Besides questions about e-commerce strategy in general, another question we frequently see asked is about which are the best e-commerce marketing tools.
There are plenty out there to choose from. After surveying the field, here are our recommendations for the best e-commerce marketing tools, for all the different kinds of marketing an online store would need. They are based on both personal experience, and also from examining the most popular apps mentioned by e-commerce managers in reviews and in forums such as Quora.
Site optimization tools
Google Analytics – To keep a pulse on how users are interacting with your pages and products, take the time to set up Google Analytics on your ecommerce website. With Google Analytics, you can track sessions, users, page views, conversion events, time on page, bounce rates, and more. You can also set up reports that can help you identify problems or opportunities in real-time.
Optimizely helps boost conversions and improve user experiences. It’s a good tool for performing A/B tests, in particular. You can test a whole variety of elements: colors, copy, where the product is placed on sales pages, and more.
Moz is a useful analytics tool for scaling an ecommerce business. The Moz tool tracks keyword rankings for your site and for competitor sites, compares mobile vs. desktop rankings, finds link opportunities elsewhere on the web, identifies keyword opportunities, and crawls your site in order to find and fix any potentially damaging SEO issues
Design, illustration and layout – the clear leader in its field
Canva ‘s “design for dummies” tools help drive more engagement on your social media channels. Create photos and banners, compelling images and graphics that relate to your products or business. Canva is a good tool for those with little or no experience using a more robust tool like Photoshop.
Social marketing
Hootsuite allows you to build a stronger and more authentic brand presence for your ecommerce business on social media channels. Use Hootsuite to schedule posts and interact with current and potential customers. With Hootsuite, you can watch what people are saying about your brand or products, and get access to powerful analytics and insights that can help you get more ROI from your efforts.
BuzzSumo helps you develop compelling content that attracts new customers. Use BuzzSumo to come up with the right blog post ideas. Search there for a topic you want to write about, and survey articles already written about it. You’ll also find social media followers who share articles on those topics.
Email marketing
Campaign Monitor helps you stay on top of your customer interactions, use Campaign Monitor to send personalized email campaigns to your customers. Using automation, you can trigger messages to be sent based on a subscriber’s location in the customer journey and increase conversion with relevant content. Use Campaign Monitor’s robust analytics to create targeted segments of your email list and send beautiful, templated emails that inspire action.
MailChimp – One of the original, and still one of the best,email marketing automation tools on the market, you can use MailChimp to create and send regular email updates about your products to your list of subscribers and customers. For example, you could create email campaigns that offer special coupons to new customers, or you could use email to tell customers about new products.
Customer io enables you to use marketing automation for the whole customer lifecycle to create relevant email campaigns based on your customer’s behavior. You can trigger transactional emails to keep your customers up to date with important information and use analytics and segmentation to send relevant newsletters based on detailed customer profiles. Customer.io also integrates with a number of different services through an API.
Visualization tools
Syte is an artificial intelligence visualization tool that gives your customers the ability to interact with your inventory. Use Syte to show them how your products work in their daily lives. Let them search your inventory with a photo, for instance. Syte gives your customers the ability to click directly on your inventory to purchase or learn more. This is a great tool if you sell on Pinterest.
LiveSession and HotJar are both visual replay tools for viewing cursor movements and clicks made by customers viewing your web offers. These UX insights can tell you which features on the page are receiving the most attention, and where the roadblocks are that cause cart abandonment.
Personalized customer marketing
ReferralCandy – E-commerce managers use ReferralCandy to build customer loyalty. It works on an “ambassador/referral” model. New customers get a personalized referral link for sharing with friends. You can also use the tool to set up custom discounts, limited-time deals, and view data on your highest-referring customers.
Promoter io is a tool used to survey customers, but this one is focused entirely on gathering feedback using the Net Promoter System. By using the tool to constantly improve your NPS (Net Promoter Score), you can drive more sales, connect with your best brand and product advocates, identify real problems, and outgrow your competitors.
Advertising tools for E-Commerce
AdEspresso – AdEspresso is expressly made for testing your Facebook Ads campaigns, offering a number of simple A/B tests. The analytics make it easy to assess your campaigns’ performance. It will also give suggestions on optimization for improving certain metrics.
Google Ads – Formerly called AdWords, Google Ads is part of a revamped marketing support ecosystem at Google that also includes Google Shopping and Google Local Inventory Ads. Google Ads is both a platform and a toolbox that is powered by Google’s vast catalogs of data, with complete Analytics and ways to set conversion goals, etc. To increase brand and product exposure, you can use Google AdWords to create campaigns that drive more customers to your website.
Omnichannel marketing
Shoppingfeed syndicates search-optimized product listings on all of the world’s most powerful marketplaces, syncs and refines inventory data, perfects your listings, and automates your fulfillment workflow. Shoppingfeed connects with over 1,000 e-commerce channels across the world, the largest of any omnichannel service provider.
Besides connecting with all those channels, Shoppingfeed has just developed a proprietary technology we call our ProductGraph(c), which assigns dozens of potential attributes to every listed product. It was specifically designed to address the way shoppers search when using voice commands, rather than typed queries. See below for examples.
