Building a predictable Lead generation machine is a challenging task. Once you crack the challenge, though it is extremely rewarding as you can scale up faster. Also, you can afford to be more selective with who you work with. Lead generation tools are essential pieces of software that make it easy to capture qualified leads without complex coding. Usability is always important for your campaigns. You need to look out for integration where you need to share the data between different tools. This can include exporting landing page data to Google Analytics.
Above all of this, you need to make sure Lead generation tools are going to help you achieve your goals. At least you must make sure that you achieve them much easier or faster in greater volume or more cost-effectively. Pricing is a critical measure of course. And you want to make sure that you are getting the features you need for minimal investment. Do keep in mind that the software providers often limit the features or usage at different price points. So it will often cost you more if you use a tool focusing on a bigger quantity.
What kind of tools are we looking for?
Modern businesses need to generate their leads from more channels than ever. This means there are a plethora of tools in different categories. These include inbound, outbound, email marketing, etc. Let us break it further down to further categories:
- On-page Lead generation tools: To help you capture the leads on your website.
- Inbound Lead generation tools: To help you bring more leads to your websites and other channels.
- Outbound Lead generation tools: To help you identify the leads and send messages via outbound channels like email, calls, etc.
- CRO tools to maximize leads: So you an increase in the percentage of users who convert into more valuable leads.
- Email marketing tools: To help you generate and nurture leads along your customer journey.
- Search marketing tools: To increase the traffic from organic and paid search and generate more onsite leads.
- Marketing management tools: To measure performance, maximize lead generation, and improve the quality of leads.
On-page Lead generation tools
Here we are looking at the tools that you can use to generate leads from visitors currently on your website. You have already invested in bringing these visitors to your website. So these are the tools that are going to convert them into genuine leads:
- Leadformly
- Optinmonster
- Unbounce
- Intercom
- Turnstile
- Qualaroo
- Hello Bar
Let us start by looking at Leadformly, a web form design, and optimization tool. It has transformed the way businesses generate leads for so long.
Leadformly
Starts from $30/month
Your form is what separates your leads from the non-leads. The small improvements to your lead capture form can have significant impacts on your overall conversion rates and marketing performance. Some businesses have even seen numerous 200% increase in their leads from form optimization alone.
Researchers found out that the forms provided by the email marketing services and CRM were very basic. They were negatively impacting the conversion rates. They looked for several form builder tools and plugins but did not succeed to get a better solution. This resulted in the launch of a new product. Leadformly sweats the little things so that you do not have to. It ranges from displaying optimal progress bar indicators to using conditional logic to segment your leads.
They spent a lot of time experimenting with forms to identify what actually increases from the conversions. In addition, Leadformly has built in analytics and audience insights to help you understand your leads and their performance.
Optinmonster
Starts from $19/month
Popups are always a contentious issue in online marketing and design. However, they can make a positive impact when done well. Marketers often implement exit-intent popups that only trigger when a user shows signs of leaving the page. The idea is that they are less intrusive than regular popups. Plus, they give you one last shot at converting a visitor into a lead. Optinmonster makes it easier to implement popups on any page and create A/B tests to improve the performance.
Unbounce
Starts from $79/month
Unbounce is probably the first name that strikes the mind with landing page builders. It features one of the best drag and drops builders in the game. Unbounce may not be a beginner’s tool but it is one of the most advanced builders that you will find. It is simply about more than simply building attractive landing pages. The whole point is of creating the page structure in the first place. With the support of A/B testing, AdWords integration, and visitors stats, Unbounce is probably the best all-rounder builder tool around.
Intercom
Starts from $87/month
Intercom enables you to communicate directly with your leads who are visiting your website. You can set up rules to display messages to the visitors after meeting certain conditions. Let us say that a user spends more than a minute on your pricing page. Also, they are on their second visit you could display a message to open a virtual assistant or live chat.
An operator can speak directly with the visitors or even chat on video directly from the live chat window. The potential for Intercom is incredibly powerful in many aspects. From gathering product feedback and understanding objections to collecting the leads who are searching around on your website.
Turnstile
Starts from $99/month
Wistia one of the most popular video hosting companies for B2B brands offers a simple feature termed Turnstile. Its main goal is to collect the name and email addresses of potential customers for you and your business. This comes after someone has finished watching a video. By offering an email collector at any point in the video you can turn these engaged visitors into valuable leads.
Qualaroo
Starts from $199/month
Marketers often think of Qualaroo more as a customer research tool. If you are unfamiliar with their product, they provide you with unobtrusive mini customer surveys. These surveys enable you to communicate with visitors to your website.
Hello Bar
Starts from $99/month
Hello Bar is a powerful widget that appears at the top of every page on your website after installation. You can customize the message, call to action as well as A/B testing different messages to optimize your conversion rates. For driving mailing list subscribers there is a great opportunity to attract attention with an incentive. This can be a free eBook to win a prize in return for an email address.
Inbound Lead generation tools
Now that you have the tools to generate leads from website visitors it is time to increase the traffic volumes. This will help you in maximizing the impact of your on-page Lead generation strategies. In this section we have got another five tools that are going to help you with this:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Everwebinar
- Quora
- Hootsuite
- Slideshare
We are in the B2B arena. These tool choices reflect the kind of strategies we implement and the type of leads we are looking to attract. So you might need to look elsewhere if you are more geared towards B2C lead generation.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Starts from $64.99/month
If you are in B2B sales then LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for capturing leads. Alongside receiving lead recommendations and seeing profile viewers it enables you to save leads into your CRM directly from LinkedIn.
Everwebinar
One off $497 fee
Everwebinar is a powerful webinar automation tool that aims to help you build efficient email marketing lists with a purpose. With Everwebinar you can schedule and automate your webinar footage to play at set intervals. The software aims to recreate the live experience for users. The goal is to increase engagement and attendance. It tells users, that the next webinar is about to begin even if you choose to replay it several times.
Quora
Free
Quora has become a destination for asking and answering questions online. If you search for topics related to your business you will likely hundreds of questions and answers. These answers can subtly convey the expertise of your company which may drive potential leads to contact you.
Hootsuite
Starts from $25/month
Managing one social media account is time-consuming enough let alone having to manage multiple. Hootsuite allows you to manage all of them from one place to get insights for your entire social marketing strategy. Also, most importantly schedule and automate your posts.
SlideShare
Free
Since 2012, SlideShare has become one of the most effective Lead generation tools for reaching B2B audience. The key with SlideShare is to ensure that your slides have a proper presentation and make sense without any explanation. When you get these two areas right, there is a high likelihood that SlideShare will feature your presentation.
Outbound Lead generation tools
Outbound marketing does not get much love these days and in some ways this is understandable. Strategies like cold emails can be highly effective when done right. To do things right you are first going to need the right tool. Here is what we are looking at in this section:
- Datanyze
- SendBlaster
- Growbots
- Hunter
- BuzzBuilder
First up, we have got Datanyze, which will help you save time prospecting new leads.
Datanyze
Starts from $600/month
Datanyze is a tool to help software and tech companies save time prospecting. The main benefit of Datanyze is that it shows you the technology used by your prospects. Also, it helps you find new prospects based on what technology they use.
Sendblaster
One-off $150 fee
Sendblaster is a straightforward bulk email sender that allows you to create mails by simple editing templates. These templates are available in it’s library. You can then send them out to an unlimited number of contacts.
This is the key selling point of Sendblaster that you only pay a one-off fee and can send unlimited emails. Sendblaster is also one of the only bulk senders in this category that has a strong reputation. It avoids spam algorithms of ISPs and major inbox platforms.
Growbots
Priced on application
Growbots dubs itself as an ‘AI for sales’ and uses clever rules and a large database of contacts. This allows him to do clever outbound lead generation. Many people in Software as a Service companies prefer Growbots to many tools.
Hunter
Starts from $49/month
Hunter lets you type in any domain and find the email addresses associated with it. It gives you the manual control to pick and choose your ideal email targets. You can access the email addresses you need without scouring every site one by one.
One of the most important features of Hunter is that it comes with an email validation tool. This tool helps you ensure that more of your emails are going to the right places. You can also run email campaigns directly from Hunter although there are many alternatives to this tool.
BuzzBuilder
Starts from $250/month
Buzzbuilder helps to get more of your message reads while maximizing the number of respondents who take an action. The thing with cold emailing is that you are always fighting an uphill battle in terms of engagement. Buzzbuilder has a strong reputation with Internet Service Providers. This means more of your emails will reach their intended targets. The platform’s personalization features mean that you should be able to engage more of your prospects.
CRO tools for maximizing the leads
With your lead generation strategies working in full motion, there is still more you can do to maximize the results. It does not matter how much traffic you are bringing in. You are only going to be able to convert a certain percentage of those visitors into genuine leads. The trick is maximizing that percentage. Then you can turn as many of those visitors you have worked so hard to get into real sales opportunities. These are the tools you can use to make this happen:
- Leadformly
- LeadForensics
- Pingdom
- Mixpanel
- Hotjar
- VWO
Now we have already looked at Leadformly as an on-page lead generation tool. But it also serves another important function as a CRO tool to help you optimize your forms for conversion.
Leadformly
Starts from $30/month
As a conversion optimization tool, Leadformly helps you maximize the conversions where they matter the most i.e. your web forms. There are plenty of form builder tools on the market. But only a few provide the form analytics tools you need to measure the performance and optimize your forms.
Those that do generally fall too short on providing the data insights you need to truly optimize form conversions. Leadformly is different because it provides details from analytics on the user actions that really matter. For example, it shows you the last form field users were filling out before quitting the session.
It also shows you how long it takes users to fill out your entire form and individual fields. This helps you to highlight the problematic parts of your forms and put fixes in place. Instead of simply providing form completion rates and metrics that tell you how poorly your form is doing. Leadformly gives you the tools you need to diagnose problems and either remove them or fix them with ease.
LeadForensics
Pricing based on web traffic volumes
There are many potential leads on your site yet only a handful fill out your inquiry forms. You can significantly increase the percentage of visitors filling out your forms using a tool like LeadFormly. But there will always be a few leads slipping through the cracks.
LeadForensics solves this by using the visitor’s IP to tell you which companies are viewing your website. Many people find out using this that many brands visit the contact page but do not fill. Their sales team could then go to LinkedIn find the marketing director, and call the company asking for a conversation. You can imagine that it does not only increases the number of targeted leads their business receives. But also has a great conversion rate as the leads were already familiar with the business.
Pingdom
Starts from $50/month
The best tool for speed optimization is a quality developer which knows how to put code together with balanced performance. However, if your website is already live and lagging behind you need to diagnose what the problem is. Pingdom goes further than any of the free options you will find such as Google’s page speed tools. However, Pingdom constantly monitors the speed of your site looking out for issues. It helps to diagnose the root cause rather than treating the symptoms.
Mixpanel
Starts from $89/month
If Google Analytics tells you what is happening on your website, Mixpanel makes it easier to see who did what. It also gives you a second data channel for you to compare against Google’s data. It never makes sense to put all of your faith into one single tool.
Hotjar
Starts from $29/month
Hotjar is a conversion optimization tool that makes a real difference to your landing page performance. With heatmaps, you can see what users are clicking on. Scroll maps show you what users are seeing and its user feedback features are excellent as well.
VWO
Starts from $99/month
Visual Website Optimizer is a go-to tool of many for split testing. Businesses use it to ensure that all key pages in their user journeys are continually improving their conversion rates. Businesses have been able to get more leads and conversions out of every marketing dollar they spend. And also scientifically optimize their marketing funnels.
Email marketing tools to generate and nurture leads
Capturing leads is a marketing priority for every business. But what are you going to do after those people sign up for your list or try out a demo? You are not going to hope they find their way along the buying process themselves and finally make a purchase. You are going to nurture those leads across the process yourself with targeted messages. Email marketing is the most important channel for achieving this. These are some tools you might be wanting on your side:
- ActiveCampaign
- SendinBlue
- Prospect.io
- Really Good Emails
- Canva
ActiveCampaign
Starts from $9/month
Your ability to capture and convert leads largely depends on your email marketing and Customer Relationship Management solution. After all, if you can not properly segment and use follow up with your leads based on rules. You will have a harder job while qualifying and converting those leads.
ActiveCampaign allows you to track every single interaction a lead has with your site. It uses these triggers for your email marketing campaigns. This means you can notify your sales team as soon as a lead visits a certain page on your site. You could also automatically follow up with cold leads every few months or build email campaigns to nurture them back.
SendinBlue
Starts from $50/month
SendinBlue is a great email marketing platform for sending transactional emails. It does not provide the automation features you need and it lacks a little on the integration side. But, it is a highly capable piece of software all the same. With its white-label offering, you can customize URLs to match your domain and add your agency logo to the interface. Overall, it is not the most customizable white label option but you do get multi-language support. This could be crucial if you are dealing with clients in foreign-speaking languages.
Prospect.io
Starts from $79/month
Prospect is an email automation platform that puts heavy emphasis on outbound marketing strategies. It provides an email finder tool to help you create lists for cold email campaigns. It also offers a separate verification tool to refine your lists. You can create and automate drip campaigns by either creating your emails from scratch or using the library of templates.
Really good emails
Free
Templates are a good source of inspiration for email designs. However, you have to filter through a lot of not so great templates in the process. It helps to have a collection of great designs at hand and this is where Really Good Emails stands out. You can browse emails by category like industry, engagement, etc. Also, you can get a list of quality email designs to draw inspiration from.
Canva
Starts from $30/month
With Canva you can quickly create simple graphics and visuals for blog posts or social media. It is not a replacement for Adobe Illustrator or pro software but a great platform for creating unique images faster. It is also free, unless you actually want to pay for any of the discrete stock images.
Search marketing Lead generation tools
Organic and paid search are the two most important channels in terms of bringing new visitors to your site. But they are also two of the most competitive ones. You need every advantage you can get when it comes to search marketing and these tools can help you out:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Yoast SEO plugin
- Twilio
- Google Analytics
- Google Ads Scripts
SEMrush
Starts from $99.95/month
SEMrush is marketers’ favorite SEO tool for on-site auditing and running a health check on their websites’ technical SEO. While SEMrush is popular for its keyword research capabilities we actually prefer the site audit functionality. It provides you with a thorough checklist of all your website’s technical SEO opportunities.
Ahrefs
Starts from $99/month
While Ahrefs is a general-purpose SEO tool there is one function marketers use it for particular. The backlink checker tool in Ahrefs has no rivals making it an indispensable tool for link building. Also, its website reports have more details than any of the other tools to date. It provides a wealth of technical SEO information about your website. This helps to pinpoint problems faster and fix them before they hurt your search ranking.
Yoast SEO plugin
Starts from $49.93/month
If you are running a website on WordPress then This plugin is one of the few you should add first. Do remember that this plugin is not going to solve all of your SEO problems. However, it will ensure you cover the basic essentials for every page or post you add. This will even analyze and offer suggestions on how you can improve it for SEO and readability.
Twilio
Pricing upon application
Twilio is an advanced communication system that allows you to integrate SMS and voice calls into any application. For search marketers though one of its most important features is its call tracking capabilities. This ensures that calls do not fall through gaps in your data collection efforts. You can also use Twilio to attribute calls. Also, you can track users along the consumer journey, create SMS marketing campaigns, and communicate with customers.
Google Analytics
Free
Google Analytics is not perfect but it is still the most powerful tool of its kind. Sync GA with AdWords and you have got yourself one hell of a system for tracking landing page performance. Also, setting up remarketing lists to bring back the leads to your website after they leave. To get the best out of it you will probably need a developer. He shall be responsible to set up things like events tracking and custom metrics but it is a worthy investment.
Notice some detailed insights into where your visitors are coming from and what they do on your website. With this information, you are not just in a position to optimize your landing pages. But also advertising strategy and other parts of your website for better performance.
Google Ads Scripts
Free
Google Ads Scripts give you the freedom to automate all kinds of features and functions. For example, you can add your own bidding rules and detect low performing keywords. You can also track quality scores across all your campaigns and generate custom reports.
Marketing management tools
As we already know that modern marketing is all about generating and managing leads from multiple channels. You need a solid set of marketing management tools to bring all of these channels together. Here are a few:
- ActiveCampaign
- HubSpot
- Hull.io
- Hoovers
- Buzzsumo
ActiveCampaign
Starts from $9/month
ActiveCampaign is an all in one CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation suite. Though this is not a Jack of all trades software. ActiveCampaign is one of the best providers in all three categories and its automation features in particular hard to beat.
You can use ActiveCampaign as the hub of your sales and marketing campaign, bringing these two crucial strategies together. It will allow you to break your sales funnel into multiple stages. Plus, you can create campaigns set up especially to guide leads across the buying process.
HubSpot
Free
Hubspot is an incredible collection of integrated software tools, some of which you can even use for free. It is a capable CRM platform and form builder. In terms of usability, you probably would not find a better all-in-one solution. Plus, the quality across its tools is high. The only problem is that pricing quickly ramps up once you start dealing with a higher volume of leads. So if your business scales you are going to end up with some hefty monthly bills.
Hull.io
Starts from $450/month
Hull brings all of your campaign data into a single place. This allows you to get a truly comprehensive overview of how performance is working collectively. It does the same thing with the customer data too. So that your sales representatives can access all the relevant information about each customer when they need it. It brings all necessary data into a single dashboard.
Hoovers
Hoovers pride themselves on being the largest as well as a single source of business information anywhere. This means that if you personalize the leads that you require then Hoovers is a great place to look.
Buzzsumo
Starts from $99/month
Buzzsumo helps you discover the most shared content across social media. It helps to get brief reports on the best performing content from around the web. You can also use it to find top influencers for any topic. Then you can get alerts for new content that includes your target keywords.
Conclusion
All of the tools we have looked at are a leading class in their field. So you do not need to worry about their usability and features. They all efficiently deliver on these aspects. What you need to do now is determine which tools are going to help you achieve your marketing goals. Also, you need to make sure that the prices are justified.
