Want to Boost Sales? Check out These 4 Free Ecommerce Tools. Once your business grows, you can get the best tools money can buy. For now, these four won't cost you.
By Syed Balkhi Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Building a successful ecommerce business or an online store is a task that requires a great deal of work. You not only have to manage your promotions, marketing and sales, but you also need to gather data, optimize your product pages, run email marketing campaigns and do much more to sustain your business growth.
Related: 5 Great Shopify Apps to Optimize Your Ecommerce Store
Obviously, you can't do all these things alone. You need help from the right tools to automate some of these processes, analyze and collect data to drive traffic and generate more sales.
You don't have to spend your entire marketing budget to achieve these goals. Thankfully, there are many great free tools you can use to supercharge your ecommerce site. Have a look at some of the best tools you can start using right away:
1. MailChimp
Email marketing is an important part of running an ecommerce business. It is a part of everything, from generating leads to running promotional campaigns, and more. When it comes to building an email list, MailChimp is a great email marketing service you can use to get started for free. With over 14 million registered users, MailChimp is not only the most popular email marketing service available today but it's also the only software that offers a forever free plan with automation.
How to use it. As an ecommerce business or an online store, you can, for instance, use MailChimp's automation tools to create a series of emails to build funnels to convert leads into sales. You can also create automated follow-up emails to re-engage with users who abandon your shopping cart. Further, you can build email lists with segments.
Tip: MailChimp's free plan allows you to grow an email list of up to 2,000 subscribers.
2. HubSpot CRM
Running a business involves lots of funnels, logs, databases and tracking. You need a proper system in place to manage all these technical aspects of your business without getting lost. HubSpot CRM (customer relationship management) is a great free tool you can use to get this job done. HubSpot CRM is an all-in-one platform that allows you to manage your sales and marketing process from one dashboard. And it comes with a forever free plan.
How to use it. HubSpot CRM will help you manage everything related to your sales process, including sales funnels. You can track customer interactions, find information about leads, create personalized email sequences and more.
Tip: HubSpot also has a free marketing hub and sales hub software, which will also come in handy for managing sales pipelines, creating automated outreach emails, creating follow-ups, tracking customers and closing more deals.
3. Nelio AB Testing
As an ecommerce business, you need to be constantly improving your store and website by testing new strategies and tactics to make the most of your marketing efforts. Usually, this involves running A/B tests to figure out what kind of a website layout works the best and which colors encourage more clicks on your CTA buttons.
Nelio AB Testing is a powerful WordPress plug-in you can use for this task. The plug-in comes with a free trial, which provides you with some useful tools and enough time to run several tests to optimize your website and product pages.
How to use it. In addition to its A/B testing tools, which you can use to split-test your pages, blog posts, home pages and entire themes, Nelio also comes with an effective heatmaps feature.
Tip: Using heat maps, you can learn which areas of your website need to be improved, by tracking user behavior and seeing which buttons, images and links get noticed the most.
4. Elementor
As your online business grows, there will come a time when you have to revamp your website design to offer a better user experience. Website revamps used to be expensive, but not anymore. If you have a WordPress website, you can use a page-builder plug-in like Elementor to design custom layouts and web pages without any coding or web design knowledge.
Related: 3 Chrome Extensions That Can Boost Your Ecommerce Business
How to use it. Elementor is an open-source page-builder plug-in that comes with a live editor. Using the plug-in, you can design custom home pages, more effective product pages, landing pages and sales pages by simply dragging and dropping design elements into a blank canvas.
Tip: Elementor also supports ecCommerce plug-ins, such as WooCommerce, for crafting better product pages as well.
Conclusion
Managing and growing an ecommerce business doesn't have to be a herculean task. As long as you have the best tools on your side, you can accomplish all your goals with minimum effort.
Related: One Ecommerce Tool Makes Doing Business Internationally Easier
Of course, once your business starts to grow, you will be able to afford even better and more powerful tools. Until then, give these free tools a try.
