When it comes to creating lead generation campaigns, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to software. Most of the tools that come at no cost are still pretty powerful. Depending on your business, you may even find yourself with a decent amount of choices. There are currently hundreds of software tools used primarily for lead generation purposes. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular free tools and what they offer to help you find the right solution for your business needs.
Sure, a small business may not have the budget for expensive tools that can help generate leads for your company. However, there are plenty of tools out there which are completely free. If you’re looking for effective tools to increase your lead generation efforts and boost your sales, this post will show you some of the best free online lead generation tools which will help you get started right away.
A comprehensive list of lead generation tools to help you prospect and find new clients, customers or leads. You’d be surprised how many things you can do for free to discover the answers about your market, your product, and what people want.
Whether you’re looking for free tools for your business or have a business to start, you’ll probably find what you need here. The world of lead generation is changing rapidly and it’s important to follow all the latest trends in this industry. Our free tools will enable you to find what you’re looking for quickly and easily, so check them out and make sure that you know about all the lead generation tools available today.
What is a Lead Generation Tool
Lead generation tool is an application that automates the process of lead generation to provide you quality leads. These tools can generate leads from different sources like social media, landing pages, websites, and so on. Based on the sources and channels, different lead-generating software works differently.
Each tool has a unique set of features and functionalities to capture quality leads for your business. You can then nurture these leads to boost conversions and sales via different sales/marketing campaigns. Let’s check out the important lead generation tools below.
ClickFunnels
Best For: Creating landing pages, affiliate programs, sales funnels
Suitable For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
With ClickFunnels, you can design new websites, landing pages, membership pages, opt-in pages, squeeze pages, and much more. It’s the perfect sales funnel creator to set up a lead generation system and bring more prospects into your sales funnel.
Here’s why we consider one of the best lead generation tools:
- Use the drag-&-drop editor to create a website, landing pages, sales funnels, lead capture forms, and more.
- Provides 40+ pre-built templates to create sales funnels without any coding.
- Integrate payment gateways into your sales funnels and web pages to promote conversions.
- Use mail automation to capture bulk leads and send targeted messages to the prospects via mail, text, and social.
- Offers an inbuilt affiliate program manager to draw more leads into your sales funnels.
- Track the funnel performance like click-throughs, conversions, opt-ins, and visitors directly from the dashboard.
Pros
- Easy to set up and use.
- You can accept the payment directly on the sale funnels without redirecting the visitors.
Cons
- Essential features like autoresponder and Actionetics are available only in higher-tier plans.
Price: Contact for price
Mailshake
Best For: Email outreach, cold mails
Suited For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
Mailshake is one of the most effective tools for mail outreach and lead generation. It offers a plethora of personalization and targeting options for your cold mail campaigns.
How Does Mailshake Help in Generating Leads?
- Send bulk emails to your contact list, generate new leads from replies, nurture them using drip mail campaigns, and convert them to your customers using Mailshake.
- Provides a single dashboard view to manage your entire marketing campaign from one screen.
- Other features include ready-made email templates, personalization options, alerts, an inbuilt phone dialer, automated lead status management, and mail status monitoring.
- Easily integrate with other CRM tools, such as Slack, Hubspot, Salesforce, and much more.
Pros
- Supports automated email follow-ups and pausing sequences based on the recipients’ actions.
- A/B test your email campaigns from the same tool.
- Inbuilt lead management eliminates using a separate tool to track lead acquisition.
Cons
- The pricing is based on the number of users, making the tool a little expensive.
- The campaign analytics can be improved to show more information and details.
Price: Starts at $59/month
Acquire
Best For: Email and SMS marketing, Live chat, and call
Suited For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
With Acquire, you get an all-in-one customer engagement and lead generation tool for your business. It offers an integrated omnichannel approach to help you build a satisfying conversational experience for your customers irrespective of the channel they use to interact with you.
What Makes Acquire a One-Stop Solution for All Your Lead Generation Needs?
- Acquire makes it possible to connect your customers via multiple platforms.
- Engage your visitors via SMS, call, live chat, and emails to collect valuable information and find new prospects.
- Keep things neat and clean by unifying all communications channels into a single dashboard.
- Integrate with Zendesk, Shopify, Zapier, and other tools to export captured leads and manage them accordingly.
Pros
- The real-time visitor tracking feature is great for generating high-quality leads.
- The advanced targeting makes it possible to engage visitors at the right moment.
Cons
- Expensive than other similar tools.
- The team management dashboard needs better control for data distribution.
Price: Contact for a price quote
Overloop
Overloop is a CRM with a special focus on email address prospecting, conversations, pipelines, and workflows.
A drag and drop dashboard helps you see all of your pipelines at a glance, giving you an excellent business overview.
Overloop’s automation is also built on a visual dashboard, so you can put your sales prospecting on autopilot. Best of all, it integrates with a range of services to get contact information automatically.
Key Features:
- Find email addresses either individually or in bulk
- Turn these emails into cold emails, all in the same tool
- Track email campaigns with in-depth data
- Automated workflows reduce repetitive tasks
Pricing: Overloop is free to start as a CRM. Starting with email automation and tracking is $70/month. Email finder credits start at $39/month for 250 credits, ranging to $299/month for 10,000 credits.
HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the world’s top CRMs available. While they offer a wide variety of tools, one of the top uses of HubSpot is its email marketing services.
With HubSpot, you can create stunning conversion-ready emails while also learning from valuable insights and reports into how your emails perform with your customers.
HubSpot can be one of your best assets when it comes to sales and marketing.
Key Features:
- Easy-to-use platform
- Separate hubs let your focus on the areas your business needs, all in one tool
- Live chat functionality
- Email template, scheduling, tracking, and engagement tools
Pricing: HubSpot offers a free CRM with valuable tools. Their paid plans are for their marketing, sales, customer service, CMS, and operations hubs, which start at $45/month.
Pardot
Pardot is a well-known lead generation tool that helps you manage and qualify sales leads. By qualifying leads, you can rest assured that you’re always talking to the best leads.
Pardot includes fine-grained segmentation and marketing automation for better communication with your future customers.
There are also tools within Pardot to help you with landing page design, embedding forms, and email management.
Key Features:
- Lead nurturing and qualification tools help you find the best potential customers
- Detailed data that lets you customize the user experience
- Separate tools based on industry
Pricing: Pardot’s pricing ranges from $1,250/month for their Growth plan, $2,500 for their Plus plan, and $4,000 for their Advanced package.
ConvertPlus
Pricing: Paid WordPress Plugin for $23 one-time fee
Rating: N/A
ConvertPlus is another tool for displaying popup forms on your website. However, instead of a SaaS solution, this tool is offered as a WordPress plugin.
It has many of the same features as Sumo, including timed popups, percentage of the page scrolled popups, exit popups, etc. It can be a good tool for companies using WordPress that can’t invest in a monthly SaaS tool.
MailChimp
Pricing: Free, paid plans start at $9.99/month
Rating: 4.5/5 stars on GetApp (Based on 2295 reviews)
MailChimp is one of the most popular and easiest-to-use email marketing platforms out today. One of its best features is its intuitive, easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder. MailChimp also offers email automation. The platform can be used for free to store up to 2,000 email contacts and send out 12,000 emails/month. After that, paid plans start at $14/month.
Best For: Email and social marketing, lead forms
Suited For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
Mailchimp is another all-in-one marketing and lead management tool that offers email marketing, survey forms, social ads, and AB testing capabilities to build your marketing campaign.
How to Generate New Leads Using Mailchimp:
- Use the drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates to design engaging emails.
- Publish posts on social media and create ad campaigns in Mailchimp to retarget visitors to your website.
- Assist your visitors from filling the signup forms to buying the product using automatic follow-up emails.
- Use behavioral targeting to auto-send messages according to visitors’ actions, like a welcome message or a related product recommendation for a recent buyer.
- Create and add customizable forms to your website’s sidebar and footer to collect contact information.
- Show popup forms based on conditions and customer interactions on your website to generate new leads.
- Merge your contacts from all channels into the in-built Mailchimp CRM.
- Compare industry benchmarks to study open rate, click rates, subscription rates, and other metrics to analyze your campaigns’ success.
- Lets you A/B test to see what is working for your audiences, such as different subject lines, images, layouts, and more.
- Easily integrates with LiveChat, Zapier, and other tools.
Pros
- Import your custom email templates and customize them using the inbuilt HTML/CSS editor.
- Campaign analytics is one of the best we have seen in the outreach tools.
- The free plan supports up to 2000 contacts which is a great way to get started.
Cons
- The inbuilt templates are very basic and often require heavy customization from your end.
- The mobile application offers limited functionality.
Price: Basic free plan. Paid plans start at $10/month
ActiveCampaign
Pricing: Paid plans start at $9/month
Rating: 4.5/5 stars on GetApp (Based on 76 reviews)
ActiveCampaign is another popular email marketing platform. While ActiveCampaign’s email builder isn’t as polished as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign has a more powerful email automation editor.
They also offer additional tools in their marketing suite, including landing page templates, segmenting, Facebook custom audiences, contact scoring, SMS marketing, and more.
Why are Lead Generation Tools Important
From start-ups to global enterprises, millions of businesses are already reaping the benefits of using the best lead generation software. There must be something pretty serious about such tools, right? Here’s what companies find beneficial about lead generation tools:
- The tool helps in identifying new prospects and high-quality leads.
- It finds accurate contact information about the leads.
- From tracking opportunities to strategizing marketing campaigns, lead generation tools can do it all.
- It helps in achieving a great ROI.
- The tool lets you identify up-selling opportunities for existing customers.
- Using reporting, you can easily gain valuable insights on website usage.
- With precise targeting, these tools help in fighting website abandonment.
- It is super easy to convert existing website traffic into leads and customers with a lead generation platform.
- Automatic lead generation & nurturing do the heavy lifting for your teams.
- The tools provide seamless integration with other sales/marketing tools.
Conclusion
The best lead generation tool for small business is one that generates high-quality leads and includes a user-friendly mobile platform. While there are many tools available, the best free tools for lead generation typically do the following:
Lead generation is one of the most important aspects when trying to grow your business. It’s the whole point of building your website, crafting your message and establishing a social presence in the first place. Naturally, then, what you do with those leads is a very important consideration; effective lead management can make or break your bottom-line.