eCommerce marketing tools, some of which have the potential to turn today’s small brand into tomorrow’s world-beater if used properly. Digital marketing has grown so rapidly that literally dozens of these tools have sprung up to help brand managers attract and manage their following as if they had full-time staff devoted to growing the business. Whether your brand has just been launched, or you’re looking for a few of the top digital marketing tools to drive your next expansion phase, here are some of the best marketing tools for eCommerce businesses on the market now:
1. Sumo
If boosting your conversion rate and increasing sales is a priority for you, then you will definitely want to consider using Sumo on your site. This plugin is available on both Shopify and WordPress to make for easy integration. With a suite of tools including things like social media sharing, A/B testing,email integrations and campaigns, and the ability to reduce cart abandonment, you’ll find that Sumo has everything you need to meet your goals for your eCommerce business.
2. Storetasker
Needing help with a one-off project for your Shopify site? Storetasker can help with that. With access to a wide array of experts, Storetasker asks a number of questions about what kind of project you need help with and then connects with an expert who is best suited to complete the task. They will send you a quote, you will be able to review everything they work on, and just like that, your project is finished! As a Shopify agency partner, a number of our client’s have used this resource and it has worked great for getting small projects done quickly.
3. InfluenceGrid
TikTok has truly made a name for itself in the last few years, and taking advantage of this social media platform should definitely be a part of your business’s social media strategy. InfluenceGrid gives you the ability to identify TikTok influencers that fit your target audience, as well as your budget, to take your TikTok marketing to the next level. With features to help you make the most of your TikTok Analytics, including the ability to search by things like engagement or number of followers, this is definitely a tool you don’t want to miss out on.
4. SEMRush
Using SEMRush to inform your social media strategy is like hiring a spy network that can keep you abreast of what your competition is doing right and advise you on ways to promote yourself even better. This tool analyzes your current online presence and offers suggestions to improve your current reach. Once you’ve done that, the app uses a web crawler to discern what the most successful brands in your industry are doing (i.e.: times when they post, platforms they use, linking strategies, etc.) and delivers a handy report for you to digest and improve upon. With almost real-time tracking and results reporting, SEMRush has quickly become one of the favorite tools of the world’s leading online brands – if only to keep up-and-comers from stealing all their best moves.
5. Deep Crawl
Deep Crawl recognizes that the internet basically runs through Google now, and so it works to help you optimize your site for Google’s search algorithms and place a little higher on the results pages when your public looks for you. Using a vast web of digital arcana, this web crawler can audit your site and suggest technical SEO improvements, teach you about your own site’s architecture, and help you recover from Panda and Penguin penalties imposed by Almighty Google for this or that offense.
6. Google Analytics
Google Analyitcs is the grandad of marketing tools. Using a super-simple interface anyone can understand, Google Analytics shows casual users where their marketing strategy is working, and where it needs help. Further down, the tool delivers professional-quality reports on site traffic, visitor sources, and behavior on the site to drive better conversion ratios. Maybe best of all, it’s fully integrated with AdWords, so if that’s a source of revenue for you, you’re probably already familiar with some of Analytics’ metrics.
7. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster
If you’re serious about being online, a working knowledge of Google Search Console is eventually going to be unavoidable. This tool, which is tied to your Google account and requires a sign-in before you can use it, helps users analyze click traffic from casual browsers and test whether Google’s algorithm can properly read your site data for search results. The console doesn’t do much for you by itself, but the information it provides may be invaluable, especially for new and small-scale businesses. Bing Webmaster Tools does for Bing users what Google Search Console does for everybody else: it analyzes and helps you optimize your site for easier discovery through searches. One nice feature this tool offers is a free mobile optimization tool that helps desktop webmasters enter the burgeoning world of mobile sites and potentially drive sales among younger and more smartphone-savvy customers.
8. Mail Chimp
Mail Chimp is an automated marketing app that sends out over 10 billion emails a month for its subscribers, many of whom opt for the limited free version of the service. By directly targeting a potentially unlimited base of customers, Mail Chimp may be one of the most cost-effective ways of putting your name and a call to action in front of your audience.
9. Smile.io
Are you looking for effective ways to build up brand loyalty for your eCommerce business? Smile.io is a great way to nudge your customers to join and engage in your online community through things like an established points program, or inviting returned customers to leave referrals and reviews. These can act as incredible motivators for your customers to join and participate in your brand, and bring others with them along the way.
10. Soldsie
Getting a lot of followers on Facebook and Instagram is great, but Soldsie takes digital marketing to the next level by making it possible to buy products directly from your brand’s social media accounts. With Soldsie, casual browsers can find your social media page, take an interest in what you’re selling, and then place an order by clicking a button. This greatly streamlines the sales funnel by cutting out the call to action and letting customers buy from you without having to click over to your product page.
11. Canva
Some online retailers are great at writing content, while others are good at marketing. Neither of these skills is a guarantee of good design sense, which is why Canva offers tools to make an attractive presentation for your brand without the years it usually takes to become a good web designer. Using this app’s intuitive interface, even a total novice who can’t draw can compile color schemas, digital photos and pleasing font choices to present a brand in the light that best suits it.
12. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange lets you do something incredibly useful and informative: this alternative to Google Analytics offers a playback feature so you can watch exactly how a user accessed your site and what they did when they got there. Eschewing Google’s rather complex interface this tool uses a dynamic heatmap and other visual tools to effectively let you stand over your visitors’ shoulders and watch which bits of your site were the most effective and interesting to them, and which got very little attention. This brings a massive advantage to webmasters planning a site redesign, as well as to ecommerce brands that just need a little tweak to streamline the flow from landing pages to checkout.
13. Shakr
We have found time and time again that video content is the best way to entice your viewers and help you establish a connection with your target audience. Shakr provides valuable services centered around generating video content for eCommerce businesses. They take your brand and audience into consideration and deliver some of the best video content out there to help you see the results you’re looking for in your video campaigns.
14. BuzzStream
One of the most important elements of a good SEO approach is getting reputable sites to link to your content. This signals to search engines that your site is helpful, relevant and safe for visitors. Buzzstream helps you get those links by analyzing social profiles and contact information to find influential partners for you. Then, it saves your emails and project notes, which streamlines your interaction with those partners. Finally, it can even reach out on your behalf and request a link, which gradually builds up your all-important credibility to the search engines.
15. Wistia
Wistia is a kind of YouTube for professionals, with smooth, ad-free streaming on any device, guaranteed. If your brand depends on video presentation, such as a tutoring or lecturing service, Wistia can host either your full content or samples for customers to peruse. The service offers detailed analytics to help you track engagement and fine-tune your approach to maximize follow-through from site visitors.
16. Quantcast
If you’re wanting to create messaging and campaigns geared towards your target audience, but are unsure of how to identify your ideal market, Quantcast can help. They provide services that give helpful audience insights so that you can gain a better understanding of who they are and what best practices you can implement to make a connection with them through your marketing efforts. They have tools to help you understand their psychographics, demographics, engagement, and traffic look like, giving you a 360 degree view of who they are, what they’re doing, and how you can best serve them.
17. BuzzSumo
Nothing beats the bang for your buck that comes from a well-placed share or retweet from a major social media influencer. Influencer marketing may be the most productive form of digital commerce promotion. BuzzSumo helps users find the best content shared by those popular influencers and get their brand noticed by orders of magnitude more people than ordinary media channels ever could.
18. Google Analytics URL Builder
Google Analytics URL Builder is a potentially powerful tool for adding parameters to your URLs and tracking the success of your targeted marketing efforts. With this tool, you can effortlessly track the sites your advertisements are appearing on and see how successful the links in your targeted emails are at driving traffic, versus the links you post on Twitter and the banner ads you’ve put on your blog.
19. Guardia1
No matter what you do, things are going to go wrong every now and again in your business. It’s important to be prepared to deliver a great customer service experience when this does happen, which is where Guardia1 comes into play. With services geared toward replacing damaged or stolen packages, Guardia1 has a team dedicated to making sure that your customers are taken care of when things go awry.
20. Glew
If you’re looking for ways to more effectively track your business and how it’s growing, Glew is a fantastic tool to consider. They provide a variety of resources aimed at helping eCommerce business owners track their business data and more accurately set goals. Gain helpful insight through things like dashboards and automated reports. This is an integration tool that functions across a number of major platforms, including Shopify, Facebook, Amazon, and more.
21. Unbounce
Unbounce is a premium WordPress plugin that lets you quickly build landing pages, optimize them for search placement, and then upload them to your site in a few minutes with no coding at all. The service uses a variety of templates to effectively create a paint-by-numbers page with pre-optimized tags, parameters and meta data that can put your brand higher on the search results page and drive conversion from a larger funnel than you had before.
22. Mention
Mention keeps the proverbial ear to the ground across multiple social media platforms and listens for your brand’s name. Every time a member of the public happens to bring you up on Twitter, Pinterest, or any other platform, Mention finds the reference and alerts you with customizable notifications, so you know how your reputation is faring in the digital wilderness.
23. Gramarly
Nothing spells “amateur” like having lots of elementary spelling and grammar mistakes on your site or in your social media posts. Grammarly fixes that by scanning through your content for spelling gaffes, misplaced commas and even annoying instances of passive voice. All this helps you present a more positive and confident face to the public you’re trying to influence.
24. MarketMuse
If you’re wanting to focus on your content marketing and you’re needing an easy way to generate top-notch content, MarketMuse is a fantastic tool to consider. This tool helps you to more effectively consider your competitors as well as your target audience and guides you through how you can generate the kind of content that generates results.
25. Wooly
Making sure you are establishing customer loyalty is crucial to generating success as an eCommerce business. Wooly has a variety of services all centered around turning your customers and site visitors into advocates for your business and brand. There is an incredible amount of power in having someone who is passionate about your product share their positive experience with others. Wooly is here to help you generate more success through your customers sharing their thoughts on what you have to offer.
So there you have it! What tools am I missing that you use to help grow your eCommerce business?
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Greg Shuey
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
