tasks
Creating optimized processes
Increasing your return on investment

Here are the 6 main reasons why you need to start using marketing tools for your small business.

1. Save your time

As a SaaS, your and your employees’ time is precious and worth money.

While managing a business solo or with a small team, every hour you save from marketing tasks you can actually spend:

Developing new features or products,
Getting closer to your customers,
Managing your team,
Or grabbing a drink.

You need the right SaaS marketing tools to handle tasks on autopilot without you or your team performing the tasks.

And the best SaaS marketing tools that save your time are the fully automated ones.

For example, a tool like Hootsuite or Later can publish your Instagram posts on a predetermined schedule without human interference.

By fully automated, I mean that you set up the software at the start, and then it can run by itself without any human interference.

For example, you want to send confirmation emails to leads who sign up for your product or fill out a form on your website.

It would be crazy to have someone responding to these new leads manually. Not only is it time-consuming, but it’s a tedious task for you or your team.

If you’re a new SaaS and you have up to 10 leads per day, that’s manageable, I understand.

But how would you scale your business if you spend your valuable work time just confirming sign-up or contact requests?

In this use case, the solution is to use automated marketing software that responds to your new leads without performing any task.

With advanced marketing technology, you can automate the whole process from the moment a prospect lands on your website until they become a customer and after.

With the time you save using the necessary SaaS marketing tools, you can spend it on other stuff.

One last tip, setting up automated marketing processes gets you ready when your SaaS scales up.

By that time you’d have your marketing foundation laid down, and your structure can support a more significant number of customers, support messages, and requests.

2. Reduce unnecessary charges

According to Indeed, the annual salary of a community manager is $49,663 in the US.

How much does social media automation software cost per year? $228

This tiny example can tell a lot on how you can use SaaS marketing tools to reduce unnecessary costs.

For instance, you can rely on social media software, like I’ll explain in the next section, to automate 3 social media accounts just for $19 a month to import your content and have your necessary social channels automated.

I’m not saying this is the best solution for everyone. But, if you’re a new SaaS product and you’re trying to keep your expenses low, this is a great solution.

When your company is more stable, and your MRR is predictable, you can hire and grow a high-performing team without worry.

For now, SaaS marketing software can reduce unnecessary expenses for your business.

Here are the tasks that you can accomplish with free online marketing tools:

Lead generation
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Search engine optimization
Graphic design

These tools don’t replace humans, you still have to do the work and set your tools up at the start.

But once you set it up, it runs automatically, costing your small business only a few dollars a month.

In the upcoming sections, I’ll go through the best SaaS marketing tools and share how they work.

3. Automate processes with workflows

Using the right marketing tools for your SaaS startup helps you automate processes and get rid of repetitive tasks.

Tools like Integrately help you connect different apps you use and automate workflows to automate tasks.

For example, you want to automate the following scenario.

Every time you acquire a new significant lead through an Elementor Form, you want add them to your Automiy account and send a Slack notification.

Workflow example to integrate Elementor with Automizy and Slack

You can easily create similar workflows or much more complicated ones using Integrately.

Think about your business use cases and what processes you’d like to automate first, then easily set it up to save your energy and have fluid business management.

4. Automate your lead generation

For a SaaS startup, a primary objective is to feed the top of the funnel with more visitors and signups.

By using lead generation marketing tools, you can automate the process of converting leads on your website.

Does that mean getting new leads and customers is guaranteed?

Of course not.

But when you feed your website qualified traffic through PPC ads or SEO and have lead capturing tools integrated into your website, you can turn website visitors into leads automatically.

This inbound marketing strategy helps you feed your top of the funnel, leading you to qualify users and to convert them into paying customers.

5. Set up automated sales funnels

Dealing with prospects is not only about “Signup now.”

Sadly, many SaaS startups are treating their prospects this way and end up losing them to their competitors.

As a SaaS startup owner or manager, you’d want to:

Establish trust with prospects and customers
Provide value
Set the right expectations together with prospects
Engage customers and keep them close

These 4 points can be achieved with a well-structured sales funnel.

A sales funnel is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the customer journey from the moment a visitor lands on your website until they become a customer and after.

SaaS marketing tools allow you to set up automated sales funnels that qualify and nurture your leads to make them ready-to-buy users.

Take the example of the following sales funnel.

Step 1: Visitor opens your signup page and completes the signup form.
Step 2: You send them a welcome email to confirm their action.
Step 3: 1 day later you share a tip on the most crucial action they need to take to get value out of your software
Step 4: 3 days later you invite them for a demo call or show them a more complex task to complete in your software
Step 5: After 1 week, you send a sales message to convert them

You see this whole funnel to welcome, nurture and qualify leads?

It can run automatically on autopilot after you set it up using the right combination of SaaS business tools.

Automated sales funnels are among the top reasons why you should introduce SaaS tools to your business.

6. Increase returning customers

As humans, we’re so good at forgetting things. This is a fact.

Forgetting about a customer or a prospect equals lost revenue. And every penny you lose as a SaaS business goes to one of your competitors.

You don’t want that. I don’t either.

For that, automated marketing tools eliminate the chances of forgetting to reach out to a customer.

When you set up long-term sales funnels, make sure to include a part to re-activate or re-engage inactive users.

Why re-engage inactive users?

According to Invesp, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%.

And it can cost 5 times higher to acquire a new customer than re-win an old one.

Crazy, isn’t it?

Using SaaS tools helps you keep your customers close and set up funnels that help you re-engage them in case of inactivity.

I will show you how to do this in detail in the next section.

9 Must-Have SaaS Marketing Tools To Be More Effective

In this section, I will go through the tools that we use at Automizy, used before, or other fellow SaaS tools that we’ve partnered with or learned about.

I will recommend one tool per category (lead generation, email marketing, social media, SEO, etc), taking into consideration:

Price: Free or paid and suggest a low-cost tool with the best quality.
Reliability: If you can trust the tool and its reliability.
Value: Available features and functionalities.
Usability: If the tool is easy to use for non-techie people

Here we go.

1. Elementor

Elementor is a drag-and-drop website builder, where you can create your own landing pages and blog without knowing any code. It is a great tool for those who don’t want to spend hours coding their websites.

Rather than spending hours coding, you’d use the time to optimize your conversion rates.

It eliminates the need of hiring expensive web designers or front-end developers and you can create stunning websites without knowing any code whatsoever.

At Automizy, our website and blog are created on Elementor and managed by our in-house marketers.

This allows our developers to focus on developing the software and not disturb them or take their focus away by asking them to handle the website.

This makes Elementor a practical SaaS marketing software as it supports and empowers marketing teams for their conversion optimization experiments.

Pro tip: Split test for Elementor plugin to run AB tests.

Pricing

Elementor pricing starts at $49/year for an essential 1 website plan, and goes up to $999/year for a 1000 website. You can find more details on their pricing here:

Integrations

Elementor integrates with all major email marketing services like Automizy, MailChimp, AWeber, and Constant Contact.

It also integrates with a few CRMs such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, Highrise, or Zoho.

These integrations help SaaS marketers to use Elementor in conjunction with their CRM and email marketing software.

Instead of exporting and importing data from one tool to another, integrating your lead generation tools to your nurture tools saves your the tedious work of managing messy CSV files.

Use cases

Here is a list of use cases of introducing Elementor to your marketing bundle:

Enhancing customer experience by making the website more up to date
Decrease workloads and time spent on coding a website, blog posts, landing pages, etc.
Designing responsive webpages in minutes
Creating landing pages with ease

Dos & don’t

One of the main Dos of Elementor is introducing it to your marketing team. So when deciding on a website page update or tweak, any member of your team can execute it.

So hold a day or a session in which you introduce Elementor to your team to speed up the execution of your website optimizations.

Among the top don’ts to avoid with Elementor is: Don’t create pages, publish them and leave. Why?

The website speed of Elementor is not really optimized. For that, you need to use Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to monitor your website speed and optimize it accordingly.

You can use WP Rocket with Elementor to optimize your website speed.

2. OptiMonk

When running a business, every lead you capture presents a revenue opportunity for you.

OptiMonk is a free lead generation software that helps you capture your website visitors and convert them into subscribers and leads.

It’s mainly an onsite retargeting tool that displays personalized popup opt-in forms to your website visitors and captures their contact details.

It allows you to create, personalize and trigger:

Popups
Sidebars
Notification bars and nanobars

Here is a sneak preview of some of the templates that you can use in OptiMonk.

Popup examples to use for SaaS businesses

Once you register to OptiMonk you’ll have access to +300 popup templates that you can customize to match your website and brand.

Most of the time popups are handled as a negative element to add to your website because it interrupts visitors’ experience.

That’s not the case with OptiMonk.

The software provides you with multiple choices on when to trigger your popup to display. By setting the right triggers and frequency you can avoid overwhelming your visitors.

setting the right triggers and frequency you can avoid overwhelming your visitors

Instead of ruining your visitors’ experience, you’ll make it more engaging by triggering personalized content at the right time, with the right message.