Freemium plans for marketing technology can seem too good to be true. And with fiddly free trials and limited functionality, they often are. Here, Kavita Singh shares the top 19 genuinely free and valuable marketing tools. Find out what you’ve been missing out on.
Social media and SEO:
Screaming Frog: Used by the likes of Amazon, Disney and Google, the digital marketing agency, Screaming Frog, uses SEO to help businesses track their online presence. It taps website links, images, CSS, scripts and search engines to analyse the results of your website. Advanced features include, detecting broken links and duplicate content and generating XML sitemaps.
Serposcope: Serposcope is 100% free and has loads of SEO features. The software automatically tracks websites for specific keywords, so you’ll be able to retrieve ranking history of a competitor at any time. The tool utilises geotargeting, which searches keywords based on the city and country if you’re looking to reach a specific region. While using Serposcope, you’ll be able to retrieve your competitors’ ranking history for every keyword you track.
Email management:
Putsmail: Have you ever sent a mass email only to realise you forgot to include one tiny detail? This service allows testing of an HTML email before sending it to your contacts. You can enter up to 10 recipient addresses, your subject line and HTML. Alternatively, you can include a plain text version of your email. Now, you can avoid those awkward followup emails about your missing attachments or wrong subject line.
Mailchimp: Mailchimp is one of the most well-known email marketing platforms. The tool allows users to create email campaigns, landing pages, and pop-up forms, as well as automate marketing emails, product recommendations and order notifications. Your plan is free just as long as you stay under 2000 contacts on your list.
Mautic: With Mautic, you’ll be able to catch potential clients, and unlike Hubspot, it’s an open source tool. Mautic automates the process of getting and nurturing leads generated from landing pages and forms, segments contacts, handles and sends workflow email, text messages, web notifications, social media monitoring. It can integrate with your CRM to make chopping and changing from platform to platform a thing of the past.
Flowlu: Avoid writing lengthy invoices. With Flowlu, invoicing is directly implemented into customer accounts. Flowlu is the CRM tool to use if you need to keep track of revenue and expenses. This all-in-one business platform allows up to two users to utilise cloud CRM, records and lead management, and agile project management.
Crystal: With Crystal, you can discover and predict relationships with clients instantly. Along with a free personality test, you can use its social media URL lookup tool to analyse and predict future relationships. You’ll be able to determine what comes naturally, energises, or drains someone, as well as how to speak to or meet with them.
Website creation:
WordPress: WordPress is one of the top content management systems for a reason. Beginners can get a free domain name in five minutes. Users also have the freedom to see who visits their website and from what region of the world. You can also choose from a selection of customisable design templates to personalise your website. It’s a platform worth investing in if you want to start small and build from there.
Data analysis:
DataBox: DataBox allows users to manage all their KPIs on one platform. Instead of spending time creating insights, you’ll be able to act on them right away. You can also mix and match metrics from different sources right on one data board to get a complete view of your performance at a glance.
Clicky: Clicky has many of the same features as Google Analytics, but it’s much less intimidating with a friendlier interface. At one simple glance, you can see where visitors came from and what device they were using at the time. Clicky’s free features include real time data, basic segmentation, API access, and widgets for a single site with less than 3,000 page views.
Open web analytics: It’s important to know who’s looking at your website, but don’t forget about the ‘how’. Open Web Analytics lets users analyse how people use their website and applications. It’s licensed under GPL and provides website owners easier ways to add web analytics on their sites. The system also comes with built-in-support for tracking websites made with popular CRMs.
Inspectlet: Eliminate the guesswork when analysing how users interact on your website. With its slogan, ‘Google Analytics tells you what, Inspectlet tells you why’ this marketing tool can check in with your audience like no other site. Inspectlet records videos of your site as if you’re sitting right next to your visitors. You’ll see every click and keypress with 1000 free recordings a month.
Project management:
Asana: If you’re looking to avoid office burnout, Asana might be the platform for you. Manage tasks and personal to-do-lists by collaborating with up to 15 teammates by mapping out deadlines for yourself and your colleagues. Ease the stress of project management in one download of its free version.
