1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a tool that can to help you manage your social media accounts from a single platform. It can help you to reach prospective customers, while also making it as easy as possible to engage with the existing ones. If you’ve got a few different accounts and you deal with a lot of customer engagement, this could save you a considerable amount of time. They offer a 30-day free trial, which can give you an idea of whether the service can work for you before you have to make a commitment.
2. MailChimp
People might be more focused on social media these days, but email marketing still has its place and can be very effective. MailChimp is a service that makes it possible for you to run a comprehensive email marketing campaign. Whether you want to send out newsletters, set up automated follow-up emails or send emails for any other purpose, you can get it all sorted with MailChimp. It can also be fully integrated with your Facebook marketing campaign and all the major eCommerce platforms.
3. Wyng
User-generated content can often be the most useful, and Wyng offers a service that helps to provide you with just that. You can use it to get hashtag campaigns going, create quizzes for customers to engage with, and create lots of other avenues through which customers can generate content. You can request a free demo if you’d like to get a proper feel for it before spending anything.
4. AdRoll
Advert retargeting – sending out adverts to people who have previously visited your site – is a very useful way to make sure that one-off shoppers keep coming back to your site and that prospects turn into customers. AdRoll specializes in advertising retargeting and if this is something you want to be doing for your website, you might like to give it a try.
5. Rocket Fuel
If you’re putting out any advertisements, you need to know if they’re working. With Rocket Fuel, you can find out how likely people are to click on your advertisements. This kind of service can stop you from investing in ineffective advertisements that will ultimately just burn a hole in your budget. It can help you to identify which adverts are most effective and to optimize all of your ads.
6. Optimizely
You want to be sure that your website is well optimized for users. Optimizely allows you to conduct tests on different parts of your website to find out how customers are interacting with your site. Optimization might not be something that immediately comes under “marketing”, but it’s really quite an important aspect because the easier your site is to use, the more likely people are to buy from it.
7. Canva
Images are going to be central to any marketing campaign. Canva makes it very easy for you to resize and edit any images that you want to use, while also making it possible for you to create completely new images. It’s a service that will be invaluable for anybody who does not have a graphic designer on board with their business.
8. Shopify Store Builder
While Shopify is not a tool of its own per say, it is worth mentioning because there are so many different eCommerce and tools available to Shopify users who sign up for their store subscription. This is a great way to growth hack digital operations. Useful features include:
● Facebook Store, which allows you to sell directly from your Facebook page
● Free Shipping Bar, which makes it easy to advertise this important fact (a big converter for busy shopper)
● Bulk Discounts, which allows you to easily import discount codes into your store
● The ability to automatically retarget shopping cart abandoners with personalized voucher codes
● Kit — your online marketing CRM and bot.
If you use Shopify, you definitely should be taking advantage of the broad selection of apps and tools available — some of them free, some of them paying.
Whatever you’re doing for your marketing, there’ll be a tool out there that can make it easier. These eight cover quite a few different areas and could be useful assets to most marketing campaigns. So long as you are taking the time to focus on what you’re creating, they might really help to increase your marketing ROI. Which tools do you use in your marketing?
Patrick Foster: Been working in ecommerce since the mid 2000s, both as an entrepreneur, and now as a consultant and trainer. Lots of experience in the field with plenty of tips and tricks to share with other passionate businesses in the digital field!
