Automation tools are the key to running a successful SaaS business. They help you optimize your software like intranet, boost customer satisfaction, and reduce manual work—all while increasing revenue and decreasing expenses.
But with so many automation tools out there, it can take time to figure out which ones will work best for your needs. That’s why this article is created. It’s an easy-to-use guide to the automation tools that are right for you. Continue reading to know more.
1. HubSpot
You may have heard of HubSpot as the marketing platform that helps you grow your business. But the company is not just a marketing tool; it’s also an automation platform for SaaS businesses.
HubSpot marketing software has been around since 2006 when co-founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan launched their first product to help small businesses manage their websites and email campaigns.
Since then, it has grown into a suite of sales, marketing, and customer service products that help companies automate many of their routine tasks. These products are now part of the same package called HubSpot CRM.
“HubSpot CRM is an all-in-one software solution that can help you automate everything from lead generation campaigns to customer onboarding emails — all while collecting and analyzing data about your customers’ behavior and preferences. These features make HubSpot an indispensable tool for creating an efficient SaaS marketing strategy” Says Carl Anderson, CEO at Turbo Boost
With the right accounting software for SaaS business, much of this manual data entry and categorization process can be greatly alleviated.
2. Sender
Sender is an email and SMS marketing platform trusted by 180,000+ successful brands globally. The platform is one of the most affordable yet powerful email marketing tools that help businesses engage their audiences and boost their sales with effective marketing messages.
Sender primarily focuses on email and SMS automation, helping you create and manage your email and SMS campaigns from the same dashboard.
With Sender, you can:
- Segment your subscribers and send personalized emails and SMS to engage them further;
- Create effective drip campaigns to nurture your leads into loyal customers;
- Design beautiful cart abandonment emails to convince visitors to go back and complete their purchase;
- Send automated “thank you” messages after customers buy your products, then ask for feedback or give them a discount for future purchases.
The platform provides a drag-and-drop email builder and a massive library of stunning templates. That way, you can quickly design beautiful, personalized, engaging emails, popups, and forms. It also offers an HTML email builder for coding pros that want to put their skills to work.
Besides this, the email marketing software has a reporting and analytics feature that helps you monitor your emails and SMS in real-time to improve their performance. Sender also integrates with different CMS, ecommerce platforms, and CRMs, including WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop.
3. Tidio
Tidio is a comprehensive customer communication platform designed to streamline customer service and enhance overall customer satisfaction. It empowers businesses to generate high-quality leads, boost conversions, streamline operations, and automate customer support up to 70%, all while delivering swift and effective assistance.
With Tidio, you can:
1. Use the power of conversational AI with the AI chatbot Lyro;
2. Offer quick human support with a live chat;
3. Create your own chatbot flows of use one of the many templates for automation;
4. Handle messages from all channels in one tool with a Helpdesk;
5. Boost conversions with personalized email marketing campaigns;
6. Enjoy a tailored customer experience ecosystem with customizable limits for agent seats and chatbots with Tidio+.
Tidio stands out as an ideal solution for businesses striving to deliver exceptional customer experiences without the hassle of managing multiple tools. With its unified platform, extensive integrations, and AI-powered features, Tidio serves as a catalyst for enhancing business operations and customer satisfaction.
4. Planly
Planly is an innovative social media scheduling tool that simplifies the process of planning and publishing content across various social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. Designed for businesses of all sizes, Planly allows you to manage and schedule your social media posts from a single dashboard.
With Planly, you can:
- Efficiently work with your team by adding as many members as you’d like and managing your social media strategy together.
- Track the progress of your content with detailed analytics and understand its performance across various platforms.
- Navigate easily with Planly’s intuitive and straightforward interface.
- Get support whenever you need it with our dedicated customer service team.
- Leverage AI to help create engaging content and streamline your posting process.
- Upload high-definition videos to enhance your social media posts.
Planly offers a 14-day free trial, with individual plans starting at $15 per month, making it accessible and cost-effective for any business.
5. Buffer
Buffer is a social media scheduling and marketing app that helps brands manage their social media accounts. Buffer allows users to schedule posts across multiple social channels, track the performance of those posts, and measure the impact of their efforts. Like handling tools with ease, user also rely on craft CMS hosting from Cloudways that results in reducing their hassles for server management.
Buffer is an automation tool for SaaS businesses because it’s easy to use, affordable, and can help you reach more customers and grow your business. Here are five reasons why you should use Buffer:
- It’s easy to set up, manage and use;
- You can schedule content across multiple social media platforms;
- You can organize your content by topic or channel;
- It’s affordable — there are no limits on how many social profiles or networks you use with Buffer;
- It integrates with many third-party apps.
“Buffer also provides a free tool for bloggers called Blogger App. This allows users to schedule blog posts daily and share them directly from their Buffer account. If you want more choices for scheduling tools, you can have a look at these social media post schedulers.” Says Jessica Shee from iBoysoft.
6. Zapier
Zapier is a web app that allows you to connect different software applications through “Zaps” that can be created with just a few clicks.
The integration possibilities are endless, but here are some examples of how you could use Zapier:
- When someone signs up for your newsletter, send them an email;
- Add the name of someone who’s mentioned your product on Twitter to your CRM;
- Send an SMS alert when a customer renews their subscription.
“Zapier makes it easy for SaaS businesses to automate tedious tasks such as sending emails or creating new contacts in Salesforce when a new lead is added to Salesforce or a new row is added to your Google Sheets spreadsheet.” Says Jonathan Rogers from Credexel.
7. Zendesk
Zendesk is an automation tool for SaaS businesses. It allows you to automate your customer service processes to spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time focusing on the things that matter most — like your customers.
You can use Zendesk’s automation features to create rules that automatically respond to common customer requests or proactively reach out to customers with personalized messages at the right time. You can even ensure your team answers only the right tickets based on their skills and expertise. This customer service software allows businesses to manage and track customer inquiries across multiple channels.
While tools like this are not directly related for events photographers, it can be a valuable for businesses in this industry (and others) that “need to stay organized and responsive to customer needs.” Says Sharon Winson, Sales Manager at Nucrete.
8. SocialBee
SocialBee is an all-in-one social media management tool that helps businesses share their content across all social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and Google Business Profile.
The core features of SocialBee are designed to automate social media marketing, from content creation to publishing and analytics.
Here are just a few of the features this tool has to offer:
- Generate captions with the AI assistant;
- Use Canva, Unsplash, and Giphy integrations;
- Organize your posts in different content categories;
- Set up a posting schedule for all your social media profiles;
- Recycle evergreen posts or remove time-sensitive content;
- Customize your posts for each social media platform;
- Analyze the performance of your accounts and posts;
- Reply to comments and monitor your mentions;
- Create multiple workspaces and collaborate with your team.
“The SocialBee platform is intuitive and easy to use. I particularly like the ability to directly add to the schedule the posts I want to publish. SocialBee allows me to work with multiple social platforms, with easy scheduling and analytics all within one intuitive interface.” Says Adrian Williams, founder of Parrog Agency.
9. Chameleon
Chameleon is a SaaS tool that helps businesses automate their sales and marketing. With Chameleon, you can create automated marketing campaigns, send targeted emails and SMS messages, and track customer response.
With Chameleon, you can:
- Create automated campaigns for cold emailing or drip messaging;
- Reach out to customers based on what they’ve done in the past;
- Send SMS messages to your customers’ phones;
- Create surveys to collect feedback from your audience.
“Chameleon’s drag-and-drop campaign builder makes it easy to create automated campaigns for cold emailing, drip messaging, or webinar registrations. You can also create custom surveys to help gather data about your customers.” Says James White, Managing Director at Media First.
10. Autopilot
Autopilot is an automation tool for SaaS businesses. It helps you create and deliver marketing content in minutes, like email sequences and automated webinars. You can even automate the follow-up on your products and services.
Some of its features include:
- Automated email campaigns: Create automated email sequences that are sent automatically based on triggers or events, like when someone takes action on your website or purchases a product from you;
- Automated webinars: Create webinars without worrying about creating slides or finding presenters; fill out a form and let Autopilot handle it;
- Automated drip campaigns: Start building a relationship with your customers by sending them personalized emails at regular intervals after interacting with your business (like signing up for a free trial).
“Autopilot is an excellent tool for small businesses — it’s easy to use (even for non-tech people) and affordable. It integrates with all the significant CRMs and CMSs, so you can easily connect it with your website and other tools.” Says Rene Delgado, Founder & CEO at Shop Indoor Golf.
11. FindThatLead
FindThatLead is an all-in-one lead generation platform that helps businesses and individuals find the professional contacts they are looking for, generate leads, verify emails, manage their customer portfolios as a CRM and establish mass email communication.
Prospector, its lead generation functionality, allows sales professionals to search and prioritize companies and employees based on location, industry, size, technology, job titles, keywords and other categories.
“FindThatLead’s API allows its users to integrate its system with various third-party tools such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Gmail, Salesflare and more. Users are also provided with dashboards that show sales funnel results, from email open rates to conversion rates.” Says Steve Pogson, Founder & E-commerce Strategy Lead at FirstPier.
Tools on FindThatLead:
– Prospect Generation Tool – Provides you with the contact of your future best customers
– Cold Email Campaigns Sender – Reach your prospects with catchy emails
– Avoid Spam Folder – Verify your email lists to make sure you are reaching the right people
– Find any professional email – You just need to put a URL and we will extract
Side Note: While not purposefully an automation tool, Storydoc is an online software that integrates with automation tools and CRMs such as Hubspot or Salesforce to help you create and distribute the most effective and eye-catching sales and marketing collateral. You can include decks in your drip campaigns, automate and personalize each deck that goes out.
12. Salesforce
Salesforce is an automation tool for SaaS businesses. It helps you manage customer relationships and close more deals by tracking sales conversations, automating tasks, and personalizing the customer experience.
Salesforce can help your organization in many different ways. You can use it to:
- Create a new opportunity or contact record automatically when a lead fills out a form on your website or sends an email;
- Automatically send emails based on events like when a prospect visits a landing page or clicks a link in an email campaign;
- Email your prospects individually based on their profile data — like their job title or industry;
- Send personalized messages to prospects who have signed up for content on your website with no effort from your team;
- Track the status of every customer interaction — when they open an email or click through from another email campaign — so you know which messages are working best and what kinds of messages will resonate with each person in your database.
“The biggest benefit of using Salesforce is that it integrates with other tools like Gmail, Google Docs, and Slack. You can use these integrations to automate your workflows and save time in-between tasks.” Says Alice Rowen Hall from Rowen Homes.
13. Attention Insight
“Attention Insight is a software platform that predicts where users will look while engaging with content. It helps to identify design problems and provides insights into user attention without collecting fresh data from participants. Outputs include heatmaps (visual representations of how users’ attention is distributed) and Areas of Interest (the percentage attention that different visua.” Says Keith Eneix, President of FANNIT.
Conclusion
When you invest in automation tools for SaaS businesses, you’re investing in your future. You’re investing in the possibility of growth and the ability to reach new customers easily. Even the businesses planning to undertake SaaS product development and launch their software-as-a-service product, keeping this list of automation tools in mind can help when they plan to launch and scale.
You’re funding in saving time and money on tedious tasks so that you can focus on what matters most: your customers. So don’t hesitate—invest today!