Ecommerce is what Amazon is to online shopping. It dominates various product categories, and is a source of endless information and discussion within the marketing industry. When it comes to digital marketing tools and tactics, ecommerce has accumulated an impressive collection of possibilities for businesses seeking opportunities to engage with existing or potential customers.
We’re living in exciting times. As an online retailer, you get to experience the best of what technology has to offer. New, more innovative tools appear on a daily basis: for inventory management, for marketing purposes and so on. All these tools are intended to help e-commerce businesses reach their goals faster, more efficiently and effectively. Contrary to popular belief, free digital marketing tools that actually work aren’t a myth, they exist!
Ecommerce marketing is not easy especially if you are new in the market. It takes a lot of time, effort and money in order to achieve your goals. No wonder why many ecommerce marketers are still struggling with sales and conversions even though they have spent so much on ads, paid social media services, content marketing and other marketing strategies. Before deciding which ecommerce marketing tools you will use in your business, there are some things that you should take note of.
If you’re an Ecommerce business owner, this is a must read! Every day on my blog I receive questions from the Ecommerce community about how to get traffic or make sales. These frequently asked questions about Ecommerce marketing can be answered using some of the free resources below
Marketing automation tools for eCommerce business
Marketing automation tools help in automating tasks such as emails, advertisements, responses, and other website actions using personalized and useful content that helps to gain customers and their satisfaction.
1. OptiMonk: Drive more conversions with popups and other onsite messages
We couldn’t not lead with OptiMonk, our award-winning, conversion-driving popup solution.
OptiMonk bulked up to cult status among the ecommerce community as an easy-to-use popup creator tool. It lets store owners create striking onsite messages without needing any design skills.
But it’s more than a simple popup tool. OptiMonk has grown into a go-to Customer Value Optimization (CVO) platform that helps online shop owners create a delightful shopping experience. It is a perfect mix of personalization, A/B testing, and advanced segmentation.
There are five pricing plans to choose from, including our Forever Free Plan (no credit card required) and our Essential plan that is only $29 a month.
Each plan scales up your page views and domains and offers additional premium features.
Create your free OptiMonk account and start growing your business today.
2. Optimizely: A/B testing and multivariate testing tool
Optimizely is a popular A/B and multivariate testing tool. It helps run better experiments and creates a more responsive customer experience.
For example, you can use it to test two homepage variations that each feature a different design and copy.
There are two main pricing plans to choose from:
- Web. It offers a code-free visual editor for website experiments and personalized campaigns.
- Full Stack. It allows you to utilize feature flagging (a software technique that allows you to turn off and on specific functionality, sans code) and experimentation within your stack.
Contact Optimizely’s sales team to find out pricing.
3. AB Tasty: The experience optimization company
AB Tasty is dedicated to building better user experiences.
They fuel their experimentation and feature management platform with AI and automation.
Your real-life results? More targeted, ROI-generating campaigns.
AB Tasty backs up their platform with impressive figures—think 19%+ conversion rates.
Let’s talk pricing: there are several personalized plans to choose from. To find out costs, you need to contact the AB Tasty team.
Find out more about AB Tasty here.
Best website optimization tools
Wish your site was faster, easier to navigate, or offered a better user experience? Take a look at our best website optimization tools collection below.
4. Compressor.io: Fast & efficient image compression
Looking for a free ecommerce tool that helps you reduce the size of your images without ruining the quality? Look no further.
Compressor.io speeds up your website faster by compressing your photos—providing an awesome boost to your ecommerce SEO.
There are two pricing plans:
- Free.
- Pro. It offers unlimited compressions and zero ads, and it costs just $50 per year.
5. GTmetrix: Website performance testing and monitoring
Want to analyze your website’s speed accurately?
Discover which pages are loading slowly and see how you can increase your site speed with GTmetrix. You can test your site speed in 22 different global testing locations.
Take a look at the pricing plans:
- The Basic plan is totally free.
- The Solo plan is defined as “A minimal plan for those who need more features and on-demand tests.” It costs $10 a month.
Head over to GTmetrix to learn more about their plans.
6. PageSpeed Insights API: Analyze the performance of your website
Google also offers a fantastic tool for checking page speed, accessibility, and performance.
Besides analyzing your page speed, it also gives you tips on how to make your site faster and most effective—for both desktop and mobile views.
Check out the free tool here.
7. Hotjar: Website heatmaps & behavior analytics tools
Hotjar allows you to find the “why” behind the lack of conversions on your site. It offers a range of qualitative analytics tools that help you see the movements visitors make on your site.
Hotjar answers questions like: Where are they dropping off? Why are they clicking through?
Analyze your users’ behavior with some of their best features:
- Visualize your visitors’ behavior with heat maps that highlight their movements across the page.
- Utilize recordings to see what your users see.
- Use tools to collect qualitative insights like surveys and incoming feedback.
HotJar offers a free version limited to 300 recordings and 3 heatmaps. Premium packages start at $39 a month.
8. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Google Mobile-Friendly Test will tell you how mobile-friendly your site is in seconds.
Just drop your URL into the test bar. Google then provides suggestions on how to fix any errors and enhance the mobile-friendliness of your site.
Advice focuses on several issues—from the size of the text to how close clickable elements are to each other on the page.
Best of all? It’s free.
Find out more about it here.
Best SEO tools
Get found by more of your target audience. Read on for some of the best SEO tools.
9. Google Keyword Planner: Free online keyword research tool
For most businesses, keyword planning starts here.
Google’s Keyword Planner can help you discover the average number of times people have searched for specific keywords and how popular the related keywords are.
It can help you select the best keywords for helping your content rank.
Take a look here and start using it for free.
10. Link Explorer: Backlink checker tool
You can use MOZ’s Link Explorer tool to research backlinks and anchor texts, find link-building opportunities and discover damaged links. It can also be used for competitor analysis.
The free version provides plenty of useful information—like why your page is ranking where it is and how your competitors are performing.
To get full access, you need to be a Moz Pro subscriber for $99/ month, which provides detailed advice on optimizing your pages.
Find out more here.
11. Google Trends
You can use Google Trends to gather extra information that isn’t provided by the Keyword Planner tool.
You can explore trending search terms or even see how one keyword is trending compared to another (see the screenshot below that shows a laptop/notebook comparison).
By selecting different regions, you can also see more details on the search volume for specific countries and locations.
Google Trends is free to use—discover it here.
Types of eCommerce Marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Web push marketing
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Chatbot marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
Conclusion
Ecommerce marketers need the best marketing tools to grow their online business. For most of us, we may think that marketing tools are only for super-rich ecommerce entrepreneurs who are making millions every day. But you’re wrong at this moment. There are many free marketing tools for ecommerce you can use right now to grow your business without spending even a single penny (even in the future).
There is this misconception that if it’s free, then it must be useless. If a company is offering a tool for “free” surely there must be some asterisk attached to the offer. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, many ecommerce startups and businesses actually use free tools as part of their marketing strategy. And, whether you are running your business from home or using an agency to do the heavy lifting for you, there are plenty of free tools available to help you market your products or services effectively and also grow your business.