To grow and sustain an eCommerce business isn’t easy. It’s hard work that requires investing in the right tools for the job, just like any other tradesperson. But with so many tools available, which ones should you pick? Here, to help you, are seven of the best marketing and analytical tools for scaling an eCommerce business.
Make Yourself Known: Marketing Tools
1. Optimizely
Your website is as important to a stable business as a foundation is to a house. With Optimizely you will be able to build, deploy, and run A/B testing on your eCommerce website design so as to make improvements and boost your conversion rate. You will be able to go through your website page by page, piece by piece, testing text, colors, and even the positioning of products on pages.
It does require some time and effort – it can be difficult to get to grips with newcomers – but Optimizely really can help your prime your base sales platform for the best results.
Main advantages:
- Well-trusted, Optimizely has become a big name in the industry;
- Excellent editing features;
- Variables can be changed while testing out a hypothesis;
- Analytical and heatmap features allow you to analyze visitor behavior;
- Conversion predictions.
2. Adobe Photoshop
People like pictures. People also like to pick up the item they are interested in buying and inspect it before deciding whether or not to make the purchase. Ecommerce of course removes this tangibility. So the pictures of your products on your website need to be excellent and of professional quality.
Grainy or blurred, pale, bad angles under bad lighting – none of that will sell your product. You will also want a uniform look to your website and product descriptions. Photoshop will allow you to edit and customize your pictures and text, remove unwanted objects in your product photos and bring a uniform look to your brand.
Continuity is a key part of making your brand recognizable and building trust: Photoshop will assist you with the aesthetics and creativity of your eCommerce website. The better the quality of your images, the higher the likelihood of conversions. Photoshop is a deep package with a tidal wave of robust features:
- Color and clarity enhancement of products;
- Better looking pictures optimizes visitor attention and time on a page;
- Photoshop provides 3D viewing, so products can be looked at from all angles;
- Can be used across desktops and mobiles utilizing cloud storage.
3. Canva
Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool – and also a complex one that can be overwhelming to newcomers. Canva is a lot simpler and aimed at designing images, graphics, editing videos and even packaging to push marketing across social media channels.
Canva has been designed to help your brand stick out from the crowd, grab the attention of social media users, and generate their interest in you. It includes several features to assist in the scaling of your business:
- Time-saving custom templates for you to build from;
- Like Instagram stories templates, Facebook post templates, among others” and insert link under instagram stories
- Collaborative tools allow for efficient teamwork;
- Speedy image creation for social media thanks to its easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder.
4. Rocketium
Rocketium is an AI Creative Management Platform for businesses looking to scale marketing campaigns. It combines visual content creation, collaboration tools, publishing, and analytics to streamline creative workflow and run more effective campaigns faster. Rocketium helps reduce the turnaround time for marketing creatives and reduces costs by automating the creative production process.
Capabilities:
- Automatically create banner and video creatives from a spreadsheet for different products, categories, and offers to be relevant for different cohorts on multiple channels.
- AI-based auto-sizing to save hours on resizing creatives for multiple channels.
- Bulk editing to make instant, last-minute campaign-level corrections or for faster experimentation. This is especially useful for eCommerce brands, where the norm is waiting till the last minute to make offer changes across campaign creatives to snipe down the competition.
5. Pics io
Pics.io is the digital asset management (DAM) solution to easily manage your media. Photos, videos, infographics – visual media plays a crucial part in any marketing campaign. However, what many don’t understand is how much time one spends looking for needed visuals each day. Given that marketing always runs on a tight schedule, these hiccups add up fast and contribute to slow content delivery.
With Pics.io, you can search for assets fast using metadata (e.g. keywords), quickly check and retrieve needed revision of an asset and improve collaborative effort by keeping assets & commentary on them in one place.
- 7-day trial
- Saves each user 10 hours/mo that they would have spent looking for assets
- 270% search results improvement
- Plans start with $150/mo per 10 users
6. Usersnap
Usersnap is the most versatile customer feedback software, perfect for eCommerce both directly on websites or inside products if using an application. Some of Usersnap’s current and former customers include Canva, Instacart, Microsoft, Facebook, Nike, and Tango. With Usersnap, you can have facts when making your eCommerce product decisions.
You can set up feedback surveys, feedback forms, interview requests, satisfaction ratings, and visual bug reports to nail down user suggestions, issues, and requests. With WordPress plugins and browser extensions (Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox), Usersnap is a great option to consider when looking to improve the experience of your eCommerce business.
- 15 day free trials are available
- Flexible pricing, starting at $69 a month for 10 users and multiple projects
- Decrease time to delivery on projects by 50%, based on customer facts
7. Hootsuite
Put simply, Hootsuite will do a lot of hard work so that you don’t have to. Hootsuite will build up your brand presence and the legitimacy of your company across social media. Hootsuite supplies an excellent array of features to optimize the presence of eCommerce businesses on all the major platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and so on.
Hootsuite can schedule posts, as well as engage and interact with potential and current customers alike. It will also provide the one window from which you can keep an eye on what is being said about your company on all the platforms. It supplies a great vantage point from which to monitor activity, as well as great analytical tools for deeper insights.
Main advantages:
- Social media post scheduling (can post across every platform simultaneously);
- Monitor the engagement of social media marketing;
- Enhances ability to engage and interact in real-time with customers and leads.
Monitor the Data: Analytical Tools
8. Google Analytics
Most will agree that this is just about the best analytical tool an eCommerce company can use – and most of them are already using it. If you are not, then you need to be. As can be expected, Google analytical software is incredibly powerful and can be a massive boon to businesses of all sizes.
Google Analytics will let you monitor sessions so that you can see just what your website visitors are looking at, how long they are looking for, the number of views your page is receiving, the time spent on individual pages, bounce rates, conversions – you name it.
Deepak Shukla, the founder of Pearl Lemon, uses Google Analytics with his SEO team to monitor progress and rankings on search engines. He states, “It’s easy to use, inexpensive, and very useful for teams that are trying to get analytical data about the progress of their SEO campaigns or measure the growth of their e-commerce websites.”
Google Analytics will nail down every activity and report back, giving you the insights needed to make changes and improvements where they are required.
Main advantages:
- Spam filtering ensures analysis of only genuine traffic;
- Track marketing campaigns and all website activity;
- Reports inform you of which demographics are responding in the highest numbers.
9. Moz
Moz is a very handy scaling tool to have added to your analytical armory. Moz tracks pivotal metrics such as the ranking of keywords – for both your own site and that of your competitors.
It also includes the interesting and useful feature of being able to monitor and compare rankings between desktops and mobile devices. Particularly helpful is Moz’s ability to crawl your website looking for SEO issues that could negatively affect your business – and then fix them.
Main advantages:
- Webpage monitoring and scanning for SEO optimization;
- Auto-suggestion and carrying out of fixes;
- Analyzing competitor SEO and backlinks;
- Analyzing and providing feedback on the success rate of your keywords.
10. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics has the power to take your business up another step of the ladder. This software will let you know who your best customers are – and where they came from. With this information, you will be better equipped to target potential leads and make more conversions of visitors to your eCommerce website.
Kissmetrics provides a top-down view of what is going on, enabling you to accordingly make the optimal adjustments. The tool is in the category of event-based tracking tools that follow marketing analytics trends, and its alternatives include Amplitude or Mixpanel.
Main advantages:
- All-round reporting informs of where your marketing is going right and wrong;
- The unique angle from which to monitor your marketing and customer activity.
11. Social Champ
Social Champ is your one-stop solution for all your social media management, marketing, and automation needs. Social Champ supports all the major social media networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, and YouTube. Boost your social media presence without wasting unnecessary time by scheduling content effortlessly from a single platform.
Schedule content in bulk, curate content with RSS feed automation and trending suggested articles, retweet and recycle posts.
Do not miss the social conversations by accessing your organic & paid comments, direct messages, and reviews from your connected social accounts. Avail the opportunity to analyze your online content with beautiful graphs and export them as a white-labeled PDF report.
Main advantages:
- Tailored social media posts to be scheduled on several social accounts simultaneously.
- Choose custom date ranges to analyze your social posts based on key data metrics.
- Connect with your audience with an efficient social inbox, Engage
Conclusion
There is a huge array of growth marketing tools at the disposal for eCommerce business owners – old and new, from small LLCs to large corporations, with which to better the growth of business and monitor customer activity.
The best results are often gained from experimenting and mixing and matching the tools that are best for your individual enterprise. Using the tools above will give you a head start if you are just starting out and scaling your eCommerce business.
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