Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses That Will Facilitate Growth

Ahh, marketing. The crucial task of putting your company/product in front of the right audience and intelligently promoting all its benefits. A task that is done by those with both the brains and the creativity but often undermined by those in charge of the technical side of things. If this resonates with you, then you are at the right place.

Here at Coupler.io, we recognize the hard work done by marketers worldwide, especially those helping to build a business from the ground up. That is why, in this article, we will introduce you to the best marketing tools for small businesses that will aid you in your everyday tasks and help your business reach the goals set for it. Excited to learn more? Then keep reading!

The benefits of marketing tools for small businesses

Before getting to the nitty-gritty, we feel obligated to make one point – using a marketing tool for small businesses is a must if beating your competition is what you aim to do. Plus, you get to enjoy a range of benefits such as:

• Email marketing tools – saving time and money, personalizing content, boosting sales and website traffic, collecting feedback, engaging your audience…
• Social media marketing tools – boosting brand awareness and website traffic, more conversions, better brand loyalty and authority, cost-effectiveness, content repurposing…
• Marketing SEO tools –  better content ideas, improved keyword research, better SERP ranking and traffic, link insights, optimized user experience, competitor research…
• Conversion optimization tools – gaining visitor behavior insights, identifying conversion boosting changes, more revenue, leveraging current web traffic, lower customer acquisition costs, better UX…

With that said, we believe you can see the main benefits of marketing tools for your business. What else could you need to start using them today? A list of the best ones? Don’t worry; we’re on it! 🙂

Email marketing tools

Email marketing, a marketing strategy with great cost-effectiveness, can be easily boosted using the right software. From sending and tracking emails to segmenting your contact lists and providing you with a drag-and-drop email builder, email marketing software really is like a Swiss knife with tons of features packed in and a must-have marketing tool for small businesses. With it, completing the often difficult tasks, including managing email campaigns, reporting, measuring performance, scheduling, automating, and more becomes a piece of cake for those responsible.

Mailchimp

We are kicking things off with a tool (or better yet, platform) that enjoys a lot of popularity, with some even calling it the market leader – Mailchimp. Mailchimp is a well-established email marketing platform that is great for beginners, startups, and small businesses largely due to its forever-free plan.

Feature-wise, it comes with plenty, such as email automation, tracking personalization, data segmentation, lead capturing, A/B testing, CRM, and more. Templates and autoresponders are also part of the package, and so is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder with which you can create emails and website pages. How does all of this fit into one platform? Quite beautifully as Mailchimp boasts a consistent and eye-pleasing UI.

What’s more, Mailchimp can work hand in hand with a range of platforms such as Shopify, WordPress, Magento, and so on, as well as serve as a data source for data integration tools such as Coupler.io.

Coupler.io can be used to export Mailchimp data to a spreadsheet, workbook, or table with no coding required. The exports can be done automatically every week, day, hour, or according to a custom schedule and be of great use for those wanting to visualize their Mailchimp data, back it up, and share it with team members. So, if you want to pull campaign, audience, automation, or report data from the email marketing platform and use it to improve your business, Coupler.io is the way to go.

Notable features:

• Templates – email marketing templates that can be customized with no coding required
• Integrations – connections to a range of apps and web services
• A/B testing – testing of different versions of the same email marketing campaign

Pros	Cons
– All-in-one platform – Forever-free plan – Beginner-friendly	– Limited and confusing tracking features – 5 account limit on the free plan – Pricey premium plans

Pricing (grows with the number of contacts)

	Premium	Standard	Essentials	Free
Monthly email sends	150,000	6,000	5,000	2,500
Max contacts	Unlimited	100,000	50,000	500
Users	Unlimited	5	3	1
Customer support	Phone & Priority Support	24/7 Email & Chat Support	24/7 Email & Chat Support	Email support for the first 30 days
Templates, integrations, reporting & analytics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Price per month	$299	$17	$11	$0

Data security 

In March 2022, Mailchimp suffered a security breach which was resolved by blocking the bad actor responsible from a user account, notifying the account owner, and preventing further access to the Mailchimp platform. 

For those interested, on the Mailchimp security page, you can find information on the security practices put in place by the platform, which include application-wide TLS encryption, brute force protection on login pages, and regular penetration tests.

Mailtrap

Mailtrap is a bit of a different yet must-have tool. With it, email testing becomes a breeze as it enables you to capture SMTP traffic from staging and dev environments, automate test flows and scenarios, check the spam score of your email content, and validate HTML/CSS. Impressive, right?

What’s even more impressive is the fact that Mailtrap setup takes less than 5 minutes and just 4 steps. Each Mailtrap account has its own testing environment and access to automated testing with unlimited API calls.

When it comes to what you can test, well, you are free to dig deep into both the content and source of your emails. On top of that, you can also put your CRM or email sending service to the test by sending emails from it to Mailtrap.

Mailtrap also takes organization into consideration as well and thus allows you to have individual inboxes for different environments or review servers. With all of that said, it’s no wonder that Mailtrap is a favorite among marketers, managers, developers, and QAs.

Notable features:

• Spam detection – analysis of email content spam score
• API – email API for delivering emails from any application
• HTML/CSS validation – checking of HTML & CSS support for top email clients

Pros	Cons
– Compatibility with any app or framework that supports SMTP – Forever-free plan – Development and production environment email debugging	– Limited free version – Lack of live support

Pricing

	Enterprise	Premium	Business	Team	Individual	Free
Test emails per month	10M	100,000	50,000	15,000	5,000	500
Sending rate limit per 10 seconds	150	100	50	25	10	5
Inboxes	300	80	40	15	5	1
Users	999	80	40	20	1	1
Max emails per inbox	1000	800	600	400	200	50
Price per month	$299.99	$99.99	$49.99	$24.99	$9.99	$0

Data security

Mailtrap has implemented technical and security processes described on its privacy policy page in order to achieve full compliance with the GDPR regulation. On top of that, reCaptcha version 2 is used on Mailtrap’s email sign up, forgot password, and resend confirmation instructions website page, while reCaptcha version 3 is used on the Mailtrap add new card billing page to protect from spam and abuse.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is regarded as a well-rounded eCommerce-oriented email marketing tool for sending and creating promotional campaigns. For each of the campaigns, Klaviyo provides in-depth, comprehensive analytics helping you understand your ROI.

The star feature of the tool is its automation feature which allows you to create different automated flows. Along with that, it also comes with advanced segmentation, text messages, email capture, drag-and-drop builder, and more. The drag-and-drop builder is fairly easy to use and can come in handy for creating emails, forms, and popups.

Lastly, it’s worth highlighting that Klaviyo can seamlessly integrate with ecommerce marketing platforms hence why it’s labeled as eCommerce-oriented.

Notable features:

• SMS marketing – sending of targeted, hyper-personalized text messages at scale
• Revenue measuring  – automatic computation of conversion analytics for all metrics in your account
• Drag-and-drop builder – addition, modification, and deletion of sections in HTML templates

Pros	Cons
– Great onboarding process – Wide range of easy-to-use email and sign-up form templates and automated flows – Personalization features	– Learning curve – Steep price – Subpar look of UI and email templates

Pricing (grows with the number of contacts)

	Email and SMS	Email	Free
Contacts	251 – 500	251 – 500	250
Monthly email sends	5,000	5,000	500
Support	Email and chat	Email and chat	Email and chat
SMS/MMS credits	150	0	0
Price per month	$35	$20	$0

Data security

Just like Mailchimp, Klaviyo also suffered a security incident in August of 2022, which was followed up by revoking access for the compromised user and removing the threat actor from the systems in an effort to resolve the incident. 

If the above made you have second thoughts about Klaviyo’s data security, you will be relieved to hear that the company implements security controls that entail logical segregation of data, logical access controls, and system functionality based on authority levels and job functions, just to name a few.

EmailOctopus

Taking the simple route is EmailOctopus, an email marketing tool running on Amazon SES infrastructure. What EmailOctopus believes sets it apart from its competition is its simplicity, intuitiveness, and clean UI, which facilitate a simpler and more valuable email marketing experience.

Intentionally or unintentionally, EmailOctopus also stands out in terms of the monthly number of emails allowed in its free plan, a number that is higher than in most other email marketing tools. That being said, the EmailOctopus does cut back on free plan features which for some might be a big drawback.

So, what exactly do you get with EmailOctopus? Quite a few things, including automation, templates, a drag-and-drop editor, and integration with third-party apps such as MailOptin, WordPress, Zapier, and more.

Notable features:

• Drip campaigns – trigger-based sending of automated sets of email drip campaigns
• Dynamic content – personalization of campaigns for each subscriber based on the data in custom fields
• Email and landing page builder – drag-and-drop creation of emails and landing pages

Pros	Cons
– Great ease of use – Customer support for both free and paid plans – Personalization features	– Requires an Amazon SES account – Lack of trigger-based emails – Only basic automation

Pricing (grows with the number of subscribers and emails)

	Pro	Starter
Subscribers per month	500	2,500
Emails per month	10,000	10,000
Users	Unlimited	1
Landing pages and forms	Unlimited	3
Reports availability	Forever	30 days
EmailOctopus branding on emails	Yes	No
Price per month	$8	$0

Data security

To protect your data, EmailOctopus stores it on secure servers and carries out your payments using Stripe and encrypted connections with SSL technology. EmailOctopus claims to have “privacy by design” baked into its engineering and product development principles and uses leading security tools and techniques.

SendX

If there is one thing SendX is proud of, it’s their tool’s affordability. But besides being affordable, the tool is also intuitive and feature-rich. With it, marketers and business owners are enabled to complete tasks such as email list building, landing page/popup form/inline form creation, campaign designing/scheduling/tracking, report generation, and so on.

Automation is also part of SendX, allowing you to use a rule-based interface and things like user activity, segmentation, and more to automate your marketing. When using SendX, at your disposal is a range of templates you can use and modify with a drag-and-drop editor. The same editor can be used for building an email from scratch if that is what you prefer.

How does this marketing tool for small businesses differentiate itself from the competition? Some would say the answer is their email deliverability rate of 99.4%.

Notable features:

• Deliverability booster – boosting of email deliverability and open rates using Opti-Send technology
• Unlimited email sends – no restrictions on the number of email campaigns sent per day
• Custom HTML & CSS – detailed modification of email design with custom HTML & CSS options

Pros	Cons
– 500K+ royalty-free stock photos – No credit card necessary for the free trial – 24×5 email support	– Small list of integrations – 15K subscriber limit in the cheapest plan – Poor personalization and targeting

Pricing (grows with the number of subscribers)

	Business Plan
Subscribers	1,000
Emails per month	Unlimited
All features	Yes
Price per month	$7.49

Data security

On the security side, SendX claims to take reasonable precautions and technical as well as organizational security measures. Just in terms of personal data, SendX follows industry best practices to protect it and preserve its security and confidentiality. Unfortunately, no specific details are disclosed on its privacy policy page.

Litmus

Litmus is one of the big boys – an enterprise solution with enterprise features counting 700K+ users, including famous names like Target and Booking.com.

Litmus is built for creating but also testing and analyzing emails with great speed. This is enabled by the range of tools it provides for running tests on different elements.

One of the unique features Litmus users enjoy is the option to view email template HTML and CSS code while browsing and using the templates. This is great for those who love making a lot of customizations the manual way.

 Notable features:

• Spam testing – 25+ different tests for identifying deliverability issues
• Team collaboration – effective collaboration through features for quick & efficient communication
• Checklists – guidance through 29 of the most common and critical email campaign pre-send checks 

Pros	Cons
– Vast email client support – Great speed – Generous free trial	– Difficult unsubscribing of test email addresses – Lack of features for organization – Reports of switching users to higher plans without notifying

Pricing

	Enterprise	Plus	Basic
Users	Custom	5	1
Read-only users	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Email previews per month	Custom	2,000	1,000
Features	Everything in Plus + more	Everything in Basic + more	Basic features
Price per month	Custom	$159	$79

Data security

Litmus’ security definitely doesn’t fall short, with the company using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data, and AES-256 bit (or higher), SHA-256 bit, and TLS 1.2 (or higher) ciphers to encrypt data. Permission to access customer-specific data Litmus only grants to trained, authorized, and background-checked operations personnel with VPN access. On top of that, role permissions for an account are supported, and two-step verification, session lengths, as well as password settings are available to Litmus Enterprise plans according to their data security page.

Social media marketing tools

With a growing number of users and the influence it has over those same users, social media has become vital to the success of businesses. To make the most out of social media marketing and save the time necessary for completing tasks such as content development, analysis, audience research, and more, many newbies and professionals resort to none other than social media marketing tools.

Sendible

Sendible has built quite a name for itself in the industry by providing great features for post optimization, content scheduling, and posting, as well as campaign performance monitoring, just to name a few. It comes packed with built-in analytics tools that can create detailed reports and enables better collaboration on all things content-related.

Sendible also doesn’t fall short in the integrations department boasting plenty of integrations with social media platforms, blogs, forums, and tools.

Agencies that work with multiple clients will particularly love Sendible as it allows for the customization of the dashboard according to a specific branding.

Notable features:

• Automatic RSS posting – publishing of relevant content to social media regularly throughout the day
• Custom reports – creation of custom reports using the Report Builder
• Keyword monitoring – monitoring of chosen keywords from the web and social media through a dashboard

Pros	Cons
– Quick post editing and optimization – Image design with Canva integration – Real-time interaction with the audience	– Expensive for solo marketers – Requires reconnection with social media profiles every 60 days – Buggy mobile app

Pricing

	Custom	Scale	Traction	Creator
Users	8+	7	4	1
Social profiles	50+	49	24	6
Price per month	Custom	$170	$76	$25

Data security

Sendible claims to be taking “all steps reasonably necessary” to ensure user data is secure. These steps include strictly following the GDPR regulation, storing information on secure servers located in the US, which are also certified under Sendible Standard Security Clauses, encrypting payment transactions, and providing additional security controls for restricting access to specific IP addresses.

BuzzSumo

Research is key, and the people behind BuzzSumo know that. This is evident in the features of their tool intended to help you find the most shared content on social media channels.

With BuzzSumo, just about anyone can use data to find the best topics for social media posts. BuzzSumo can also analyze your current content and tell you who and where is sharing it.

Other interesting features among the ones this tool boasts are influencer discovery, competitor content tracking and analysis, popular forum questions discovery, and more.

Notable features:

• Trending content discovery – features for browsing topics, trends, and forums
• Content ideas generator – a collection of billions of headlines, subheadings, keywords, SERP results, questions, topics, and content engagement data.
• Content analyzer – an inspiration index containing billions of articles

Pros	Cons
– Filtering and customization – Updates and alerts – Support for all types of content	– Subpar influencer discovery – Expensive – Complicated interface

Pricing

	Large	Plus	Pro	Free
Free monthly searches	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	10
Historical data	2 years	1 year	1 year	1 year (1000 results)
Users	15	10	5	1
Alerts	30	10	5	0
Exports per month	200	150	50	0
Content projects and items	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	1
Custom feeds	50	20	10	1
Price per month	$299	$179	$99	$0

Data security

On the BuzzSumo website, not much is said regarding data security. To be more specific, in its user privacy statement, it is stated that the servers holding your data are subject to appropriate administrative, technical, and physical controls, which include industry-standard encryption technology.

Social Champ

Social Champ is a fully-loaded social media management tool that helps you to manage multiple social accounts with a centralized dashboard, speeding up your social media scheduling process. The tool supports 8 major social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Business Profile, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok.

Social Champ is power-packed with advanced monitoring and analytics features that helps you track your social media posts’ weekly and monthly performance with platform-centric metrics. 

Moreover, this platform offers in-app visual integration with Canva, VistaSocial, and Wave.video, so you don’t need to juggle between multiple tabs to edit your visuals.

Notable features:

• Social Media Calendar – Get a grid view of all your scheduled and published posts. You can even share your calendar with your team members and clients with a shareable link

• Social Media Scheduling – Schedule your Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Twitter Threads at the best time of the day and increase the visibility of your post 

• Social Inbox – Manage and monitor all your customer queries, mentions, and comments across all social media platforms

Pros	Cons
– Social Inbox to manage all conversations easily  – AI support for content and images – Free plan with unlimited scheduling options	– Social Listening unavailable  – Does not support social media ads management – Limited language support

Pricing

	Free	Champion	Business	Agency
Social accounts	3	12	40	100+
Mentions	100,000+	20,000	10,000	5,000
Scheduled posts per account	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Client organization	2	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Bulk scheduling	50	300	300	300
Users	1	2	6	10+
Price per month	$0	$29	$99	Custom

Data security

Social Champ takes all necessary steps to ensure full safety on their website. They do not share your information (personal and cards) with any third party app. However, like other websites, they use cookies to provide a satisfying experience. You can find more information on their privacy policy page. 

Mention

Mention is a widely-used social media monitoring platform. Mention’s users are mostly brands and agencies looking to find out what is said about their or a competitor’s brand/product on the web.

Its alert system enables you to track a keyword and get notified every time it’s mentioned in real-time. 

But that’s not all! This tool also has features for social media post scheduling, and sending analytics straight to your inbox daily, it also enables you to respond to mentions right from the platform, and helps you find suitable influencers.

Notable features:

• Slack integration – Slack notifications for brand or competitor mentions 
• Mentions filtering – filtering of Mention feed by source or using Mention’s filters
• Sentiment analysis – identification of positive and negative mentions of your brand and competitors

Pros	Cons
– Easy to use – Has billions of sources – Supports teamwork	– Expensive – Quite limited free version – Complex onboarding

Pricing

	Company	ProPlus	Pro	Solo	Free
Alerts	10+	7	5	2	1
Mentions	100,000+	20,000	10,000	5,000	1,000
Social accounts	Unlimited	15	10	5	3
Users	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	1	1
Price per month	Custom	$166	$83	$24	$0

Data security

Mention has a dedicated security policy page on which it elaborates on technical and organizational measures put in place. The company uses servers hosted on OVH, Scaleway, and AWS, located within the EU. The Mention application itself has been security tested by the open source community and runs in security-patched Linux environments. Backups of customer data are performed and kept for 30 days, and all personal data is processed according to applicable law.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a simple yet very cool tool. It enables scheduling and organizing of content (by category), but its star feature is the one for recycling content, which automatically reshares your most popular posts and thus increases engagement and traffic.

MeetEdgar supports both image and video content as well as multiple networks. What’s more, if you want to do some link tracking as well, MeetEdgar will provide you with the necessary feature.

Notable features:

• Automatic post variations – automatically created content variations for your social media queue
• RSS integration – easy importing of content using RSS feeds
• Advanced filters for the content library – easy narrowing of content library results with one or more filters at once

Pros	Cons
– Good support – Suggests the best time to post – Big time-saver	– Expensive – No possibility to reply to comments from within the platform – Poor UI

Pricing

	Edgar	Eddie
Social accounts	25	5
Price of additional social accounts	$1.99	$3.99
Scheduled posts	Unlimited	Unlimited
Weekly automations	1,000	10
Content categories	Unlimited	4
Team members	20	20
Price per month	$ 41.58	$24.91

Data security

MeetEdgar provides a solid amount of data security information in its privacy policy. There you can read about secure servers and third-party password-protected, secure services used to host data. In terms of billing and payment data, it is encrypted. What’s more, Edgar doesn’t store the passwords of your social media platforms. Instead, it receives and stores access tokens only.

eclincher

eclincher claims to be “a solution for everyone” for the purposes of social media management, using which you can schedule and publish posts, keep track of and analyze your social media performance, find social media influencers, perform social listening, and do lots of other things.

Content recycling is also possible with eclincher – a very cool feature it has in common with tools such as MeetEdgar.

And if we were to name one stand-out feature of this tool, that would for sure be the auto-posting one that makes use of smart queues and RSS feeds.

Notable features:

• Visual calendar – visual overview of published and scheduled content
• Team and client collaboration – boosting of collaboration using shared calendars, approval workflows & work with internal, external, and clients
• All-in-one smart inbox – managing and engaging across all your accounts using one unified inbox

Pros	Cons
– Product team receptive to feedback – Great support – Supports nearly all social networks and a large number of sources	– Advanced features reserved for paid plans – Poor UI – Mobile app doesn’t support all features

Pricing

	Agency	Premier	Basic
Users	6	3	1
Profiles	40	20	1
24/7 live support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Web mobile app & extension	Yes	Yes	Yes
Price per month	$219	$119	$59

Data security

In the security section of its GDPR compliance page, eclincher talks about using security controls such as multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, and OAuth 2. Its Information Security Program goes under penetration testing conducted by Amazon AWS, and the continuous delivery of its services is ensured by disaster recovery, backups, and a business continuity plan. Amazon AWS is also a provider of the necessary hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology required to run the eclincher services, and so are other industry-leading third-party vendors and hosting partners.

Marketing SEO tools

SEO is of utmost importance for those wanting to build a great web presence. But, those who have at least once dabbled in achieving good SEO know that it involves tedious tasks ranging from keyword research to competitor analysis. This is exactly the reason behind the popularity of SEO tools that can do the tasks for you and also provide error-free reports giving you insight into how search engines like Google view your website.

Ahrefs

If there is one tool you might be familiar with, that would be Ahrefs – a complete marketing toolkit and the top backlink analysis tool among marketing and SEO experts.

Geared towards professionals, Ahrefs offers features for keyword research, backlink checking, site and content auditing, search rank monitoring, and more. 

The tool boasts 295 billion indexed pages, an index of 16 trillion live backlinks, and a crawler that processes up to 5 billion web pages daily.

Notable features:

• Site explorer – in-depth analysis of the organic search traffic and backlink profile of a website or URL
• Content explorer – database of 11 billion web pages for finding content ideas and link prospects
• Competitor analysis – information on competitor content, backlinks, keywords, PPC ads, and more

Pros	Cons
– Support for a range of search engines – Easy Core Web Vitals performance audit – Unique traffic potential metric	– Interface isn’t geared towards beginners – One account per plan – No social media analysis features

Pricing

	Enterprise	Advanced	Standard	Lite
Keywords explorer lists	250	100	50	5
Crawl credits per month	5M	1.5M	500.000	100.000
Tracked keywords	10,000	5,000	2,000	750
Price per month	$833	$333	$166	$83

Data security

Ahrefs’ privacy policy page states that the company takes “appropriate security measures to prevent unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or unauthorized destruction of the Data”. It also states that data processing is done following organizational procedures and modes.

Majestic

Besides being one of the oldest SEO tools, Majestic is also an SEO veteran favorite. The tool focuses on website crawling and has a huge amount of backlink data enabling powerful backlink tracking as well as domain analysis.

Majestic also comes with keyword tools and tracking, SEO metric comparison, a “Site Explorer”, which can provide you with an overview of a site and its number of backlinks, and more features. 

“Majestic Million” could be considered this tool’s most famous feature used to list the top 1 million sites online.

Notable features:

• Bulk backlink checker – checking of backlink numbers for a bulk of URLs
• New and lost links information – simple and intuitive identification of new and lost backlinks
• URL submitter for crawling and indexing – instruction of Majestic’s crawler to check new URLs

Pros	Cons
– Browser plugins – Deep crawling – Advanced historic index	– Confusing custom metrics – Poor UI – Mostly focused on backlinks

Pricing

	API	Pro	Lite
Analysis units	100M	20M	1M
Site explorer data rows	30,000	15,000	5,000
Analysis depth	30,000	15,000	5,000
Report units	950	300	60
Max analyzable backlinks	100M	20M	1M
Price per month	$333.33	$83.33	$41.67

Data security

Majestic is very vague when it comes to explaining its data security. To be more specific, Majestic uses the wording “appropriate security measures” on its privacy policy page when talking about how it protects your data and briefly mentions that access to users’ personal data is limited. It also claims that procedures have been put in place in case of suspected personal data breaches.

SpyFu

If you haven’t guessed by now based on its name, this tool allows you to spy on competitors. It does that by giving you information on what keywords were purchased by your competitors through online advertising services such as Google AdWords.

In terms of keywords, it can also list the ones that get the most traffic.

Other SpyFu features include SEO and PPC competitive research, custom list and domain creation, rank (paid and organic) monitoring on top search engines, reporting, and more.

Notable features:

• In-depth SEO reports – SEO reports containing information on domain SEO performance or keyword performance 
• Top organic competitors and their best keywords – significant information about how competitors try to attract clicks
• PPC ad history – list containing every ad a domain ran in the last 16 years

Pros	Cons
– Customizable – In-depth reports – Well-presented data	– Fairly complex – Sometimes slow – Charts and graphs cannot be exported

Pricing

	Team	Professional	Basic
Search results	Unlimited	Unlimited	10,000
Data exports	Unlimited	Unlimited	10,000
Domain overview PDFs	Unlimited	Unlimited	100
Historical data	10+ years	10+ years	6 months
Sales leads & domain contacts	2,000	500	250
Weekly tracked keyword rankings.	40,000	15,000	5,000
Price per month	$149	$36	$16

Data security

The SpyFu privacy policy page contains some information on the topic of data security. In short, SpyFu says that it designs and operates its services with the protection of user privacy in mind. It uses a secure offsite third party to store and process credit card transactions and takes “appropriate security measures” to protect against unauthorized access or unauthorized alteration, disclosure, or destruction of data. In addition, it restricts access to your personally identifying information.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog stands out from the other tools mentioned by being primarily a website crawler, a super fast one. Its speed is a benefit that users highly appreciate as it gives Screaming Frog competitors a run for their money.

With Screaming Frog, you can analyze your website and know exactly which errors to fix, ranging from metadata and duplicate content all the way to redirecting. On top of that, if you do link building, you can use Screaming Frog to improve your strategy. 

Notable features:

• Web scraper – custom extraction feature for scraping any data from the HTML of a web page
• Redirects audit – checking and auditing of redirects at scale through crawling or bulk URL upload
• Staging site crawling – crawling of any staging server and website and comparison of staging vs. live website URL structures

Pros	Cons
– Advanced crawling features – Go-to tool for experts – Frequent updates	– Quite limited free version – Lack of data visualization – Not beginner-friendly

Pricing

	Paid	Free
Basic features	Yes	Yes
Crawl limit	Unlimited	500
Scheduling	Yes	No
Crawl configuration	Yes	No
Price per year	$209	$0

Data security

Screaming Frog doesn’t differ much from other tools in terms of data security practices described on its privacy policy page. According to it, secure data centers located in the UK and US are used to store data that can be accessed by authorized personnel only. The data is further secured by appropriate technical and organizational measures.

Hunter Campaigns

This is not directly an SEO tool, but Hunter Campaigns can help you with sending outreach campaigns for various off-page SEO purposes.

Hunter Campaigns is a cold outreach tool by Hunter, a tool for running personalized cold email campaigns. It’s used by thousands yet millions of professionals for email lookup, email verification, and cold outreach automation.

You can use Hunter Campaigns to fully personalize your emails at scale by integrating your own data through custom attributes, set up and schedule your follow-ups, track the performance of your outreach campaigns, use a free library of hundreds of cold emails to get insights for your email sequences.

It is a free tool for those who use one Gmail account for email sending, and most of its features are available in the free plan. 

Notable features:

• Full personalization – make every email personalized by integrating your own data
• Scheduling – decide when the emails are sent and set a daily quota
• Email tracking – know what happens to your emails after your click send
• Multiple accounts – link multiple Google or Microsoft email accounts to the same Hunter account

Pros	Cons
– Free of cost meaning you can automate cold email campaigns without breaking your budget – Email tracking helps you to understand what happens to your emails	– No A/B testing feature, team dashboard and detailed performance -Free plan does not support link tracking

Pricing

	Free	Starter	Growth	Pro	Business
Email accounts	1	5	10	20	40
Attachments & images in emails	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Link tracking	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom tracking domain	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Recipients per campaign	500	2,500	5,000	7,500	10,000
Unlimited users	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Price per month	$0	$49	$99	$199	$399

Data security

Hunter’s security policy page provides details on the steps they take to ensure data security. They briefly enumerated security measures for data encryption, physical security of data centers, software security, and debit /credit card information security. Hunter also has a Security Bounty Program, which rewards users who report vulnerabilities in the software. 

Conversion optimization tools

Conversion rate optimization is a process with the goal of taking website visitors and turning them into valuable leads and customers. The process entails optimizing your current website based on data, user behavior, and some plain logic. And while logic should come naturally to you, data and user behavior insights you obtain through conversion optimization tools.

OptinMonster

Need more leads and conversions? OptinMonster is here to help you! Using this tool and its drag-and-drop builder, you will be able to create eye-catching opt-in/lead generation forms from scratch or using one of the 50+beautiful prebuilt templates.

To make sure the right people see the right content at the right time, OptinMonster will also provide you with a set of targeting features, including page-level targeting, dynamic text replacement, and custom display rules.

On top of that, users of OptinMonster get to enjoy its signature Exit-Intent technology – a very effective tool for converting visitors trying to abandon your website – A/B testing, in-depth conversion analytics, and compatibility with various CRM platforms.

Notable features:

• Geo-location targeting – displaying of relevant campaigns based on users’ locations
• 2-step opt-ins – forms used to ease visitors into handing over contact information
• Campaign triggers – smart triggers that follow user behavior and display the right campaign to the right person at the right time

Pros	Cons
– Interesting animations – No limit on the number of forms/popups – Non-interruptive popups	– No multi-step forms – Not very intuitive – Customization options need improvement

Pricing (grows with the set of features)

	Growth	Pro	Plus	Basic
Features	Growth features	Pro features	Advanced features	Basic features
	All the tools necessary to transform your conversions.	Must-have if you sell ANYTHING on your website!	Great for growing businesses who want to do more.	Essential tools to get more leads from your existing traffic.
Price per month	$49	$29	$19	$9

Data security

We definitely need to give OptinMonster credit for providing users with comprehensive security information. For that, it has a dedicated page that covers 256-bit SSL encryption for all information that travels between your browser and OptinMonster, Sucuri monitoring of OptinMonsters servers, managed Pagely hosting, redundant storage and servers, and MaxCDN as its content delivery network. Backups are also mentioned and done by replicating your data across database servers in multiple geographic locations.

Hotjar

Heatmaps help you understand the user on a different level, and Hotjar is a pro at creating them.

This behavior analytics tool will connect to your website(s) and depict how users interact with it through colors – the bolder the color in a specific spot, the more intense the user activity. With information like this, you can make websites more efficient and geared towards facilitating engagement and conversions.

But heatmaps are not the only thing Hotjar provides. Recording of user actions on your website, surveys for gathering feedback, and real-time results are also part of the Hotjar package.

Notable features:

• Recording highlights – capturing of recording snippets and heatmaps and grouping them into collections
• Dedicated team workspaces – displaying only team-relevant information in Hotjar
• Multiple pages into one – combination of multiple pages into one heatmap

Pros	Cons
– Quick integration – Small learning curve – Great support	– Small number of integrations – No user segmentation – No predictive analysis

Pricing

	Scale	Business	Plus	Basic
Sessions per month/day	Unlimited daily	500 daily	3,000 monthly	1,050 monthly
Features	– Everything in Business – Dedicated customer success manager – Unlimited sites under the same plan – Enough data for the largest sites – Full access to every feature	– Everything in Plus – Custom-built integrations – Identify API – Frustration and confusion signals – Removal of Hotjar branding	– Everything in Basic – Filter and segment data – Events API	Basic features
Price per month	Custom	$32	$80	$0

Data security

Hotjar takes security seriously, and it wants users to know that. Thus, on the Hotjar data safety, privacy, and security page, much is explained. AWS eu-west-1 data centers are Hotjar’s choice for data storage, and both its application and database are run inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, which doesn’t expose data directly to the internet. Hotjar doesn’t rely on personal information to keep track of returning users but on unique user identifiers. It also doesn’t collect keystroke data on input fields. Other important data security information mentions firewalls, an intrusion protection system, HTTPS, protocols and ciphers usage, daily full database backups, and more.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange isn’t just a tool; it is a complete CRO suite that could take your number of conversions to another level. Through its dynamic heat mapping and an array of other features, you can take a better look at user behavior on your website – essential for knowing what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. 

Two of the most important features included are visitor recording and form analytics which allows you to capture what kind of experience a customer is having on your site and what steps they take.

Other features worth highlighting include polls and surveys, funnel analysis and live chat. The live chat feature, in particular, gets a lot of praise for its ability to push leads toward purchasing.

Notable features:

• Dynamic heatmaps – viewing of clicks, moves, and scrolls on every element, drop-down, popup, and hover-over menu
• Visitor profiles – complete record of interactions with a site 
• Announcements for visitors – sharing of important news or promotions

Pros	Cons
– Affordable – Detailed user recording playbacks – Great UI	– Poor recording and heatmap filtering – Small number of integrations – Time limits on data storage

Pricing

	Enterprise	Scale	Expand	Grow	Build	Free
Pageviews per month	Custom	300,000	100,000	40,000	10,000	500
Websites	Custom	1	1	1	1	1
Team members	Custom	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage for heatmaps and recordings	Custom	60-day	60-day	60-day	30-day	30-day
Storage for surveys, chat logs, and events	Custom	365-day	365-day	365-day	365-day	365-day
Dedicated support	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Prioritized feature requests	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Price per month	Custom	$150	$70	$35	$18	$0

Data security

Although Lucky Orange’s security overview page was last updated in December of 2018, it offers a fair amount of information on how Lucky Orange keeps data safe and secure. On the page, mentioned are methods of how Lucky Orange prevents the transmission of sensitive data, including opt-in keystroke logging, marking sensitive HTML content with special CSS classes, and scrambling all page text content. Along with that, you can learn about other data-security aspects, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) hosting, AWS-powered CDN, state-of-the-art data centers, AES-256 encryption, GDPR compliance, production systems running on Linux or Kubernetes Container-Optimized OS, and more.

Sniply

Social media is all about presentation, and Sniply knows that. So, with this tool, you can shorten your URLs and make them look neat, thus enhancing the visual aspect of the content you share.

But wait, there is more!

Sniply also enables you to add a call to action (CTA) to every shortened link. Why a CTA? To redirect users to your site and, of course, boost the number of conversions made through your social media.

Sniply’s other features include link metrics tracking, A/B testing, and more.

Notable features:

• Custom positioning – selection of CTA location on a page
• Conversion pixels – tracking of specific actions on a website
• Link management – tracking and analysis of clicks and conversions

Pros	Cons
– Easy to use – Allows layering CTAs over external content – Intuitive	– Small character limit – Blocked by certain websites – Limited analytics

Pricing

	Agency	Business	Pro	Basic	Free
Clicks per month	250,000	50,000	20,000	5,000	500
Links per month	50,000	10,000	5,000	1,000	20
Brand profiles	15	10	6	2	1
Team members	10	5	3	1	1
Price per month	$250	$125	$66	$25	$0

Data security

The section on data security in Sniply’s privacy policy isn’t a very long or detailed one. In it, there is a brief mention of “administrative and electronic measures” employed to protect your personal information and the practice of deleting that information or storing it in a format that prevents user identification when it is no longer needed.

Heap

Heap is a platform for digital insights that can provide you with a 360-degree view of a customer’s journey and, in turn, give you an insight into all the actions taken by the user to engage with your website or product.

The actions Heap keeps track of include sessions, pageviews, form submissions, clicks, and filed changes.

The data you receive from Heap is the perfect combination of quantitative and qualitative analytics, and using it will bring you one step closer to delivering an unparalleled digital experience.

Notable features:

• Engagement metrics – capturing of customer interaction and satisfaction with a product
• User behavior analytics – insight into user behavior and reasons behind it
• Event visualizer – easy definition and management of events

Pros	Cons
– Real-time insights – Flexible event definitions – Automatic tracking	– Steep learning curve – Requires some technical knowledge – Lack of tutorials/documentation

Pricing

	Premier	Pro	Growth	Free
Features	– Everything in Pro – Unlimited products/websites – Data foundation: ETL, advanced governance – Premier support: 24/7 email + A dedicated CSM – Custom Sessions or MTUs	– Everything in Growth – 1 additional product/website – All data enrichment sources – Personalized digital experience capabilities – Access to all add-ons – SSO + MFA – Custom Sessions or MTUs	– Everything in Free – CSV export – Additional enrichment sources for advanced analysis – Account-based analysis (B2B, SaaS)	– Basic features – Up to 10k monthly sessions
Price per month	Custom	Custom	Custom	$0

Data security

Heap’s quite detailed privacy policy has a section dedicated to security that mentions “appropriate technical and organizational measures” to protect your personal information as well as secure servers for collecting the information but doesn’t go into any technical details. For more information, users can reach out to Heap’s data privacy team via email.

Mouseflow

What does a combination of heat mapping and session recording features produce? A great conversion optimization tool! And Mouseflow fits this description very well. With this tool and its range of features, you can address the pain points of your users and optimize your website.

In achieving that goal, the session replay feature will be of great use as, with it, you will be able to rewatch the user journey and filter the replays. Mouseflow’s heatmaps also provide you with plenty of information down to even an accidental click.

And, no, you don’t need advanced skills to use Mouseflow since even its data analytics dashboard has a clean design. Other features of this tool include feedback campaigns, funnel and form analysis, as well as a number of integrations.

Notable features:

• Frustration tracking – tracking, identification, and filtering of frustrated website users
• Feedback – custom interactive surveys for fast audience targeting
• 6 heatmap types – click, scroll, attention, movement, geo, and live heatmap types

Pros	Cons
– Integrates with most platforms – Detailed session recording – Easy to use	– Expensive – Quite limited free version – Fairly complicated setup

Pricing

	Enterprise	Pro	Business	Growth	Starter	Free
Recordings per month	200,000	150,000	50,000	15,000	5,000	500
Websites	20+	20	10	3	1	1
Storage	12 months	12 months	12 months	6 months	3 months	1 month
Price per month	Custom	$299	$159	$79	$24	$0

Data Security

On Mouseflow’s dedicated data security page, information can be found on its dedicated US/EU data centers, HTTPS data transmission, disabling of keystroke tracking in all form fields, disabling of keystrokes in specific form fields, exclusion/replacement of content shown in your HTML, two-factor authentication, and password salting and hashing using pbkdf. 

Best marketing tools for small businesses – which ones should you go for?

Now, you know the answer you’re looking for. Something along the lines of “you should go for tools x, y, and z because….”. And while we could give you what you want and our favorite tools some extra promo, we will instead give you what you need – some honest advice on how to pick the marketing tools for small businesses that are right for you.

Below, you will find a breakdown of a few key things to consider while scouring the sea of tools available to you. Use it smartly!

The actual size of your small business

We titled this article “Best marketing tools for small businesses” for a reason. The reason is the fact that all the tools listed here are built for optimal use by, you guessed it, small businesses. Still, when it comes to your business and the tools you buy for it, knowing exactly how big or small it is matters a lot.

Why? Well, the size of your business will determine the features you need, the pricing plan you should go for, and so on. In other words, if you know the actual size of your business, you will be able to make the right decision on which specific marketing tool for small businesses will facilitate its growth and at what cost (if any).

The skills of your team

The right tool in the right hands can do magic, while a wrong tool in the wrong hands can do more damage than good or simply be useless. That being said, the skills that your team possesses should be a guiding factor during tool shopping.

Say, for instance, that your marketing team is composed of people with marketing backgrounds and experience. In that case, complex tools that provide highly-detailed information and advanced features will serve their purpose and are worth the investment. If the opposite is true, and not-so-knowledgeable marketers fulfill your marketing roles, then sticking to easy-to-use tools that focus more on optimization and automation is the way to go. At least until the skills of your team receive an upgrade.

Your marketing strategy

No two businesses are the same, and that rule applies to their marketing strategies as well. So, in order to obtain the desired results, each business will need a unique set of tools tailored to its marketing strategy.

Put simply, if your focus is on email marketing, equip your team with the tools that will get your emails to the right inboxes at the right time. If, on the other hand, you believe the key to success is content marketing, then invest in tools that will help you find suitable topics and make your content “pop”.

Your budget

Last, but certainly not least, we have to mention budget – a factor that, for many, narrows down the list of tools for consideration. Luckily, many of them come with free trials or even free plans, but those often put a range of limitations on you if you attempt to access them every day and from multiple accounts. So, be prepared to spend some money on “must-haves” but not overspend on “nice-to-haves”. Also, remember, always make use of the available free trials/plans to give the tool a proper test run before making the purchase.

And that is it! But, before we go, a quick question. As Coupler.io, the data integration tool we mentioned at the beginning of the article, is constantly expanding its list of data sources, we want to know which data source you want to see next. Let us know by completing our quick questionnaire!

Back to Blog