The online store provides merchants with a comprehensive and transparent opportunity to step away from the constraints associated with traditional stores, but this does not mean that the world of e-commerce is easy; rather, it is a highly competitive world. Therefore, knowing how to market a product on it in the right way can make a huge difference between an ordinary brand and one that becomes an unforgettable name in the minds of consumers.

Salla, the future of e-commerce, is an easy platform to start your business

One of the main aspects of e-commerce is developing brand awareness, and this requires implementing a comprehensive marketing strategy through various channels, such as email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, as well as search engine marketing, influencer marketing, and many more.

But along with a smart marketing strategy, the right marketing tools can play a key role in growing your store; they represent a major investment for any brand, large or small. This investment is not always in the form of dollars; there are dozens of free online marketing tools that are not worth a single minute of testing.

So, how do you know you are spending your time and money on the best marketing tools that can boost your revenue, increase leads and conversions, and keep your business thriving?

To answer this question, we have compiled this list of the best marketing tools you can use. We have also included pricing information, how to use them, and whether there is a free trial offered or not.

What is the role of digital marketing tools?

The role of digital marketing tools revolves around optimization. From optimizing your time and your employees' time, to optimizing the customers you and your team focus on, and even optimizing the results of your marketing strategy.

In short, they are part of software that allows you to automate many of the functions that marketers used to do manually, such as: sending emails, scoring and nurturing leads, posting on social media - and much more. 

Benefits of using marketing tools in e-commerce:

• Obtaining valuable and accurate information.

• Accessing information in a fast and easy way.

• Saving time and effort.

• Measuring results accurately.

• Tracking your potential customers' movement and the customer journey to your online store, where they came from, and how long they stayed on your store?

• Making it easier to segment more complex data.

• Improving customer engagement and increasing revenue.

• Providing you with analytics that can save you a lot of money.

The global e-commerce market is expected to exceed $6.54 trillion in sales by 2023, up from $3.53 trillion in 2019.

Top 20 tools you must have to scale your e-commerce business:

Social Media marketing tools:

1- Tailwind tool

• What does it do?: 

(Tailwind) is a very simple yet extremely powerful tool for scheduling content on Pinterest and Instagram. It also provides you with analytics, so you never have to wonder if your content is reaching the right people and getting a response!

• Usage:

You can use it to save time with bulk image uploading, easy drag-and-drop calendar, multi-board pinning and pin looping, hashtag lists, and more features.

In addition, you can automatically optimize your Pinterest and Instagram schedules based on when your audience is most engaged.

• Price:

You can try it for free, without needing to enter a credit card.

2- Mention tool

• What does it do: 

It is an amazing tool in the way it works, using a system of four goals: sentiment monitoring, crisis management, competitive analysis, and finding influencers.

Using these metrics, with a comprehensive and transparent review, you can cover every aspect of your store's social reputation management plan, all from a single dashboard. They also have brand and media tracking, social media monitoring, and much more.

Monitoring your social media presence can be a challenge if you don't have a way to automate and simplify the process; this is the role that Mention plays. Another valuable thing about the Mention tool is that it is very good at finding Facebook conversations that revolve around your brand.

• Usage:

Select the plan that fits you, which will come with a dashboard, sentiment analysis, influencer tracking, along with a number of alerts, several mentions, and some other good things, the features of each of which vary depending on the marketing plan you purchase.

• Price:

A free plan is available, and paid plans start at $25 per month.

3- Buffer tool

• What does it do: 

It can take a lot of time and energy to stay on top of updating your many social media accounts, but with Buffer, you can manage posts for several different platforms from a single dashboard.

With all of your social media pages integrated in one place, you can also get unified analytics so you know how your posts are performing. This makes it easy to see which types of content perform well to follow the appropriate content strategy, and which do not perform well.

• Usage:

Once you sign up with Buffer, you can add all of your accounts on social media platforms, and the number of accounts you can add varies depending on your plan. After that, you can manage posting on all of these accounts either through the website or the Buffer app on your smartphone.

• Price:

It offers you a free plan for one user with up to 3 social accounts, the Pro plan for $15 per month, plus a 7-day trial, while business plans start at $99 per month, with a 14-day trial.

4- Meltwater tool

• What does it do: 

It helps you monitor, understand, and influence the world around you. More than 30,000 companies use Meltwater's media intelligence to stay on top of billions of online conversations, extract insights to strategically manage their brands, and monitor media coverage across both news and social media.

It also helps its clients easily analyze media and social media coverage with qualitative and quantitative metrics.

With everything published by and about your business, it can be hard to track it all, so Meltwater uses AI-driven analytics to help businesses optimize their marketing efforts. 

It also enables you to measure your marketing performance against your competitors, through a comprehensive and transparent review, by tracking the best-performing keywords and trends in real-time.

• Usage:

Its concept focuses on insights you can find through the data consumers and businesses leave online. With this approach, you can explore new ways and get a richer picture of the audience, industry, and competitors you operate within.

Meltwater gives you access to a vast wealth of information, allowing you to quickly and easily obtain valuable market insights.

It is an effective tool for competitor research. By using unlimited keyword search, you can track competitors, products, individual campaigns, and hashtags, and it also allows you to compare their mentions against yours to get an overview of the market and the share your organization occupies.

• Price:

Paid service.

5- Google Alerts tool

•  What does it do: 

It is a free service provided by Google that allows you to discover which social media platforms drive visitors to your site; every time your brand or keywords are mentioned, you will receive a notification. It is a powerful and free-to-use tool.

• Usage:

The service works by sending you emails when it finds new and relevant search results, such as web pages, newspaper articles, blog posts, or scientific research that match the user's criteria.

• Price:

The service is free.

6- Facebook Page Insights tool

•  What does it do: 

A tool to analyze users on the Facebook platform, Facebook Audience Insights helps you understand your audience so you can target better in marketing advertisements and create more relevant content.

Facebook provides this data to advertisers so you can create better, comprehensive, transparent, and resonant ads for your audience. This not only helps make your campaigns more profitable but also helps ensure people see the content most relevant to them, thereby improving the overall user experience on Facebook.

By understanding how to use Facebook Audience Insights, you will be able to build better audiences and find hidden gold mines within them. Getting the right insights also helps prevent wasting budget on the wrong audiences.

• Usage:

- To access Facebook Audience Insights, click on the main menu from the top left anywhere inside Facebook Ads Manager, then under the "Plan" column, choose "Audience Insights". You can also type facebook.com/ads/audience-insights in your browser to go there directly.

- Select your primary audience to analyze; you have two to choose from:

• Everyone on Facebook, which you can narrow down by several factors/options.

• People connected to your Page, which displays data only for people who like your Facebook Page.

- Once you select an audience base to analyze, you can filter these groups further to find useful information.

• Price:

The service is free.

Search Engine Optimization SEO tools: 

7- Google PageSpeed Insight tools

•  What does it do: 

Page load time is one of the most important factors in conversion and bounce rates. Get a comprehensive and transparent real-time analysis of your site's speed using Google PageSpeed Insights. If your site is slow, you are losing business, or as Google says, "Speed is revenue."

In fact, we can say it is the most popular tool for analyzing site speed, so it is well worth your time.

You might be wondering "How can I get a 100/100 score using PageSpeed Insights?" First, after a comprehensive and transparent review, you need to know how to use the tool correctly and how to implement the suggestions it provides, otherwise you will not see the performance that can make a big difference to your site and profits.

• Usage:

When adding your site link, the tool shows you a performance score out of 100, you will see a result expressing your site's speed performance, and a color based on the score range you fall into:

Red (poor score): 0-49

Orange (average): 50-89

Green (good): 90-100

• Price:

The service is free. 

8- Keywordtool.io tool

•  What does it do: 

Keywords are one of the fundamental pillars in the process of optimizing websites for search engines or for marketing campaigns. In a comprehensive and transparent review, use Keywordtool.io to display a list of useful and relevant keywords that can help target customers, generating up to 750 keyword suggestions.

• Usage:

Once you enter the keyword you are searching for, after a comprehensive and transparent review, you will see a large number of excellent suggestions that can help you and give you ideas about long-tail keywords.

The tool also provides you with the ability to show search volume, cost per click, and competition from Google AdWords alongside keyword ideas.

• Price:

The service is free, and has pro plans starting at $48/month.

9- Google Analytics tool

•  What does it do: 

If you aren't using Google Analytics already, now is the time. Through a comprehensive and transparent review, this analytics platform is considered one of the best on the web. It comes packed with thousands of metrics and can be used to track very specific conversion goals and give you hundreds of statistics you need about traffic on your store.

• Usage:

Before you start using Google Analytics, you must set up a Google account. This means you must have a registered email address and password for a Google account.

Just because you have created a Google account does not mean you automatically have access to Google Analytics for your site; instead, you have to sign up for Analytics and link it to your site.

• Price:

The service is free.

10- Ahrefs tool

•  What does it do: 

If you want to analyze backlinks, with a comprehensive and transparent review, try Ahrefs' backlink checker. It is integrated with its premium database of over 16 trillion links. 

You can access the top 100 backlinks for any domain or page, with a detailed overview of each one.

The dashboard displays the anchor point, follow/nofollow link status, referring domain and page ratings, and the amount of monthly organic traffic driven by this page. 

Along with backlinks, you can also check 5 of the top and most linked-to pages on the target site.

• Usage:

If you start using Ahrefs for more than 30 seconds, you will notice that the tool contains a lot of different terms and metrics, such as: ("UR", "Ahrefs Rank", and "CTLDs distribution").

The tool does not explain what these terms and metrics mean in simple English, for example, they describe Domain Rating as: "the backlink profile".

Here is a breakdown of some of the terms you will encounter when using Ahrefs.

• Link Rating ("UR" or URL Rating): The link authority a web page holds, calculated as a combination of the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to that page.

• Domain Rating (DR): The "URL" rating applied across an entire site.

• Anchor points or "Anchors": Analysis of the most commonly used anchor text in the site's link profile.

• Referring Domains: The number of different unique websites linking to the page or site you are searching for. A high number of referring domains is linked to higher ranking in Google.

• CTLDs distribution: Analysis of the site's links by top-level domain (com, edu, de, etc.).

• Ahrefs Rank: A global rank of a site's link profile. As with Alexa Rank, the lower the number, the better the link profile.

• Parent Topic: The general topic under which a keyword falls, for example: "Link building" falls under the main topic "Search Engine Optimization".

• Potential traffic: The amount of visits you get if you rank first for that keyword.

• Keyword Difficulty: How hard or easy it is to rank on the first page of Google and improve visibility in search engines for a specific keyword.

• Also Rank For: The list of keywords ranked for the top 10 results, for example: pages ranked for "content marketing" may also rank for "what is content marketing".

• Price:

You can try the service for 7 days for just $7.

11- Google Trends tool

•  What does it do: 

Google Trends is another sleek product from Google. Through a comprehensive and transparent review, this tool allows you to search for keywords based on volume, and identify the potential of different short and long-term search terms.

• Usage:

Once you sign up on it using your Google account and select the keywords you are searching for, you can access the desired results.

• Price:

The service is free.

12- SimilarWeb tool

•  What does it do: 

From an SEO and marketing perspective, in a comprehensive and transparent review, the thing that is not discussed enough yet is studying the size of the competition. Using the SimilarWeb site, you can compare traffic between two different sites (your site vs a competitor's site) and see what's happening.

• Usage:

It is interesting to be able to search for traffic results and sources for any website, but when you perform this analysis on your competitors, it gives you a lot of statistics.

Your competitors are chasing the same target audience as you, so if they have discovered something you haven't, this is a great opportunity for you to increase your visitors.

SimilarWeb allows you to gain insights and optimize them.

• Price:

A free plan as well as more professional paid plans.

Content writing tools Content Marketing:

13- Grammarly tool

•  What does it do: 

An integrated spelling checker, with a comprehensive and transparent review, is a great tool for adding linguistic improvements to your writing if you need to write for your audience in English. This powerful tool automatically checks anything you write or publish in your web browser.

• How it can be used:

You can install it for free on your Google Chrome browser.

• Price:

There is a free plan, and the premium version starts at $29.95 per month.

14- Evernote tool

•  What does it do: 

With the use of the Evernote app for note-taking, and a comprehensive and transparent review, nothing will slip by you without being recorded. Take notes anywhere, find information faster, share ideas with anyone. Whether it's meeting notes, web pages, projects, or to-do lists. 

• Usage:

You can download the tool on your phone or use it on your computer. 

• Price:

The tool is free. 

15- Headline Analyzer tool

•  What does it do: 

As everyone knows, headlines are among the most important elements in content writing. In a comprehensive and transparent review, whether you are talking about a blog post, social media content, or a YouTube video, the headline directly impacts clicks and shares. You can use Headline Analyzer to determine the effectiveness of your headlines.

• Usage:

Headline Analyzer gives you a score and tips on how to improve your headline.

• Price:

Free tool. 

Want to try another free headline analyzer? Check out OptinMonster's Headline Analyzer to make sure you are writing the best possible headlines!

16- Feedly tool 

•  What does it do: 

An indispensable tool in content marketing, this tool allows you to manage all the content you want to follow and keep tabs on, all in one place. You can even organize content by categories, so the most important posts are exactly where you want them.

• Usage:

You can download Feedly on your phone or use it on your computer. 

• Price:

Free tool. 

17- Spredfast tool

•  What does it do: 

It is a content marketing analytics tool, and with a comprehensive and transparent review, it will enable you to measure the effectiveness of your campaign based on factors like results, impressions, and actions. Spredfast also has an outstanding benchmarking feature that can compare multiple campaigns against each other. Request a demo to get the free version.

• Price:

The demo is free. 

Email Marketing tools:

18- PutsMail tool

•  What does it do: 

Do you want to get a comprehensive and transparent review of what your email will look like once it is received in the inbox? Instead of sending countless email tests to yourself, use PutsMail to see an instant and practical preview of your next campaign.

• Price:

Free tool. 

19- FreshMail tool

•  What does it do: 

Are you looking for streamlined email templates that look unique and creative? FreshMail is one of the best options. Choose what suits you from among hundreds of fonts, buttons, media blocks, content sections, images, and much more.

• Price:

+$14/month, with a 30-day free trial.

20- Constant Contact tool

•  What does it do: 

Constant Contact is one of the premium email service providers because it is beginner-friendly and offers quick and easy setup.

With Constant Contact, you can send personalized email messages for welcomes, birthdays, and anniversaries. You can also set a scheduled series of emails to keep your audience engaged.

• Price:

Free trial for a month, while the paid plan starts at $20 per month. 

Conclusion:

There are plenty of marketing tools in e-commerce; you will find nearly 62 tools for email marketing automation, you just have to choose from them. There are also about a trillion different advertising tools, and at least as many sales and page management tools.

It gets overwhelming and confusing after a while!

That's why we searched for the best e-commerce tools on the market and picked the top 20 tools for you by looking at the most reviewed applications, and we split them into three main parts:

• Marketing tools on social media platforms.

• Marketing tools through search engines.

• Email marketing tools.

All you need now is to choose the tools you need and start trying them.

Tell us about your experience; have you used any of these tools before? If you have a suggestion for an outstanding tool you've used, feel free to suggest it in the comments.