The 12 Best Lead Generation Tools and Software
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Software and tools are the lifeblood of marketers. The better the tools, the more you can accomplish in a day. Of course, you have to know how to use them, but I’ll leave that part to you. What I’m here for today is telling you which tools are top-tier for all kinds of lead generation. Let’s get started; there’s a lot to cover.
1. AdEspresso
Most of your leads will come from your landing pages, but you need good ads to get people to your landing pages in a mindset that will encourage conversion. One of the best PPC engines out there is Facebook, and one of the best tools for optimizing Facebook campaigns is AdEspresso. Elements of their tools have been listed in our great tools lists, but if you want the whole thing, you’re going to want to go straight to the source.
If there’s one flaw with AdEspresso, it’s that it’s only limited to Facebook and Instagram ads. You can’t run Twitter ads with it, nor can you run Google Ads. However, they did just form a partnership with Hootsuite, which makes them even more powerful. Check them out and give them a month or two, and I guarantee you’ll see some excellent results.
2. Unbounce
If you’re setting up a dedicated ads system to send people to your landing pages, you want to make sure your landing pages are up to snuff. Unbounce is a tool for optimizing landing pages. It won’t replace a good education on landing page optimization, so you should still read up on how to optimize, but it will give you all the tools necessary to make those optimizations.
Foremost among those tools is the landing page split testing engine. You can create multiple versions of a landing page, and even dramatically different landing pages, and test them against one another with traffic from a single source. Eliminate variables for good, accurate testing and figure out how to best capture leads from your traffic.
3. PadiAct
Not everyone who visits your site comes to it via a landing page from an ad. Often they come from social media shares or blog post links on other sites, and the pages they land on aren’t landing pages. You still want to capture those leads, but you don’t want to drive away existing users by bugging them with indiscriminate actions like chat pop-ups or huge banner ads.
PadiAct is one of many possible pop-over content calls to action, but they have a behavioral engine attached. They monitor the kinds of people who sign up for your site, and they start to identify new people who can fall into that category. For example, if they find that new users who stick around long enough to visit three different content pages are most likely to convert if given the chance, they’ll give them a chance with a pop-over on that third page. It adds a lot of finesse over the traditional exit intent pop-over and can capture a ton of new leads.
4. Qualaroo
Optimization can only do so much if you don’t have the information you need to know how to optimize. Without information, you’re just throwing ideas at the wall and hoping something has a positive effect. What if you could reach out to the people visiting your site and get some information about what their intent was, whether or not they solved it, and if they have any feedback about the conversion process?
Qualaroo does exactly that. They put a little pop-up in the corner of your screen, on certain specific pages, that allows you to ask questions of the user. Think of it like a micro-survey that appears when you want it to for specific segments of users. Put it on your blog to ask about content satisfaction. Put it on your mailing list confirmation page to ask what got them to convert. Put it in your sales process to ask if they have any concerns.
5. Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach is a tool made for outreach and influencer marketing. It’s a keyword-powered mass scraper that scours the internet for bloggers writing about the keyword you specify. When it finds a blog, it harvests information about it, like social shares, traffic estimates, key authors, and contact information. You can then easily sort and filter through this information to identify potential prospects for links, networking, guest posting, and other forms of outreach.
On top of that, it has a Chrome extension that can harvest information on the fly from sites you visit, and give you at-a-glance statistics about the site, including ways to contact them right away if you so desire. There’s also a template-based contact engine that helps you formulate the perfect contact messages to hook up with these powerful influencers.
6. Contactually
Getting leads is one thing, but you also need to follow them up. It can be pretty easy to let your inbox become a mess and lose track of ongoing conversations. Have you talked to X before? Were they receptive or negative to your advances? Do you have connections you can exploit? You don’t want to embarrass yourself sending a cold pitch to someone you know, and you don’t want to let conversation threads peter out without resolution.
Contactually is a CRM and contact management system that helps you keep track of all of your relationships, whether they’re with leads, with customer service issues, with partners, or with influencers. It’s very quick and easy to integrate with whatever system you’re currently running, and you’d be surprised how much more easily you can take advantage of your existing relationships.
7. Wishpond
Now we’re getting into more generalized tools and suites of plugins you can use for a wide variety of effects. Wishpond has a lot of different tools they put at your disposal. All of them tie into lead generation in some way. They have an app for running contests on your site and on social media. They have drip campaigns for email management and mailing list onboarding. They have pop-over engines. They have a landing page engine and a form generator. All of it then ties into they overall lead management back-end, which helps you keep track of your leads and follow up on them without undue delay.
8. Intercom
Qualaroo is one way to get information out of the people browsing your site, and Intercom is another. Intercom is a more interactive means of talking to your customers, because it’s just that; talking to your customers.
How to Improve the Quality and Value of Your Leads Possibly the number one most common complaint…
It’s a live chat program that pops up an automated introductory message after a certain amount of time spent on the site. If the user decides that yes, they do want to answer you or ask you a question, they can type and send a message, which is then picked up by an agent on the other side. The live chat connection is made and allows the customer to ask what they want, and you can solve their issues without ever roping them into email or phone calls. On top of that, Intercom integrates with the rest of your communications and centralizes it all in one platform for easy cross-method communications.
9. ScrapeBox
Called the Swiss Army Knife of SEO, ScrapeBox is one of those nuclear option tools that delivers an absolute ton of information and has a wide range of functionality, and is absolutely impenetrable if you don’t read up on how to use it.
ScrapeBox is a great tool for harvesting immense amounts of information, either about a single site or about thousands of sites at a time. You can use it for keyword research, for finding expired domains, for link prospecting, for guest post submission opportunities, for comment hunting, and a whole lot else besides. In fact, it’s so broad and far-reaching that just reading this guide can take you an afternoon. Plus, it’s a one-time purchase that only costs you $100, and you can usually find discount codes if you’re willing to give someone an affiliate click.
10. Lead Forensics
Have you ever wished you could reach out to the people who visited and left, to ask them about their interest and why they didn’t convert or fill out a lead form right away? With Lead Forensics, you can. They monitor your site and cross-reference the IP address with the locations of known businesses. You can see what brands are discovering your site and you can research them on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Figure out who their marketing or sales director is, give them a call, and you have an instant lead.
Obviously, this is aimed primarily at B2B brands, since it’s difficult to stalk individual users based on their IP address. If you’re in the right niche, this can get you a lot more leads, like cold calling on steroids.
11. Prezly
If you’re in a niche where you often develop and release new products or services, you’re probably familiar with sending out press releases for hype and exposure. You’re also painfully aware that a huge percentage of those press releases are ignored and fall on deaf ears. Prezly allows you to form connections with the people who publish your press releases.
You can create what is effectively a digital newsroom, where you can invite your publishers to see your press releases live when you make them. You can then track engagements and information about your publishers, to form closer relationships and more reliable communications. If press releases are part of your marketing strategy, this can really be a game changer.
12. ReferralCandy
Referral Candy is a site plugin that adds a user referral system to your site and store. If you want to get more people to sign up for your service, join your mailing list, or buy your products, this is one excellent way to do it. Users who visit and become customers are given a referral code they can send to a friend. If the friend uses it, the referrer gets a coupon to your store, of a value of your choice. It’s a pretty flexible engine, and it can be used in multiple ways for different sites.
The only downside to Referral Candy is the pricing model. They have different tiers of plan and each one has both a flat monthly fee and a percentage of referral sales as a pricing model. However, you don’t get to choose; they charge you for whichever one is higher. This means it can eat into your profits significantly if you kick into high gear for a month and trigger the percentage unexpectedly.
Honorable Mention: GSA Email Spider
This last entry on the list isn’t part of the main list, for one reason: the company that makes it doesn’t seem to make it any more.
GSA is an interesting company. They’re German, the GSA standing for “Gesellschaft für Softwareentwickling und Analytik” which roughly translates as Company for Software Development and Analysis. They’re also hilariously amoral compared to many other companies developing tools for marketing and analytics. They have security tools for in-home webcam monitoring. They have PC speedup tools that clean up your startup items on Windows. They have a backup manager to help you back up your local files. Yet at the same time, they have mass spam submission tools, website scrapers, and tools to download movie clips from websites completely disregarding copy protection.
Most people know GSA for their search engine spider, which crawls a site and pulls all sorts of information. They also have a mass backlink creator that can “produce over 1000 new links within a couple of minutes.” There’s also a proxy server scraper that can build you a proxy list of public proxies.
Their Email Spider was a fantastic tool for harvesting data. You could plug in a URL or even just a keyword, and it would run web searches for that keyword, then scrape every site that comes up for email and phone number information. This would make it easy to build a list of possible places to “cold call” or submit guest post pitches to, or whatever other use you wanted.
However, their site no longer lists the email spider as a product, and most references to it are from 2014. There are download links scattered across the web, but I’m not going to link to them, because I can’t verify if they’re legitimate copies, demos, spyware-infused hacks, or stolen and cracked copies.
That said, with all of the above tools, you should have an easy time with your lead generation, outreach, and submission even without GSA. Plus, you can explore their other tools and see if any of them are useful. Who knows, maybe you really want a tool to visualize your gene map.
Written by James Parsons
Hey James! Nice list and thanks for mentioning NinjaOutreach 🙂
Thanks james . With these tools my lead gen team can work with ease and efficiency .
Thanks for sharing this list of lead gen softwares. Its useful in better generation of leads to my business.