Marketing toolbox: 20 essential tools you need to simplify your marketing initiatives in 2021
With 2020 already here, marketers around the world face the challenge of adapting to new trends and modernizing their methods of managing their marketing initiatives. Here’s a list of nine modern tools that you need in your marketing toolbox to simplify your activities in 2021!
Nifty for effective project management
No matter what your projects are about, you need to manage them with ease. Even if you have already made some mess with your tasks, no worries — you still can sort it out. Try Nifty and automate your project progress tracking.
Project management can sometimes be nothing but a really tedious task. However, these days will soon be long gone! With Nifty, you can manage your work, projects and communication in one place and access important docs, folders and arrangements in a heartbeat, all in one place. No more searching for a sticky note with passwords scribbled on it, no more trying to recall some files that you need right here and right now.
If you already use a tool for task management but you are not 100% sure that it is a good fit for your company, you can easily switch and move your projects from that particular tool to Nifty.
Nifty puts your marketing activities on display by creating timeline clarity while managing files, copy, communications, and feedback an organized effort. Combine your daily team collaboration with your client delivery by selecting which Tasks and Milestones are visible to your Guest.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $99 / up to 50 users, unlimited projects / month.
Customer Review Score: 4.8/5 (Capterra)
Free plan is available for teams up to 10 users and 3 active projects
Systeme.io for marketing automation
systeme.io is an all in one marketing tool that allows you to:
- Build an online business from scratch
- Launch email marketing campaigns and newsletters
- Build sales funnels with upsells, downsells and order bumps
- Sell and host digital products
- Run your affiliate program
- Launch a blog
- Set up your landing pages and pop ups
- Get leads
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $19/month billed annually
Customer Review Score: 5/5
Free plan: No
SalesHandy for email marketing
SalesHandy comes with multiple features like Email campaigns to send cold emails, Email personalization with mail merge feature, link tracking, and Auto Follow-up to name a few.
To know about your recipient’s behavior and get more insight into your report, you get an advanced analytics feature that will help you know more about your performance.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $9/month billed annually
Customer Review Score: 4.3/5 (Capterra)
Free plan is available where you can use unlimited Email Tracking and Scheduling free for lifetime
Encharge.io for onboarding emails
Encharge.io is a marketing automation software built for SaaS products and savvy marketers.
It helps startups increase their trial conversion rate with behavior-driven onboarding emails. With Encharge you can send automated emails when a user does or doesn’t do something in your app, that way, creating a relevant customer journey for each user in your product. Encharge also integrates natively with tools like Segment.com, HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, Stripe, and more, allowing you to bring in user data from your whole marketing stack, which helps you with segmenting your audience and building personalized onboarding experiences.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: $49/month for 2,000 users
Customer Review Score: 5/5 (Nifty)
EngageBay for marketing automation
EngageBay is a simple, affordable, integrated, all-in-one marketing, sales and service automation platform with a free CRM, built to grow small businesses and startups. The marketing automation suite offers email marketing, email sequences, landing pages, web forms, and more.
Save time, nurture your audience and automate routine, manual tasks.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $7.79/month
Customer Review Score: 4.6/5 (Capterra)
Kontentino for seamless social media management
If you feel that it is high time for you to get your social media workflow back on track, the beginning of a brand new year gives you the perfect opportunity to do something about it finally! Kontentino is not just a regular social media scheduler (even though you can plan nearly all types of content with this tool). It enables you to do even more, including social media reporting and content calendars for inspiration. However, there is one feature that social media agencies would die for. Social media approval.
When you work with many clients on many profiles, communication may quickly become a struggle. Kontentino stands out with a user-friendly client approval feature that allows your clients to accept — or reject — the content you created. Then you can intuitively schedule it afterwards, and analyze its performance. Hassle-free? For sure.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $54 / 3 users, 10 social media profiles / month
Customer Review Score: 4.7/5 (Capterra)
Elastic Email for all-around email delivery
If you want to create landing pages, web forms, and emails using only one tool, Elastic Email is a platform to look into.
Elastic Email currently celebrates its 10-year anniversary of building an email delivery service from scratch. They have a very user-friendly dashboard where, with just a few simple clicks you get to design your email, send it, and analyze the results. Depending on your plan you get access to other tools, like email automation and unlimited custom fields.
Elastic Email helps all business owners with keeping in touch with their customer base. The platform also has a blog with helpful tips that can improve your email marketing game.
Free trial: yes
Pricing: starts from $10 for 10,000 contacts and unlimited emails
Customer Review Score: 4.7/5 (G2)
Mopinion for understanding your customers
Mopinion is an all-in-one user feedback software that assists brands in managing their digital channels. They are a great resource for helping companies get a clear picture of their customer’s journey, strategize and drive up customer enagement and lead to less user churn. Mopinion has web, mobile and email versions and is a crucial tool to help companies establish a clear product roadmap based off adhering to existing customer feedback.
Free trail: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $229 monthly includes one digital channel and email feedback along with access for 20 team members.
Customer Review Score: 3.3/5 Capterra
3dcart for selling online
When it comes to selling your product or services online, nothing beats 3dcart as an e-commerce platform. From a complete e-commerce website, to a simple hosted payment page, you can sell anything online. Including real-time delivery calculation for physical goods, tax management and payment processing with Stripe, PayPal or over 100 other payment option
3dcart can also be integrated with many of the other marketing tools listed here, either with a pre-built app or by taking advantage of their Zapier connector to integrate hundreds of other solutions.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $9 /month
Customer Review Score: 4.4/5 (Capterra)
Chatbotize for building jaw-dropping chatbots in minutes
If you are a marketer, you must have heard of chatbots. However, building one may have never really crossed your mind before. While in the past it really took some time and skills to build a chatbot from scratch, nowadays the struggle is gone. There are some tools you can use to create a fully functional chatbot in no time, and Chatbotize is one of them.
With Chatbotize, you can make the most of ready-to-use blocks and plugins that help you to quickly create a chatbot from scratch. No matter if you need it for customer service, conducting a contest or a quiz, or simply for keeping the right level of interaction — various plugins allow you to build a chatbot to ease the burden on your agents and engage with your clients.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $49 / 5 plugins, 10 AI topics / month
Customer Review Score: 7.5/10 (SaaS Pirate)
LiveSession for analyzing user behavior
If a vital part of your business is the website, then you probably do care about its performance. Having a reliable suite of tools to help you recognize any potential bottlenecks on your website is crucial if you want to make more deals or generate more leads. One of the tools that you should consider investing in is LiveSession, which is a quantitative session replay software. With LiveSession, you can identify user behavior and watch even a single sessions of a particular person. Why would you do that? To recognize what the problem with conversion, sales or lead generation might be.
Sometimes a round of quick fixes is enough to improve overall performance, but other times it is going to take longer to implement the necessary changes. However, at the very least you will have identified them. If your business relies solely on your website, you simply need to have this in your toolbox.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $99 / 10 000 sessions, 10 users, 3 websites / month
Customer Review Score: 4.6/5 (Capterra)
Adzooma for optimizing adverts
Let’s face it — not each and every marketer has enough time or skill to create amazing advertising campaigns. Mistakes in this field can cost a lot — and we are talking about burning money. Does it mean that if you have no time you should definitely resign from paid advertising? In the past, we may have answered “yes” to this or just recommended hiring a different agency. Today, we can just talk about Adzooma instead.
Adzooma automatically analyses your advertising accounts, using machine learning to improve processes. Thanks to Adzooma, you can not only optimize performance and deliver better results, but also automate some tedious, manual tasks and finally stop burning money on ads that do not work. Simple as that.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $49 / user / month
Customer Review Score: 4.5/5 (Capterra)
Filestage for seamless collaborative content review
Creating great content is part of everyday life for marketing teams, but it can become quite challenging when you’ve got to collaborate with others and collect feedback. We all know how it feels to send out collateral for review and then have to spend countless hours untangling email threads of vague and conflicting feedback! Filestage is the ideal solution. This content review platform makes it simple for marketing professionals to quickly upload and share creative collaterals with just a few clicks. Your stakeholders can then easily access the intuitive platform and start to share their feedback. Best of all, it works with a wide range of media types including video.
The platform is simple to use and it creates a handy to-do list for your team members based on the comments that were left. This means that you’ll never miss an important piece of feedback again!
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $119 / 15 projects, unlimited users / month
Customer Review Score: 4.7/5 (Capterra)
HR Partner for Managing Your Team
HR Partner is the HR software for small businesses with anywhere from 20–500 employees. It helps companies manage employee records, leave requests and accruals, onboarding checklists, employee portal, timesheets, expense claims, reminders and more. It also includes a complete recruitment and applicant tracking system. In fact, HR Partner gives small and medium businesses everything they need to manage their HR processes and reduce the time spent on HR administration tasks. Traditionally, software like this has only been available for much larger businesses but HR Partner is specifically designed and priced for small and medium businesses.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: $60/month for 25 users
Customer Review Score: 4.8/5 (Capterra)
TimeCamp for time tracking
The marketer’s job is very demanding and requires being focused all the time. That’s why it’s essential to manage time smartly and wisely divide the time for each activity. Here TimeCamp comes with the help! It’s a time tracking software that logs time spent on work automatically. It monitors the hours for tasks and projects to know what you and your employees are working on and what’s the projects’ state and budget. Working in the background, it doesn’t bother the users and helps them stay focused on their work instead of filling timesheets manually. For a better perspective, it generates comprehensive reports showing clearly what are the most time-consuming tasks and how you and your team members are productive.
Moreover, you can create invoices basing on worked hours for billing customers accurately. Thanks to the attendance management feature, you can track the employees’ absence as well as have a deep insight into their work and progress of tasks and projects. TimeCamp also integrates with dozens of most popular apps to make work smooth and faster!
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $7 / user / month
Customer Review Score: 4.7/5 (Capterra)
Super Monitoring for detecting problems with your website
In a modern world a website is the most important marketing tool. It’s in the center of all marketing activities, including those performed off-line. Any downtime, or even a malfunction, causes significant losses when promotional efforts are wasted, because visitors can’t be converted into leads.
The only way to minimize damage is to react as quickly as possible to any problems with the website. And for that you need website monitoring that will be constantly checking your website availability and performance.
Super Monitoring will be checking your website every minute, checking the server response, measuring the response time and verifying the content (phrase matching). It can also be measuring the page load time and testing specific functions or processes (like checkout). It will also watch your domain’s and SSL certificate’s expiration dates.
In case of any problem you can expect immediate email and SMS alerts. In the on-line reports you will find additional information that will help you in root-cause analysis — HTTP headers, HTML snapshots, browser screenshots, etc.
To make using Super Monitoring even more comfortable, you can install one of the plugins and integrate the user panel with your favorite CMS — WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento or PrestaShop. Or use the API to connect the data directly with your own application.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $5.99 / 1 URL check, 15 SMS credits / month
Customer Review Score: 4.9/5 (Capterra)
ScreenRec for faster team communication
Project management goes hand in hand with team communication and this is exactly what ScreenRec is best at. Technically it’s a screen recording tool but, in practice, it’s a great way to share your ideas, explain tasks and give feedback to copywriters and content writers. Here’s what this means: Instead of sending a long-winded email, you can record a video of your screen to get your point across visually.
With the ScreenRec app installed, just press Alt — S and record your screen while talking. When you stop recording, the app generates a secure shareable link for you and copies it to your clipboard. You can paste this link in an email, private message, in a comment on a PM platform like Nifty, and so on.
So, next time you’re stuck in email mayhem, try sending a video. A simple 1-minute visual explanation can truly be worth 1,000 words (if not more).
Pricing: Free / 2GB
Customer Review Score: 4/5 (Trust Pilot)
IdeaBuddy for innovative business planning
IdeaBuddy is an innovative business planning and modeling tool that helps aspiring entrepreneurs to create a business model, develop their ideas, validate the concept, and get a beautiful business plan. All of this comes with a step-by-step guide and relevant examples. The tool is simple, easy, and fun to use!
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $9 / user / month
Customer Review Score: 4.5/5 (Capterra)
Harmonizely for setting up meetings
Marketers are at full exposure to communication, including status meetings or stand ups with clients. And, to be fair, doing this manually can be a struggle, especially if you need to handle a lot of meetings on a daily basis. Setting up the right time and date for meetings when you are trying to contact a few people can be really difficult, so why not you take advantage of some help in this area? With Harmonizely, you can easily integrate your calendars within one app and simply navigate the whole appointment and meeting processes there. You can also send it to your sales or customer teams that are struggling with some processes to help them too.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $12 / user, unlimited meetings / month
Customer Review Score: 4.7/5 (Capterra)
Brand24 for social media monitoring
Brand24 helps you monitor online mentions about your brand, product, or service. You can use the tool to raise brand awareness or monitor sentiment around your brand. Slack integrations and notifications system will help you react in time and Get instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, reviews and more.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $49 / 5 users, 5 mentions / month
Customer Review Score: 4.8/5 (Capterra)
RocketLink for smarter re-marketing
Shortening links is no newbie in the world of social media. In many cases, you can even analyze what happened to them afterwards. However, with RocketLink you can do even more still, and take your link shortening to the next level. By setting up special pixels, you can build custom audiences from those who clicked on your shortened link, even if it does not lead to your content. This way, you can benefit from external content for your own purposes — and then make the most of re-marketing by sending campaigns to custom target audiences.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $19 / 20 Links, 2 pixels / month
Customer Review Score: 4.7/5 (Capterra)
Venngage for creating graphics
Visuals do the job — we all know it. Without any appealing social media posts, attracting your main audience can be really difficult, and even the best piece of copy can be overshadowed by a graphic that you never knew you always hated. Since a picture is worth more than a thousand words, you should take great care of its quality.
Venngage gives you access to thousands of elements and templates for creating social media posts, presentations and infographics. What is more, you can do so in seconds, since it utilizes a Drag & Drop editor. Quick save, quick gain — your super attractive posts are ready in the blink of an eye.
Free trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts from $19 /50 image uploads, multiple pages / month
Customer Review Score: 4.6/5 (Capterra)
Bonus — DomainPromo
DomainPromo.com shares hand-picked deals for online business owners, freelancers and side-hustlers. You can find deals from web hosting and domain name registration companies, coupons for online marketing tools, website builders, VPN services and anything online business owners might need to improve and maintain the services they offer.
The website also offers free WordPress themes and weekly freebies for online businesses.
Did we miss any tools? Feel free to share your favorite modern tools to jump into in 2020!
