According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, marketers say their top priority this year is generating more leads. Funnily enough, previous reports from HubSpot found that a majority of marketers (62%) found generating leads to be their biggest marketing challenge.
Clearly, marketers understand the importance of generating high-quality leads but feel they could use all the help they can get when it comes to actually securing them.
Thankfully, there’s no shortage of lead generation tools available to help you capture valuable prospects but choosing the right tools for your needs can be difficult with so many options. So we thought it might help to bring together 100+ of the best lead generation tools in each category together so you can narrow down your list of options and pick the right tools for you.
So here goes.
What are we looking at in this article?
Seeing as we’re looking at a long list of tools in this article, it’ll be much easier to process everything if we break them down into defined sections. So we’ve grouped our list of favourite lead generation tools into the following categories:
- Strategy & planning: Research and plan your lead generation strategies.
- Inbound leads: Bring more leads to your website from external sources.
- On-page leads: Turn web traffic into solid leads.
- Outbound leads: Find and secure leads outside the reach of your online presence.
- CRO tools: Convert more website visitors into leads by optimising your pages.
- Email marketing: Capture and manage your email leads more effectively.
- Search marketing: Increase your leads from organic and paid search.
- Social media: Capture and manage more leads from your social media accounts.
- Lead nurturing: Turn more leads into paying customers.
- eCommerce & B2C: Specialist lead generation tools for eCommerce brands and online retailers.
- Visual content: Create visual content more easily.
As you can see, we’re covering the full spectrum of channels modern brands can use to maximise lead generation and techniques to improve performance further. With the possible exception of eCommerce and B2C tools, every business can find value in each section of this article and you should find dozens of tools that can add something to your own lead generation efforts.
Strategy & planning tools
First up, we’ve got a bunch of tools that will help you research and plan your lead generation strategies. Here are the tools we’ll be looking at in this section.
- TrueNorth
- Twitter Search
- Quora
- Answer The Public
- BuzzSumo
- LeadQuizzes
- Brandwatch
- Audiense
- Tweepi
- Feedly
These tools will give you the insights you need to stay on top of industry trends, learn which content is getting results, understand your target audiences in greater detail and see how your competitors are capturing leads.
#1: TrueNorth
Marketing works best when all marketing activity works towards achieving your goal.
That’s the aim of TrueNorth, which centralises all of your marketing activity and results in one place with everything connected to a projection of your growth. You can think of it as a smarter, data-driven marketing calendar.
This is in direct contrast to traditional project management tools which often end up as endless, unfocused task lists.
#2: Twitter Search
Twitter Search is basically a trends tool of its own but this one provides you real-time feedback on what people are interested in right now.
#3: Quora
Quora provides a platform where you can explore the questions your target audiences are asking and see how the industry responds – a powerful tool for both audience and competitor research.
#4: Answer The Public
Answer The Public is a search query research tool that allows you to type in a keyword and access an extensive list of related search queries – in far greater detail than the keyword tools provided by Google and Bing.
This is a great tool for learning what your audience really cares about in relation to your keywords and hunting down valuable long-tail keywords for both SEO and PPC.
#5: BuzzSumo
Social media is a great indicator of content performance and BuzzSumo helps you discover the best-performing content related to your keywords. Simply type in something like “lead generation” and the tool will show you the content that’s engaging users most effectively – great for content research and benchmarking.
#6: LeadQuizzes
Sometimes, you need to get feedback directly from the source and LeadQuizzes allows you to put questions to the people using your website. You can create quizzes and surveys to place on your site and social accounts to get insights directly from the people you want to engage with.
#7: Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a comprehensive consumer and industry research platform that compiles data from 100 million different sources. If you want strong, reliable data to build your lead generation strategies around, Brandwatch is a sledgehammer of a research/planning tool.
#8: Audiense
Artificial intelligence is changing the way brands conduct audience research and predict consumer interests/behaviours. Audiense uses the power of AI to and deep data to pinpoint your target audiences – no matter how niche or complex they are – and predict their other interests by cross-analysing their data with millions of similar users.
#9: Tweepi
Tweepi is another AI tool but this one is going to help you grow your Twitter following and increase engagement through meaningful interactions. Its algorithms pinpoint the best tweets and users for you to engage so you’re ready to start leading conversation rather than simply following them.
#10: Feedly
Feedly is simply an RSS feed dressed up in some nice CSS code but it’s an excellent content research tool. At the very least, you can keep up with what your competitors are publishing and the platform also provides feedback on which content is gathering most attention, which helps you gauge which content is striking a chord with audiences.
Inbound lead generation tools
Now, we’re getting into the heavy hitters with our top inbound lead generation tools. Here’s a quick preview of what we’ll be looking at on this section:
- Unbounce
- WebinarJam
- Everwebinar
- SlideShare
- Bidsketch
- Quoteroller
- Callingly
- ReferralCandy
- Subbly
These tools will help you create the resources you need to capture quality inbound leads, such as landing pages, webinars, customer quotes and referrals. This would normally involve an immense amount of work (eg: creating landing pages from scratch, hosting live events, etc.) but these tools make immense tasks manageable.
#11: Unbounce
Your homepage and blog posts can only generate so many leads and maximise – and most of these are low-quality (ie: low purchase intent). To grab high-quality leads, you need a fleet of landing pages with focused messages, compelling CTAs and epic lead generation forms.
Which means you need a tool like Unbounce, which is the best landing page builder on the market in our books.
#12: Demio
If 91% of B2B professionals say webinars are their preferred type of content, you know this should be a key part of your lead generation strategy. If it’s not, you’re missing out. Admittedly, running webinars takes a lot of work but Demio helps you reach the widest possible audience and get the best return on your time and financial investment.
#13: WebinarNinja
Now, WebinarNinja is another beast entirely. This platform allows you to pre-record a single webinar event and auto-play the footage at sent intervals, turning one event into a resource that can keep generating leads for the long-term. Best of all, you can automate signups and lead nurturing so that your webinar is doing all of the work for you while you crack on with other things.
JetWebinar is another great tools that allows you to do the same.
#14: SlideShare
SlideShare remains a powerful inbound marketing tool for B2B brands and not only if you’re marketing on LinkedIn. Packing your presentations with plenty of data and visualisations creates sharable content and images that people are going to want to reference and embed on their website, which brings in valuable links, citations and traffic.
#15: Bidsketch
Creating custom quotes, proposals and bids eats up a lot of time and valuable resources, which is especially painful when you know the majority of bids aren’t going to materialise. Bidsketch takes out a chunk of the workload with its proposal software that will save you hours on every bid with its excellent templates and drag-and-drop builder.
#16: QuoteRoller
Quoteroller takes things even further by automating your workflow and cutting out all of the repetitive tasks that make custom quotes painful to create.
#17: Callingly
Callingly is a sales powertool tool that integrates with your CRM, landing page or web form to capture lead information as soon as it comes in and connects your sales team so you can respond to new leads faster.
#18: ReferralCandy
The best customers are the kind that keep buying from you and recommend your brand to the people in their lives. ReferralCandy is a platform that allows you to reward your existing customers for introducing you to new leads, all of which can be automated through the platform.
#19: Subbly
With Subbly, you can add subscriptions and monthly/annual payments to your website for ongoing services, such as SaaS tools or monthly retail services. Most importantly, you can create free trial periods, which is one of the most powerful led generation strategies around now that subscription purchases have become the norm.
On-page lead generation tools
Once you’ve got traffic on your website, you want to convert as many of them into valuable leads as possible. So, in this section, we’ve got a bunch of tools that will turn your pages into lead generation power tools:
- Leadformly’s form builder
- Optinmonster
- Intercom
- Drift
- Turnstile
- SurveyAnyplace
- Hello Bar
- Unbounce’s Dynamic Text Replacement
- Outgrow
- Proof
It’s not all about generating the highest number of leads, either. You want to capture the right kind of leads, which starts with the prospects most likely to buy into your offer. Your inbound marketing efforts should be bringing such people to your website and these tools will help you turn them into leads.
#20: Leadformly’s form builder
It doesn’t matter how good your marketing strategies are, you can’t capture prospects without lead generation forms that seal the deal. Leadformly is the only form builder tool on the market that comes packed with high-converting multi-step forms that you can customise and embed on any page.
Leadformly’s builder puts advanced tools like conditional logic at your fingertips, allowing you to build intelligent tools in seconds.
#21: Optinmonster
Optinmonster says that over 70% of your website visitors leave your site without doing anything of value and never return. But it also provides one of the best tools for building and managing popups, which aim to keep people on your site and point them towards conversions.
Exit-intent popups are the flagship feature, which trigger when a user looks like they’re about to leave your site, giving you one last chance to make an offer they can’t refuse.
#22: Intercom
Intercom is a powerful lead generation tool and customer service channel all rolled into one and we’re so happy with the platform that we use it on the Leadformly website. Users can get in touch with our team and ask any questions they have or reach out to us with any technical issues they’re struggling to solve.
#23: Drift
Drift is a younger, trendier alternative to Intercom that relies on the chatbot format to generate leads and provide instant, automated responses to user interactions. For your website users, the two tools more-or-less provide the same thing but on the back end, Drift is a more simplified (and cheaper) platform than Intercom.
#24: Turnstile by Wistia
Wistia is an excellent video hosting platform that allows you to retain ownership of your footage and easily imbed high-quality GIF-like videos on your website. Our favourite Wistia feature, though, is Turnstile, which allows you to add CTAs to your videos and generate qualified leads from your video footage.
#25: SurveyAnyplace
SurveyAnyplace is another tool that allows you to create surveys and quizzes but it puts greater emphasis on lead generation than gaining customer insights (although it’s perfectly capable of the latter, too).
#26: Unbounce’s Dynamic Text Replacement
We’ve already recommended Unbounce as the ideal landing page builder but we want to take a moment to talk about one of its most advanced lead generation features. Dynamic Text Replacement matches the copy of your landing pages to the keywords users type into search engines to discover your brand.
Welcome to personalised landing page content, more relevant messaging and a higher volume of leads from your advertising campaigns.
#27: Hello Bar
#28: Outgrow
Outgrow helps you create interactive lead generation content such as calculators, quizzes, polls and giveaways without writing any code.
#29: Proof
Proof is a drag-and-drop platform that allows you to personalise your website without any of the complex programming or coding it would normally require. Simply create your variations, set your conditions and enjoy the benefit of higher-quality leads thanks to your more relevant messages.
Outbound lead generation tools
Inbound marketing seems to get all of the attention these days but a solid outbound strategy can drastically expand your reach. So let’s take a moment to look at the best outbound lead generation tools available right now:
- Datanyze
- Sendblaster
- Growbots
- Hunter
- BuzzBuilder
- Leadfeeder
- FindThat
- SalesRipe
- LeadFaze
- Sendbloom
With these tools, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience beyond the limits of your online presence and reach out to potential buyers you would never find otherwise.
#30: Datanyze
Datanyze tells you which technology solutions businesses are currently using so you can understand their needs. Naturally, this is ideal for software and hardware companies that want to find potential customers but you can associate technology use to services and other products, too.
#31: SendBlaster
Blast email campaigns are a controversial topic but the reason for debate stems from that fact that, done correctly, it can still be a powerful strategy. SendBlaster is one of the only blast email senders that has a good reputation with ISPs, meaning fewer of your emails will get snapped by spam filters.
#32: Growbots
Growbots wants to automate your outbound sales by helping you prospect potential leads and manage campaigns from the same platform. The software uses AI to create prospect lists and then you can create personalised campaigns, which will be delivered automatically.
Finally, Growbots’ recommendation engine will measure campaign performance and match you with further prospects based on responses from your existing list, improving campaign performance over time without you lifting a finger.
#33: Hunter
Drip campaigns are a classic email automation strategy and BuzzBuilder applies the concept to your cold email campaigns. You can send timely follow-up emails to reach business executives at the right moments and increase leads while the platform uses predictive lead scoring to determine which prospects are most likely to buy.
#35: Leadfeeder
If you want to know which companies are visiting your website, Leadfeeder is the platform for you. Business minds discover your website because they have a demonstrable interest in what you do and these are business opportunities you don’t want to miss out on.
With Leadfeeder, you don’t have to.
#36: FindThat
FindThat says it best when it calls itself “The Yellow Pages of Email”. The platform helps you find and verify the email addresses of professionals from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as well as bulk email lists from business names and website domains.
#37: SalesRipe
If you like the sound of the tools we’ve looked at in this section, SaleRipe combines the best of them into a single outbound marketing platform that’s used by the likes of Adobe, Amazon and Dell. You can build targeted prospect lists in seconds, access contact data, target specific contacts and businesses, and manage your leads all from within SalesRipe.
#38: LeadFuze
If you want to try out an email finder, LeadFuze will give you 25 leads for free and the chance to try out its software while you’re at it. You can find prospects based on their industry, business size, technology used and the talent they’re currently looking to hire, among other things.
LeadFuze’s AI and automation technologies will help you find the most relevant prospects and close leads while minimising the manual workload.
#39: Sendbloom
Finally, we’ve got Sendbloom, a prospecting automation and campaign management platform that helps you pinpoint new leads, deliver personalised messages and optimise your campaigns.
Conversion rate optimisation tools
You’re never going to convert every visitor into a lead but every good lead generation strategy aims to maximise this percentage. This means a solid set of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) tools are essential to your lead generation efforts and these are the tools we’re going to focus on next:
- Leadformly’s form analytics
- Leadforensics
- Pingdom
- GTMetrix
- Google Analytics
- Mipanel
- Hotjar
- VWO
- Amplitude
- Heap
With this set of CRO tools, you should have everything you need to maximise performance across all of your lead generation pages.
#40: Leadformly’s form analytics
Earlier, we explained how Leadformly’s form builder will help you create high-converting lead generation forms in minutes without writing any code. Now, another really important tool in Leadformly is its advanced form analytics reports that provide in-depth insights far beyond Google Analytics and similar tools.
Leadformly doesn’t only show you how well your forms are doing as a whole but also reveals how individual form fields are performing so you can pinpoint the smallest compromises and remove issues to truly maximise results.
#41: Lead Forensics
Lead Forensics is a sales funnel optimisation tool that helps you prevent leads from slipping through the cracks of your sales and marketing processes. You can identify leads, prioritise the most valuable ones, track prospects across the consumer journey and reach out to them with personalised messages.
#42: Pingdom
Pingdom is a website speed optimisation tool that identifies technical issues slowing down your loading times. Aside from being a crucial factor in conversion optimisation, loading times are also considered in Google’s search algorithm – especially on mobile sessions.
#43: GTmetrix
If Pingdom doesn’t solve your loading time problems or you really want to maximise speed, then you might want to try out GTmetrix. The tool allows you to test from more locations and provides feedback on a larger range of technical factors, meaning you might discover problems other tools can’t detect.
#44: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the first analytics and conversion optimisation tool every business/marketer should have in their tech stack. The platform can’t quite do it all alone but it’s a better insights tool than many paid options on the market – many of which simply use Google Analytics data anyway.
#45: Mixpanel
While Google Analytics can provide an overview of what users are generally doing on your website, Mixpanel shows you who is doing what. By tracking individual users, you’re able to gain deeper insights into how different target audiences are behaving on your website, which is an invaluable tool for adapting your messages to suit their unique interests.
#46: Hotjar
Heatmaps are another staple tool of conversion optimisation and Hotjar provides excellent heatmapping tools to see how users are clicking (or not clicking), scrolling and interacting with your website. Aside from that, Hotjar also offers some great user and customer feedback features so you can capture insights directly from prospects.
#47: Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
VWO is one of the most comprehensive conversion optimisation platforms on the market, allowing you to create variations, run tests, manage optimisation campaigns, capture insights and basically do almost everything you need to from a CRO standpoint.
#48: Amplitude
Websites aren’t always the only platform you want to optimise and Amplitude is a specialist optimisation platform for digital products. So, if you’re developing apps, software and other digital products, you can use Amplitude to track user activity and optimise the experience to maximise user retention and keep them engaged with your product – essential if you’re running a subscription-based product.
#49: Heap
Amplitude is an incredibly powerful platform but it can be a little complex to set up for non-technical teams. Heap aims to deliver similar capabilities in a software package that’s easier to set up and start using right away. Both are great options if you’re selling digital products and it shouldn’t take long to figure out which one best suits your needs.
Email marketing tools
When we talk about solid lead generation, we’re typically talking about getting new prospects on your email lists. From subscribers to free demo users and even paying customers, it’s all about getting people on your email lists so you can continue to target them with relevant messages.
So, it goes without saying that you want the right set of email marketing tools to generate these leads and deliver those crucial follow-up messages. And, it turns out, we’ve got just the set of tools for you:
- ActiveCampaign
- SendinBlue
- Prospect
- MailerLIte
- Moosend
- ConvertKit
- Really Good Emails
These are some of the best email marketing platforms in their niche so let’s explain what each one of them has to offer.
#50: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is one of the most advanced email marketing systems on the market and its automation features set it apart from pretty much all of the competition. There are some alternatives that can more-or-less match ActiveCampaign (HubSpot being one of the few names that come to mind) but you’ll have to pay significantly more to get anywhere close.
One of the most standout things about ActiveCampaign is that its pricing only increases gradually as you move on to more expensive plans, which will naturally happen as your business grows. Most providers hike up their prices as soon as you’ve got one lead too many on your system but ActiveCampaign keeps everything incremental.
#51: SendinBlue
One area that a lot of email marketing platforms fall short on is transactional emails but SendinBlue is a bit of a specialist here. The company has significantly improved its software in other areas over the years, too, and it’s now a solid choice as an all-in-one solution.
#52: Prospect
Prospect removes the divide between outbound prospecting and email marketing automation to create a fully-functioning lead generation strategy. With tools to speed up list building, automate your outbound emails and optimise campaign performance, Prospect could be the only outbound email solution you need.
#53: MailerLite
If you’re a small business, startup or freelancer that wants to unlock the power of email marketing without expensive software and technical headaches, then MailerLite is one of the first options you want to look at. The company provides enterprise-level tools for reasonable prices so that you can build and automate an entire email marketing strategy without writing a single line of code.
#54: Moosend
Another great option for entrepreneurs and freelancers is Moosend, especially if you don’t have any working experience with email marketing. Drag-and-drop building, automation, personalisation, campaign management and analytics are all made easy with Moosend’s simple interfaces and conversational documentation.
#55: ConvertKit
If you’re a creative entrepreneur more than a technical wizard, then ConvertKit was designed with you in mind. The platform wants to help you “connect with your audience” and “make a living doing work you love” while spending less time on the technical aspects of email marketing.
#56: Really Good Emails
We all need inspiration from time to time and Really Good Emails is a great place to find quality campaign examples that you can learn from and use to inspire your own strategies.
Search marketing tools
More than 75% of all traffic comes from search with more than half (53%) coming from organic search and a further 15% from paid search. Which means the vast majority of your leads are also going to come from search and you want the best tools available to maximise this channel.
Here are tools we’re looking at in this section:
- Paid search
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Yoast SEO
- Twilio
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Google Ads Scripts
- SimilarWeb
From targeting high-intent leads, finding the right keywords and managing the technical aspects of SEO, these tools will boost your search marketing efforts.
#57: Paid search
Paid search is the only channel that will bring high-intent visitors to your website today. Getting leads of this quality isn;t easy but this is where paid search excels and as soon as you start advertising on Google Ads, you’re able buy your way into a solid lead generation strategy.
#58: SEMrush
To maximise your search presence (both organic and paid), SEMrush compiles search and competitor data from hundreds of sources (not only Google Analytics and Search Console) to give you detailed insights. From keyword research to competitor analysis and finding new content opportunities, SEMrush is one of the most comprehensive search marketing tools available.
#59: Ahrefs
Ahrefs doesn’t offer as many features as SEMrush (especially for paid search and social media) but its rank tracking system is excellent and its simpler interface can make it easier to interpret data – especially with keyword research.
It’s also slightly cheaper but these are both excellent tools and it didn’t seem right to leave one of them out.
#60: Yoast SEO
If you have a WordPress website, Yoast SEO should be the first plugin you download – simple as that.
#61: Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an SEO audit tool that crawls your website for technical SEO problems under the hood – things like low-quality links that could be dragging down your search ranking.
#62: Google Ads Keyword Planner
If you’re advertising on Google Ads, you’ve already got access to one of the most useful keyword research tools in the business – so make the most of it.
#63: Google Ads Scripts
Google Ads Scripts allow you to add automated functionality to your Google Ads campaigns. There are thousands of existing scripts you can use to automatically remove underperforming campaigns, pause keywords with low Quality Scores, limit over-deliverability, automate your bids and all kinds of other functions.
#64: SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb allows you to analyse any website or app to gain insights into their performance. You can use these insights to analyse your competitors’ performance, discover new opportunities, identify emerging trends and understand your target audiences with greater accuracy.
Social media tools
Social media introduces your brand to a wider audience and allows you to capture leads at earlier stages of the purchase journey. Turning social prospects into genuine leads can be tricky but these jobs will help you get the task done:
- Paid search
- Facebook Audience Insights
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Hootsuite
- Buffer Publish
- Buffer Replay
- Oktopost
- Socialbakers
- Socedo
- MeetEdgar
Managing a complete social media strategy across multiple platforms won’t be such a mammoth task with these tools on your side.
#65: Paid social
While paid search is great for generating high-intent leads who are ready to do business, paid social is the ideal platform for expanding your audience and capturing leads at the earlier stages of the buying journey. The key thing is to know which platforms your target audiences are most active on and which type of content they’re engaging with most – something that varies greatly from one network to the next.
#66: Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook is the world’s largest social media network in terms of user numbers and it’s also one of the few that’s equally adept at B2C and B2B marketing. No matter what your target audiences may look like, they’re almost certainly on Facebook and the platform’s Audience Insights tool will help you track them down and calculate the size of your reach on the network.
#67: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the network’s most advanced prospecting tool for B2B marketers and sales teams. It combines advanced search filters with personalised algorithms to help you find the right prospects directly on LinkedIn and build meaningful relationships through genuine interactions.
#68: Hootsuite
Managing multiple social media accounts can be a nightmare but Hootsuite allows you to do everything from a single dashboard, which means no more switching between accounts every time you want to add/edit posts or respond to comments. You can also measure the performance of your entire social marketing strategy with Hootsuite’s analytics reports, giving you the complete picture of how each channel is working collectively.
Hootsuite also allows you to schedule social media posts ahead of time.
#69: Buffer Publish
Buffer splits its social media software into two products, the first of which is Buffer Publish. The platform allows you to post across all of your networks but it gives you advanced customisation options so you’re not limited to posting exactly the same thing on each network.
Buffer Post also provides collaboration and planning features for your team to device and refine their strategy. And, just like Hootsuite, you can schedule posts for each network using Buffer post.
#70: Buffer Analyze
Buffer Analyze provides comprehensive analytics insights from your social media strategies into a single dashboard so you can measure performance of your entire strategy and individual networks with ease. You’ll see which of your posts are performing best across networks, the best time to post and ideal frequency to post in order to maximise engagement.
#71: Oktopost
Oktopost is an advanced social media management suite for B2B marketers. The platform’s calendar allows you to visually manage posts and you can schedule everything to reduce the manual workload. You can attribute and track social leads to see how each post and channel is contributing to the sales journey and Oktopost also has dedicated features for thought leadership, employee advocacy and audience engagement.
#72: Socialbakers
Unlike Oktopost, Socialbakers is geared more towards B2C brands and publishers. Once again, you can manage your social media accounts from a single place and you also get dedicated features for research and planning, content strategy, influencer marketing, social customer care and advanced analytics.
#73: Socedo
Socedo is another B2B offering that aims to help you grow your Twitter following and drive more traffic to your website.
#74: Edgar
Edgar is an advanced social media management tool that uses artificial intelligence to save you time and boost ROI. The platform can even write status updates and posts for you by using its AI algos to find quote-worthy text from your content – all you have to do is approve and click to share.
Lead nurturing tools
Once you’ve captured leads, you still need to turn that initial interest into valuable action and this is where you want an effective suite of lead nurturing tools. There are plenty of software options on the market but we’ve narrowed our selection into the following 10 tools.
- ActiveCampaign
- HubSpot
- Hull
- D&B Hoovers
- Autopilot
- Ominsend
- Rejoiner
- Freshworks
- Acquire
- Zapier
From capturing the right leads to nurturing them and automating as much of the process as possible, these tools will have you covered.
#75: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign’s trio of CRM, email marketing and marketing automation systems makes it one of the sophisticated lead nurturing platforms around. Aside from helping you to generate more leads, ActiveCampaign gives you the tools you need to keep them warm and guide them along the purchase journey by uniting your sales and marketing efforts.
#76: HubSpot
HubSpot is another comprehensive sales and marketing platform with an extensive range of products and tools that cover almost everything your businesses need to generate and close leads. It is also one of the more expensive options on the market but few software providers offer the same extensive range of tools at a consistent quality.
#77: Hull
If you end up with customer data spread out across multiple platforms, Hull will bring it all together for you to access from a single place. Unifying your data will improve the accuracy of your analytics and help you extract more meaningful insights while also cutting down on any manual data crunching.
#78: D&B Hoovers
D&B Hoovers is a B2B prospecting tool that goes the distance and helps you turn leads into paying customers. With comprehensive intelligence on more than 120 million businesses, the platform helps you find valuable prospects and allows you to deliver personalised messages at each stage of the purchase journey.
#79: Autopilot
If your marketing tech stack lacks sufficient automation features, Autopilot can provide the visual builder that brings your marketing strategy to life. You can build automation workflows using the drag-and-drop builder or select from pre-made workflows and measure performance using Autopilot’s built-in analytics reporting.
#80: Omnisend
Omnisend combines email and SMS marketing into a single platform and you can also integrate the tool with search and social to manage a multichannel strategy.
#81: Rejoiner
For eCommerce brands, cart abandonments are the antithesis of success. Rejoiner helps reduce cart abandonments with its dedicated email marketing solution designed to bring prospects back to complete their purchases.
#82: Freshworks
Freshworks puts the focus on the after-sale customer experience, providing a suite of tools to help brands deliver the best possible customer service and maximise the number of repeat purchases.
#83: Acquire
Acquire builds a 360-degree overview of the entire customer experience, allowing brands to offer omnichannel customer service. The platform unifies your customer data, maps out interactions and provides you with the tools you need to provide comprehensive support: live chat, email, calls & SMS, screen sharing, chatbots and more.
#84: Zapier
Zapier connects your favourite apps to reduce unnecessary, repeated actions and save you time throughout the day. For example, you can automatically upload Gmail attachments to Drive, share new Twitter mentions in Slack and add new subscribers from Unbounce to your ActiveCampaign contacts.
eCommerce & B2C lead generation tools
A lot of the tools we’ve looked at in this article are suitable for all types of business but many of them are focused towards B2B businesses. So, in this section, we’re going to balance the books a little with some lead generation tools designed specifically for eCommerce and B2C brands:
- Privy
- Sumo
- Drip
- Nudgify
- Instagram Checkout
- PushOwl
- Kit for Shopify
- LoyaltyLion
- Countdown Cart
Software providers don’t always cater for eCommerce and B2C businesses but we’ve picked a selection of the best tools that will help sell more products and keep customers coming back for more.
#85: Privy
Privy is an email marketing solution designed specifically for eCommerce brands. You can use the platform to grow your email list, manage your email marketing strategy, run cart abandonment campaigns and implement SMS messaging to round up your multichannel efforts.
#86: Sumo
Sumo is an email capture tool for eCommerce brands, combining features like popups and notification bars with social sharing and analytics. It’s not a comprehensive retail solution by any means but definitely a tool for small eCommerce brands to look at and the free version means you can try things out with nothing to lose.
#87: Drip
Drip is a fully-featured CRM platform for eCommerce brands with dedicated features for retailers who are sometimes ignored by B2B software providers. Drip integrates with major platforms like Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce, provides an excellent CRM platform for managing customer behaviour and advanced personalisation, engagement and optimisation features.
#88: Nudgify
Nudgify adds CTA and social proof notifications to your website to show users how many people are looking at your products and buying from you. Nudgify says its platform can increase sales and signups by 15% with “ethical” social proof and real-time data.
#89: Instagram Checkout
Instagram Checkout lets users buy directly from brands from inside the Instagram app – a feature that’s currently only available in the US with selected retailers but expanding as we speak.
#90: PushOwl
PushOwl allows you to ask users permission to send them notification (please, don’t do this as soon as they land on your site, though) and send them valuable notifications on their device – even after they’ve left.
#91: Kit for Shopify
Kit is a virtual assistant for Shopify that helps you manage your online store and implement marketing strategies that will grow your online business. The app uses Shopify’s strong integrations with Facebook Advertising to help you reach a wider audience and turn ad views into paying customers.
#92: LoyaltyLion
The only thing better than a paying customer is one who keeps coming back to buy again and LoyaltyLion wants to help you create more of these recurring customers. The platform uses data-driven insights to understand what matters most to your customers so you can make informed improvements to your customer service.
#93: Countdown Cart by Beeketing
Countdown Cart is a simple app from Beeketing that you can use to add countdown timers to your product pages to create a sense of urgency and increase sales.
Visual content tools
Lead generation strategies are nothing without content and all of the tools we’ve recommended work best when you’ve got a good supply of quality visual content for blog posts, landing pages, social content, emails and everything else.
So let’s take a moment to look at some tools that will help you create all of these visuals:
- Canva
- Aminoto
- Adobe Spark
- Unsplash
- Infogram
- Visme
- Gyazo
Visual content can be expensive and very time-consuming to produce but these tools will slash your expenses and turnaround times.
#94: Canva
With Canva, you don’t need a design degree or specialist software to create social media images, basic graphs and other visualisations.
#95: Animoto
In today’s video-centric world, creating enough video footage for your marketing efforts can be expensive and time-consuming. Animoto can take up some of the slack by making it easy to create simple videos using images and basic animation/editing techniques.
#96: Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is like a souped-up version of Canva and Animoto that makes it fast and easy to create simple visual content. You can create social graphics, entire web pages and short videos without Adobe’s more specialist software.
#97: Unsplash
Unsplash is one of the most popular sources of free-to-use images on the web, albeit a controversial name in the photography field.
#98: Infogram
Data visualisations are one of the best ways to give your content authority and shareability – especially if you’re able to turn that data into compelling visualisations. Which is precisely what Infogram is there to help you do.
#99: Visme
If infographics are your visualisation of choice, then Visme is probably the easiest way to create them at scale.
#100: Gyazo
Gyazo is a simple screen capture tool that allows you to record your screen and instantly save the footage as a GIF, which is perfect for sharing short clips and adding visual content to your web pages.
Which lead generation tools will you be using next?
If you’ve made it this far through our article, you’ve previewed 100+ of the best lead generation tools on the market and we’re confident you’ll have discovered more than a few that could help take your business to the next level. We understand this might be a lot to take in so go ahead and bookmark this article for future reference if you want to come back to it.
Most of the tools we’ve looked at in this article offer free trials While some of them are free, regardless. So go ahead and try out some of these for yourself and see what they can bring to your own lead generation strategies.
