Ecommerce marketers have a lot of plates spinning at any given time. Different audiences, different content types, different online channels, different KPIs and OKRs…there’s just no way to do it all without some type of help.
Chances are, you’re already using some type of digital marketing software, even if it’s just what’s built-in to WordPress or Facebook. But it may be time to go bigger and better.
According to Hubspot, 91% of marketers in 2021 were confident that the programs they invest in are directly influencing revenue for their company. So the question is: Are you ready to join them?
In this article, I will outline some of the best digital marketing software on the market right now and explain what each does well. Included are overviews of each tool, pricing details, screenshots to highlight the user interface, and a list of integrations (where applicable).
The Best Digital Marketing Apps
Here’s the list of the best digital marketing tools that I’ll cover in this article.
Digital Marketing Solution: Buyers Guide
Here’s what you need to look for when selecting digital marketing software.
Key Features
What key functionality should all digital marketing software have? What features are nice but not mandatory (and may come at an additional cost)? Here are my thoughts:
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Digital Marketing Platforms
Here’s a brief description of each digital marketing software solution to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
1. Hubspot Marketing – Best for beginners
Hubspot Marketing is one part of the digital enterprise that is Hubspot. With over 7 million monthly visits to their blog and 150+ user groups for their products, it’s probably safe to assume that they know what they’re doing. Be sure to make use of their free online resources for digital marketing learning.
The Hubspot suite consists of inbound marketing, lead generation tools, an automation platform, analytics, advanced CRM, scheduling, quotes, tickets, customer feedback, a CMS editor, SEO recommendations, and more. You can mix and match what products you want to use and only pay for what you need. Their free marketing platform is quite generous, with email marketing, forms, landing pages, contact management, social media ads, and traffic conversion metrics.
Overall, I’d recommend Hubspot Marketing for anyone just starting out—small businesses, freelancers, entrepreneurs, and startups. They have everything you need to get started, learn, and grow.
Hubspot costs from $35/month and offers a free version with limited features.
2. Mailchimp – Best for design newbies
Thanks to their memorable audio ads (“mail…kimp?”), Mailchimp has become one of the most well-known email marketing tools around. Their generous free plan means that almost every digital marketer has tried them out at least once. However, did you know they do way more than just email marketing nowadays?
Mailchimp has grown into an all-in-one marketing platform that offers custom domains for websites and stores; design tools for emails, social ads, landing pages, and postcards (with AI-powered design assistance); audience management tools; and marketing campaign automations.
Mailchimp is a great option for those of you who don’t have a dedicated graphic designer on your marketing team. They really make building aesthetically pleasing digital marketing content so easy. This can save you from looking amateurish in a sea of beautiful online content.
Mailchimp is free to use for a list of up to 2000 contacts. Paid plans cost from $9.99/month and unlock additional marketing features. You can try out any paid plan for free for 30 days.
3. Marketo – Best for design experts
Adobe Marketo is a hefty digital marketing program with a price tag to match but it really is worth its weight in gold. This incredible comprehensive digital marketing software integrates nativesly with other Adobe programs you might already be using: Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, and Lightroom.
If you are a design-centric team already in the Adobe ecosystem, then Marketo is the natural next step. With Marketo, you’ll get audience behavior tracking, automated marketing campaigns, channels-vs-revenue reports, sophisticated customer journey flows, and content management and personalization.
Marketo is also great for digital marketers working solely in a MacOS/iOS environment, as Adobe products have always worked seamlessly with Apple hardware and software.
Marketo offers customized pricing upon requests, estimated to start around $3298 the first month (fee + setup) and then $1299/mo going forward for a basic plan.
4. Salesforce Marketing – Best marketing for sales teams
Salesforce Marketing is the digital marketing software branch of the sales and CRM platform Salesforce. They offer email templates, a digital marketing campaign builder, B2B demand generation, marketing analytics, and digital advertising help.
Salesforce Marketing connects right into other first-party Salesforce tools, like Customer 360, Sales, Service, Commerce, Analytics, and Integrations. Therefore, so long as you can stomach the cost, it truly is an all-in-one enterprise solution for digital marketing, sales, and customer service.
Salesforce Marketing makes the most sense for large, multi-departmental organizations that can make use of their many interconnecting platforms without flinching at the price tag.
Salesforce has different marketing packages at different prices. I would recommend the Email, Mobile, and Web package to start at $400/month (billed annually). Then, you can add suites for automations ($1250/month), social media management ($1000/month), advertising ($2000/month), and/or data ($3000/month) if needed.
5. Semrush – Best for search engine optimization (SEO)
Do one thing and do it well! Semrush is the master at search engine optimization (SEO), which is a crucial part of digital marketing these days. Key features include SEO, content marketing, competitor research, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, and social media marketing. They are used by brands like Tesla, Apple, IBM, WAlmart, and Samsung.
If you can, I would suggest you add Senrush into your digital marketing stack as a secondary tool, no matter what else you are using. They may not have the nitty-gritty campaign builders that the other software has but the SEO tools are vital to keep your ecommerce brand on track.
Semrush lets you audit up to 100 webpages for free, which you should be making use of at the very least. This will check your ecomm website for over 130 technical and SEO mistakes.
Semrush costs from $119.95/month and offers a 7-day free trial.
6. Blueshift – Best customer data analytics
Blueshift is a powerful customer data platform that, when used correctly, can be a digital marketing powerhouse for ecommerce brands. They have omnichannel orchestration, predictive intelligence, audience segmentation, advertising personalization, email and mobile marketing, and contextual customer chat.
Blueshift is designed to collect, sort, and visualize all of your incoming customer data, no matter what platform it’s coming from. Then, it provides marketing tools to leverage that detailed data into actionable insights and new campaign ideas. For example, their predictive analytics can help you market “you might also like” products to customers who have already purchased something from your store.
Blueshift is great for detailed, flexible, and actionable analytics for data-minded ecommerce leaders. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better reporting suite on this list.
Blueshift offers customized pricing upon request.
7. Sprinklr – Best for marketing workflows
Sprinklr is a customer experience management platform (CXM) that uses artificial intelligence to produce data-backed insights for smart marketing moves across over 30 digital marketing channels. They are used by industry-leading brands like Microsoft, L’Oréal, McDonald’s, Marriott International, Honda, and Netflix.
Sprinklr’s key features include customer data capture, multichannel integration, AI-powered insights, agile marketing with automated workflows, personalized ad experiences, enterprise-grade auditable governance and approval structures, performance vs. benchmarks reporting, and customizable dashboards to visualize all of the above.
As you can see from the screenshot above, Sprinklr handles marketing campaign scheduling, project management, and approvals in a Kanban-like task list. This is a great system for ecomm managers who want to build campaigns and track milestones and tasks in one platform.
Sprinklr offers customized pricing upon request.
8. Morphio – Best PPC automation tools
Morphio is a digital marketing reporting suite with customizable dashboards with which to manipulate, view, and share your campaign insights. They can help you track things like organic vs paid search results, backlinks, display advertising, engagement metrics, and keywords for your site.
Morphio can also audit pay-per-click campaigns (PPC) automatically and will monitor digital ad budgets and pacing so that you don’t have to do it manually. The platform can auto-exclude ineffective placements, provide alerts for 404s and website errors, and leverage machine learning to make campaign next step suggestions.
PPC is a pain in the butt and Morphio can save you a ton of time monitoring and optimizing your ads. It’s one of those tools that will eventually make sense to have in your marketing tech stack alongside other content and campaign software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Morphio costs from $39/month and comes with a free demo.
9. Clerk.io – Best ecommerce personalization platform
Clerk.io is an ecommerce-centric marketing platform (now that’s refreshing!) with the ability to optimize your site store’s search, build product recommendations, and deliver marketing content by email, social media platforms, or online ads.
Clerk.io’s sales- and behavior-based search engine makes sure that new customers find what they are looking to buy—the first time. Their AI will make smart recommendations for store search results based on keywords and intent and will sprinkle in product recommendations and upsell strategies. Then, you can go in with a human perspective and adjust.
They have 4 product modules that you can mix and match to get all the features you need. I’d recommend their Search and/or Recommendations plans to start while using free services for email marketing and audience data.
Clerk.io costs from $99/month per solution for a total of $396/month if you buy into all four: Search, Recommendations, Email, and Audience. You can test Clerk.io out for free before you buy.
10. Drip – Best for integrations
Drip is an ecommerce-centric digital marketing software solution (yay!) with multichannel campaign management, abandoned cart touchpoints, and post-purchase campaign templates. They can handle both email and SMS marketing and charge you based on the number of contacts in your system + the number of messages you send monthly.
Drip integrates with over 100 digital tools and apps, including Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Big Commerce, any custom online store, Facebook Custom Audiences, Gobot, Thrivecart, WisePops, Chargify, DRift, E-Junkie, PayPal, and others. A paid plan with Zapier will get you even further, unlocking hundreds more connections.
Drip is a perfect solution if you need a digital marketing solution that speaks to all of the other tools in your tech stack. This ensures scalability, as it’s super easy to add new products into the mix as needed.
Drip costs from $19/month for up to 500 contacts (30 messages/month) and comes with a free 14-day trial.
Looking for even more ecommerce marketing options? Here are a few more digital marketing tools that didn’t make the top list.
Digital Marketing Support Services
So you’ve picked a digital marketing software: But what now? You may still need additional tools for planning, analytics, graphic design, and PPC optimization. Here are some tools you might consider adding to your marketing arsenal.
What do you think about this list?
Phew! That was a lot to take in. For bite-sized ecommerce tips and tricks, I’d recommend subscribing to the Ecomm Manager newsletter. And yes, that was just me marketing to you. (Caught red-handed.)
Now it’s your turn: Let us know in the comments what online marketing tools you are loving these days. Are you doing multimedia content marketing or focusing mainly on SEO for your web pages? Do you use a marketing agency or handle it all in-house? Have you tried using influencers for marketing or is that hard no—and why? What are your marketing efforts going to look like in the coming 30, 60, and 90 days?
We’d love to hear from you!
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