With ecommerce continuing to grow in popularity, it's important for online retailers to have a comprehensive ecommerce toolkit at their disposal. In this article, we'll outline 20 tools that could revamp your ecommerce toolkit.
From market and competitor research tools to social media marketing management softwares, project management tools, analytics platforms, conversion tracking tools, and more, this list has everything you need to grow your business with the full potential of 2022's ecommerce software offer.
Market and competitor research tools are essential for ecommerce businesses. They can help you understand your market and identify potential competitors.
You can use market research tools to analyze your current sales and customer base. This information can help you determine how to improve your sales and marketing efforts.
You can also use competitor analysis tools to learn about the strategies used by your competition. This information can help you develop new marketing strategies or improve your existing ones.
Ubersuggest is a tool that can help you to find the best keywords for your website and blog. It can also help you to optimize your content and improve your website’s SEO. In our experience, Ubersuggest gives a bit better perspective on SEO than Google's Keyword Planner, which we will discuss soon.
On top of doing everything that Google's solution can, Ubersuggest also gives suggestions for both content and backlinks, based on the competition in your market. As a paid solution, it is worth the price.
Google Keyword Planner is a tool within Google Ads that can help you to find high-traffic keywords for your ecommerce business. You simply enter the keyword phrases that you want to target and the tool will provide you with a list of related keywords.
You can also use Google Keyword Planner to research keywords based off of a competitor's domain, allowing you to find out what your audience is searching for.
Google Market Finder is a tool that allows you to easily find new markets to expand to, geographically, which can provide insights that you simply would not arrive at on your own.
The tool uses your URL to assess your site to determine your product or service offering and qualifies geographical areas for your business based on things like income, the search volume of relevant keywords, as well as the CPC you would pay in that region for Search Ads.
Similarweb is an all-in-one analytics and competitive traffic intelligence platform that helps you find information about your competitors’ website traffic, social media followers, and revenue. Similarweb also provides you with insights into the demographics of your competitors’ customers.
This information can drastically improve how you segment and target your audience, as well as how you should position yourself in order to stand out from the bunch.
The Facebook Ad Library is a great place to learn about how your competitors are targeting your audience through their creative approach.
Reviewing enough competitors' advertisements will give you plenty of insight on the successful ad formats that you see continually popping up in the competition's advertisement portfolio, as well as the different approaches to ad creative, which can help you ensure that you are both following the best practices with your audience and that you know how to successfully stand out.
Semrush is similar to Ubersuggest, but with quite a few more features that help you develop and audit your content, as well as PPC optimization and even content posting. In order to help you master your site's SEO, it features competitive analyses and also assists in finding opportunities for backlinking.
One of the great things about email marketing is that it increases user engagement and customer loyalty by offering great promotions to customers. Email marketing also makes it easy to keep both existing customers and potential new customers engaged with your company in a personalized way.
As we continue to review the essential components of an ecommerce toolkit, there are some email marketing tools that help you automate your processes and easily run tests and segment your audience, and more.
MailChimp is the top addition to the ecommerce toolkit for businesses that are small to medium in size and don't have the internal expertise to fully utilize platforms that require more complex knowledge of coding and creative development: much of that is templated based on tons of data and testing on Mailchimp's end.
On top of this, Mailchimp looks quite a bit more like Hubspot in the diversity of their offer: while they are an email marketing software, as implied in their name, Mailchimp offers a pretty wide range of features that you wouldn't expect with an email platform:
You can easily segment your audiences, integrate your site, as well as 250+ other softwares and plugins, and they even have tools that help you write the copy for your subject lines.
Your whole life could probably be templated by MailChimp: the platform is practically physically holding your hand throughout the entire experience, which makes it ideal for your ecommerce toolkit if you are worried about the complexity of your email platform.
ActiveCampaign is one of the best email marketing tools for ecommerce businesses that could use an all-in-one solution for automating and optimizing their entire customer journey.
In addition to the email templates and CRM, ActiveCampaign integrates with the most essential platforms to help you integrate your funnel's campaigns into one management platform, which allows you to compare data across multiple channels:
On top of this, ActiveCampaign offers free services that are tailored to whichever plan you choose. Each plan comes with a number of unique features as you scale up, so it is important to understand what is offered within each before you make your decision.
All in all, if you want an email tool that is developed with your customer journey in mind, ActiveCampaign is the ideal email solution for your ecommerce toolkit.
On top of all of the basic segmentation and management features that ecommerce email marketing tools offer, such as an easy-to-use email builder and endless templates to choose from, GetResponse also has a load of free images and GIFs that can be used in your messaging.
Aside from the extensive features supporting your email campaigns, GetResponse is also able to offer:
GetResponse's diverse offer really puts it up in the ranks with the versatility of Hubspot in the case that you are looking for an all-in-one platform for your ecommerce toolkit.
One of the most important tools you need in your ecommerce toolkit is a good project management system. This system will help you track your progress and keep track of all the deadlines you have set for yourself and your teammates.
One thing to keep in mind is that not all project management systems are created equal. Some are better suited for small businesses while others are better suited for larger businesses. It's also important to choose a system that fits with your team's workflow and style.
Overall, a good project management system is essential to your ecommerce toolkit if you want to achieve run your business efficiently. It will help you stay on track and meet your deadlines, no matter how challenging they may be.
Monday is a great solution for your ecommerce toolkit if you are looking for simplicity. It is very easy to get started managing your processes, content planning, projects, and leads. Furthermore, Monday allows for integrations with key internal communication, social, and creative development programs so you can easily track all of your progress from one place.
ClickUp might be the ideal project management solution for your ecommerce toolkit if you want a tool that is both affordable and highly-customizable. The paid plans start at just $5 per month for each user, and they have clearly devoted some effort into ensuring that their mobile app is capable of providing the true ClickUp experience.
In order to ensure that ClickUp works for your project management needs, they have included more than 15 views that you could choose from, and a plethora of workflow templates to give you a head start on creating a workflow that works for your team. All around, ClickUp's value per dollar for smaller teams might make this the ideal management solution for your ecommerce toolkit.
If you are looking for the ideal project management tool for your ecommerce toolkit, you can't simply gloss over ProofHub. It is an all in one project planning software that has many features that can help you to improve your business's efficiency. The platform has all of the features that you would expect in a project management software:
ProofHub also has an analytics dashboard and can generate reports so that you always make decisions with a top-level view on what is happening in your company, guaranteeing that you can steer it in the right direction: an absolute beast for your ecommerce toolkit.
You need to use analytics tools to track your website's performance and identify where you can improve your marketing efforts. These tools do this by helping you find out how your customers interact with your website and marketing campaigns.
This information can help you to hone in on the important audiences and optimize your site and marketing assets to fit their needs.
Getting a handle on your customers' behavior is key to understanding how to grow, so having the right analytics tracking platform in your ecommerce toolkit is essential.
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track the traffic and activity on your website, and one of the most widely known analytics solutions on the market. It is a great way to improve your website’s visibility and optimize your marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics can help you to track the following information:
By understanding these metrics, you can optimize your website and marketing campaigns to better tailor the experience to your user by identifying problem areas from your landing pages to your checkout and beyond.
You can install Google Analytics on your website using the Google Analytics Add-on for Firefox or Google Analytics for Chrome. You can also use the GA plugin for WordPress to install Google Analytics on your WordPress website.
Plausible Analytics is a tool that you can use to track and measure the performance of your ecommerce website. It helps you to identify and address problems early, so that you can improve your site's performance and increase sales, with at least the same power of any other analytics tool that you could add to your ecommerce toolkit.
One of the key unique value propositions that Plausible Analytics has on Google Analytics is that it really focuses on providing both businesses and their customers the privacy that they have been battling for. Because of this, your site data is entirely owned by you, and the platform doesn't utilize cookies to help you track user behavior.
That means you no longer have to worry about forcing your uneasy users to consider whether or not they want to share information with your site!
If you have an audience that is generally weary of sharing their data, this might be the best analytics solution for your ecommerce toolkit.
Clickly takes analytics conversion rate optimization very seriously with their platform. While they have a free version that allows for up to 3K daily page views, the real magic happens when you get the Pro Plus package, at $14.99 per month, or $119.99 annually.
This entitles you to a plethora of premium features not offered in the free package, as well as a heatmapping tool so you can find out precisely what the issue is whenever your data suggests that there is a problem, all from the same platform.
If you want to be able to fuse your analytics and heatmapping, which makes perfect sense to do so, Clickly is a great analytics platform to consider for your ecommerce toolkit.
Social media management softwares are essential for any ecommerce toolkit. This includes tools that allow you to monitor and manage your social media accounts, as well as tools that help you schedule and publish content.
Social media simply cannot be ignored, and posting content across many platforms, managing their unique requirements, and keeping up with your post analytics can get too messy when you are trying to focus on selling.
Let's dive into what we consider to be the top 3 social media management softwares for your ecommerce toolkit in 2022.
Loomly is a social media management platform that allows for post management and ad building across all of the top ecommerce channels on the market.
This platform allows users to create posts and ads direclty in the platform, offering many creative integrations that help them do so, as well as interact directly with the audience and within teams. All of your progress can be tracked in a simple to read dashboard.
WIth the minimum buy in at $26 for 2 users, Loomly makes it possible for businesses of all sizes to scale on their platform, making it a very accessible platform for your ecommerce toolkit.
Buffer is a social media management tool that can help you to schedule posts, track mentions, and measure the performance of your campaigns.
Buffer is free to use, and it is available on both desktop and mobile platforms, but also offers premium packages that include even more features that help you streamline your content production, and even the building of your landing pages.
Buffer can help you to schedule posts, track mentions, and measure the performance of your campaigns. It also allows you to share posts automatically on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
If you are looking for a social media management tool that can help you to schedule posts, track mentions, and measure the performance of your campaigns, then Buffer is the ideal platform for your ecommerce toolkit.
Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools in ecommerce: it's right up there in the ranks of brand awareness with the likes of Hubspot. Hootsuite is a social media management platform that can help you to manage all of your social accounts, across platforms, all in one place.
You can use Hootsuite to schedule posts, track reactions to your posts, and measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, as well as collaborate with team members to more efficiently execute on campaigns.
The issue with Hootsuite, while it is a very refined platform that offers quite a bit more than your general social media management system is the price.
It starts at $49 per month for 1 user, and quickly scales up as you move up in the plans, making it accessible to those willing to spend a bit more to add this kind of tool to their ecommerce toolkit.
If you want to get a real picture of how your visitors are moving through your site, you are going to have to get a heatmapping software for your ecommerce toolkit.
We touched on heatmapping in the case of Clickly, however, not all other analytics platforms offer this as a feature, so you should know which heatmapping softwares could be relevant to your ecommerce toolkit in 2022.
Hotjar is one of the most well known tools that can help you to track how users are interacting with your website, helping you improve the user experience on your website and to identify issues early on.
Aside from the heatmapping feature, Hotjar also offers features for analytics and insights. This can help you to identify which areas of your website are performing well and which areas need improvement.
Hotjar is available as a free trial, so you can try it out before you decide whether or not it is the right tool for your ecommerce toolkit, however, there are some premium features, like filtering and segmenting data, that makes the premium packages worth considering.
Crazy Egg is one of the most popular ecommerce tools on the market. It allows you to track your website’s traffic, conversions, and other performance data.
The heatmaps track all kinds of relevant user data, such as region, language settings, referral site, and more to give you an idea of who is having issues at certain points on your site, and makes it very simple to test new configurations of elements, or single site elements alone.
Crazy Egg offers 5 different plans for different sized companies, so be sure to assess these before making your decision on whether or not this is right for your ecommerce toolkit.
In order to succeed in ecommerce, you need to have the right tools in your ecommerce toolkit. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the tools that are right for one business may not be right for another.
However, no matter how you go about selecting the mix of tools for your ecommerce toolkit, you will undoubtedly need one for each of the sections in this article, so hopefully this has prepared you to make some quick but sure assessments and get to selling!
