You’re a tinkerer, an experimenter, a marketer with the chops to understand engineering and product. The kid that grew up playing with legos and somehow knew their way around a computer pretty intuitively.
Today, as a growth marketer, you’re in charge of driving traffic for your business, converting those visitors into customers, and finding new ways to make more money from every interaction. It’s a tough job, but the opportunity to experiment and constantly learn make it a worthwhile endeavor.
In today’s fast-moving business world, you’re only as good as the growth tools you use. And if you’ve seen the MarTech 5000 recently, you understand the massive amount of software that is at your disposal. How do you choose what tools are worth your time, and what’s simply noise?
We’ve put together a list of the 42 best growth hacking tools you need to stay ahead of your competition. They’ll help you get more traffic to your site, increase your conversion rates, improve LTV, and hit all the KPIs you’re tasked with improving.
Without further ado, here’s the list of the top growth hacking tools:
Best Growth Hacking Tools
1. Proof
Have you ever wanted to create a truly personalized experience for your visitors without bugging your engineers and spending hours getting campaigns set up? Our personalization software, Experiences, takes the pain out of launching a variety of experiments to boost your signups, demo registrations, MQLs, and more!
A few of the growth tools at your disposal include the ability to swap headlines and on-page assets, launch dynamic CTAs, create welcome back campaigns for existing customers, and adjust ads to match landing pages.
2. Pingdom
Today’s consumers are used to blazing fast internet speeds. Gone are the days of dial-up Internet and painstakingly slow connections…
With Pingdom, you can keep tabs on your highest-traffic pages, and regularly schedule a check-in to make sure that your pages aren’t being slowed down by unnecessary plug-ins or scripts.
3. Sumo List Builder
As a growth marketer, you’re tasked with driving traffic to your site and then making sure it converts. A sad reality is that despite all of your best efforts, 70 to 90 percent of the traffic to landing pages will bounce.
How do you control for that?
Sumo’s list building tool allows you to collect emails through 7 different types of popups and scroll boxes. It’s not overly intrusive, and it can guarantee that your hard-earned traffic isn’t wasted.
4. Beamer
When your team launches new features, updates, or special offers, your traditional approach is to send out a message to your list.
Rather than sending an outbound message, you can alert your customers of updates with a pop-out Notification from the sidebar. Installing Beamer is easy — you embed their code on your site and you can easily start displaying messages.
This is a great growth hacking tool for PMs and growth marketers looking to increase the utilization of newly rolled out product features. Rather than having to send a message each time a change is deployed, you can push out an in-app notification that delightfully alerts a visitor on-site.
5. OptInMonster
Optinmonster has built their entire business around conversion optimization tools — from exit-intent popups to welcome ads to floating conversion bars and more.
Over 700,000 websites use Optinmonster to turn traffic into leads, subscribers, and sales. Right when a visitor is about to bounce, you can trigger a splash screen to make a last ditch effort to collect their email.
And if a visitor isn’t coming back, this can be a great effort to make sure the visit to your site wasn’t useless.
6. Manychat
Manychat is a growth hacking software tool that allows you to easily create Facebook bots for marketing, e-commerce, and support.
It’s easy to set up a bot to respond to incoming Facebook messages — but that’s not all of the functionality available. You can also set up Manychat campaigns to broadcast messages to your subscribers. We used this technique to promote the launch of our podcast, Scale or Die, and we’ve seen higher engagement rate than we did from comparable email campaigns.
7. Five Second Test from Usability Hub
When a visitor comes to a landing page, you have only a few seconds to capture their attention and convince them to convert. How do you do this?
Create a page that’s easy for your visitors to quickly understand!
That’s easier to say than do. Five second test from Usability Hub gives you a platform to verify that the information you’re trying to convey to your visitors actually sticks with them. Definitely a great tool to keep in your growth hacking arsenal.
8. Hunter.io
Trying to find out the right person to contact at a company for a blog pitch? Need a contact that you think could be a match for your sales email?
Hunter helps you easily identify the email address you need within a matter of seconds. And if it doesn’t know the exact email of who you’re looking for, it provides the most common pattern at that company (i.e. firstname@company.com).
9. Fiverr
You’ve got a lot on your plate — and as a growth practitioner, it’s important to value your time. Most projects you’ll work should be approached with the effort/impact grid. With that framework, you evaluate the amount of effort required to accomplish a task with the amount of impact that action can have in affecting your KPIs.
With that in mind, outsourcing with Fiverr can be a great way to move certain off of your plate — or to automate systems that you’ve proved out and templatized.
10. Zapier
Ever wanted to send a Stripe transaction to a slack channel? Wanted an email fired whenever someone books time on your Google calendar?
With Zapier, you can connect nearly any major service (1500+ connections) to nearly any other service on the platform. It’s wildly powerful and it makes connections that you might not have ever imagined possible.
11. CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg is a heatmap and A/B testing platform from Neil Patel, the SEO mastermind. With their set of tools, you can quickly diagnose and test what works — and more importantly, what doesn’t work on a page.
It’s less powerful than Optimizely and VWO, but the barrier to getting started is also slightly lower.
12. Typeform
Typeform allows you to quickly launch well-designed forms and surveys to collect information from your visitors. You can easily add Typeforms into pages on your site — and use them to gather information from NPS to product feedback and beyond!
What I appreciate most about this product is the level to which they hold design to in their product. Their software product is not only functional but also well-designed in every instance.
13. Proof Notifications
In the 1984 book Influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini identified the 6 principles of persuasion. Social proof, one of the six concepts he mentioned in that book, is the social phenomena that our actions are influenced by the actions of others.
It’s why we wait in line for that cool bar, trek across town for the best new taco, and buy the same things as our friends. Social proof used to only exist in the physical world… until recently.
With our social proof notification software, you can show activity that’s happening on your site to convince new visitors to convert. Display messages such as “John recently signed up for a Demo” or “100 marketers are looking at this page.” It’s a great growth hack utilized by 20,000+ websites across the web.
14. HubSpot
If there’s a software I may not be able to live without, it’s Hubspot. Since we run our CRM, marketing automation, and email marketing all through their software, I’m logging into their tool multiple times a day.
Having so many functions in one location is great — it limits the number of touchpoints we have to think about and it makes getting a more robust picture of leads easier. Plus, their blog provides great content around everything related to inbound marketing.
15. Mailshake
Mailshake is a cold email outreach tool designed for sales teams, PR agencies, and link builders. With the software, you’re able to quickly send personalized and automated emails for lead generation, relationship building, and content promotion.
Another great thing about Mailshake is that you don’t even have to reinvent the wheel. This growth hacking tool comes preloaded with outreach templates that you can quickly drop into campaigns.
16. Appcues
As a growth marketer, you know that your job does not end at customer acquisition. You’re also charged with activation and retention. Appcues helps with that exact part of your job.
By installing their script on your site, you can add experience layers to your product such as user onboarding flows, feature announcements, and NPS surveys.
17. Amplitude
You’re only as good as your data. And while you may be collecting data at several spots on your site, in your marketing campaigns, and in your application — it’s worthless unless you can gather insights from it.
Amplitude solves that issue by giving you the growth tools to set product strategy, improve user engagement, drive revenue, and optimize for conversions.
18. Optimizely
Optimizely is the world’s leading experimentation engine — empowering growth and product teams to run split tests to their audiences. With their platform, you can ideate on ideas to improve a KPI, run experiments to verify your hypothesis, implement changes, and repeat.
Their testing engine is utilized by marketing team at large companies ranging from IBM to American Express and Ebay.
19. VWO
VWO is another enterprise-grade solution that can help growth marketers run A/B tests and perform conversion rate experiments on their sites.
Over 4500 enterprise brands such as eBay, Target, and Virgin utilize their software suite to gain important user insights and execute tests.
20. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a search tool that can help you gauge what content performs the best for a topic or a company. You simply enter your search query, and Buzzsumo returns the top performing posts for that query — including the number of Facebook engagements, Twitter shares, Pinterest shares, and Reddit Links.
It also provides an Evergreen score and a Total engagement metric to help you gauge whether or not to produce an article or page around a topic. Definitely take a look at this before you start writing any sort of content.
21. Unsplash
It’s a pain having to dish out hundreds of dollars a month to Getty or Shutterstock for photos that look well, boring…
The reality of growth marketing is that while you wish you could avoid stock photos, it’s a necessity at times. You have to put a photo as the cover photo for a new blog post on NPS, you might need a picture of a smiling customer to run as a variant on a Facebook ad, or you might want to make your landing pages pop with interesting pictures of customer avatars.
That’s where Unsplash comes in. This site provides user submitted, high-quality stock photos that actually don’t look like stock photos. It’s a game changer.
22. Segment
Collecting all of your data in one place — it’s easier said than done.
You’re likely collecting and processing events from form completions on landing pages housed on Unbounce to trial signups in your own app. Then you’re storing data in your Hubspot CRM to send messages to customers across the world.
How do you make sure everything lines up? Segment helps you clean, collect, and control your customer data.
23. Clearbit
Clearbit is a customer data engine that helps you enrich information about your visitors to more accurately identify their wants and needs.
By providing their API with an IP or email address, you can gather a whole host of demographic data and firmographic data around a business. And the best part?
Clearbit can pipe all this data to your site all in real-time.
24. Wistia
Video is the future of marketing — you’re already seeing this trend play true with an increased reliance on video for landing pages, Facebook ads, and for everything related to online content.
As a growth hacker, there are times you might want to embed a video on your site or in your product and use it as a lead capture. YouTube and Vimeo allow you to embed videos on your site, but when it comes to conversion and customization, you’re straight out of luck.
Wistia provides the functionality a marketer needs from video hosting such as the ability to A/B test, add CTAs, gate video with an email address, collect heatmaps, and oh so much more!
25. Customer.io
Customer.io is an email automation messaging platform that allows you to send targeted emails, push notifications, and SMS messages to your customers.
It’s a powerful automation tool but it has an easy-to-use segment builder, a rules-based workflow builder, and a drag-and-drop HTML editor.
26. Hotjar
Hotjar provides a whole host of growth tools that can help a growth marketer understand quantitative and qualitative insights about how users are using a product. Their tools include heatmaps, session recordings, conversion funnels, surveys, and feedback polls.
All of these tools are important as you identify issues, gather data, analyze data, and create a hypothesis for any experiment you’re running.
27. Profitwell
Profitwell provides a series of growth tools to track the most important metrics — from expansion MRR to run rate and beyond. Plus, with their churn reduction tool, revenue recognition software, and pricing audit tools — you can pull a whole series of levers that lead to greater revenue for your company.
28. Chartmogul
Chartmogul is another software tool used by SaaS businesses to track their subscription metrics. It has similar functionality to Profitwell and Baremetrics — but one of their most unique features is the inclusion of a developer’s hub.
With that, you’re able to use Chartmogul’s API to push, pull, and enrich data.
29. Churn Buster
Churn Buster is a dunning tool that can greatly help reduce churn at your business. With their tool, you can set up custom retries, dunning emails, subscription reactivations, and more! It puts the tools you wish your payment processor would give you into your hands.
With their tools — over $1,000,000,000 in recurring payments has been safeguarded. Not too shabby…
30. Buffer
As a growth marketer, scheduling social media posts isn’t a direct part of your job. But I’d anticipate that you’re the person on the team that everyone seeks out for process efficiencies. Plus, if you’re tasked with SEO and paid campaigns, you’re going to need content posted organically on social.
Buffer is the tool that alleviates all your social media woes. Rather than having to manually schedule posts across random times, Buffer can automate a calendar to share at the perfect time for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and more.
Just use Buffer, trust me…
31. Ahrefs
In terms of backlink and SEO research tools, Ahrefs is the industry standard. It’s the best proxy for not only what you should write about — but about what backlinks are pointing to certain pages, how your competitors are ranking, and the traffic value of all of your marketing efforts.
This tool, along with Google Search Console and SEMRush, should be an important part of your growth stack.
32. Iconomonstr
As a growth marketer, the chances that you’ll have to throw together a landing page without engineering and design is pretty high. Plus, the ability to be flexible, creative, and quickly react to changes thrown at you is imperative.
Iconomonstr provides free, simple icons that you can drop into sketch or a mockup to quickly ship designs.
33. Clearbrain
Clearbrain is analytics software that is trusted by the growth teams at companies such as Instacart, Eventbrite, and Invision. They offer three main growth tools: predictive segmentation, automated insights, and an incrementality engine.
With predictive segmentation, you’re able to forecast which groups have the highest intent to convert or churn. With automated insights, the software automatically brings the most striking user data to the top. And with the incrementality engine, you can test whether the insights surfaced by Clearbrain actually play true for a wider audience base.
34. Datanyze
Ever had a lead, but wondered if the prospect actually uses the tools your software integrates with? That’s exactly the problem Datanyze can help solve.
With their API, you can quickly identify the tech stack of a lead — and use that qualify, personalize, and segment.
35. Intercom
Intercom is the leader in customer messaging. And it’s important to note: they aren’t solely a live chat solution anymore.
With Intercom, you can qualify leads, launch chatbots, send targeted audience onboarding messages, and run your help center. Their many growth hacking tools are an essential part of our stack — and they offer a bunch of testing and optimization features that growth marketers rely on.
36. Drift
Drift pioneered the concept of conversation marketing — and in just a few short years they’ve grown to 100,000+ customers in a variety of industries.
Their bots are designed to help sales teams do everything they need to convert traffic on site. That includes meeting scheduling, account based marketing campaigns, email sequences, and videos.
37. Fullstory
Fullstory is a software tool that helps you record user sessions, analyze those sessions, and search search for important moments.
It’s a key tool that growth hackers can utilize in order to better understand the actions that are good, bad, and surprising while a visitor is on-site or in-app.
38. Stripe
Without Stripe, Internet commerce would be years behind where they are today. Stripe provides an API and functionality for any type of business to start processing online payments.
Millions of companies — from small businesses to enterprises — across the world rely on Stripe — and I’m pretty confident most of you are already using their product somewhere on your site. If you’re not, you’re missing out.
39. Webflow
Webflow provides a platform where you can quickly drag and drop elements on a page — plus change any copy or element — all without the need for a developer. The widespread adoption of Webflow has completely changed how marketing departments function.
And with their tools, you can iterate and launch pages to convert your traffic.
40. Google Tag Manager
Even if you’re technical, there will come a time when you need to launch a script on a page, but you lack the ability to quickly do it. Even merge requests can take time.
With Google Tag Manager, you have the solution of your dreams. GTM, as it’s known for short, only has to be installed on your site once. Then, from their easy to use panel, you can add any scripts and pixels that you want to fire on a page.
Plus, if you make any mistakes while editing your site, you can quickly revert to previous versions.
41. Google Optimize
We mentioned Proof, VWO, and Optimizely earlier in this post. But if you’re just getting started with testing, Google Optimize can be a great solution for testing.
It provides an easy to use A/B testing platform out of the box. And the best part about the whole thing? It’s free to use.
42. Automate.io
Ever wanted to automatically send the leads you collect from Facebook ads directly to Mailchimp, without the manual hassle of downloading and uploading files? What about saving all your Shopify orders as a database in Google Sheets?
With Automate.io, you can connect major business services link Salesforce, Shopify, Paypal, Gmail to automate marketing, sales, and business processes. Thousands of marketers from Google, Uber, Intel utilize their services to save time.
Growth hacking is about always learning
There you have it, 42 of our favorite growth hacking software tools. There are a ton of other awesome software that could have made this list, and we’d be remiss if we called this a complete list.
But these are some of the tools that we can’t imagine not using on a site. There will always be new companies popping up, and as a growth hacker, you know the importance of testing out the newest software.
If you have any suggestions for a tool that you think should be included here, leave a comment below! We’d love to hear your thoughts.
