Free Marketing Software Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best tools that I’ll cover in this article.
Have you spent many long afternoons trying to create simple graphics using a complex design tool, logged in to your website hosting account to try and find how many web visitors you have, or dug through social media to find out if people are talking about your business?
Almost every ecommerce business has a long list of marketing tasks like these that they dread working on all day, week, or month. When it looks like you need a tool for every aspect of your marketing, your store’s budget starts to curl into a ball and hide in the corner after seeing the monthly spend.
I have good news for you! Plenty of free tools are available for you to use and effectively manage your budget. Either through free trials, free base plans, or software that’s completely free. So why spend money when you don’t have to? You can tell your budget not to worry and invest your funds in other business needs. I want you to save money, so I put together a list of free marketing software that you can use to leverage your ecommerce brand.
Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best free marketing platform? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): I look for software that allows users to personalize and customize their campaigns, designs, and messaging. When using these tools, you should be able to create, change, and review templates efficiently.
- Usability: I look for software that makes it easier for you to perform your marketing tasks. The software you use should be effortless, and you should have a good time using it. Software that’s too high-tech requires more intense training or is difficult to learn and feels like you’re hacking into a secure system isn’t on this list.
- Integrations: I look for software that can integrate with other systems if you have multiple automation systems in your business. The more systems you need to integrate with your marketing software, the more complex it can get. So, it’s essential to use software that integrates with other programs easily.
- Value for $: I look for software that is either completely free, offers a free subscription level, or a free trial. This list should be helpful in providing you with the features you need and the return on investment (ROI) you’re looking for in your business.
Marketing Software Key Features
The purpose of using free marketing software for your ecommerce business is to exploit all of the essential features to optimize your marketing process. Here are the key features that should be a part of your marketing software.
- Automated Lead Scoring: When collecting leads, marketing software should use specific criteria for scoring them. This can consist of the customer’s or prospect’s demographics and behaviors. It can also use the customer’s interaction history to identify the lead.
- E-mail Marketing Campaigns: Free marketing tools connect your ecommerce store with your audience. One way to do this is by sending out mass e-mails. Marketing software can allow you to pick a template for your company e-mails or newsletters.
- Creating and Storing Data: Software can help you gather customer information by using an intelligent form and analyzing their actions on your site. You can then use this data to create customer profiles.
- CRM Integration: This type of software can send leads that your site collects to your current CRM database. As a result, your sales team is able to work more efficiently.
- Landing Page Creation: Many free marketing software doesn’t require you to have the best technical skills. Some software uses a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, and your teams can create and personalize simple landing pages.
- Lead Management: Marketing software can help your teams develop and maintain a good relationship with your customers and prospects. The software can do this by helping you inform your customers about your brand and products to give you the opportunity to establish trust.
- Web Analytics: Understanding your website visitor’s activities can help you understand what they want or how you can increase their interest in your ecommerce store. It also gives you details about what your visitors like most about your products and brand.
- Real-Time Alerts: The software should offer real-time alerts to your team members. If any workflow requires some attention at any time, the proper team members should receive an automatic alert to complete the necessary action.
- Social Marketing: This feature can track and analyze your customers’ social activities and presence. It can also help your business post messages on your various company social media profiles.
- Organized Workflows: Any marketing software should provide easy workflow creation and management. This feature is essential for increasing productivity for your teams by creating an organized process that they can easily follow and optimize.
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Free Marketing Software
Here’s a brief description of each free marketing system to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Canva
Create graphic designs with little to no skills
Canva is a highly popular graphic design platform. Before the platform, businesses relied on teams of designers or freelance graphic artists to create all their visual assets. Canva allows non-designers to create high-quality graphics for various social media platforms; and their paid ads, blogs, e-mail, and print ads.
Canva is an excellent option if you don’t have the skills or experience with software such as Photoshop or Illustrator. The massive variety of optimized sized and built-in templates makes it quick and easy for anyone to create any graphics they want. You can also use the platform to collaborate with your team or clients by sharing a link for them to view the graphic and make any necessary edits.
Canva integrates with other third-party tools, including Slack, Google Drive, WordPress, Dropbox, and Hootsuite.
Canva is free and provides many creative assets for you to use. It does come with premium assets that you can use for a monthly fee.
Google Analytics
Real-time business intelligence and data visualization
Google Analytics helps your digital marketing team understand the best messages and channels that provide their ecommerce store with the best results. Google Analytics can give your teams insights that can help everyone understand your site’s users and efficiently evaluate your product’s performance. Small and large stores can use the software’s testing and conversion tools to create better customer experiences and maximize their digital strategy.
Google Analytics provides your business with almost everything regarding business intelligence and data visualization. For example, in the software’s dashboard, you can monitor the average amount of time your visitors spend on your site. You can also see who’s on your site at the time you are on your dashboard in real time. Use this data to see where your visitors are coming from and how to get them to keep coming back.
Google Analytics integrates with a wide variety of systems and software; some of the most popular integrations include Shopify, WordPress, Facebook, Zendesk, and Marketo.
Google Analytics is a freemium software offering an excellent service for free and a paid version with more significant features.
HubSpot
Generate e-mail leads with a free pop-up tool
HubSpot’s marketing hub provides all the marketing tools you need and your data in one platform. It can help you save time and get the vital context required to give your customers a personalized experience to attract and convert customers. Your team can use the HubSpot Marketing Hub as a part of their CRM platform to help you use this data in other business functions.
HubSpot Marketing Hub helps you gain significant information about your e-mail leads. The pop-up tool collects e-mail addresses from your site and gives your team vital data, such as the pages these leads visited. The hub can also show you which of your web pages are converting at higher rates compared to others.
HubSpot integrates with hundreds of popular third-party applications, such as GoToWebinar, Mailchimp, and Lucky Orange.
HubSpot’s free plan allows users to send up to 2,000 e-mails and five active lists.
Hotjar
See what website visitors are doing
Hotjar can help your teams see what your website visitors are looking at on your ecommerce store. The platform provides you with product experience insights to show you what they feel strongly about your site. Your product teams can use this information to develop and deliver real value to them.
Hotjar provides tools such as click maps, heat maps, scroll maps, and visitor recordings. These let you see exactly what visitors are doing on your site, where they click, and how far they scroll. The platform also gives you options to help you analyze your sales funnel. You can also insert surveys and messages to show your site’s visitors.
Hotjar integrates with thousands of popular apps, such as Slack, Zapier, Optimizely, Hubspot, Shopify, and WordPress.
Hotjar has a free forever plan that gives you access to 1,050 sessions/month.
Twilio
Embed communications into your website
Twilio’s platform helps you engage with your website’s visitors throughout every step of their journey. Your marketing, operations, and customer service teams can use the platform to deliver personalized experiences at scale. No matter the size of your business, you can develop meaningful one-to-one connections with your customers.
Your company’s programming team can use Twilio’s API to integrate various communication methods and solve communication challenges using web development skills and coding. The API helps businesses make and receive phone calls and send and receive SMS messages. You can also use it to help customers track their deliveries by sending them alerts about their packages.
Twilio integrates with over 200 applications, such as Mailchimp, Hubspot, Salesforce, Google Drive, and Google Contacts.
Twilio offers a free trial and low prices for usage that scales as you grow.
Buffer
Automate social media posting schedule
Various businesses, brands, individuals, and agencies use Buffer’s social media management platform to create meaningful engagement. Using their platform or Google Chrome extension, you can publish social media content to multiple major social media networks. You can find a lot to like about Buffer if you’re looking for an effective platform to help you create and post more successful content.
The Buffer Publish tool can help your ecommerce store automate content planning and posting. When it comes to scheduling social media posts, Buffer Publish is highly reliable. You can use the calendar to schedule your posts at specific times for the platform to post your content automatically. The platform also helps curate your content. When you enter a link you want to share, Buffer shows a preview of how it can look on your social media page when you post it.
You can use Zapier to integrate Buffer with thousands of web applications, such as WordPress, Feedly, Google Sheets, Trello, and Googe Calendar.
Buffer offers users a forever free plan that lets you connect one profile from each social media network and allows you to schedule ahead ten posts for each profile.
Hootsuite
Execute social media strategies across multiple networks
Hootsuite helps ecommerce store’s digital marketing teams schedule social media posts, monitor trends, and engage with audiences through various networks. Stores in any industry can gain actionable real-time insights from their social media pages to make vital business decisions from one dashboard. Your teams can also use Hootsuite to sign up for expert certification, training, and coaching in social listening, customer care, and social commerce.
When using Hootsuite, you can schedule social media posts across several networks, such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Your team can manage paid and social content to monitor customer conversations. The platform also has a calendar or post planner view to help you plan your content and see what posts need approval and which are rejected. Hootsuite allows teams to track campaigns through various pre-built report templates they can share with the rest of the company or clients.
Hootsuite integrates with over 150 apps, such as Adobe Stock and Google My Business. It also connects to over 35 social networks.
Hootsuite’s free plan allows you to use two social accounts, five scheduled posts, and one user. The paid accounts offer a free 30-day trial.
Crowdfire
Discover, schedule, and publish posts for every social network.
Crowdfire is a free social media marketing solution that connects to all the platforms you would expect: YouTube, WordPress, Shopify, Ebay, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on. Through Crowdfire, you can schedule social media posts, have topics and images recommended to you, gather relevant hashtags to your product, and track minions of your company online.
Crowdfire is free to use with some feature limitations.
SumoMe
Collection of standalone tools to boost a site’s performance
SumoMe is a tool available on WordPress that provides users with tools to help grow an e-mail list. You can use the services it offers that maximize your social engagement, traffic, and conversion rate. It provides a central platform where everything it offers is available, and you can select the tool you need to build your list. The platform handles multiple vital tasks that might ordinarily need seven, eight, or nine separate plugins.
SumoMe’s collection of apps falls into six main categories: list building, social sharing, on-site analytics, communication, traffic boosting, and ecommerce. The combination of all these tools can help you improve your site’s performance. Some of the features these tools provide ecommerce businesses include building pop-up opt-in forms, creating full-screen calls to action, web analytics, and allowing visitors to highlight content to share on social media. These powerful functionalities can help you grow an entire business, not just a website.
SumoMe integrates with tools such as Hubspot, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Wrike, and ConvertKit.
SumoMe’s free plan allows users to have unlimited subscribers and send 10,000 e-mails a month.
The 10 Best Free Marketing Software Summary
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Canva Create graphic designs with little to no skills | Free to use | From $16.99 /person/month | Visit Website |
| 2 | Google Analytics Real-time business intelligence and data visualization | Not available | From $12,500/month | Visit Website |
| 3 | HubSpot Generate e-mail leads with a free pop-up tool | 14-day free trial + freemium version available | From $45/month | Visit Website |
| 4 | Hotjar See what website visitors are doing | 15 days free trial | From $39/user/month | Visit Website |
| 5 | Twilio Embed communications into your website | Free trial available | Pricing varies per product | Visit Website |
| 6 | Buffer Automate social media posting schedule | 14 days free trial | From $5/user/month | Visit Website |
| 7 | Hootsuite Execute social media strategies across multiple networks | 30-day free trial | From $49/user/month | Visit Website |
| 8 | Crowdfire Discover, schedule, and publish posts for every social network. | Not available | Free to use | Visit Website |
| 9 | SumoMe Collection of standalone tools to boost a site’s performance | Free to use | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Moz - SEO software to check the competitiveness of various search queries.
- Crowdfire - Discover, schedule, and publish posts for every social network.
- Curator - Collect posts from multiple social media posts and see how many people view and interact with your content.
- Wistia - Video marketing platform that helps users create, host, share, and analyze video content.
- Google Scholar - Broadly search for scholarly literature across multiple sources and disciplines.
- Google Trends - Identify how frequently people search for specific terms on Google’s search engine.
What do you think about this list?
It can be challenging to decide which free marketing software is best for your business. Some believe in the motto of “you get what you pay for,” so if it’s free, that must mean it’s not good. However, as you might discover from this list, you can get exactly what your business needs for free. Start by looking at your existing marketing software and see if any free alternatives are available. It might surprise you to see what’s out there, and you can expand your marketing budget at the same time.
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