Marketing Automation & WordPress: Plugins & Tips to Get Started

Marketing automation may sound like a fancy term used by big marketing agencies but it’s actually a simple concept that can be used by anyone.

Whether you have a small WordPress blog or a big eCommerce website, you can use various marketing automation strategies to put your marketing process on autopilot.

As a WordPress user, there are so many different ways you can utilize marketing automation to your advantage. In this guide, we explore some of the best methods and plugins for WordPress marketing automation.

Let’s start by first exploring what marketing automation really is.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is all about using software and tools to automate different marketing tasks of your business so that you don’t have to manually handle them by yourself.

For example, using an email opt-in plugin to show a popup form on your website, gather emails from visitors, and automatically add them to your email list is one of the most useful marketing automation strategies used by many websites.

The main goal of marketing automation is to help save you time and money as well as to generate more leads and sales.

Different types of businesses use automation differently to handle their various marketing tasks, like creating sales funnels, customer retention, and even managing customer relationships.

How to Automate Your Marketing Tasks

How can a WordPress website utilize marketing automation? Here are just a few suggestions to help you get started.

Automate Lead Generation

Lead generation is an important part of every marketing strategy. It not only helps make the most of your website traffic but plays a role in generating sales as well.

WordPress makes it easier to generate leads by adding email opt-in forms, lead capture pages, and even through contact forms.

With the help of plugins and email marketing software, you can automate the process of capturing leads and setting up autoresponders to engage with your leads through a sequence of emails.

Use Chatbots for Customer Service

Offering customer support via live chat is a great way to help potential customers make decisions and troubleshoot technical issues. However, most small businesses can’t afford to have a person online 24/7 to answer these questions.

A good workaround for this problem is to create a live chat system with a chatbot. So that you can answer the most common questions automatically while engaging with the customers. WordPress now has plugins that allow you do just that.

Recapture Abandoned Customers

Shopping cart abandonment is a common problem for almost all eCommerce websites. Thankfully, you can now use automation to notify customers who haven’t checked out their shopping cart and invite them to visit your shop again.

There are plugins that allow you to send push notifications and email notifications to recapture abandoning customers.

Manage Contacts & Client Relationships

Building better customer relationships is one of the best ways you can build a lasting business with better customer retention. In order to do that, you need to start managing your customers and contacts from the day you launch the business.

With the help of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) plugin, you can automate this process to organize contacts and even keep track of all your customer engagements.

Auto Publish to Social Media

There’s no need to manually post your latest blog posts to each social media channel one by one. You can automate that process as well.

You can use a plugin to setup a system to automatically share a post on social media whenever you publish a new article or a product page on your website.

Best WordPress Marketing Automation Plugins

Automating your marketing tasks in WordPress is much easier thanks to plugins. You can set them up all by yourself without any outside help. The followings are some of the best marketing automation plugins you should try out.

1. Zapier

• Price: Free / $19.99 per month

Zapier is one of the most useful tools you can use to automate so many aspects of your marketing process. Zapier allows you to connect your website with hundreds of other third-party apps to create automated tasks.

This plugin can help you do everything from automatically publishing blog posts from newsletters to automatically adding users who register with your website to your email list and much more.

Main Features

• Ability to integrate your website with hundreds of third-party apps
• Easily create your own automation tasks
• Create sophisticated tasks with multiple steps and custom logic (premium)
• Offers a free plan that supports 100 tasks and 5 Zaps per month

2. HubSpot

• Price: Free

HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM solution that lets you manage many different aspects of your marketing strategy in one place. Its most useful feature, however, is managing your customer contacts and build relationships.

With HubSpot, you can sync your website’s forms with the CRM to automatically create contacts from submissions. And then segment your contacts and track all the interactions you have with those customers.

Main Features

• Manage your customer relationships with the CRM solution
• Create forms and popups to generate more leads
• Setup a live chat system to offer customer support
• Gather insights from built-in analytics

3. Ninja Popups

• Price: $24

Ninja Popups is one of the best plugins you can use to setup email opt-in forms and popup messages on your website to gather emails and generate leads.

While there are many other free and premium optin plugins out there. Ninja Popups offers the best value for your money as it costs only a one-time price for unlimited use.

Main Features

• Create branded email popups using the drag and drop editor
• Choose from dozens of pre-made templates
• Ability to create exit-intent popups, optin lockers, and more
• Supports integration with MailChimp, AWeber, and more

4. Webpushr

• Price: Free / $19 per month

Webpushr is a plugin you can use to send push notifications to your website visitors to remind them to visit your website again.

You can use Webpushr to send a notification whenever you publish a new blog post or even integrate it with WooCommerce to remind users to recover their abandoned shopping cart.

Main Features

• Automatically send browser notifications to promote your blog posts
• Send abandoned cart reminders to generate more sales
• Generate traffic from your subscribers
• Offers a generous free plan for up to 60,000 subscribers

5. Social Booster

• Price: Free / $49.99 per year

Social Booster is another useful plugin that removes the need to hire a social media manager or even use social media scheduling tools.

With the Social Booster plugin, you can setup an automated system to share your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest whenever you publish a new post.

Main Features

• Automatically share your blog posts, product pages, and more on social media
• Supports sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr
• Schedule posts to be shared daily, weekly, and monthly
• Integrates with WooCommerce for promoting products

6. Maxbot

• Price: $49

Maxbot allows you to create your own chatbot to provide customer support, create sales pipelines, and generate more leads without having to type a single line of code.

With Maxbot, you can easily create and train your chatbot to provide human-like customer support around the clock. It’s perfect for answering common questions related to products and collect leads at the same time.

Main Features

• Easily create a chatbot without any coding skills
• Provide 24/7 customer service
• Collect data from users to generate leads
• Gather insights from user interactions to learn from your website visitors

7. Ultimate Affiliate Pro

• Price: $69

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get other people to promote your products for you? That’s exactly what this plugin will help you do.

Ultimate Affiliate Pro is a plugin that allows you to setup an affiliate program on your website. With this system in place, users will be able to register as an affiliate and promote products in exchange for a small commission. It’s basically free marketing!

Main Features

• Easily create an affiliate program with multi-level marketing
• Supports WooCommerce, EDD, and Ultimate Membership Pro
• Set your own custom commission rates for users
• Send payouts using Stripe and PayPal

8. Uncanny Automator

• Price: Free / $149

Uncanny Automator is another powerful plugin that provides multiple ways to automate your marketing tasks and processes. It’s like Zapier but for WordPress-related tools.

With this plugin, you can integrate with other popular WordPress tools and plugins like Affiliate WP, bbPress, and Elementor to collect data automatically.

Main Features

• Choose from hundreds of triggers and actions to create automations
• Supports integrations with dozens of useful WordPress tools
• Removes the need to install individual plugins for integrating apps
• Offers a free version with limited features

Conclusion

With the help of these plugins, you’ll be able to automate some of the important marketing tasks of your business. However, there are many other marketing aspects you can automate. Like running A/B split testing campaigns and creating lead capture pages in WordPress.

Keep exploring and experimenting with new strategies to find ways to automate the growth of your business.