We all love the overwhelming flexibility WordPress offers, and its plugin ecosystem gives us a ton of different tools to create and build websites. The power and flexibility of WordPress are simply amazing; no need to sugarcoat that fact.
However, if you’re looking for a way to extend the power and functionality of WordPress, you might consider adding marketing automation tools.
Marketing automation — using marketing tools like email and web analytics to automate tasks across your business — has been around for ages. But what if you could integrate marketing automation into your existing WordPress site?
Done right, a marketing automation campaign — a.k.a., a sequence of automated marketing tasks planned and executed to achieve specific business outcomes — is a well-oiled machine that kicks into gear the minute a visitor lands on your site.
What is marketing automation, and why is it important?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes like email and social media. Advanced marketing automation software enables businesses to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.
Marketing automation includes tools such as email, social media scheduling, surveys, web personalization, and landing pages—tools that today’s consumers leverage to witness the rise in popularity of digital channels.
But why do you need it?
Well, suppose you’re a busy entrepreneur or business owner looking for ways to scale your operations but don’t have time for manual data entry. In that case, marketing automation may be perfect for you.
The tools are easy to learn as well.
Furthermore, many quality platforms offer free trials so you can see how they fit your needs before making a purchase decision.
How using WordPress plugins for marketing automation can make your life easier
If you use WordPress for your website and you’ve noticed that marketing automation can be a time-saver, lead generator, and help you stay organized, then using plugins for WordPress marketing automation can definitely work for you.
There are several benefits to automating your marketing with the help of WordPress plugins. You’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t in order to increase leads. Being able to analyze which content or what products have a higher conversion rate is very valuable information that can reduce your workload.
Automating your marketing efforts
If you want to take your inbound marketing to the next level, then adding HubSpot’s WordPress plugin for tracking is a must. If you’re one of the many WordPress users out there who has a website made with WordPress and a HubSpot account, you can use this handy plugin to help you add more data about your visitors and follow up with them via email.
HubSpot provides a plugin that allows you to integrate your HubSpot account with your WordPress site, so customers can enter their details directly into your website form, entering them into the lead nurturing and tracking funnel.
This is what HubSpot can help you with:
- Easily add forms to your website: The HubSpot Marketing Plugin makes it simple to create, customize, and embed your own forms on posts and pages. Their drag-and-drop form builder allows you to tailor forms for any marketing need.
- Personalize the visitor experience: You can personalize every visitor’s experience by using information from their contact records. Create smart lists based on specific criteria like contact attributes or behaviors, and use those lists in a content personalization tool to create unique experiences for contacts as they visit your site or blog.
- Learn more about how people interact with your site: The plugin’s analytics feature gives you access to page-level performance data within WordPress, so you don’t have to leave the platform. Analyze trends across pages and posts, see which pages are most engaging, view referral traffic sources, and see which content generates the most leads within WordPress.
Using the Site Kit plugin for WordPress
Finally, a way to get the most out of your WordPress site without having to dig through data and charts or spend hours poring over spreadsheets.
Site Kit is an official plugin from Google that lets you access data from multiple sources (such as Google Analytics or Google Ads) directly from your WordPress dashboard.
With this plugin, you’ll be able to:
- View your stats directly on your WordPress dashboard and make decisions based on that data;
- View stats from multiple Google tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console;
- Set up various Google tools without touching a single line of code;
- Track your desired KPIs for the entire website or specific pages only.
Site Kit supports the following tools:
- Google Analytics. You will be able to track the goals you set up for your users;
- Google Search Console. You will get access to Google search data and understand how Google displays your pages on the search engine. With this feature, you can also find out what keywords visitors used to land on your website;
- Google Tag Manager. Most business owners are reticent when it comes to installing tools and editing code on their websites. With this tool, you can now easily set up Google Tag Manager without having to change any line of code;
- Page Speed Insights. The tool will tell you what’s holding your page back from loading faster, including recommendations for improving performance (like optimizing images or caching resources). You can even see how other sites have solved similar problems so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time!
- Google Optimize. Once you’ve got Site Kit installed on your site, you’ll be able to set up Optimize and create tests in just a few minutes.
Upon installing Site Kit, you just need to give it the necessary permissions and verify your site ownership.
Using WooCommerce for your ecommerce site
WooCommerce is a free ecommerce plugin for WordPress, used by over 3 million active websites. In addition to being one of the most popular options for online sellers, WooCommerce has many unique benefits.
Among these are its flexibility and customizability—it’s easy to integrate into your website and can be modified with a wide variety of extensions and themes.
In addition to its functionality, WooCommerce is also extremely easy to use—both for the store owner and their customers. The interface is designed in such a way that beginners can use it but still offers powerful features for advanced users.
Best of all, once you’ve set up your WordPress marketing automation system using AutomateWoo, you can use it as a guide to setting up your WooCommerce integration with WordPress for ecommerce!
Learn more about eCommerece marketing: eCommerce Marketing Automation – Tools & Best Practices.
ActiveCampaign Plugin for WordPress
The ActiveCampaign Plugin for WordPress allows you to pull your contact’s information into WordPress and display it in a single location. This is especially useful if you have multiple sites using the same contact database.
With just a few clicks, you can connect your ActiveCampaign account to your WordPress site and start pulling in contact data automatically.
You can use a site tracker to see who is visiting your site, and you can enable Live Chat, allowing you to communicate with your customers through the Conversations feature directly.
To activate this plugin, go to Settings – Active Campaign, and add your API credentials.
Drip Email Plugin for WordPress
The Drip Email plugin for WordPress allows you to create a workflow that sends your visitor an email as soon as they subscribe and has a second email scheduled to send two days later. In this scenario, you might send them a welcome message immediately but then wait two days before sending another email with a hyper-specific sales pitch.
There are lots of ways you can use drip emails in your business. You could use them to remind customers that their credit card is about to expire or to notify them that their domain name will expire soon. You could even use drip emails to nurture leads until they’re ready to buy.
Drip Email comes with all those features in the free version and is constantly updating its platform to make it even better. They also have some great other integrations, like conversion tracking, full Google Analytics integration, and more.
Gravity Forms Plugin for WordPress
Gravity Forms is the plugin you should use to create your forms, and while it isn’t free (you can purchase a single-site license for $59 per year), Gravity Forms is one of the most popular form builders, with good reason. It’s incredibly flexible, highly extendable, and very easy to use.
Whether you’re creating a complex application form or just trying to collect leads from your WordPress website, Gravity Forms gives you the ability to create custom forms that perfectly match your needs.
You can quickly drag & drop form fields into place while being able to visualize a form workflow with Preview. This can help enhance your website experience and make a much nicer user experience when you have longer forms.
Automating social sharing
The Easy Social Sharing plugin for WordPress is a highly rated and loved plugin. It helps you integrate more than 20 social sharing buttons on your WordPress website.
Furthermore, the plugin allows you to add social share buttons to your posts and pages, which means that it can be used for:
- Adding buttons like Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Tweet This, and Google +1 to your blog posts;
- Adding floating share bars that stay visible as the reader scrolls down;
- Adding share buttons to images in your posts.
We all know that creating content is often not enough. You should also plan to distribute it to the right social media platforms. With the help of this plugin, you can automatically do just that without the hassle of having to switch tabs. Bonus points, your visitors will also be able to share a blog post on their social media easily.
To set up the plugin, you need to configure it from the settings tab:
You can choose the specific location where you want the social sharing buttons to be displayed and allow these buttons to be displayed on mobile devices.
Under the “Network” tab, you can choose which social media channels you want to be displayed:
In terms of designing the layout, you can choose which colors to use to line up with your branding.
Automate SEO tasks with Yoast SEO
So, what can you do to make your WordPress content more SEO-friendly? You can use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. The first thing it does is help you optimize your content for Google and other search engines. And that’s not all! It also enables you to optimize your content for readability.
When it comes to keyword optimization, Yoast offers a built-in keyword analysis tool that scans your page or post title and content and suggests changes to improve your SEO score for a chosen keyword.
In terms of automating SEO, you can choose to change your settings in bulk. For example, you can change meta titles and descriptions without having to edit each page one by one.
Simply go to the Tools section and click on “Bulk Editor.” You’ll have access to a dashboard that includes all your pages, and you can simply change the titles and descriptions one by one.
Marketing automation tools don’t have to be complicated!
We could fork over a large sum of our hard-earned cash in the name of convenience and future proofing. But is that really necessary? If there are plenty of other tools available to help your site with marketing automation, why not just use them?
In case you hadn’t realized it yet: WordPress isn’t very beginner-friendly when it comes to marketing automation unless you are strategic about which plugins you choose to use. There’s no built-in way to update your posts or schedule pages for email outreach automatically; for example, you have to do everything yourself manually. And when it comes to lead generation and sales funnels made up of multiple steps, WordPress is hardly the most efficient tool around.
It’s also essential to keep a healthy WordPress installation while working on automation. It’s easy to keep adding plugins and features and find yourself with a bloated setup. To learn more about a healthy WordPress build, check out our Ultimate WordPress Guide.
Thankfully, that’s all about to change with some great new tools from the world’s leading marketing automation providers like HubSpot and ActiveCampaign. With these advanced plugins integrated into your WordPress site, you can start automating more of your marketing efforts—without having to do anything at all!
