A growth hacker is only as good as the tools they use.
With the right growth hacking tools, you can run extensive experiments across your entire marketing funnel, identify the right tactics, and scale them efficiently.
As a growth hacker, you must constantly be on the lookout for the best marketing tools available to optimize the growth of your online store.
That’s why we’ve compiled 13 of the best growth hacking tools out there for online stores.
Ready? Let’s dive right in!
What are the best growth hacking tools?
We’ve compiled a list of growth hacking tools we’ve personally used to acquire and scale customers, retain them, or level up certain tactics.
We’ll also share some strategies that you can start using immediately to tackle each solution.
Free Trial: Forever Free Plan
Pricing: $39/month for Essential Plan, $99/month for Growth Plan
It feels great to have thousands of visitors coming to your ecommerce site. But when you see visits without lead capture or conversions, those are simply vanity metrics.
To guide your website visitors toward a sale, you have to get them to join your email list. From there, you can send out killer content to keep your brand fresh in their minds.
We designed OptiMonk to help you display the right messages at the right time for each visitor.
Here are some verifiable growth hacking strategies on how you can use OptiMonk to skyrocket your sales and expand your website’s productivity:
1. Capture leaving visitors with exit-intent popups
Exit-intent technology allows you to present a highly targeted offer just as a visitor is about to bounce.
For example, if you want to stop cart abandoners from leaving your site, you can offer a limited-time deal. You can use an irresistible incentive to motivate users to stay on your site and encourage them to finish their purchases.
Recover abandoned carts with our ready-to-use template:
2. Display personalized offers based on the current page and the referral source
OptiMonk can clue you in on two key pieces of information:
- Which page your visitors are currently on
- The referral source—i.e. how they arrived on your site (from Facebook, Google, etc.)
And you can show your leads highly relevant offers based on this information.
Here’s an example from DigitalMarketer—in this instance, a person visited their site and had the word “facebook” in the URL:
They triggered a relevant offer based on the URL. Let’s take a look:
The more you personalize your offer, the better your conversion rates will be.
3. Use conversational popups
A conversational popup is a multi-step popup that helps you to connect one-on-one with your site visitors.
On the first page of the popup, you can ask a simple question like the one below. You should also promise a discount code as an incentive for moving forward.
Once a user clicks on one of the answer buttons, the next page appears asking for an email address:
When a visitor clicks through the first page, it means they’ve already invested in the process. As a result, they’ll likely add their contact information on the signup form on the second page.
On the third page, visitors will get personalized product recommendations based on their answers.
Using conversational popups instead of simple, generic welcome popups will help you achieve a higher engagement rate and more online sales.
Ready to see it for yourself?
Try one of the templates below:
Free Trial: N/A
Pricing: No monthly subscription, you just pay for credits (one credit equals one keyword)
Keyword research is a really valuable activity for a growth hacker. But it’s also pretty boring.
One of the major issues is having a huge list of keywords without any data to support it.
So how do you solve this problem?
Typically, you have to switch between multiple tools, uploading keyword sets, waiting for the data, double-checking the data, and going through all sorts of time-draining activities that make you wish you hadn’t even started in the first place.
But what if you could get that keyword data immediately and didn’t have to jump between multiple tools?
Say hello to Keywords Everywhere.
Keywords Everywhere is a Chrome or Firefox extension that you can use to see search volume, cost-per-click, and competition data on Google Search, eBay, YouTube, and other long-tail keyword research tools like Answer The Public.
In short, Keywords Everywhere turns this:
Into this:
Here’s how to use Keywords Everywhere for growth hacking.
1. Combine Keyword Sheeter with Keywords Everywhere
Once you’ve installed Keywords Everywhere, you should see a “K” logo in the top right corner of your browser. Here it is in Chrome:
Clicking on this icon presents a drop-down menu:
Notice the “Bulk upload keywords” function? This is one of the most powerful things you can do with Keywords Everywhere. To make full use of this function, first, you need a long-tail keyword research tool like Keyword Sheeter.
Here you type in the seed keyword (in this case “growth hacking”):
Hit “Sheet Keywords” and wait for it to finish loading. In this example, we hit “stop” at 200 keywords, but you can wait as long as you need:
Copy all of the keywords that Keyword Sheeter has produced. Then, open your Keywords Everywhere menu and hit “Bulk upload keywords.” You’ll see this:
Paste your keywords in and hit “Get Metrics.”
Voila!
You now have all the necessary metrics you need for keyword analysis:
Download the file (Excel/CSV) and you’re done!
Free Trial: N/A, $7 for a 7-day trial
Pricing: Lite – $99/month, Standard – $179/month
Here’s a surprise: you don’t have to build your marketing strategy from scratch. If you have competitors, then all you have to do is replicate what they’ve done.
Take a deep dive into how they use their SEO strategy successfully.
How do you uncover what your competitors are up to? With Ahrefs.
As the website says, Ahrefs shows you why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them.
Here are three growth hacking tactics you can execute with Ahrefs:
1. Find which referral source is sending your competitors the most organic traffic and steal them
One of Ahrefs’ features allows you to discover the pages that are sending your competitors the most organic traffic.
Head to Ahrefs Site Explorer, enter your competitor’s domain, and hit “Top Pages”:
This shows all the pages on Pure Cycles that sends them the most organic traffic:
Look at the top keyword sending them the most traffic, and create a page/post that targets the same keyword.
2. Find out what kind of links your competitor is earning, and copy them
Type your competitor’s site URL into the search bar of the “Site Explorer” menu and choose the Referring Domains report:
This will show you all the sites that have linked to your competitor before. The sites are sorted by Domain Rating:
After reviewing the list, it’ll give you an idea of how your competitors have been building relevant backlinks.
Have they been writing tons of guest posts? Are they getting backlinks from places like Reddit or forums? Have they been creating content that’s generating tons of backlinks?
You’ll soon notice that some of these backlinks are replicable and some aren’t. The purpose of this activity is NOT to replicate everything but to find opportunities that you have missed out on.
For example, if your competitor got a backlink via a guest post, chances are, you’ll be able to pitch the same publication and offer a guest post on your own too.
3. Find out who has linked to your competitor, but not to you
Hit “more” on the Ahrefs navigation bar to see the drop-down menu. Choose “Link Intersect”:
The Link Intersect feature allows you to find out who’s been linking to your competitors, but not to you.
In this example, we want to see who’s linking to BOTH Smile.io and Swell Rewards, but not to ReferralCandy:
When you hit “Show link opportunities,” Ahrefs will show you the domains:
If they’ve linked to both of your competitors, chances are pretty high that they’ll link to you too. All you have to do is reach out to these sites and try to get the link.
There are tons of things you can do with Ahrefs—and these 3 strategies just scratch the surface. You can check out their Academy to learn more.
Free Trial: 30 days
Pricing: $49/month + monthly commission
Uber. Dropbox. PayPal. Airbnb. Besides being some of the largest tech companies around—what else do they have in common?
Successful referral programs.
All 4 of these major tech companies have successfully used referral marketing to grow and build their user base.
A killer referral program isn’t just reserved for the tech elite. You can set one up quickly and easily with ReferralCandy.
Just install it on your preferred ecommerce platform, set up your incentives, and you’re good to go.
Here are two growth hacking ideas that you can use today to fully utilize ReferralCandy:
1. The Cash Or Discount Strategy
The strength of your referral program depends on your choice of incentives.
So here’s a rule of thumb you should follow:
- If you’re selling something people need frequently, offer a discount coupon.
- If you’re selling a product that most people only buy once (or a product that someone would buy once in a while), offer a cash incentive.
2. Use the referral widget to encourage people to join
For your referral program to succeed, people need to know about it. This means that it’s important for you to raise awareness about your referral program.
The referral widget allows you to promote your referral program automatically. Any site visitor or returning customer will be able to learn about your referral program and decide whether or not to join.
Free Trial: 50 free leads
Pricing: $49/month for 1,000 leads, $99/month for up to 5,000 leads
Whether you’re reaching out to get a link, collaborate with another company, or get an influencer to promote your product, you need a persuasive personalized email to get the job done.
But before you even craft your email, you’ll need to try to find your potential contact’s email address.
Sometimes that’s easy. Just head to the contact page of their website and you’ll see what you’re looking for.
But this isn’t always the case.
And that’s where Voila Norbert comes in.
Voila Norbert is an email-finding tool you can use to search for and verify email addresses. All you need is the person’s name and website domain.
Let’s look at two growth hacking strategies to use Voila Norbert:
1. Finding a person’s email address
Once you sign up for an account with Voila Norbert, you’ll get 50 free credits. That means you can get started right away!
All you have to do is type in their name and website domain, and Voila Norbert will return the best email address for you.
Let’s see an example:
After hitting the “Go ahead, Norbert!” button, you’ll get an email address Voila Norbert thinks is correct:
If you have a list of people that you want to reach out to, you can also use their Bulk Upload function:
2. Verify the email addresses you’ve found
As growth hackers, you’re probably big on scraping email addresses. Whether you’re using Scrapebox, XPath, or virtual assistants, you’ve likely crafted a large list of email addresses for some cold outreach.
However, with such a large list, you might be unsure if the emails are accurate.
With Voila Norbert, you can easily find that out.
Simply upload your list of email addresses to Voila Norbert and let them verify it for you:
Free Trial: N/A
Pricing: $75/month
Publishing tons of blog posts, but no one’s sharing them yet?
Quuu is your answer.
Social media influencers are looking for content to promote every day. And publishers look for people to promote to.
Quuu provided a solution by being the middleman.
Influencers subscribe to Quuu for content suggestions, which Quuu supplements by allowing publishers to promote via their platform.
It’s a win-win.
1. Use Quuu to gather hundreds of social shares for your new piece of content:
Once you’ve signed up with Quuu, you’ll see this dashboard:
Hit “Promote a Post.” Quuu will prompt you to submit a URL:
After entering the URL you need to promote, Quuu will show you how your post will look on Twitter and Facebook:
Make your copy inherently sharable. Keep it fun, active, short, and snappy. Don’t forget to tag your own Twitter or Facebook account to gain extra followers.
Once you’re done crafting your killer copy, scroll down and choose the right category for your post:
Quuu has several category suggestions to choose from. When you’re done, hit “Submit” and wait. Quuu will manually approve your post before it gets slotted into the influencers’ social media.
As long as your content isn’t spam, the chances it will be approved are high—yay! Now you just have to wait for the influencer to approve your post.
This is what happens when Quuu kicks in:
Looks great, right?
Free Trial: Free for 720p video quality and Lumen5 branding
Pricing: $59/month for 1080p video quality w/o Lumen5 branding
Check this out:
This is Gary Vaynerchuk’s version of how to rule the web with your content:
First, you decide on your pillar content—something “large” (like GaryVee’s DailyVee) that you can produce at least weekly.
Then, you can repurpose your content from your video into multiple blog posts or use it to record a podcast series. And you can also repurpose these posts into social media content (e.g tweet lines from the blog posts).
This is a great strategy if you want to create more content in less time.
Turn your existing content into something that you can repurpose over and over again.
Some content creators like GaryVee have the help of a large team. If you’re still building your brand and working up to that level of content production, there’s a great way you can get the same results!
We know what you’re thinking: It could seem like a challenge, right?
How can you replicate their strategy without burning yourself out?
This is where Lumen5 comes in. It’s a video creation platform that allows you to transform blog posts into vibrant videos. This platform was created solely for marketers with no technical background. Just drag and drop, and you’re done!
1. Supercharge your content marketing with Lumen5:
When you first sign up for Lumen5, it will prompt you to enter a preferred blog post URL:
After entering a blog post, in this case, Luxy Hair’s marketing strategy, Lumen5 will bring you to this screen where you can edit the storyboard, make changes to the script, and so on:
Clicking the Media option brings up tons of free stock videos from Lumen5’s library:
Drag and drop them into your desired storyboard—and boom!
You’re in the video game.
Free Trial: Free with branding
Pricing: $8/month with custom branding
If you’re trying to build your email list fast, giveaways are one of the best ways to do it.
Noah Kagan famously grew AppSumo’s email list by 200,000 people through giveaways:
Not only that, but Josh Earl also had a similar experience and collected 364,104 email addresses through giveaways.
Giveaways work.
And KingSumo is the app behind these viral giveaways.
The best part?
It’s free!
1. Set up a viral giveaway with KingSumo:
On the KingSumo homepage, all you have to do is enter your email address and hit “Start a contest”.
KingSumo will bring you to this page where you’ll fill in your giveaway campaign details:
Once you hit “Save,” you’re ready to go!
Of course, the most important thing in a giveaway is the actual prize that you offer. You’ll achieve amazing results if your incentive is exciting and valuable for your audience.
Read Bryan Harris’ guide to viral giveaways to learn more about how to run a successful event promotion and generate a killer giveaway set-up.
5 bonus growth hacking tools
Want to see more tools? Here are five extra tools that you can try if you want to achieve business growth.
1. Pay With A Tweet
Pay With A Tweet allows you to give people access to your content or product once they’ve tweeted or posted about it.
This is a great way to go viral in the early stages of your product launch or to make sure your content or product spreads further across the web over time.
2. Nimble
Nimble is a relationship-focused CRM for your entire team. It’s easy to use and works in your Outlook/Gmail inbox, across social media, and the wider web.
3. Unbounce
You can use Unbounce to create, publish, and A/B test custom landing pages to convert more visitors. And you don’t need any coding skills to use it.
4. Olark
Olark is a live chat solution that you can use to increase your sales by providing customer support. It helps you monitor leads, collect customer data, and effectively support sales teams.
5. CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg is a growth hacking tool that allows you to understand the customer journey with Snapshots, Heatmaps, and Recording.
Now you can ace growth hacking
The 13 growth hacking tools we mentioned above can help ecommerce brands acquire customers and fulfill their existing tasks more effectively.
The best part? Some of these growth hacking tools offer a free trial for you to test them out and play with.
Take advantage of that because who knows, they might just become an indispensable part of your growth hacking toolbox.
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Written by
Si Quan Ong
Si Quan Ong is the Content Marketing Manager at ReferralCandy. ReferralCandy has helped thousands of online retailers run successful referral programs, and they recently launched CandyBar to serve offline retailers too.
