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Most marketers & growth hackers know the importance of marketing automation. If you're not using one of the top marketing automation platforms, it's time to give them a try. The purpose of this article is to help you choose the best marketing automation tool for your specific needs.
We've broken down each major category of use cases below so you can accurately compare these tools' features and capabilities against your unique requirements.
Zapier
Marketing automation is one of the most crucial growth hacker talents and can make you a lot more productive, which is why I had to include Zapier in our list of growth hacking tools. Zapier is a tool that connects 1,000+ marketing tools to each other to create powerful automations. Therefore not only do you have unlimited access to countless marketing tools but you also can automate different parts of your business.
Zapier helps you connect all the tools you use to automate repetitive tasks. For example, you can use Airtable to automatically record all Wpforms or Hubspot forms responses in your Lemlist or Active Campaign account, or you can automate facebook leads to your Active Campaign, Slack or Google sheets. It allows you to create automations between different web apps and "zap" important data to the right place at the right time. It's an easy way to make all the apps you use everyday actually work for you without hiring a developer.
Use Case of Zapier
Zapier allows you to put your repetitive work on autopilot. With a Zap, you can automatically send new leads from a Facebook form or other lead-gen source directly to your CRM or email list.
Here's how it works: When a lead-gen form is submitted on a site like Facebook, it triggers an automated workflow in Zapier called a Zap. The new lead is automatically sent to Zapier. From there, Zapier takes the data to its destination in what it calls the Action step. For example, it can automatically add a new subscriber to Active Campaign or Mailchimp or another CRM such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or even to a Google Sheet.
Here’s How You Can Automate Facebook Lead Ads to CRM
Step 1:
Authenticate Facebook Lead Ads and CRM Connector.
Connect your apps and make sure that everything is working as it should.
Step 2:
Pick one of the apps as a trigger, which will kick off your automation.
A trigger is the first step in your Zap, and you have to select the app that has it.
Step 3:
Choose a resulting action from the other app.
This is what Zapier will do with the information you send over, like create a task or create an invoice, for example.
Step 4:
Select the data you want to send from one app to the other.
Now all you have to do is tell Zapier which information from one app should go where in another app.
That’s it. The possibilities are endless! You can create Zaps for just about anything.
Expandi.io
Expandi is an all-in-one Growth Hacking tool for your LinkedIn account. Expandi is a tool for B2B marketers looking to automate their LinkedIn activity. Whether you send messages, view profiles, or invite people, Expandi allows you to do it automatically. With Expandi, you can automatically find relevant contacts, target them for automation, send invitations or view their company pages and products. You can also schedule a new campaign and set up your own activity preferences.
Use Case of Expandi.io
If you need to get in touch with people on LinkedIn, Expandi is a great tool to use. It's easy to use and has a lot of features that make managing your accounts simple. You can have multiple accounts open at once, which can really help when you're trying to manage a team or grow your business.
Here's How You Can Use It:
- Search for the right Facebook groups where your audience is located.
- Scrape their names using Phantombuster and turn them into LinkedIn profiles using the API “LinkedIn Profile URL Finder”.
- Then make awesome content to get in touch with them, and finally turn them into leads by using Expandi.
Phantombuster
Phantombuster is a cloud-based data extraction software designed to help businesses automate sales and marketing processes by scraping useful data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other online platforms. There are different growth hacking use cases of Phantombuster. The application allows users to save all data in the cloud in CSV and JSON formats. This tool can be used to scrape data from social media pages, build automatic lead generators and email extractors, or build a simple web automation tool.
Features include web automation, sales automation, social media automation, lead generation, and more.
Use Case Of Phantombuster
Let's take a look at what Phantombuster can do with Google Maps.
- First, make sure you have a Google account. Once logged in, click on the Google Maps tab in Phantombuster, then click on "Connect account."
- Google will ask you to authorize Phantombuster to access your account. Just click "allow," and you're ready to go!
- Now it's time to launch your first agent! In this example, we're going to extract every place out of a Google Maps search. Click on the search box and type in "restaurants near me." Click the "Launch" button, and let Phantombuster do the rest!
- Phantombuster will now add new restaurants to your list as you scroll down. When it's done, click the "export" button, and voilà: your prospection file is ready to use!
Of course, that's just the beginning of what Phantombuster can do with Google Maps. Let it browse through the websites found on GMaps and extract emails, phones, and social media contacts... A full prospection file is ready to use in just a few minutes!
Landbot.io
If you've ever been talking to your computer and felt like it was talking back, you're not alone. We all want to feel like our tech is engaging with us, and that it's easy to get where we want to go on the sites we visit—especially if those sites are important to our business. That's where Landbot.io comes in! Landbot.io is a cloud-based solution that helps small to medium businesses create conversational websites, landing pages, surveys, lead generation chatbots—and more—to engage with customers, facilitating an improved user interface experience and conversion rates.
When you create a page or survey using Landbot, you can talk to it just like you would a friend (or at least a friendly salesperson). Instead of clicking around and filling out forms, you can have a nice little conversation with the site, answering questions or getting information about whatever products or services you're interested in. It's fun AND informative!
Use Case Of Landbot.io
With Landbot’s webinar registration chatbot, you can collect email addresses from potential attendees and import them into Google Sheets, Airtable, or any database via Zapier. Post-registration, send a confirmation email with webinar details to all attendees or add them to your mailing list via Zapier or Mailchimp integration.
You don’t even need to create your own registration flow—just click on their webinar registration template and customize it in minutes. You can also allow attendees to add your event to their calendar after saving their seats for the webinar. Also, try their Stripe integration to collect payments in the same flow. Simply use their Webinar Registration template & create a shareable chatbot that you can promote across any platform you want - Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Telegram.
Save time by automating registration and collecting more information from attendees with this chatbot.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most user-friendly social monitoring tools out there. It’s super easy to customize your streams and monitor any social platform you like so that you can see what’s going on in your industry at a glance. You can zero in on essential topics, trends, and social profiles based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and specific users.
Use Case Of Hootsuite
There are tons of Hootsuite use cases for Facebook, Twitter etc but If you haven't been keeping up with Reddit, it's time to pay attention. Because Reddit is a social media platform that can provide some serious insights for your business.
Reddit is a forum where users post text, images, and videos to discuss various topics. The site has over 200 million unique visitors and 430 million average monthly active users, so there are lots of opportunities for brands to engage with their audience.
Here's How To Set Up Your Searches
Step 1: Brainstorm your search terms.
Step 2: Set up your searches in your Hootsuite monitoring software.
Step 3: Check your streams regularly..
Step 4: Remember to revisit your search terms and adjust accordingly every so often.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a heat mapping tool. Hotjar gives you excellent insights into your user's activity by employing heat maps and recordings of website visitors. Heat Mapping allows site owners and UI/UX designers to see what path users are taking through their website, buttons they’re pressing, where they hover over, where they stop to read more, etc.
Hotjar is an analytics and feedback tool for websites. It records your visitors' actions and mouse movements, clicks and scrolling, and lets you replay their session to see what they clicked on, how they navigated through your site, and what they may have viewed on your site in order to improve the performance of your website from their perspective.
Use Case Of Hotjar
Hotjar’s feedback polls are a great way to get an idea of what your users think about the content you're putting out. But if you want to get useful answers and not just general responses, there are a couple of ways to make your feedback forms more effective. One way is to conduct a Hotjar analysis for your feedback forms. You can do this by using the visual rating system called Net Promoter Score, where users rate how satisfied they are with the content or how likely to recommend it on a scale from 1-10.
This gives you some solid information about whether or not people like your content and (importantly) why.
TexAu
TexAu is a tool that allows you to do exactly that. It takes care of all your manual processes and automates them (even the ones you didn’t think was possible to automate). If you want to automate your Twitter marketing, TexAu can help you with that. If you want to automate your Facebook marketing, TexAu can help you with that as well. If you want to gather leads for your business, TexAu can also help you with that.
Not only does it have functionality for multiple platforms, it also has functionality for multiple situations. You can use it for building relationships on social media platforms, or maybe even extracting data from competitors and clients.
Use Case Of TexAu
The next time you have a product up on Product Hunt, you can use TexAu to find a list of people who upvoted your competitor's products. And then you can send them a message showing how your product is superior and offering them a free trial.
Here’s How You Can Do It;
- First, extract the upvoters of a list of products. You can provide the URLs of the products on Product Hunt with a CSV file or a Google Spreadsheet (remember to make it public).
- Next, authenticate easily and safely on LinkedIn. The automation needs to connect to LinkedIn on your behalf. We can do that easily and safely with your session cookies. You can grab your cookie easily with our Chrome extension, or you can follow these steps to get the cookie manually.
- Now you can search for their profiles now on LinkedIn with the list of names and surnames from Product Hunt. It’s not perfect, as you’ll get some false positives, but you’ll find many of your competitor’s upvoters this way.
- Finally, send them a message offering a free trial. Now you can reach out to them and show them just how superior your product is in solving their needs by offering them a free trial.
Airtable
Airtable combines Google Spreadsheet / Excel with a database. It's difficult to understand, but this tool is an excellent addition to anyone working with tablets or data (as most growth hackers do). Airtable makes it easy, table by table, to arrange your data and then add it to "Sheets" and "Apps" (full-featured databases).
The program gives you the possibility of working from sheets, as in Excel, or from cards, like in Trello. Both options allow you to enter text and images, as well as store links to files and assets. In addition to all this, Airtable also allows you to create checklists and custom fields for each card, which means that you can structure the content on your cards however you want.
For instance, if you combine it with Zapier, you may construct smart CRMs or Kanban boards.
Use Case Of Airtable
Using the scientific method to growth hacking is a great way to make sure you're testing your assumptions instead of just guessing. Airtable gives you 5 templates that are designed to help you structure your growth experiments in an organized and efficient way. You can keep track of when you start and end your marketing experiments, as well as search for patterns and learn from your mistakes.
With this template, you'll be able to develop a framework for brainstorming ideas and watch your approach get more focused over time. You don't have to be a scientist to use these template—just someone who's ready to learn!
Hunter.io
Sometimes you need to contact someone but you don’t have his or her e-mail address. Having a hard time finding the e-mail address of someone you want to reach? Use Hunter.io and find it instantly. Hunter.io is a tool that helps you track down email addresses, with no false positives. You can use it for free and it is very easy to use. (You can also pay for an advanced plan if you need to). We think this is the best tool out there for finding email addresses on the web, so sign up now and check it out!
Once you’ve gathered a list of e-mail addresses, it might be worth looking at Hunter.io to make sure that these e-mail addresses will really reach their destination and find the person you want. A lot of people will just give you an old or unused e-mail address, so this is one of the many reasons why Hunter.io is a good option to try out.
Use Cases Of Hunter.io
Hunter’s TechLookup lets you create lists of companies that use specific technologies to run their websites. And the best part? You can do it in just 3 steps:
- Find the technology you’d like to target. For example, let's say you are interested in scraping websites that are running online shops on Shopify. All you need to do is navigate to the page with Shopify technology and click the “Create my list” button.
- Validate your selection and download the file with the companies who use a specific technology. Easy as 1-2-3!
- Import your list on Hunter to search their email addresses. In a few seconds, you’ll be able to get the personal email addresses of your potential leads with estimated deliverability scores! (You can automate this step with Zapier)
- Automate it with Zapier & Mailchimp and send emails to your prospects
UsabilityHub
UsabilityHub is the best to know for its 5 second-test and is one of the most used (as well as my personal favorite) user testing tools on the market. But UsabilityHub is much more than that. It’s a great tool to get feedback from your colleagues on a new design for UX and UI.
You can set up simple quizzes that are ideal to test the user-friendliness of your new or current designs by means of 5-second tests or preference surveys. Don’t let these features stand on their own, however. Usability Hub deserves its place in our list because it helps us iterate on designs, gather feedback, and increases productivity among colleagues working in UX and UI.
Use Cases Of Usability
- The five-second test from Usability Hub gives you a powerful tool to test users' perceptions about your site.
- It's easy to set up: just create your questions, upload your screenshot or image, and select the number of participants you want.
- In minutes you'll have meaningful data ready for analysis.
- The five-second test can be used at any stage in your website's development process, but it's great to use when you redesign your key landing page—your home page or services page, for example
Leadpages
Leadpages is definitely one of the most used SaaS tools for building online marketing landing pages. Their focus is definitely on converting your visitors to leads or customers, which you can achieve by offering a signup form, adding an email capture feature, and also prompts for installing the Native app on mobile devices.
Leadpages is an all-inclusive landing page tool that's affordable and simple to use. They take care of hosting and deliverability for you by keeping your code on their servers. You can design beautiful, fully customizable landing pages without ever touching a line of code. Simple drag-and-drop software allows you to change the layout, background images, calls-to-action, and other design elements with just a few clicks.
Instachamp By Mobile Monkey
InstaChamp is for brands that use Instagram to achieve business goals. InstaChamp’s Instagram automation capabilities make it a great fit for personal brands like coaches, entrepreneurs, creators and artists.
B2C businesses like D2C and retail brands can also benefit from InstaChamp's abilities to drive more sales through messaging automation. Businesses can get started with InstaChamp as soon as they have an Instagram business account, which is required to use the Instagram Messaging API that powers InstaChamp's unique capabilities.
Use Cases Of Instachamp By Mobile Monkey
1. Story Mentions
When someone mentions you in their Instagram Stories, it's a chance to make a meaningful connection. Use InstaChamp's Story Mentions use case to automatically send them a direct message thanking them for the mention and introducing them to your brand.
2. Post Comments
Instagram posts are about sharing ideas and starting conversations, but it can be hard to keep up with all of the comments on your posts. With InstaChamp's Post Comments use case, you can automatically send a direct message to anyone who comments on one of your posts, allowing you to get more out of each post in less time.
3. DM Replies
Direct messages are one of the most personal ways to interact with people on Instagram, so it can feel like a missed opportunity when you have hundreds or thousands of unread messages in your inbox. InstaChamp's DM Replies use case helps you manage your DMs by automating responses to your most frequent questions or requests.
FOMO
Social proof is a powerful persuasion technique. When you let others know that something is good or useful, it has a powerful effect on your decisions
FOMO is a revolutionary new app that makes it easy for the average person to find and book their dream trips and restaurants. It uses your location to reveal FOMO-ified offers in your area, direct you to nearby venues with special food and drink menus, and let you book your table by swiping your debit or credit card through the FOMO app. It’s so easy to use and provides so much value that I believe it will quickly become the “go to” app for frequent travelers looking to save money and have fun while they're at it.
It's no secret that FOMO is one of the most powerful motivators in the world. The fear of missing out drives people to do all sorts of things, from spending more time with friends, to traveling, to making purchases. That's why a lot of marketers use FOMO as a way to increase their email open rates and create a sense of urgency around their offers. If you're looking for some ways to utilize FOMO in your own marketing emails, we've got some killer tips for you!
Use Case Of FOMO
1. Create A “First 100 Buyers” Offer
Offering a limited number of items is one of the most effective ways to create urgency. The more limited your offer is, the quicker it will drive action—and it doesn’t get more limited than only having 100 of something available.
2. Use Free Shipping To Create A Limited Offer:
Another way to create a sense of urgency is by using free shipping. This tactic has become so popular because people don’t want to pay for shipping and will often buy something just so they can get it for free.
3. Show Sold Out or Expired Offers To Reinforce Urgency
When people are deciding whether or not to buy a product, they will often compare different options. One way to encourage them to buy your product is by showing that it has sold out or expired so they no longer have the option to buy it anymor
Optimizely
Optimizely is an A/B-testing tool that helps you to improve your website and boost ROI. Optimizely’s A/B-testing tool allows you to automatically run experiments that continue to make your conversion rate better. You can see which variants of your website convert more visitors. Optimizely increases the efficiency of an experiment or website by providing data as soon as that change is made. You can see what is working and what isn’t, and you can make decisions based on accurate data.
Use Case Of Optimizely
When it comes to running tests, we have a lot of experience. We've helped companies of all sizes and in all industries increase their conversion rates through testing. Here's what we've observed about the step-by-step process that leads to successful experimentation:
Step 1:
Identifying and Setting Up Goals
The first thing you need to do is identify your goals. Are you looking for more clicks on a button? More views of your products? More purchases from your site? More newsletter signups? Once you identify your goals, you can set up the correct tracking tools so that when someone takes an action you're tracking, you'll be able to see it.
Step 2:
Ideation and Hypothesis
To figure out what kind of changes you should make to your site, you'll come up with ideas based on research or simply brainstorming. Then you'll create a hypothesis for each idea—this is essentially a prediction about what will happen if you make that change. If a potential change has multiple possible outcomes, come up with a hypothesis for each one.
Step 3:
Experiment Building
This is the step where you actually build out the different versions of your site (or app) that will end up getting tested against one another.
LeadFeeder
If you're a sales-focused marketer and want to increase your lead volume and conversion rate Leadfeeder provides some key insights into the companies visiting your website. The tool shows which of these companies are 'non-converting' i.e. they visited your site but didn't convert. It then gives you actionable tips on how to improve conversions on your site and get more leads from them.
It makes us able to find out who have been on our website in the past and what they clicked or didn’t click on. We can then use this information to optimize our sales process and convince better companies for a trial period of our tool. LeadFeeder can save this in your CRM automatically and has a strong connection to Zapier. For LeadFeeder, Albacross is an inexpensive alternative.
Use Case Leedfeeder
- With Leadfeeder, you can track and identify companies that visit your website—even if they don't leave their contact information.
- Leadfeeder helps answer questions like these:
- Which of my assets are driving traffic from my target audience?
- How engaged are those visitors? (Are people spending time on my site, or bouncing off immediately?)
- How many visitors have come back to my site after their first visit?
- Where are they coming from? Are they coming directly to my homepage, or are they coming to a specific piece of content through a search engine or social media post?
- What companies are visiting your website and not leaving their contact info?
Clearbit
Clearbit makes it easier than ever to enrich your user & lead data. Whether you’re targeting a new customer or focusing on a lead, Clearbit helps you uncover the identities of anonymous users and website visitors. Clearbit helps you enrich your data, by providing useful background information when working with your users and leads. I promise, you will be surprised when you see what Clearbit can do! Sadly, they aren't cheap.
Mailjet
Mailjet is my personal favorite tool for automating e-mails. With Mailjet, you can create branded, customized messages. And thanks to integrations with Zapier, you can automate your marketing campaigns and save time. This makes it a great choice for growing businesses that want to concentrate on their core competencies.
Mailjet also allows you to automate your work, so a lot of sending e-mails can be done automatically without much manual effort. You can control your whole sending process with ease. You can also send embedded videos with Mailjet, which gives you more possibilities for personalization and customization than sending emails alone. Moreover, they always find new ways to improve their product, such as their "Undeliverable" reporting (which helped me to fix my bounce rate considerably).
Adespresso
AdEspresso by Hootsuite is an online advertising platform that is all about testing and optimizing your campaigns.
It allows you to run split tests on every aspect of an ad, from the image to the text, with a single click. The platform also allows you to create, analyze and optimize Facebook Ads, Instagram, and Google campaigns. This means that you can easily create thousands of different versions of your ads in just a few minutes. These tests help you understand which aspects of your ads are performing the best. Once you've run a test, AdEspresso will automatically pause all losing variations and funnel the budget towards what's working. Your ads will continue to improve over time until your conversion rate can't get any better.
Use Case Adespresso
Sugar and Crumbs is a baking supply store that runs on the AdEspresso platform. They also use their Coaching call service to get help with their marketing strategy. Together, they worked to increase their online presence by building a Facebook group and running Live sessions.
AdEspresso also helped them move away from boosting posts for engagement and shift their focus to CPA and Return on Ad Spend via conversion-focused ads. They employed two strategies: building video view audiences (10-second video views, 5 days) to make the best use of that vast number of FB Live viewers and adding each new video into the same audience, and then using dynamic product ads for retargeting.
Adsespresso quick split testing capabilities also helped Sugar and Crumbs optimize their special sale on weekends: with the ability to rapidly A/B testing ads and identifying the best performing one, they were able to reduce CPA. Their ROAS increased by 66%.
Hemingway
Hemingway is a tool that cleans up text, removing distractions so writers can focus on their content. Hemingway applies the best practices of clear communication to your writing, so you can write clean and accessible copy. Hemingway is a beautifully simple online tool that checks for poor writing and suggests ways to improve. Hemingway is currently offered through software as a service (SaaS) and as such does not require any installation or complex set-up procedures.
Sumo
SumoMe, or just Sumo today, is one of the most famous growth hacking solutions. Sumo allows you to add additional email subscribers by placing banners and other items on your website. Very easy to use and quite popular because coding skills are not needed.
There are plenty of benefits when it comes to using SumoMe on your own website. With Sumo, you can display a banner, add social sharing buttons, or even add a popup that people need to fill in their email address if they want to read the rest of your article or page. The main reason for the increase in your subscriber list is that you will get more people subscribed in no time.
Drift
Drift is a chat tool that lets you text or voice message visitors to your website. It makes communication easy, so you can connect with more customers the way they prefer. And it’s free!
Drift is a free chat tool for websites. If you have a bit more budget, then you may prefer Intercom, or if you want to combine it with social media, you can now add a Facebook Messenger Chat directly to your website. Another free alternative is Tawk.to.
Canva
Canva is a free online design tool that makes it easy to create stunning graphics for your website, social media posts, or other content. I use this tool often to create visuals for my articles and social media. It's easy to use (no design knowledge required), and has over 1 million scalable templates.
Viral Loops
Viral Loops creates your referral program for you. You'll easily be able to track your viral growth on the background stats page of their dashboard. Viral Loops is a great tool for any marketing campaign that wants to make it a success. It's highly recommended!
The most renowned instances of growth hacking are "reference programs" in the form of ambassadors and new clients for your present customers. Consider PayPal and Dropbox's growing hacks, for instance. Everything you need for your reference software is provided by Viral Loop.
Import.io
Import.io is a web scraping tool that makes it possible to convert any data from the web into spreadsheets and databases. It makes it easy for marketers, analysts, and developers to quickly get the data they need and convert it into spreadsheets.
If you have to do large-scale work, this is very interesting. And furthermore, you can easily automate scraping with import.io – all in a cloud-based environment, making it completely easy to use. The Chrome extension 'Data Miner' may be an easier alternative to Import.io.
Calendly
Calendly offers an easy way to schedule appointments with your potential customers. It is used by many entrepreneurs and growth hackers. Calendly is a great tool to help organize meetings and appointments with your clients. When you use Calendly, you don’t have to rely on a booking form or your personal calendar to schedule appointments. Instead, your clients can use a simple online web app to pick the time and date they would like to meet with you.
Calendly helps your potential customers to arrange a meeting with you in your calendar. This way you don’t have to check your email, and you can schedule the meeting directly from your own calendar. This saves time and leads you to make more effective use of your marketing budget. It helps to increase customer engagement.
MixMax
MixMax is a Gmail extension that transforms your emails into more powerful engagement tools. It comes with many features catered to business professionals and has a slick user interface. If you love using Gmail, this is a must-have app. In fact, MixMax is a great friend for many salespeople and growth hackers who depend on using email as their primary channel for communication with prospective customers.
You can use MixMax to gain insights into your sent email campaigns, e.g. if the recipient has read your email. With MixMax, you will know if the recipient has already viewed an attached pdf file or a link in the email. Did they forward your message directly to a colleague? It’s all here and ready to be checked!
Moreover, MixMax also offers you the chance to enjoy your e-mails, schedule them for later sending and use templates.
Userlane
I believe that the Activation of the pirate funnel is one of the most undervalued sections. A powerful user is great to hook your customers and show them your wow time, which is great for retention and referrals. Using an onboarding tool like Userlane would be advisable. This gives you the option to create a great entry in your app/dashboard for new users.
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