Autopilot becomes the newest player in low-cost marketing automation, targeting small businesses with a cost of entry as low as $4 a month.
Sharkey (c.) is flanked by Autopilot CMO Guy Marion (l.) and CRO Peter Stern (r.).
Mike Sharkey, who learned the joys of marketing automation with a real estate rental website in Australia, was shocked when he came to the States and found that the technology remained the sole province of large enterprises. Today he and his partners did something about it with the launch of Autopilot, an SaaS offering serving what he calls “the massive gulf” between Mail Chimp and Marketo. SMB’s can become users for as little as $4 a month.
“Most companies are 60 to 70 percent invested in batch-and-blast email and they want to do more, but marketing automation is fairly complex to operate and can take three to four months to implement,” says Sharkey, Autopilot’s CEO. “We saw this huge gap in the market and said, ‘Why hasn’t anyone built an out-of-the-box marketing automation system?’”
