With more and more businesses adopting new technologies there’s an increasing demand for automation software that helps marketing, sales, and customer success professionals automate repetitive tasks, connect the dots of their entire TechStack, and stay on top of things when looking to effectively build clear processes, better prioritize tasks, and cohesively manage their time. But, how do you go about choosing your next business automation software? Are you looking for tips on how to choose your next business automation software? Look no more!
The demand for business automation software is increasing all over, especially among the companies that have already managed to align all their Marketing, Sales, Revenue, and Customer Success Software.
Today, we’ve decided to zoom in and help our readers to decide which business automation software they should choose to automate their business and scale operations. Discover the best tips how to choose your next business automation software.
At its very core, business automation software is created to give an answer to manual work, repetitive tasks, and all things that are time consuming, and help its users to better see and oversee potential conflicts when their operations become bigger with time.
The main goal of business automation software is to streamline internal business processes and make sure that everything ‘backstage’ is properly working 24/7 round the clock, and give its users piece of mind.
Business automation software is built with many layers, combining deep understanding and knowledge about the different types of conflicts the modern business is currently having.
For example, many marketers are looking for a workaround that will help them assign all their upcoming Zoom webinar registrants to a relevant Salesforce CRM campaign, in case the business automation software already offer such built in integration, then marketers can simply use the same pre-built integration and start automating their desired task with just a few clicks.
Sounds easy right?
It really is!
Now that we have a better understanding of what business automation software is all about and how it can help you scale your operations from day one, let’s take a look at things you need to carefully examine when evaluating your next business automation vendor and some other tips on how to choose your next business automation software.
The evaluation process, especially when looking to integrate a new business automation software might be a tedious task in case you’re not following a well structured process. We decided to make it as easy as possible for our readers by listing below the most important things one should look at when evaluating their next business automation software.
Most business automation tools allow new users to test out their software, and enable free trials in just a few clicks. The questions you should be asking yourself are:
– For how long is this free trial valid for?
– Can I extend my free trial?
– Does it require me to put in my Credit Card information?
– Will I be able to use the software to its fullest without any blocked features or any other limitations?
Having a clear answer to each and one of the above questions will help you start evaluating the different tools on a much broader level.
Pro Tip: Before starting any free trial, make sure you check out their pricing page, so you’ll know what to expect after your free trial period is over. In case you found the pricing structure too expensive for your business at this time, you shouldn’t start any free trial since you will anyway won’t be able to use the paid version. Instead, go and look for a software that can answer your needs and that you can actually afford paying for.
All business automation tools offer thousands of pre-built integrations so you won’t need to look elsewhere and easily automate what matters the most for your business. The best way you can go about when looking for your next business automation software is this: search in Google for your desired automation between the two applications and find the most accurate result based on your search query.
For example, you’re looking to automate Zoom meeting registrants and assign them to a new Salesforce campaign. Based on Google search results you can easily find the appropriate tools to help you with your mission.
Ease of creating new scenarios, integrations, and one click solutions is highly important especially in case you’re not a highly technical person and are working in Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, or even Customer Service.
You must check first what the process of creating new integrations requires from your side to do, and if it requires anything like using Webhooks for example, can you handle this yourself or you might want or need to delegate this work to a more technical person within your company?
Communities are in most cases what defers a great product from an excellent one.
The bigger the community around the product the better chances are for you to find answers to common questions, get professional help, and easily customize workflows and different scenarios based on others sharing their key takeaways and personal experience using the tool.
One important thing to look at is how active the community around the tool is, look at the threads, Facebook groups, Slack groups, web portals and find out also how responsive the product team is and how quickly users requests are being addressed.
One thing’s for sure, before even starting your free-trial, you must check that the new automation software is fully secured, and the reason being simple, when using their software you’ll be required to integrate all your business accounts and allow permissions in Admin level so the business automation software can easily extract useful information from your other business accounts and use it accordingly when automating and connecting between the different tools.
Verify their security measures, and also if they comply with GDPR or any other security protocol that is required in your region.
Let’s take a look at the TOP 3 business automation tools, and let us help you choose the best tool based on your business size, and maturity level.
Our first to start with is Zapier. Zapier is helping you to easily and seamlessly connect your apps and automate workflows with just a few clicks.
Zapier custom integration flows help you mobilize information between your different web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work.
‘Zaps’ are automated workflows that connect your apps and services all together. Each Zap consists of a trigger of one or more actions. When you turn your Zap on, it will run the action steps every time the trigger event occurs.
What we like the most about Zapier?
The fact that Zapier connects more web apps than anyone, and they also add new options every week!
What we like even more about Zapier?
We really like the fact that Zapier provides a ‘Forever Free’ plan. Although it has its limitations, you’re not asked to ‘Upgrade’ after a specific period of time like on all other platforms (Integromate, and Automate.io).
Today, more than 3 million people rely on Zapier to take care of their tedious tasks!
In case you are already experienced with Zapier and want to explore other alternatives for various reasons, Integromat will be the best alternative for you.
Integromat is a powerful integration platform that allows you to visualize, design and automate your work in minutes. Integromat lets you focus on your business fundamentals, and let automation take care of the rest.
‘Scenarios’ is a series of modules that indicate how data should be transferred and transformed between apps/services. In order for Integromat to automate your tasks for you, you have to create a scenario that includes your desired apps, and tasks brief to run between them.
What we like the most about Integromat?
The fact that it gives you such a visualization, you get nowhere else. The way you can visualize different scenarios let you also oversee potential complications in the workflow, plus you can easily remove or add new scenarios making it dynamic and easy to use.
What we like even more about Integromat?
We love the fact that it allows you to track social media performance in real time, automate data coming from RSS feeds, and that you can create a custom scenario to fit any of your business needs.
Today, more than 1 million users are using Integromat to automate their repetitive tasks!
Third, but definitely not least on our top business automation software list is automate.io.
Automate.io offers an easy-to-use workflow automation stream that lets you connect the web apps you use every day. You can pass data through them and automate repetitive tasks without having to code or relying on developers.
What we like the most about Automate.io?
We just love the fact that, not like other tools, Automate.io lets you create complex workflows spanning across multiple apps in minutes. Add delay, conditional logic, format data and much more.
What we like even more about Automate.io?
In case you’re in e-Commerce, Automate.io is the best solution for you, their entire approach around automating thousands of tasks in a short period of time really makes the difference for small business owners and drop shippers.
Today, Automate.io is used by 30,000+ organizations from 93 countries, from small businesses to Fortune 500!
After evaluating the TOP 3 business automation tools our top pick is Integromat.
After using the 3 tools for 60 days we have found that using integromat and creating what so called on their platform – ‘New Scenarios’ is the best and easiest approach to automate manual tasks and build new logic based on the different business needs.
It also seems like the people behind Integromat have built a reliable system that helps you grow based on your different business needs.
Besides the flexible pricing plans and ease of use, Integromat also wins when it comes to user interface and pre-built solutions. The only thing we found Zapier is better at is the fact that it offers more integrations with 3rd party apps, but this shouldn’t bother you in case you’re using top TechStack tools.
In terms of customizations we have found that automate.io provides the most flexible terms when you’re looking to customize and build new integrations.
Integromat also offers a mobile app for its users, something that you cannot enjoy in case you’re using Zapier or Automate.io.
Now, you’re probably asking why Zapier is still considered by many Marketing Ops Professionals the most popular business automation software?
The answer is pretty simple actually, it was first to Integromat, it might have better marketing, and the fact that it got Series A funding (which Integromat have not yet done) helps make Zapier a more visible tool when it comes to user adoption and global usage.
The growing demand for business automation software has drastically increased especially during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and now more businesses small or large are looking for different solutions to help them eliminate repetitive and time consuming tasks, avoid employee burnout, and keep their business operations running 24/7 – 365 days a year.
Our team of experienced software developers, marketers, and sales engineers have compiled this thorough research in order to give full clarity for businesses just like yours when looking to implement the best business automation software, and start automating their way to success.
We would love to hear your feedback about this thorough research covering all aspects related to business automation software.
Have any questions? Contact us!
