Grow Your Business With These Recommended Marketing Tools And Software
Having the right marketing tools to run your business helps tremendously, but most people try hundreds of different tools and waste tons of money in the discovery process. At the end of the day, you must find the right tools that are ideal for your particular business. But, these are some stellar recommendations that will help you save some time and money.
Below is a list of tools that you should consider when starting a business online. All the blue text is CLICKABLE so you can instantly research the tools that interest you the most. We have given some description to each tool below but you should also do your own research, and select the tools that are right for your business.
Shopify
If you are selling products (even digital products) online and you need a great low cost way to manage and sell your products on a website, Shopify is what you need to be using.
Not only is it incredibly easy to use marketing tool, you can get your store up and running in less than 1 hour. Once you have uploaded your products, SHOPIFY makes it incredibly easy for customers to buy from you.
However, the greatest benefit of all is it’s integration with Facebook & Instagram advertising platforms. Shopify allows you to easily connect to Facebook business manager which automatically tracks all the activity on your site with the Facebook Pixel.
There is no need to hire an expensive coder to implement the codes on your site.
Shopify also integrates with Snapchat Ads, Google Ads, and many more. So if you’re going to eventually use advertising to drive traffic to your Shopify site, you’ll be able to get up and running with no technical expertise. All the codes can instantly be added though the Shopify apps store.
Another huge benefit is that Shopify has an app store that allows you to choose from 1000’s of free and paid apps that will help you add the specific customizations your store needs.
I am NOT a technical personal at all but Shopify makes everything incredibly easy. It’s a total win for the low cost of $29.99/month with a 14-day free trial.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is an extraordinary tool built to help entrepreneurs achieve their goals whether it be in e-commerce, customer service, business development, lead generation, client acquisition, and much much more. ClickFunnels is a very versatile tool that spans across any industry whereas Shopify is designed specifically for e-commerce.
However, ClickFunnels is great for creating sales funnels that focus on selling a singular product or service through a landing page or series of landing pages aka a FUNNEL.
You can certainly sell multiple products and services with ClickFunnels as well, but you would build separate funnels for each product or service. Many entrepreneurs use ClickFunnels for e-commerce to focus their marketing efforts on each individual product vs Shopify that focuses more on your store and a variety of products.
ClickFunnels offers a wide variety of tools and applications within it’s system, not only for building customized web pages but for collecting leads, selling products and services, email marketing, affiliate onboarding, pixel tracking, upsell flows, and much more!
ClickFunnels is a great price for the amount of value you get and you can even get a 14-day free trial. After your 14-day free trial the cost is $99/month for the basis plan.
Proof
Proof is an amazing marketing tool that helps increase conversions on your website on average of 5% – 15% which is amazing. Proof is a website plugin that shows notifications of recent website visitors or website purchasers.
It’s meant to show social proof of other people taking action on your website to help encourage new visitors to make purchases or take action as well.
You can create customized settings for Proof alerts, but the default shows new notifications of purchases every 7 seconds. It’s non-obtrusive and it adds a lot of value and social proof to your website.
You can try Proof free for 14-days and then the starting plan is $29/month.
Hellobar
Hellobar is another one oof the amazing marketing tools you’ll find in this guide. It allows you to create different pop-up notifications on your website. The great thing about Hellobar is that the popup notifications can be customized to different sizes and shapes and they can be customized for different actions.
- You can collect emails
- You can create links
- You can make announcements
On one of our projects we were able to increase CTR (click through rates) by 50% creating a website link pop-up.
We were running Facebook ads to a landing page where people needed to click one of three buttons to continue down our funnel. We added a non-intrusive pop-up bar at the bottom of the page that asked users to click and “Get Started” and we were able to reduce our ad click costs from $0.50 to less than $0.25 per click through.
What we found was that the bottom of the page pop-up grabs people’s attention really well, so offering a weblink, email signup, or discount announcement will help improve your website performance tremendously.
To learn more about Hellobar click here.
There is a free plan and a paid subscription when you need to increase your usage, but the free plan is really good and most people won’t ever need to upgrade. The paid version starts at $29/month.
Lemlist
Lemlist is a unique service that allows you to individually email a ton of people at once, and create follow-up emails and sequences to people based on actions they take. Essentially you can automate INDIVIDUAL outreach.
Lemlist connects to your email account and automatically sends out emails 1 by 1 so you can save time reaching out to people individually. If people don’t respond to your first email, Lemlist will send out a follow-up email and keep sending as many follow-up emails as you can schedule – until you get a response.
Once you get a response from your prospect, you’ll get a notification, then you can handle the email conversation from there.
This is one of the greatest marketing tools for cold outreach because it automates all the hard work of individual email outreach and allows you to spend more time on the people who are actually interested and engaged with you.
Lemlist has a 14-day free trial and a starting price of $29/month!
Get Response
GetResponse is our go-to email marketing service. Unlike Lemlist, GetResponse is designed for email marketing to your customer list or your list of potential customers in bulk. GetResponse has too many amazing features to list them all but here are some of our favorites.
Automation flows allow you to categorize certain subscribers and send them specific email sequences based on who they are or actions they have taken on your website or within your email list.
GetResponse allows integration with tons of web builders including Shopify. The Shopify integrations allows you to easily categorize people and manage them based on actions they took on your site. Our favorite feature is the abandon cart list we can create which allows us to create email follow-ups with people who were about to purchase our products and then decided not to.
GetResponse also has some amazing prebuilt templates, and it’s pricing is structured for email list growth. The pricing is very competitive compared to many other email service providers, especially as your list grows bigger and bigger.
This is one of our preferred email marketing tools and we have tried them all!
Sign up for a 30-day free trial or a starting price of just $15/month
Streak
Streak is a tool designed to work with gmail that helps you track and organize your email communications. It’s known for being a CRM that allows you to properly track the status of your email communications with clients or prospects, BUT our favorite feature is the READ feature.
With Streak you can see if and when someone has READ your email. This way you know when to follow-up. We’ve used this tool to send emails to people we know have just read our previous emails and it’s helped increase our email response rate tremendously.
It’s also cool to be able to know when someone has read your email or not.
This is a free tool until you maximize your usage and then plans start at $15/month.
It’s one of the most immediately impactful tools we use.
Outgrow
Outgrow is an amazing company that allows you to create quizzes, calculators, chatbots and more, all to help you collect more data on your users and increase sales.
We have used quizzes to get tons of traffic and help turn cold traffic into hot traffic that converts. Quizzes are incredibly powerful because they are usually fun to take and they can easily go viral.
One of our most successful quizzes was “find out which college you can get into” went viral among the high school community and it allowed us to generate a huge email list which we were then able to monetize by selling college related products and services.
Outgrow can help you set up these lead generation mechanisms through things like quizzes, calculators and chatbots. It’s really an amazingly powerful tool!
Outgrow has a free trial and the starting price after that is $14/month
PixelMe
PixelMe is one of the most incredible marketing tools and it allows you to add your Pixels from various advertising platforms like Facebook to a shortened link. Anyone who clicks on your link will be tracked by your pixel and you can add your links to any website so you can gather data on users everywhere.
For example, you might sell products on a partner site like Amazon or a business partners website and you can use your Pixel to track performance and gather data. PixelMe is incredibly powerful especially if you write blogs or post content on other websites.
Example: We work with clients who have massive websites, if we wanted to we could ask our clients if we could add our tracking links to their sites to collect all their data, and then we could use that data to improve our advertisements.
PixelMe is free up to 5000 clicks a month and then the starting plan after that is $24/month
QuickBooks
If you aren’t already using QuickBooks this will be an incredibly helpful tool for you to keep track of your business revenue and accounting. Using QuickBooks makes your bookkeeping, general accounting, and taxes a heck of alot easier.
The QuickBooks program takes some getting used to, but once you understand how to use it well, it will make your life a lot easier.
Teachable
Teachable is one of the leading course platforms for people interested in selling their knowledge. We’ve found Teachable to be the most user friendly solution, however, it’s not the most flexible or technical solution.
As you grow on the Teachable platform, you’ll want more features and abilities which will most likely cause you to only use Teachable for hosting your actual course, and you’ll keep your website and marketing material completely separate. You’ll want to use a tool like ClickFunnels or SamCart to drive sales and signups, and then auto-create the users on the backend to access your courses.
That being said, Teachable makes it really easy to start selling your course and to start building an audience of loyal customers.
SamCart
SamCart is very similar to ClickFunnels in the sense that it allows you to build simple high converting pages and funnels – and easily collect money through payment processors like Paypal, stripe and more. Where SamCart differs is in the features. SamCart keeps things very simple and straightforward and for that we really like the tool. It’s really good for creating simple, high-converting sales pages.
Most people use SamCart as a one-page lander to collect payments for e-commerce products or services. And SamCart is a great secure way to charge a client for customer work as well because you can simply create a sales page and send your client the URL and they can pay right on that page.
SamCart also has integrations with top technologies on the market so you can connect SamCart to just about anything. For that reason, this is one of our favorite marketing tools of all time.
Some of the links in this list are affiliate links we receive a small compensation for the recommendation of these products. We work with several partners that have great products and services and recommend only products and services that we have used. If you are interested in learning more about marketing and driving traffic to your online offers, check out our other helpful articles at https://www.sprawlin.com
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