5 Must Have Tools For Modern Growth Marketers
A few years back a normal marketer would need to bug their engineers everyday to run SQL queries in order to learn more about their customers. Nowadays, there are so many good tools out there for growth marketers that you do not need to rely on engineers to do all the work for you. Being data driven is important. As marketers, we want to be as data driven as possible so we know exactly what is working and what isn’t working. Here are 5 must have tools that I use on a daily basis and highly recommend it.
Mixpanel
I pretty much live off of Mixpanel. Everytime I need any sort of data, Mixpanel is where I’m at. Need to make a quick presentation of how the business is doing? Show off those funnels!
Mixpanel allows me to see every little thing and track every little thing that is happening on my site. I’m able to see where a user came from, what did they do on the site, where in the funnel did they drop off, retention rate,live feed, and many more.
Out of all the endless features that Mixpanel have, my ultimate favorite is the funnel tab. With funnels I can see exactly where my users are dropping off in the funnel or why they aren’t converting. That way I can target that specific part of the funnel and try to fix it. Here are some sample funnels:
Visited Homepage -> Clicked Learn More -> Created Account -> Started Trial -> Created Project
Landed on pricing page -> Clicked Start Trial -> Created Account -> Created Project -> Used Service
I usually have quite a lot of different funnels set up so I know exactly what the conversion rates and usages are.
I also love the retention tab, where it shows user retention rate based on formulas and cohorts. So for instance, you could look up how many users signed up for your product and then came back and used your service within a day. You can target and trigger specific events, which is what makes Mixpanel so powerful.
If you’re more technical and you’re someone that loves SQL queries, then the formula tab of Mixpanel might be perfect for you. You could use it to achieve well calculated information. Mixpanel’s events are easier to understand, more flexible, and simpler to report on than say, Google Analytics.
Intercom
A lot of people have misconceptions about what Intercom does. Everyone I ask seems to give me a different answer. Some would say that it is a powerful analytic tool like Mixpanel and some would say that it is a customer support tool. I’ve also heard some people that refer to it as an emailing tool.
All the above is correct but I mainly love it because of their emailing and support features. Intecom allows me to build a whole onboarding walkthrough process with it’s welcoming messages. Intercom allows me to engage in conversations with my customers while they are using my product.
With Intercom I could also send out custom drip emails to my current customers so that I know how they are doing without having to spend hours and hours of time on sending out personal emails.
One of my most favorite features of Intercom (not a must have) is the world map. The world map allows me to see where my customers are located. The UI is excellent and it’s quite pleasing to see that my users are from all over the world ☺
Google Analytics
This is the tool that most marketers are somewhat familiar with and have played around with it at some point. Bloggers use it and more than 90% of the major websites in the USA use it. It’s a simple and free analytic tool that gets the job done.
I use it mainly to check my site’s traffic and everything I need to know about my traffic. For instance, I always like to know what are my bounce rates and where are the main acquisition source coming from. I try to locate some overall trends within Google Analytics.
So, a lot of people ask, what’s the point of Google Analytics if you are already using Mixpanel? Both of them are powerful analytical tools that marketers must have, but I use both of them for different purposes. I mainly use Google analytics for the following:
- Overall traffic trends
- Referrals
- Site speed
- Which pages are receiving the most traffic
- Session time
and many more!
Mixpanel overall provides a much better event tracking panel in my opinion.
Mailchimp/Aweber
Email is one of the most important asset you can hold onto from your customers/potential customers. Especially in the tech world, people tend to check their emails quite often. It is very important that you have some sort of tool to maintain a list of your audience’s email.
Imagine spending hours and hours on writing this insane high quality ebook that you are planning to release for your company. The time comes to release and unfortunately you don’t have anybody to reach out to because you didn’t save that email list! Don’t let that mistake happen. Start collecting emails early.
Both Mailchimp and Aweber are excellent choices and can provide automated drip email campaigns along with some real simple email templates. Each time I have some sort of ebook or webinar to share, I’ll head over to Mailchimp and put together a quick form to start collecting emails.
Optimizely/Unbounce
Last but not least is Optimizely/unbounce. I use these tools to ramp up ridiclously good and high converting landing pages. I can then take those landing page and run A/B test on them to see which ones convert more. With Optimizely, I can change a lot of small details on my site for testing purposes.
With Unbounce I can ramp up a quick landing page off a nice looking template and start collecting emails right away. I could also easily navigate back to a page and edit the copy. If you’re someone that needs to host multiple event and push out a lot of content like white papers and ebooks, then having an account with Unbounce is a must have.
It’s worth mentioning that there are a lot of other tools that I use on a daily basis as well, but these are the main ones. Some other tools I use are Sumome, Word Press, SEO Yoast, Baremetrics, Slack , Dropbox, Google drive and many more.
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