Marketing Automation for Small Business: Tools and Tips

Marketing automation for small businesses means using software to run repetitive marketing tasks, like sending a new email subscriber welcome sequence or post-purchase confirmation. These are triggered by actions like sign-ups or purchases, instead of a business owner sending each one by hand. 

Rather than feeling impersonal, the right marketing automation software can actually deepen your connection to your customers, says Harlem Candle Co. Founder Teri Johnson. Teri uses automation tools to segment and recognize her VIP customers. “Being able to give customers early access to certain things because they are so loyal makes them feel special—that they’re not just anybody. They feel like, ‘She knows me,’” Teri says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

In this article, you’ll learn what marketing automation for small businesses looks like in practice, the types of automation tools available, and tips from small business owners on where to start. 

What is marketing automation for small businesses?

Marketing automation is software that triggers a marketing action based on specific behavior. For example, a customer signing up for a newsletter or abandoning their cart would trigger a specific email, text, or customer tag without the business owners having to send each message manually. 

Automations take over parts of the marketing workflow that would otherwise require daily manual effort. Once a workflow is built, it runs in the background. That way, teams can spend more time on higher-level work rather than repeating the same manual tasks for every new customer. 

Here are some marketing tasks worth automating:

• Lead capture. In this automation, pop-up or embedded sign-up forms collect a visitor’s email address or phone number, store it in your customer relationship management system (CRM), then send them a welcome email sequence. 

• Gathering customer data. Automated workflows tag and group customers by behavior, location, or purchase history, building segments a store can use in future campaigns without manually sorting a contact list. 

• Post-purchase communication. Order confirmations, shipping updates, and review requests get sent automatically after checkout. 

• Cart and checkout recovery. When a shopper adds items to a cart or starts checkout but leaves without completing the purchase, an automated email or text can prompt them to return and complete the purchase. 

• Posting social content. Social media posts can be automatically posted across multiple platforms according to a schedule you set in advance. 

Automation tools for small business

Automation capabilities are table stakes for today’s marketing tools, so most tools have some level of automation built in. For example, an email marketing tool will automatically send emails, and a social media management platform can auto-post. 

But there are also some automation apps specifically designed to create custom workflows and connect your entire marketing tech stack. These are the two most popular options for Shopify users:

Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow is a free workflow automation platform designed for ecommerce. Flow integrates with other Shopify tools like Shopify Forms for lead generation and Shopify Messaging for email and SMS marketing. You can also connect it to more than 90 external apps, including Google Sheets, Slack, OpenAI, and Klaviyo.

Shopify Flow comes with hundreds of prebuilt templates for common automation use cases, but also allows you to create completely custom workflows for your specific business. If you’re not sure where to start, you can use Shopify’s built-in AI assistant, Sidekick, to generate a custom workflow based on plain-language prompts.

Pricing: Shopify Flow is included with all Shopify plans. The Basic plan starts at $39 per month, and there is a free trial available.

Zapier

Zapier is a tool that connects software that wouldn’t otherwise communicate with each other. It comes with workflow automation templates, and you can also create custom workflows, known as Zaps.

With more than 7,000 app integrations, Zapier may make sense if you want to create a workflow with an app that isn’t compatible with Shopify Flow, and you’re willing to pay a monthly fee to do so.

Pricing: A paid plan is required to use Zapier with Shopify. Zapier paid plans start at $30 per month.

Marketing automation use cases

Here are some marketing automation use cases from real ecommerce businesses:

Scaling operations 

Tique Chandler, founder of Chandler Honey, has built a lean operation that runs like a well-oiled machine thanks to carefully implemented automated systems. When a visitor signs up for her newsletter, they enter a sequence that starts with a welcome email, followed a few days later by recipes and brand stories, while Shopify’s native tools separately trigger automated cart reminders to bring back high-intent shoppers. 

“The first thing I tell any entrepreneur? Set up your abandoned cart alerts. But don’t stop there. Email sequencing has transformed how I run my ecommerce business, allowing me to do less work on the ecommerce side while significantly improving my conversion rates,” Tique, who uses Flodesk, says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

The automations kept her revenue steady while she was offline on maternity leave.

Nurturing leads

At MiJa Books, Cofounder Stephanie Reed initially handled customer outreach and school book fair bookings by hand. “It was a challenge because I’m also wearing all the other hats in the business—we soon realized we need to hit people right away, once a lead comes through. It needs to be automatic,” Stephanie says on an episode of Shopify Masters. 

Her cofounder, Muammar Reed, set up an automated funnel using Zapier. The lead entering a giveaway triggers a text with a booking link, adds the contact to an email platform, and starts a multiday sequence tailored to different educational personas, ultimately helping the business scale without adding headcount. 

Rewarding loyalty

Harlem Candle Co. founder Teri Johnson used to look up customer addresses manually and handwrite thank-you notes. As the brand grew, she built customer segments to identify VIPs who regularly open emails and complete checkouts, then used automation to send those segments custom email flows offering early access to new launches. In this way, she’s been able to make loyal customers feel special in a scalable, manageable way.

“Some customers have been with me since 2016. For me to even acknowledge that and to be able to put stuff like that in the language of our email flows is super cool,” Teri says on Shopify Masters. The personalized touch makes customers feel like Teri and her brand know them, but it’s all data pulled from their interaction with her store—and it’s replicable at scale.