Welcome to this lesson of our Growth Hacking Academy, on growth hacking tools.
As you’ll know well by now, growth hacking is the marketing of the future — evolution and innovation. And alongside marketing’s evolution there have to be tools capable of carrying its weight.
Growth hacking aims at growing the business and rests on continual experiments, run or assessed through many tools.
That’s exactly what this lesson covers: which growth hacking tools you can use, and what for.
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The categories of growth hacking tool
Anyone working in growth hacking has to know and use the digital marketing tools available.
There are tools and platforms — growth hacking tools — that help growth hackers, support their work and are genuinely necessary.
There are a great many, free and paid, many useful and some indispensable. What matters is choosing the ones the work actually needs and that prove effective.
Plenty of tools do different jobs, and we’ve decided to present them split into these categories:
- lead generation tools: for acquiring traffic;
- acquisition tools: for acquiring the customer;
- email marketing tools: for communicating with the customer;
- analytics tools: for analysing campaigns, user behaviour and so on;
- marketing automation & inbound marketing tools: for automating the whole process from lead generation to reviews;
- market research & review tools: for market analysis and for handling the customer after the sale;
- A/B testing tools: for working out what performs better — which, as we’ve established, is the most important thing in growth hacking.
Let’s dig in.
Lead generation tools
Lead generation tools matter a great deal to growth hackers. They help you capture contacts or information about users potentially interested in your products.
Here are the best.
1. Sumo
Sumo is a platform offering a free 14-day plan, after which it’s paid. Three plans are available with different costs and features.
Sumo turns visitors into customers, bringing together various services that grow traffic on your site: lead generation, data analysis and conversion rate optimization all sit inside it.
What are Sumo’s main features?
- You can see when a user is leaving your site and immediately show a pop-up inviting them to subscribe
- It integrates with the main email marketing services
- You can invite users to join your newsletter by giving them something of value in return, building a contact list
- You can see through heatmaps where users click when they reach your site
- You can add a bar for sharing your content on social profiles
- You can analyse average reading depth through content analytics
- You can use a full-screen call-to-action button
- You get a contact form
In short, an interesting growth hacking tool — worth trying.
2. Hello Bar
Another tool worth trying: Hello Bar.
With it you can easily create calls to action for your users and draw them towards your content. Using Hello Bar you can send users to your social channels or to a specific page. Through it you can work on building loyalty or capturing contact details.
Hello Bar works free of charge.
3. MailMunch
Is there a tool similar to Hello Bar that’s pleasant to use? Certainly — MailMunch. With it you can grow your mailing list.
How? Through opt-in forms. You can use the templates the platform provides without being a developer.
MailMunch offers various kinds of opt-in, it’s simple and practical, and it integrates easily with email marketing providers.
It’s free, and it also has subscription plans.
4. Colibri.io
Colibri shows you where your customers are engaging online so you can join relevant conversations.
Main advantages:
- You can diversify your traffic and improve SEO by taking part in the conversations that matter to you
- It integrates with Google Analytics
Price: 14-day free trial, paid plans from $95 a month.
5. Pay With a Tweet
Pay With A Tweet lets you give people access to your content or products once they’ve tweeted or posted about it.
It’s an excellent way of going viral in the early stages of a product launch, or of making sure your content or product keeps spreading over time.
Main advantages:
- Invite people to pay with a post on the main social channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+
- Measure traffic, clicks, sales and geographic data
- Customisation to fit your brand and website
Price: basic free plan, then paid plans from $49.99 a month.
6. Nimble
Nimble is a relationship management tool bringing together all your contacts, emails, social signals, activities and follow-ups wherever you work, so you can make the most of relationships and grow your business.
Nimble’s main advantages:
- Manage thousands of contacts across multiple channels
- Get notifications of significant events such as birthdays and job changes
- See who’s talking about you so you can reach out and engage at the right moment
You get a 14-day free trial, after which paid plans start at $15 a month.
7. Unbounce
A platform that lets you do a great deal — and, above all, get very good results.
With Unbounce you can:
- build high-converting landing pages;
- build pop-ups for any campaign;
- turn traffic into contacts and generate sales on your website, store or blog;
- run dynamic A/B tests;
- integrate the platform with the others you use (email marketing, CRM or analytics, for instance).
Main advantages:
- producing high-converting landing pages;
- the interface makes customising landing pages simple;
- you can build a form without knowing programming or HTML.
On price: a 30-day free trial and plans from $49 a month.
8. List Builder
List Builder is a free tool for collecting the email addresses of your site’s visitors. It was created by AppSumo’s Noah Kagan (Mint’s first marketing director, who also runs an excellent marketing blog).
Main advantages:
- it works on desktop and mobile;
- a “smart pop-up mode” that invites visitors to enter their email when their attention on your content is highest;
- it integrates with other email services such as AWeber and Mailchimp.
The tool is free.
Acquisition tools
Acquisition tools matter a great deal too, because they enable a fundamental step: turning a lead into a paying customer. Fundamental for every growth hacker.
Here are some interesting ones.
9. Gumroad
Gumroad helps small businesses and creators (independent writers, designers, game developers, musicians, artists and everyone in between) sell their products.
You can build everything online without having to create a full-blown store.
Main advantages:
- sell products easily as a wide range of files: HTML, iBooks, PDF and MP4;
- create covers for your products to lift how they look;
- connect Gumroad to social accounts, SoundCloud included.
Price: no hosting or set-up fee, but they take a 5% commission plus 25 cents per transaction.
10. Totango
Totango lets you push website visitors and users towards trying your product. The app lets you influence conversion towards it.
Main advantages:
- identifies and separates “real evaluators” from the average free user;
- gives you the information you need to make intelligent follow-up calls or emails;
- sends the sales team daily emails with the status of trials in progress.
Price: a free trial, with pricing available on request.
11. MixRank
MixRank is the platform that helps you find new customers by concentrating on profitable sales leads and traffic sources, with real-time information from its digital advertising database.
Main advantages:
- you find thousands of new traffic sources and reach the placements most likely to hit your target audience;
- you monitor competitors’ split tests and discover which creative, ad copy and landing pages are most effective;
- you identify advertisers and what they offer, and learn from their successful campaigns.
Prices aren’t listed on their site.
12. Twilighter
Twilighter helps grow your traffic by making sharing easy. With it, visitors to your site or blog can highlight any part of your content and share it on Twitter immediately.
Twilighter’s main advantage is that it highlights the most shared content on your site or blog so new visitors see it straight away.
Another advantage is that it’s very simple and quick — installation takes just 47 seconds.
The tool is free.
13. Bounce Exchange
Bounce Exchange turns visitors who are leaving your site into customers.
It works precisely at the moment the software detects someone leaving: an invitation appears to sign up for special content, or to leave an email.
The advantages?
- it installs easily — 10 seconds is enough;
- it catches users abandoning your site and works to hold them;
- it lets you run various A/B tests to see which call to action performs and converts best.
Finally, on cost: plans are tailored to the goals a client wants to reach, but they start between $3,000 and $5,000 a month.
The cost is high, but it works — the conversions come.
14. Click to Tweet
Click to Tweet lets you promote, share and track your content on Twitter simply and free.
It’s a useful tool when launching a product.
How does it work?
- Write the message you want others to share
- Click “generate new link”
- Share the link and track the activity
Interesting, isn’t it? And very simple.
The tool can be used anywhere and is easy to set up.
Free to use image from Google Images
Email marketing tools
Email marketing tools matter a great deal in growth hacking because they let you build a relationship with the customer.
Once you’ve gathered plenty of contacts and built a solid database, email marketing tools become useful.
Here are the best.
15. Mailchimp
A good email marketing tool, and a widely used one, is Mailchimp.
What can you do with it?
- Generate automated email campaigns personalised to your audience and structured to reach your goals
- If you want to sell and promote something, Mailchimp is perfect: it integrates neatly with the leading ecommerce providers so you can make the most of your customers’ purchase data
- You get reports on how your campaigns are performing
Excellent, no?
16. Vero
Vero helps you send emails based on how people behave on your website.
You can send an email a few hours or days after someone abandoned their checkout basket — something you’ll see plenty of ecommerce stores do.
Its unique value: “Personalise and test all your campaigns, without IT.”
So it’s genuinely built for a growth hacker who may not know code well.
Main advantages:
- send highly targeted emails with segments based on your contact’s previous behaviour;
- A/B test your emails;
- build automated, user-triggered email campaigns.
Price: 14-day free trial, then plans from $99 a month.
17. AWeber
AWeber is an advanced email marketing tool used by more than 120,000 small businesses, bloggers and entrepreneurs worldwide.
AWeber’s main advantages:
- more than 600 templates that speed up building an email;
- send an autoresponder sequence to new subscribers;
- reach the key metrics on how your emails perform.
Price: a $1 trial and paid plans from $19 a month.
18. Sendwithus
Growth hackers use Sendwithus to manage and track the revenue and engagement emails generate.
Its main advantages:
- manage and update transactional emails (the ones your application generates and sends to users) without involving designers or developers;
- A/B test your transactional emails;
- build email campaigns.
Price: free basic plan, with paid plans from $79 a month.
19. Customer.io
Customer.io lets you send targeted messages to website visitors or mobile app users based on what they do or don’t do.
The main advantages?
- Flexible segmentation, thorough reporting and A/B testing
- Use an event-triggered email to send a payment receipt or another transactional message
- Track the conversions your messages trigger
Price: free basic plan with paid plans from $50 a month.
20. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a platform that connects to customer data in order to send personalised, automated, effective newsletters and targeted emails.
Its main advantages:
- you can see how emails convert into actions and purchases automatically, with no special code;
- build triggered email campaigns with personalised content and smart rules determining who gets what;
- build email campaigns with the editor and easy-to-use list management tools.
Price: a free basic plan and paid plans from $25 a month.
21. SendGrid
SendGrid is the largest email infrastructure, sending email for more than 150,000 companies.
Its main advantages:
- it’s highly scalable: send 100 or billions of emails a month without trouble;
- it gives you real-time, actionable analytics for your emails;
- it optimizes deliverability so more of your emails get read.
Price: plans from $9.95 a month — interesting, no?
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Analytics tools
As we’ve said again and again in earlier lessons, testing strategies is fundamental in growth hacking.
The growth hacker has to understand what’s working in what they’re doing. Analytics tools help with that — here are some interesting ones.
22. SessionCam
This platform offers a set of fundamental tools that reveal user behaviour, showing the problems people run into and what isn’t working on the site, so you can improve it.
What are SessionCam’s advantages?
- It captures how users interact with your site, helping you work out what needs improving
- It uses heatmaps to understand user behaviour better
- It analyses the sales funnel to see where visitors drop out
- It reveals the paths customers prefer
- It tells you the most frequent errors
- It analyses your site’s traffic
The tool offers a free basic plan, with the advanced plan on request.
23. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics lets you deepen your knowledge of the customer by connecting all the data to real people.
The main advantages?
- Identify exactly who is at each stage of your funnel so you can reach them more meaningfully
- Understand how customer behaviour changes over time
- A very easy setup process
Price: 14-day free trial, after which plans start at $150 a month.
24. Mixpanel
An analytics tool you could use to understand how users behave inside your website.
With this kind of platform you can also gauge how effective the funnel you’re using actually is.
Mixpanel has a time-limited free plan and the paid version is fairly expensive, but it’s worth trying.
With it you can:
- measure the actions your visitors take;
- stop mining data and act on the information;
- understand why you’re losing customers;
- understand who your loyal customers are and what they’re like.
25. Clicktale
Clicktale is a customer experience analytics tool focused on website optimization, conversion analysis and usability research.
Growth hackers use Clicktale to analyse how their online forms perform, keep visitors engaged with the page’s content and guide them through the conversion process.
Their slogan: “Built by marketers for marketers”.
Main advantages:
- watch session replays for individual users on any device, use heatmapping to improve the customer experience, and raise the conversion rate with form analysis;
- aggregate hundreds of thousands of visitors browsing in sessions, or zoom into an individual visitor;
- easy setup (just copy and paste the JavaScript into your site).
Price: the basic plan is free, and premium plans are tailored to each company’s needs.
26. Coastics
Coastics is a data analysis reporting tool.
Reports are generated automatically and sent by email, carrying the most relevant and actionable data from your Google Analytics accounts.
Main advantages:
- it works on every device;
- reports are generated automatically and sent to as many email addresses as you like.
27. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg shows you how visitors behave on your website.
With it you can catch the points where they click, where users stop reading or watching, and how particular traffic segments behave on your site.
Main advantages:
- you can learn how users behave on your site without running lots of A/B tests;
- you can learn which messages work better and are most relevant, and which to change or remove;
- extremely easy to install.
On cost: a 30-day free trial, then plans from $9 a month.
Marketing automation & inbound marketing tools
Marketing today is increasingly a mix of channels that have to work together and be automated.
The tools we’re about to reveal are, and will increasingly be, every growth hacker’s best friends.
28. Zapier
With Zapier you can automate everything.
It’s a genuinely powerful tool because it lets you build processes for passing information quickly, with no code needed.
In a few clicks you can create a workflow that then runs automatically. Once registered, you can build your own custom processes from the main page.
You can even gather data from your Facebook campaigns (with the premium version).
29. Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is the only all-in-one automated sales and marketing software built exclusively for small businesses.
It’s a CRM that lets you manage several activities without needing anything else.
The main advantages of using it?
- You can stay in touch with users and follow them automatically after they leave the site, through email and social media marketing
- You get a notification when prospects are ready to buy, through lead scoring
- You can organise all your customers and prospects comfortably in the CRM (database)
On cost: prices aren’t listed on the website, but plans start at $199 a month.
30. HubSpot
HubSpot is an inbound marketing tool that lets users get in touch with you and your business.
It’s software for building deeper relationships with your visitors, from the first hello through to a satisfied customer and beyond.
HubSpot’s advantages:
- get deeper information about every contact, lead and customer;
- grow your traffic and convert more visitors into customers;
- raise productivity and close more deals with less work;
- connect with your customers and help them succeed;
- it’s a CRM, so it doesn’t only handle the database but gives you detailed information about every individual user;
- you have everything you need to build marketing campaigns.
On price: the CRM is free forever, and paid plans start at €46 a month, rising to €2,200 a year for enterprises.
31. Marketo
Marketo is the world leader in marketing automation. You can use it whether you run a small business or a large company.
The software is extremely powerful and brings together several tools: email marketing, mobile marketing, campaign building and analytics.
The advantages of using it?
- Launch precisely targeted campaigns quickly, generating more revenue with less effort
- Build automated campaigns that let you form long-term relationships with consumers
- Simplify marketing work and provide analysis of it
Prices vary: Marketo offers four main products, each priced differently.
Market research & review tools
As we’ve seen in earlier lessons of the Growth Hacking Academy, once a customer buys you don’t simply let them go without talking to them, understanding what went well or badly, and getting feedback.
Here are some growth hacking tools that help with that step.
32. Qualaroo
Qualaroo lets you survey your website’s visitors to understand what they’re looking for and why they take particular actions on your site.
Main advantages:
- Qualaroo reveals the why, not only the what or the how, so you can uncover hidden objections, identify important features and improve the rate at which site visitors become leads;
- survey desktop or mobile visitors.
Price: 14-day free trial and plans from $63 a month.
33. Consumer Barometer
Consumer Barometer gives ecommerce businesses the information about online consumers they need to take better-informed decisions.
Main advantages:
- no registration needed — just go to the website and start clicking;
- a friendly, appealing interface with data you can apply immediately.
The tool is free.
34. Typeform
Typeform humanises online surveys with a beautiful, enjoyable, interactive way of asking and answering questions.
Main advantages:
- a user experience that makes your questions look good everywhere;
- make your questions fit your identity and turn them into brand ambassadors;
- gather insight with built-in analytics and reveal hidden trends and patterns.
On cost, there’s a free basic plan and a pro plan at $25 a month.
35. Polldaddy
Polldaddy is software for creating surveys about your brand, your product or your business. That way you can gather customer feedback or carry out market research.
The advantages of this tool?
- There’s no limit on how much you create
- Gather feedback from the web, social accounts and email
- Generate analytics reports that are easy to read and share
On price: the tool has a free basic plan and paid plans from $200 a year. Polldaddy also offers a corporate plan at $899 a year.
36. Olark
Olark is a chat application letting you connect with your site’s visitors.
It tells you who your visitors are, including location, what they’re looking at on your site, where they’ve been and how long they’ve spent there, so you can connect with them more meaningfully.
Main advantages:
- targeted chat lets you set rules so you only engage with customers who visit a particular page or behave in particular ways;
- it integrates with the main CRMs, Salesforce included, so you can keep track of correspondence with all your leads and customers;
- you can build the design you like thanks to the customisation options.
Price: 14-day free trial and paid plans from $15 a month.
A/B testing tools
Test, test and test again. Those are the three most important words for every growth hacker.
Here are some A/B testing tools that can help your growth hacking strategy.
37. Optimizely
A platform that lets you experiment quickly in order to refine what you do.
Optimizely helps you raise engagement, interaction and conversion on your website by making A/B tests simple and fast.
Main advantages:
- you can run plenty of A/B tests on your site without changing the code;
- you’ll be able to do everything you want in order to improve your site within minutes;
- you can track the key metrics that tell you how the changes you’ve already made are performing.
You get a 30-day free trial, after which plans start at $17 a month.
38. Visual Website Optimizer
Like Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer makes A/B testing simple and lets non-coders run tests on their site.
Main advantages:
- set conversion goals for each test so you know exactly which version delivers the results you want;
- it supports plenty of A/B tests;
- use split URL testing to test different versions of landing pages.
Price: a 30-day free trial, with plans from $49 a month.
Conclusion
If you’ve followed this lesson you’re probably already informed on the subject, so you’ll know what growth hacking is, who growth hackers are and what they do, and how to do growth hacking marketing…
And if you don’t yet, you can go back over our earlier lessons.
In this one we’ve covered some of the many growth hacking tools — the instruments that support growth hackers.
Stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy.
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