interactive guide
25 Top Free & Low Cost Tools
Twenty-five top free and low cost tools to grow your digital sales with greater insight and execution, including tools for:
- Data & Intelligence
- User Experience
- Performance
- Email Marketing
- SEO
interactive guide
25 Top Free & Low Cost Tools
Twenty-five top free and low cost tools to grow your digital sales with greater insight and execution, including tools for:
- Data & Intelligence
- User Experience
- Performance
- Email Marketing
- SEO
part one
Data & Intelligence
1. Segment
Use: Collect all your data and store in one place with the ability to “activate”
Value: Consolidating your data enables synchronized experiences and a single customer view
2. Cyfe
Use: Dashboard Utility
Value: Enables easy access to all KPI’s that are vital to your business on a single log in
3. Similar Web
Use: Competitive Intelligence
Value: Enables your brand to benchmark channel performance and traffic ratios
4. Yandex Metrica
Use: Alternate analytical platform
Value: Additional tools beyond standard sampled data – see heatmap below
part two
User Experience
1. Conversion Calculator
Use: Quick modeling of revenue impact from UX optimization
Value: Defines the business case in template optimization, need to construct custom segments in GA
2. Usertesting.com
Use: Primary research based on constructed scenarios and actions
Value: Real consumer insight into presentation issues and friction points
3. Good UI
Use: Repository of UX testing data examples that are cultivated through the platform
Value: Assists in ideation and using pre-tested designs to key templates
4. Userlytics
Use: Self Service UX observation tool
Value: Provide the “why” behind the “what” and validate internal hypothesis on key page changes and perspectives
5. Hotjar
Use: Complete research tool for customer intelligence
Value: Has much of what other systems provide but also provides form analytics to isolate the depth of user interactivity within friction areas
6. Amazon Personalize
Use: AWS enables the ability to use Amazon technology to construct personalization modules
Value: Algorithmic flexibility complete with Amazon infrastructure make this a great option for mid market companies who wish to build their personalization stack
7.Imagify
Use: Simple solution to compress your image base modules
Value: Will help mobile rendering, overall page speed, and organic search placements due to faster load times
part three
Performance & Speed
1. Web Page Test
Use: Complete diagnostic tool for performance
Value: Waterfall diagrams and other tools enable exact locations of page “choke” and other issues
2. GT Metrix
Use: Secondary tool to compare against WebPageTest
Value: Provides further benchmarks and also integrates third party data (ex. Yslow)
3. Lighthouse
Use: Google’s performance tool
Value: Built into Chrome, provides deep intel across a variety of areas and checks against recent best practices (ex. Progressive Web Apps)
4. Observatory
Use: Mozilla’s security tool to help identify potential issues
Value: Provides free insight into vulnerable site components from a security perspective
5. Unused CSS
Use: Scans webpages to isolate non-essential CSS
Value: Gives the ability to download a “clean” CSS file to make your pages load faster
part four
Email Marketing
1. Email on Acid
Use: Ensuring that your emails look beautiful on any device type
Value: Drive email metric performance as more emails look perfect to your audience
2. Litmus
Use: Primary research based on constructed scenarios and actions
Value: Real consumer insight into presentation issues and friction points
3. Klaviyo
Use: Primary email platform
Value: Audience construction, API, and automation flows make Klaviyo our “go to” platform for small-mid market email marketing
part five
SEO
1. Content King
Use: SEO Intelligence into page footprint, conducted through daily crawls
Value: Provides the ability to monitor SEO performance at a macro level for your brand and to isolate execution areas for growth
2. Cloudflare Worker
Use: Making dynamic changes to your code using JS and service worker technology
Value: In situations in which platform modifications are challenging, this CDN driven approach can drive change in your website
3. Google Tag Manager
Use: Page level injection for SEO purposes of code mods, not from server side
Value: Last resort to implementing SEO changes but free and can work (see the example below)
4. Site Bulb
Use: SEO performance monitoring and trend identification. The data can be “repurposed”
Value: Intelligence and issue monitoring and resolution. Deep mix of parameters that matter for SEO within their crawler
5. SEO Minion
Use: Nifty chrome plug in to get quick SEO data (on-page, links, href lang, SERP preview)
Value: Time saver to assess page level code changes and rendering
6. SEM Rush
Use: SEO keyword tracking and competitive intelligence
Value: Deep variety of tools within the platform, one of the largest and most accurate databases of search keyword data (PPC & SEO)
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