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Some people say the use of tools is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Well, I say the same is true when it comes to outstanding marketers and average ones. Great tools can’t do the job for you, but they can make it significantly easier, and lead to a better final result. If you’re in the digital marketing game, there are hundreds of tools for you to choose from, but you don’t have time to sift through them all, so sit back and check out our 6 favorites instead.
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MailChimp
MailChimp is the ultimate automated email marketing tool. It’s built to integrate with many of the largest ecommerce providers, so it can automatically gather data from your store and use it to personalize your marketing directly. It can be tricky to work smart automation into your campaign so the fact that MailChimp does it all is invaluable. They also provide analysis services to accurately track the results of your email campaigns.
Built-in Facebook and Instagram campaigns make it simple to grow your mailing list, and their Google remarketing campaigns maintain your subscriber list. If you just want to get a taster of MailChimp’s power you can start with their free plan and move up to a premium plan once you’re fully convinced.
Peek
Optimizing your website is always a challenging ordeal. You can spend years A/B testing, and still have work to do. Peek allows you to get the user feedback you need without spending the time and resources that are associated with traditional methods.
Peek promises to deliver video, audio, or written feedback within 1 hour for most studies. These are real people testing your service and giving feedback, not just some bot. The primary product Peek offers is live video of a user navigating your site and speaking their thoughts aloud. You can glean many insights from these types of videos and the best part is that you can do it in an afternoon!
You can screen the people who test your site with a survey to ensure you’re getting feedback from the people you want to appeal to. You can also set specific tasks to target your testing on the parts of your site you’re having issues with.
Kissmetrics
Another website analysis tool, but rather than focusing on specific user experiences like Peek, Kissmetrics is better for analyzing how large numbers of users interact with your site. It tracks your customers through every step in their journey, from landing page to conversion. And it delivers automated, behavior-based engagement every step of the way.
Kissmetrics Populations tool is a powerful way to identify segments of your users who need your attention, and work out what needs to change to better engage them. Unlike some of its competitors, Kissmetrics doesn’t put any limits on the amount of data you can view or the time periods you can pull from. With all of these tools Kissmetrics promises to increase your conversions, drive engagement, and boost retention on your platform.
Todoist
While it’s not a direct marketing tool, there’s nothing better for efficient marketing than efficient marketers. Todoist is a productivity app that helps you organize your day and achieve everything you planned. It’s easy to add tasks to your list and tag them with priority levels so when you’re running low on time you can stay on top of what’s important without getting distracted by what’s not. It has built in functionality to enable the sharing of tasks and group discussion to make collaborating a breeze. On top of that it syncs across multiple platforms so you’re never left out of the loop.
LiveChat
A direct live chat box is a great way to alleviate your customers concerns and in turn, boost conversions. There’s no better customer service option for modern consumers than instant messaging with a real person on the other end who understands your problem or concern. LiveChat places a small, non-intrusive floating box on whichever pages of your site you want. And all a customer has to do to get instant assistance is click on it. Even if they don’t decide to take advantage of it, simply seeing the option is there can be reassuring. LiveChat also integrates directly into your online store so that you can keep managing customer communications from one central data hub.
LiveChat is used by over 23 thousand businesses and they offer a free 30 day trial, so you can discover just how much they can boost your conversion risk-free. Set up is quick and the apps are intuitive, so what have you got to lose?
CJ Affiliate
Why do all this troublesome marketing work by yourself when you could have your customers do it for you? CJ Affiliate is the number one way to turn your customers into brand ambassadors. Affiliate marketing is what it’s called when you pay a commission to a person or company for revenue generated from their traffic. There are large networks of people who make their money from affiliate marketing, and with CJ Affiliate you could have them driving traffic to your store at the click of a button.
With affiliate marketing it’s important to monitor the quality of the people you’re outsourcing to. This is a time consuming job that you don’t want to do yourself, luckily, all of CJ Affiliate’s partners are curated and monitored; meaning the public perception of your brand won’t be hurt by low effort, spammy, posts.
It’s easy for a technophile to get lost in all the cool new options out there, so it’s important to keep a results-oriented frame of mind when deciding which tools are worth your time. If you think it’s a cool tool, but it’s not really boosting your sales, maybe it’s not worth your time.
Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she shares tips on ecommerce and how companies can improve the way they represent their brand. She is passionate about using her experience to help brands improve their reach.