Generating quality leads is a complicated business, as you can see. There are a lot of different lead generation tools out there, and they all work in a different way. For this reason, learning which lead generation tool works best for you may take some time. But the reward is great. You have the ability to generate leads for your business – no matter what it is that you sell or do – at zero cost.
There are many tools available on the Internet available for free and can be of great help in generating leads yet newbies have the trouble in finding the best free tool for their business. Yes, you may use those lead generation tools free and start your marketing campaign in an easier way.
The world we live in is constantly changing and evolving. People are more tech savvy than they’ve ever been, and most people prefer to communicate online rather than in person. In fact, two-thirds of people pay attention to an organization’s social media profiles before making any purchases from that company. If your small business isn’t optimizing your website with the right social media tools and improving paid search, your competitors are probably crushing you right now.
There’s no shortage of lead generation tools today. That’s a good thing, because the better and more targeted your approach, the higher your conversion rates are going to be. Finding tools is easy. But finding the best free lead generation tools? That’s an entirely different thing. This overview of the best free lead generation tools you can use will help you figure out just how to generate leads for your business — and increase conversions in the process.
What to look for in all lead generation tools
Before we get into the thick of it, I just want to quickly run through what you simply need to consider for each type of lead generation tool.
1. Ease of use
It should not take more than a few hours to learn and understand the lead generation tool you’ve chosen. Also, it shouldn’t force you to rearrange your entire workflow.
I’ll admit, there are some exceptions to this rule like some sales tools are made to become the core of your workflow.
2. Ease of implementation
You also shouldn’t need a developer to get value out of the tool you chose. That’s a big red flag. Setup should take, at most, a few minutes.
Those are really the only two factors written in stone. Other categories of tools have different needs as well.
Sendinblue
Best For: Email marketing and SMS marketing
Suited For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
SMS Sendinblue is one of the best experience optimization and lead generation tools. It offers a plethora of features to optimize your website, maximize engagement, target visitors to collect leads, and streamline the sales process.
You can do it all with this single tool – email and SMS marketing, website live chat, marketing automation, designing landing pages, creating lead forms, and deploying Facebook ads.
How to Use SendinBlue to Generate New Leads:
- Create, design, and deploy your email and SMS marketing campaigns to find new prospects.
- You can install the live chat widget on your website for support and lead generation.
- Build interactive signup forms using the drag-&-drop editor to collect in-depth information from the website visitors.
- With Sendinblue Inbox, you can reply to your customers in real-time on email, SMS, and chat.
- Inbuilt CRM to manage your contacts in one place. You can store and update all the information about your contacts, including relevant documents.
- Use different lists to organize your contacts, such as the source of acquisition, step in the conversion funnel, or any other criteria.
- Create tasks, add deadlines to them, and assign them to different team members.
- Automate workflows with automatic lead scoring, transactional SMS and emails, and more to streamline your sales process.
Pros
- It has both email and SMS marketing built in the same tool, increasing the outreach options.
- The shared inbox keeps all the communication in one place, making it easy to act.
- Mailing list management is quite easy and organized.
Cons
- The interface for building transactional emails feels a little convoluted. It can be made more user-friendly.
- Needs more detailed documentation on CRM and marketing automation for new users.
Price: Free basic plan. Paid plans start at $25/month
Intercom
Best For: Live chat, chatbots, email marketing
Suited For: Small to big enterprises
Integrations: Yes
Intercom is one of the best conversational engagement software that will help you generate new leads and serve your website visitors simultaneously through live chat support and email marketing.
How to Use Intercom as an Online Lead Generation Tool?
- Supports live chat, custom chatbots, outbound mails, in-product messaging, push messages, and notifications to maximize engagement with the visitors.
- Use custom chatbots to trigger interactions automatically with the visitors via personalized greetings based on what they’re doing on your website and collect valuable information.
- Streamline workflows with advanced routing rules so the chatbots can chat, qualify leads, route, and schedule the meeting of new prospects with the right team.
- Integrate and manage all the conversation channels from one place.
- Reply to customers, start a live chat or call, and send outbound emails directly from the inbox.
- Integrate Intercom with tools like Salesforce, Marketo, Stripe, Shopify, and more to sync data and automate workflows.
Pros
- Automated multi-channel targeting for your campaigns to find targeted leads
- The centralized inbox lets you communicate with prospects via their preferred medium.
Cons
- Needs more categories to filter out the tickets
Price: Starts at $39/month
CallPage
Best For: Callback automation
Suited For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
CallPage is one of the best callback automation and lead generation software that will help you connect with buyers immediately. You can collect leads from the website and contact them instantly without letting them wait on the phone.
How to Qualify Leads Using CallPage?
- Add a fully customizable popup on the website to collect visitors’ contact information.
- Automatically transfer the data to the consultant and connect with the customer within 28 seconds.
- A popup prompts the potential customers to provide their phone number >>The widget connects them straight to your consultant >> The consultant talks with your potential customer on their mobile or landline.
- Offers mobile responsive popups.
- Call your leads directly from the CallPage dashboard.
- The analytics dashboard displays the client’s data and interactions like source, date, time, name, the manager who spoke with the client, customer geolocation, and much more.
- See call status and other information – received calls, missed calls, unanswered calls, and upcoming calls.
- It supports several integrations, such as Salesforce, Slack, and other CRM tools.
Pros
- The built-in SMS feature makes it easy to qualify the leads after the call.
- The analytic dashboard shows real-time stats of every installed widget and lead process.
- Work on Facebook as well.
Cons
- One of the most expensive callback apps in the market.
Price: Free basic plan. Paid plans start at $159/month
SharpSpring
In addition to its own built-in CRM, SharpSpring integrates with all the top CRM lead management tools. That allows you to manage lead data across multiple platforms.
SharpSpring includes custom deal stages, a helpful pipeline overview, and other marketing strategy tools.
Key Features:
- Marketing and email automation all in one tool
- Integration with many of the top marketing apps and tools
- Detailed analytics on every interaction with your leads
Pricing: For small businesses, SharpSpring’s pricing ranges from $399/month for 1,000 contacts, $899/month for 10,000 contacts, and $1,299/month for 20,000 contacts.
Keap
Keap helps you keep your customers’ information and conversations neatly organized all in one place.
From lead capture to emails to invoicing, Keap makes many of your essential business tasks easier to handle.
Like other CRMs, Keap also has automation tools to help you streamline marketing and lead generation efforts.
Key Features:
- Desktop and mobile apps so you can stay connected on the go
- Marketing automation to nurture your leads
- Migration tools to make importing your data from email providers fast and straightforward
- Includes a business phone line that works on your existing iPhone and Android phones (US and Canada only)
Pricing: Keap’s pricing starts at $79/month for the Lite plan, $169/month for the Pro plan, and $199/month for the Max plan.
Adobe Marketo Engage
Adobe Marketo Engage uses behavior tracking to help you identify prime customers for engagement.
With a cross-channel engagement feature, you can coordinate 1 to 1 communication with your leads across online and offline platforms.
Plus, Adobe Marketo Engage personalizes the user experience on your site, even for anonymous users. This helps you attract more leads and improve the quality of sales leads.
Key Features:
- Marketing Automation rules to engage and attract more leads
- Revenue tracking to track different marketing channels impact your bottom line
- Works across different teams so other departments can help foster and grow your leads and sales
Pricing: Marketo has different pricing and packaging plans. You’ll need to contact their sales department for more details on monthly costs, as pricing varies based on your database size.
OutreachPlus
Pricing: Free for one user, one email address, and up to 100 contacts and 100 emails; paid plans start at $19 per month.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars from G2
Tired of sending cold emails that don’t convert? OutreachPlus is an email integration tool that helps you create, personalize, and schedule follow-up emails.
This makes it easier to build relationships through cold emailing. It also detects changes in replies, such as if your contact responds from a different email address, forwards your message, or has an autoresponder.
Unbounce
Pricing: Paid plans start at $80/month for up to 20,000 visitors and 500 conversions
Rating: 5/5 stars on GetApp (Based on 48 reviews)
Unbounce is a tool used to create custom landing pages. The platform features a drag-and-drop landing page builder as well as many pre-built templates. Opt-in popups and A/B testing are also available. A 30-day free trial is available with paid plans starting at $80/month.
Instapage
Pricing: Paid plans start at $499/month
Rating: 4.5/5 stars on GetApp (Based on 144 reviews)
Another popular landing page builder, Instapage integrates with popular email marketing and CRM platforms like Zapier, Hubspot, MailChimp, and Salesforce. The tool offers a drag-and-drop landing page and other handy features such as A/B testing, lead capture forms, conversion analytics, and heat maps.
Leadpages
Pricing: Paid plans start at $27/month
Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars via Capterra
Leadpages claims to be the “#1 Landing Page Builder”. While we can’t necessarily say it’s the best, it does have a very well-designed drag-and-drop builder that is super easy to use. Additionally, the platform enables you to build Facebook ads directly inside the tool, and it even features built-in payment functionality for forms
What is a Lead Generation Tool?
Lead generation tool or software refers to the marketing process with the objective of stimulating and capturing customer interest in the products/services in order to build a sales pipeline.
Digital channels are often used for lead capturing and the advent of new online lead generation techniques have brought significant changes. The abundance of information available online has encouraged buyers and the new tools prequalify visitors prior to directing them to the sales team.
Conclusion
There are a multitude of lead generation tools, which makes it somewhat difficult to choose the right one. Lead generation is important because leads are what fuel business growth. Not only do you need leads to grow your business but they also need to be targeted and relevant leads.
Free tools used with a company’s existing methods can find potential leads at nearly no cost. Free tools are best used in conjunction with other activities and systems so that the cost of each item is covered as sales calls or visits are made to potential clients. The use of these professional lead generation tools does not have to be in isolation, and can save money for any online business.