Marketing tools are the invisible foundation of a strong marketing strategy. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of online marketing tools out there, and they vary in price and ease of use.
If you’re a small business owner, the cost of these tools alone can feel unwieldy, and choosing the best fit for your marketing efforts may seem challenging.
Here’s a list of the types of marketing tools you’ll need, organized by marketing category. The tools covered are best in class and most are affordable or free.
Types of marketing tools
The different types of marketing tools you’ll need fall under the following categories:
- Email and SMS marketing
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Lead generation and conversion
- Live chat
- Analytics and tracking
- Influencer and affiliate marketing
- Loyalty and rewards
You might need tools from one or all of these categories—it depends on your goals and overall digital marketing strategy. For tools that don’t have a free option, many offer seven- or 14-day free trials, so you can test them out before you commit.
Email and SMS marketing
Email marketing tools help you create email campaigns, send out email blasts or newsletters, organize email lists, and track and analyze email campaign results.
They support your email marketing strategy by providing a hub for email campaigns such as automated sequences (like abandoned cart emails), one-off customer announcements, or follow-ups.
There are tons of email marketing services available, each with different marketing automation features. These are some of the best.
1. Shopify Email
Shopify Email lets you create branded emails in minutes with a drag-and-drop editor. You can use pre-built automation templates to email customers at optimal times, and to segment your list. Create, send, and track campaigns within your Shopify admin panel.
Pricing: Included free with any Shopify store.
Platform: Your Shopify store.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a popular marketing automation platform. It offers SMS and email marketing services to help you better manage and communicate with customers. It’s not built specifically for ecommerce, like Shopify Email, but still lets you design and send email campaigns with a range of templates and customization options.
Mailchimp’s interface is user-friendly. You can create emails with its drag-and-drop editor, and set up automated emails based on customer behaviors and preferences, like birthday offers and follow-up messages.
Best of all, Mailchimp integrates with Shopify through its Shopify app, so you can easily reengage customers who are interested in your store. This integration works with Shopify, Shopify, and Shopify POS.
Pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts and includes up to 1,000 sends per month. Paid plans start at $13 for 500 contacts and 5,000 monthly sends.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface, Mailchimp Shopify app.
3. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is another email and SMS marketing platform known for its seamless Shopify integration and user-friendly features. One of its strengths is its segmentation capabilities. You can segment lists based on specific actions like cart abandonment or browsing without buying.
Klaviyo is geared toward ecommerce workflows, providing email automation templates for back-in-stock campaigns, cross-sell emails, product reviews, and win-back emails. Klaviyo is known for responsive customer support and for boosting sales, reporting up to 100 times return on investment.
Pricing: Free for up to 250 contacts. Paid plans start at $30 per month for 501+ contacts.
Platform: Standalone SaaS, Klaviyo Shopify app.
4. Automizely
Automizely’s beginner-friendly interface and comprehensive features make it an excellent marketing tool, with users frequently praising its excellent customer service. Customers can access hundreds of customizable templates, plus features like email automation, segmentation, A/B testing, and SMS marketing tools.
Automizely also integrates with Shopify stores and offers free features like pop-ups, conversion tools, coupons, and campaign analytics.
Pricing: Free for up to 300 contacts with 3,000 sends total. Paid plans start at $11 per month for 600 contacts with unlimited email sends.
Platform: Automizely Shopify app.
Social media marketing
Social media tools allow you to publish a single post across multiple channels at the time(s) and date(s) of your choosing, saving the time it would take to write and publish it separately on each channel. You can also easily create a multichannel content calendar for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more.
Because these tools track your social media metrics across platforms, they also reduce time spent on manual spreadsheet-based tasks like tracking a post’s performance. The right social media marketing tool will also make it easier for you to create and launch paid social posts and for customers to shop a social feed on your website.
5. Buffer
Using Buffer, you can schedule and share content across popular social media channels. It also helps you automate recurring tasks—for instance, triggering a series of lead-generation messages when a customer likes a social post or gathering feedback from customer responses
A range of analytics, performance metrics, and collaboration features are also included to help manage your social media content and keep it timely and relevant.
Pricing: Free for up to three social channels and 10 posts queued up at a time. Paid plans start at $5 per month per channel, with unlimited posts in the queue.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another popular social media management platform for businesses. It provides a single dashboard where you can manage multiple accounts, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more.
Hootsuite is known for its scheduling abilities. You can plan and schedule content for different times and dates throughout your social accounts. This helps you maintain a consistent presence online without having to sit at the computer 24/7. Hootsuite also offers comprehensive analytics, team collaboration features, and social media listening so you can stay on top of trends and engage with your audience in real time.
Pricing: Try any plan for 30 days free. Paid plans start at $99 per month for 10 social accounts, content curation and management features, and more.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
7. AdRoll
AdRoll is an advertising platform that helps you launch targeted ad campaigns quickly and effectively. With AdRoll, you can retarget customers across devices and platforms, including web, mobile apps, email, Facebook, and Instagram. It’s ideal if you want to support your social media marketing strategy with paid ads.
AdRoll also supports dynamic ads, which automatically tailor content based on the viewer’s past interactions with your brand. You can also optimize your advertising strategies with AdRoll's detailed analytics, which tracks campaign performance across channels.
Pricing: Free to install with a minimum budget of $5 per day for display, native, and video ad campaigns. Paid plans start at $40 per month with features like marketing automation, social ad integrations, and unlimited email sends.
Platform: Paid marketing for ecommerce businesses: Integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Wix, and PrestaShop.
Content marketing
Content marketing tools can support every pillar of your content strategy, whether that’s helping you create new videos, produce infographics, contribute to your blog, or start a podcast.
They simplify tasks and support your marketing plan.
8. Vimeo Create
Vimeo Create is a tool for marketers who need to produce stunning videos quickly and with minimal effort. It offers thousands of licensed audio tracks, motion graphics, and effects, plus AI-powered editing tools for easy video customization.
Pricing: Basic membership is free, but you get up to 5 GB per week (up to 250 GB per year) of storage with the Plus membership, which starts at $7 per month.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface, Vimeo Shopify app.
9. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an excellent research tool for content marketers. It gathers all the best-performing content across social media, blogs, and news sites and compiles it into one dashboard. From there, you can understand trends, track performance, and identify influencers in your niche.
Using BuzzSumo is simple. Just enter a keyword or topic into the search bar. Then, the tool will give you results that can be filtered by time frame, content type, region, and more. By knowing what content is popular with audiences, you can better tailor your approach to increase engagement and visibility.
Pricing: Free plan offers 10 searches per month. Paid plans start at $79 per month for unlimited searches.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
10. Promo
With Promo it’s easy to create promotional videos for your business. In minutes, this online tool can produce videos for ads, marketing campaigns, and social media.
Simply choose your video type and the product you want to promote, and Promo does the rest. Add extra text, media, colors, or music, then publish directly to your Shopify store, YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram.
Pricing: Make videos for free, but you’ll have to pay for a plan to download them. The entry-level tier costs $29 per month.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface, Promo Shopify app.
11. Canva
Canva is an online design and branding tool that allows users to create stunning visuals easily. It offers an array of templates and custom designs you can modify to your needs.
From packaging to business cards to product photos and videos, your brand has a unique visual language. Canva makes it easy for anyone—with design chops or not—to create bright, compelling visuals for your business.
Pricing: The free option includes a large set of features. The pro option costs $120 per year and comes with premium photos and templates, collaboration features, and brand kits.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO marketing tools help you optimize your organic website traffic through online search engines.
They allow you to conduct keyword research, track web page performance, monitor backlinks, and understand how to improve your website’s organic search performance.
12. Moz
Moz offers a suite of tools to analyze your website’s visibility, ranking, and performance on search engines. It includes features like keyword research, website audits, link building, competitor analysis, and keyword tracking.
Pricing: Free SEO tools include Keyword Explorer, MozBar, Domain Analysis, and Link Explorer. Moz Standard starts at $99 per month for marketing teams who need weekly keyword rankings, custom reports, competitive research, and more.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
13. Avada SEO
Avada SEO is a Shopify app designed to optimize your ecommerce website for search engines. It can do on-page and off-page SEO, including keyword research, meta tags, image optimization, and structured data integration.
With Avada, you can automate tasks like SEO audits for products, collections, and blog posts. Merchants also love the SEO audit features for finding and fixing problems like broken links quickly and easily. Overall, Avada is affordable, integrates with other apps, and keeps you current with SEO trends.
Pricing: Optimize up to 50 products with the free plan.Upgrade to the Pro plan at $34.95 per month for unlimited image optimization.
Platform: Avada Shopify app.
Lead generation and conversion
Lead generation tools automate lead sourcing and help nurture new prospective buyers, turning them into customers. Without these tools, attracting new customers to your business can be a manual, time-consuming process.
14. HubSpot
Hubspot is a marketing and sales platform designed to help your business grow. It offers an integrated set of tools, including a content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, and website optimization.
Pricing: HubSpot offers free CRM, marketing, sales, and customer service tools. Its Marketing Hub plans start at $15 per month for 1,000 marketing contacts. The next tier plan starts at $890 per month for up to 2,000 marketing contacts and significantly more features.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
15. ONE
ONE is an AI-powered marketing suite for Shopify stores. The suite includes features for email, SMS, content creation, pop ups, upsells, discounts, and more. ONE’s features allow you to manage campaigns, create content for international marketing, and run A/B tests.
ONE also has a ChatGPT-powered AI tool that can generate your product descriptions and marketing copy. It integrates with tools like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, SMSBump, and Postscript so you can consolidate your marketing data in one place.
Pricing: Free with up to 50 active profiles and two active campaigns.
Type of platform: ONE Shopify app.
16. Unbounce
Unbounce is a digital marketing tool that helps you create, publish, and optimize landing pages. You can quickly deploy campaigns to capture leads and increase conversions.
Pricing: There’s no free option, but you can start with a 14-day free trial. The basic Build plan costs $99 per month and includes up to 20,000 visitors and one domain. The Experiment plan costs $149 per month and includes up to 30,000 visitors and two domains.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
17. Octane AI
With Octane AI, you can create powerful, customizable quizzes to boost customer engagement and sales with your Shopify store. Its main feature is an AI quiz maker with conditional logic and design options.
Octane AI is effective as a marketing tool because it creates personalized shopping experiences. By guiding customers through quizzes, Octane AI can recommend items that suit their needs.
Pricing: There’s no free option, but you can start with a 14-day free trial. The Starter plan costs $50 per month after that. The next tier costs $200 per month and includes dynamic quiz functionality and a dedicated account manager.
Platform: Octane Shopify app.
18. Sales Pop
Sales Pop is a Shopify app made to boost sales by displaying recent sales notifications to visitors. It shows other customers' purchases in real time to create a sense of urgency and FOMO. Other Sales Pop features to encourage conversions include countdown timers, stock countdowns, and badges to build trust with shoppers.
Pricing: Free plan available. The paid Pro plan starts at $4.99 per month.
Platform: Sales Popup Shopify app.
Live chat tools
Live chat isn’t just for customer support. We found 70% of customers conversing with businesses through Shopify Inbox have questions about a purchasing decision.
Live chat tools facilitate real-time conversations. They can automate responses and help you track and analyze which messages facilitate conversion. They are essential for clearing away questions that may prevent customers from purchasing.
19. Shopify Inbox
Shopify Inbox is a free messaging tool that lets you chat with customers while they shop. You can manage conversations from the online store chat, Shop app, Instagram, and Messenger.
Pricing: Free with any Shopify store.
Platform: Add Shopify Inbox to any Shopify store.
20. Gorgias
Gorgias, centralizes customer support interactions across channels such as email, social media, and live chats into one interface. The Gorgias Shopify App allows you to pull relevant customer data (like order information) into the platform to provide a better customer experience.
Gorgias uses AI for fast response handling and demonstrates how support interactions impact sales. It can work for businesses of any size and offers scalable pricing so you can pay as you grow.
Pricing: No free option, but you can sign up for a seven-day free trial. Priced plans start at $10 per month for 50 tickets. The next tier costs $60 a month for 300 tickets and an extra $40 per 100 additional tickets.
Platform: Integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento.
Analytics and tracking
To understand how the elements of your digital marketing plan are performing, you’ll need analytics and tracking tools. These tools identify the levers you can use to increase customer conversions on different web pages.
21. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool to help you understand your customers and how they interact with your website. With its detailed tracking and reporting, you can make informed decisions about your marketing and customer experience.
Pricing: The standard version of Google Analytics is free.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface.
22. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orangeis a customer analytics tool that helps you understand customers' on-page behaviors. It offers tools such as heat maps, session recordings, and conversion funnels to see how visitors use your site and to identify issues they encounter. This informs site adjustments you can make to enhance their shopping experience and increase conversions.
Pricing: The free version of the Lucky Orange heat-mapping tool includes 500 page views per month and unlimited heat map data and recordings for 30 days. Upgrade to the $10 package for 25,000 page views per month.
Platform: Standalone SaaS, Lucky Orange Shopify app.
Influencer and affiliate marketing
Influencer marketing tools help you find and contact qualified influencers to market your products.
Rather than sourcing candidates by combing through social media networks, these all-in-one tools let influencers reach out to you. Meanwhile, affiliate marketing tools can help you manage your own affiliate marketing programs, an otherwise cumbersome process that is challenging to operate manually.
23. Shopify Collabs
Shopify Collabs is the easiest way to find creators to promote your products to new audiences. Search millions of creators on the influencer and affiliate marketing tool and find ones that align with your brand. Send products and discounts directly from your Shopify store, and track affiliate payouts through PayPal.
Pricing: Free.
Platform: Shopify app.
Loyalty and rewards
Incentivize customers to make repeat purchases with loyalty and reward programs. Loyalty and reward program tools track purchases and automatically generate rewards when they’re due.
Many of these tools also provide referral programs that incentivize your customers to influence new customers into purchasing.
24. Smile
Smile lets you set up a loyalty and rewards program in minutes, no coding required. It easily integrates with Shopify POS and other email marketing apps. Smile also offers expert 24/7 support to help with everything from technical questions to best practices.
Pricing: Smile’s free version includes a points and referral program. Paid plans start at $49 per month and include program branding, reward emails, and one integration.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface, Smile Shopify app.
25. Yotpo
Yotpo is a platform for creating customized loyalty programs. You can set up rewards for different actions, such as purchases, referrals, and engagements. Yotpo integrates with Shopify, so you can manage your programs from one place. Yotpo’s analytics also help you monitor and evaluate your loyalty program’s return on investment (ROI), average order value (AOV), and lifetime value (LTV).
Pricing: Yotpo’s free loyalty and rewards plan includes up to 100 monthly orders, customizable rewards, and a referral program. For $199 per month, you can upgrade to a paid plan with features like redeemable points at checkout and Klaviyo integration.
Platform: Standalone SaaS web interface, Yotpo Shopify app.
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Marketing Tools FAQ
What is a digital marketing tool?
A digital marketing tool helps businesses sell more by supporting processes like content creation, lead generation, and reward programs. Marketing software ranges in type: some automate tasks, others analyze data and results, and others help you unify marketing channels.
What is the best marketing tool?
There is no single best marketing tool. The right digital marketing tools will accommodate your specific needs at different stages of your business. To begin you’ll need various tools like an email marketing tool, social media management tool, and analytics tools. Later, you may want to add CRM platforms or advertising apps to the mix.
What tools can be used for marketing?
There are various marketing tools, but the most common fall into these categories:
- Email and SMS marketing
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Direct mail
- Lead generation and conversion
- Live chat
- Analytics and tracking
- Influencer and affiliate marketing
- Loyalty and rewards
How can marketing tools improve my marketing ROI?
Marketing tools improve your ROI by improving the efficiency of your campaigns. You can automate repetitive tasks and better communicate with customers, leading to more sales and conversions. Marketing tools also provide valuable data for optimizing your campaigns.
What are the latest trending marketing tools?
AI marketing tools are the latest trend. AI chatbots and assistants have gained popularity, as have tools like Canva and Midjourney for creating images with AI. These branding tools make marketing easier and can improve your team’s effectiveness.
