Working smart with the right marketing tools is so much better than working hard.
If you’ve ever been stuck doing tedious manual work or feel like you need a way to improve the quality of your work, then check out this guide. Chances are there’s already a marketing tool or app out there that automates or solves your issue.
Even better, most of these tools are freemium, meaning they have a free version that you can use if you accept a few limitations.
To help you out, we’ve prepared a huge list of free marketing tools that we use or have used in the past.
The tools that made the list where picked based on 4 criterias:
- Have a free plan
- Improve or automate marketing tasks
- Don’t need developer or designer help
- We’ve used it in the past
Email marketing tools
While people are fast to give email marketing a bad rep, it’s still one the most reliable channels of connecting to your audience.
Email creation
First off, you need a tool through which you can create email campaigns. Things you need to look out for when choosing a free version are the contact and email send limitations.
Mailchimp
If you’ve ever done any digital marketing, there’s a 98% chance you’ve heard about Mailchimp. Why? Because it’s really great, even on the free plan. With a 2,000 contacts limit and unlimited email sends, it’s easily the best free email marketing tool on the market. It’s a whole suite, meaning you probably won’t need any other tool to get the job done.
Hubspot
Did you know that Hubspot invented a branch of digital marketing? It’s called inbound marketing. If you’re not a fan of Mailchimp, Hubspot is a step up. The whole platform offers much more functionality than the message-sending monkey, and is widely used as a CRM by small-to-medium sized companies. Also check out their courses and blog!
Email testing
Before sending a campaign to your audience, it’s a smart idea to test the email. You could just send a preview to your Gmail, but that does not cover all bases. Inboxes are different, and even more so based on the operating system they’re on. Some just don’t like getting nicely-designed campaigns (I’m looking at you, Outlook).
Mailinator
Mailinator is a public inbox. You can create an email without having to create an account, and start getting messages sent to it. A practical way if you’re testing many emails and wish to spare your Gmail. Note that some tools automatically consider any @mailinator addresses as spam. Also note that once created, the inbox of the address can be accessed by anyone – it’s open.
Htmlemailcheck
The spam folder is not your friend. Email inboxes rate the quality of the email based on a few criterias, one of them being the quality of the HTML code. This tool checks your email’s code and returns information about the quality of the email. Post your HTML code inside, and let it work it’s magic. Most email creators have clean codes, but if you’re either coding an email design from scratch or using a 3rd party email designer, use this tool.
Mail-tester
Another spam checker, but this one checks your domain’s trustworthiness. If your domain has been flagged as not trustworthy at any point, Mail-tester will tell you. It’s very easy to use – just send a test to the address it generates and check your score.
Wordcounter
Subject lines have the most impact on open rates. You’re probably receiving daily emails on your phone or laptop – notice how some subject lines have the dreaded “…” at the end? That happens when the subject line is too long and leads to lower open rates.
The breakpoints for avoiding clipping (yes, there is an official word for it) vary from inbox to inbox. To be 100% safe, keep your subject line to less than 40 characters.
SubjectLine
This tool is a good start if you’re new to email marketing. Basically, it evaluates your subject line based on a list of factors such as trigger words, persuasion techniques, length, and a few others. I don’t use this tool anymore, but it definitely helped me when I started out. Remember, each audience is different. While some rules are universally true, not every “hack” or best practice works on your list.
Email design
If you want great results out of your emails, you can’t overlook design. Email design makes your message more attractive and enjoyable to read. Most email creation tools have templates and their own drag-and-drop design editor inside, but if you’re looking for extra juice or inspiration, check out the following tools.
BeeFree
BeeFree is probably the most used 3rd party email design tool on the market. While tools like Canva offer this as well, BeeFree is specifically designed for emails. Its free plan meets most needs, and it’s really easy to use. Start with a template, edit it and export the HTML code into your email platform.
BeeFree is great, but I highly recommend that you use Htmlemailcheck alongside it. I’ve run in cases where the generated code had unnecessary “baggage” which slows down the loading speed of the email.
Really Good Emails
Ever feel uninspired when starting a new email campaign? Then you must check Really Good Emails. The platform collects screenshots of really good emails and lets you sort through them based on your needs. They have everything you would ever need, from seasonal campaigns to onboarding emails. It’s by far the best email inspiration tool I’ve ever used.
They also used to have a yearly convention and great T-Shirts, so if you’re an email geek, go check it out.
Hubspot email signature generator
Remember Hubspot from a few lines above? They offer lots of free tools and templates for marketing. If you’re looking to make your email signature look pro, then use this generator. Just put in the required info and copy the code at the end into your email platform. Easy. I’ve made my personal Gmail signature with it as well.
Content & Copywriting
Content marketing is a large branch of digital marketing that includes a lot of areas. In this list, we’re focusing mostly on article writing, which includes copywriting. Take a look at our free content marketing tool recommendations below.
Blogging platforms
If you’re looking to start your own blog, these tools are a great place to start. They’re easy to use and meet mostly all needs you might have.
Medium
Maybe you’re not ready for your own blog just yet, but want to start writing content for
practice. Medium is a great place to start. Think of it as your own LinkedIn page, but instead of posts, you publish articles. You can find loads of other people that write awesome articles on Medium, so the inspiration is plentiful. The downside of it is that you can’t customize your page that much, compared to a personal blog.
WordPress
It’s highly probable that you’ve heard of WordPress by now. Most blogs that exist on the internet are made through WordPress, and for good reason – it’s easy and powerful. You can choose templates that you like, customize them and get the blog rolling in just a few hours.
Besides that, WordPress integrations are awesome. You have everything you need inside it. We highly recommend WordPress for creating a blog.
Keyword tools
Keyword and search platforms should be in your content marketing tools arsenal. If you’re looking for inspiration on what hot topics to write on, or want to see what your competitors target, here is a list of keyword tools that we recommend:
Google Trends
Google trends is a basic place to start looking at. Basically, Google trends show search volumes for keywords that you want, based on regions.
Basic questions like “are people in my country searching for X” can be answered here. Besides that, you can see a lot of charts about search trend changes, top 10 keywords searched for in the latest period, etc. While it’s very dumbed down compared to other tools, if you’re just looking for inspiration, then give it a try.
Google Alerts
This tool is a bit of a stretch to make the content marketing list. We use it for content marketing ideas, so it can be useful. What is it? Google Alerts is a service that sends you a notification whenever a keyword you target is being mentioned on the web, with the links to the mention. Mostly used for PR purposes, it’s awesome to keep track of news regarding a subject, and may lead to interesting finds which you can write about.
Bonus geekiness points if you add your name in to see whenever it’s being mentioned on the web 😀
Search by sites
Not a tool, but rather a Google search hack. Useful if you want to search for a specific keyword on a specific website directly from the search box. Use this formula inside the search box (replace the names) “site:specificsite(dot)com” searchword
AnswerThePublic
Google values sites that provide answers to people’s questions. Use AnswerThePublic to actually find what questions people search for regarding a specific keyword. Type in the keyword, and you can see all the grammatical forms that word is being used in a question.
These are long-tailed keywords that usually have low competition and help out greatly in SEO. The only downside of the tools is that you have a limited number of searches on the Free plan.
AlsoAsked
Very similar to AnswerThePublic, AlsoAsked is a free tool that shows variations of searches starting from a keyword you enter. For example, if you input “conversion rate”, AlsoAsked will show you the most used phrases in which that keyword is present.
Ubersuggest
While we’re not fans of Neil Patel at all, but this tool developed by his team is pretty good. It’s an SEO tool used to see search volumes and easiness of ranking on it, as well as top-performing links with that keyword. There’s much more functionality under the hood, explore it and see what helps you out.
SpyFu
We love SpyFu for one reason – stalking out the competition. Even on the free plan, just enter your competitor’s domain and you get a list of keywords they rank on, their top competitors in terms of search battle, traffic, etc. Really awesome if you’re looking to battle it out, SEO style.
Content inspiration
Every marketer hits an inspiration block from time to time. When it does happen, there are tools out there that help out. Here are our recommendations to get your writing juice engaged.
Blog Ideas Generator by Hubspot
This tool is helpful. We’ve used it a few times early in our careers to generate ideas for articles. Add a keyword you want to be the topic of your article, hit generate and you’ll receive a week’s worth of ideas for blog articles. Basically, the tool uses that keyword to generate an article headline that will structure your article – stuff like “top 7 news about X this month”.
The downside is that it only generates the headline – you still need to write it.
Quora & Reddit
I’ve bundled these two together since they are more or less the same for the purposes of this review. Both Quora and Reddit are large forums. People ask questions or post stuff on different subjects, which if you follow constantly, will generate ideas for content. Quora especially is great since you can find questions people have – use them for good SEO.
Feedly
Marketers usually are big newsreaders. Especially if you’re into content – you need to read content in order to know how to write it. If you’re used to opening your laptop in the morning and opening 5 tabs of news websites, that’s when Feedly comes in to help. It’s a news feed, which using AI, filters out only news that you might like, based on AI magic.
Think of it as an improved RSS feed. Choose which publications to follow and get a custom feed of highly relevant content.
Exploding topics
Through exploding topics you can find, well…topics that have exploded. This tool analyzes search trends and shows trend growth based on search volumes. Use it to get on top of hot topics and tap into that good traffic. The free plan is enough for starters, just browse topics from different categories, and try PRO after you’ve gotten some value out of it.
Copywriting tools
Great copywriting is an art. To help writers create this art, there are free copywriting tools out there that let you focus on the creative juices instead of the nitty-gritty stuff. We’ve made a list of such tools that help us out a lot when copywriting.
Grammarly
There’s a high chance that you’ve seen Grammarly’s YouTube ad already at one point. What does it do? This tool helps you write correctly all over the web. It’s a spell checker that you can add as an extension to your Chrome browser. It will read all of your text and detect grammar errors while suggesting the correct version.
Yes, there are other spell checkers out there, but Grammarly shines because of two factors: it’s permanently present to help you, and it’s super clean. If you’re constantly writing, I strongly suggest you buy the pro version. It analyzes sentence structures, readability, and tone besides the core feature. Also, it’s not expensive.
Hemingway
Hemmingway is very similar to Grammarly, better in some areas while weaker in others. Through an online editor (or desktop version of it), enter your text and it will determine the readability of the text. It then shows the areas that are hard to read, such as too many adverbs, too much use of passive voice, and run-on sentences.
The downside of Hemmingway is that it’s not present where you need it, since it requires your text input inside the editor. They don’t have a Chrome extension either. We use Grammarly for grammar purposes and Hemmingway for finesse.
Tone Analyzer
It’s easy to get lost in technical details while writing and lose sight of the text’s vibe. With this intuitively-named tool, you can check your text’s tone based on emotional attributes. Tone Analyzer takes each sentence and checks, based on specific wording if your text is angry, joyful, fearful, or confident.
It also checks if you’re sounding very analytical or undecided, which is great to get that extra opinion of what emotional message your copy sends.
Raise your hand if you’re sick of hearing any of these phrases: marketing is done right, content is king, keep calm and [insert here action] 🙋♂️
People are tired of hearing the same joke or phrase constantly, and will definitely be turned off by it instead. Take that smart sounding phrase that you’ve crafted and run it through Cliche Finder first to avoid turning off your audience.
Snippet
To write well, you need to read a lot. Writing creativity comes from having a large collection of content read inside your head. Sometimes though, the memory is unreliable – that’s where Snippet comes in.
Snippet is a Chrome extension that lets you save pieces of text that you’ve found interesting. You can then organize these and revisit them later when you need them. Think of it like an online notebook, helpful all around.
Content creation tools
After doing research, finding inspiration, and planning your content, the time comes to actually create it. With the free content creation tools, you can whip up professional-looking pieces of content with ease.
As a disclaimer, since content refers to a vast collection of online assets, I’m going to limit the list to content that can help your blog articles shine.
Infogram
Some information is better off communicated visually. Especially true for large chunks of data that you want to show off. Instead of creating an excel table, create an infographic. It’s a good piece of content that can be used on social media as well. Infogram is a tool through which you can do that easily, and they have tons of templates to start from.
Wordclouds
Another tool that helps in visually representing your ideas, especially user research, are word clouds. In case you’ve never seen one before, think of it as many words clumped together. The words that repeat the most from your input will be larger, standing out – this way, you see which words repeat the most, and form a pattern.
Loom
In the age in which video content is king, Loom is there to help you deliver it. With Loom, you can do screen capture videos, really good for when creating a webinar for example. What’s more, you can see where people reacted during the video.
Conversion rate optimization
Why invest in more traffic when you can just convert your current one into more customers? CRO is great for getting more bang for your ad bucks. Here are some great CRO tools that we recommend.
Session and heatmap recording tools
Besides good data, doing CRO requires context for that information. You may have a high bounce rate, but why? Heatmaps and session recordings are awesome at delivering that context. You can see what each page visitor did on your page, so you can easily correlate quantitative data with reason.
HotJar
We love Hotjar. Simply put, they are the easiest to use heatmap tools that we’ve used. With HotJar, you can also run surveys that trigger based on user activity on the page. Also, check out their blog, it has great content on it!
Inspectlet
If you’re just looking for session recording tools, Inspectlet should be on your radar. It’s easy to implement and has high limits on the free plan, which puts it above HotJar for this feature strictly.
Form builders
People usually interact with your online business through forms. Whether it’s a checkout form, newsletter subscription form or, simply, a survey you are running, having an easy to use tool which gets the job done is important. Here are our choices.
123FormBuilder
Create surveys and forms for any need, free. This is our go-to form builder, as it’s the most versatile platform. We’re also biased towards it since we’re 123FormBuilder alumni.
Typeform
A more design-oriented form builder, Typeform makes the form completing experience feel like running water and calm music on a warm, autumn day.
User research tools
User research is a great way to add context to your analytical data. Through the tools below, you can have real people use your product/website and see their reactions and comments on the way they are designed.
Usabilityhub
Five-second tests let you see the real impression people have of your website, by showing them a page for 5 seconds and following up with questions. Definitely good if you’re planning on investing heavily in a paid campaign with a landing page.
Usertesting
User testing is more complete in the sense that you can screen users better and give them more complex tests. Usually good if you’re trying to see UX issues, such as people not finding features fast enough or not knowing how to use your product altogether.
Unfortunately, there is no free plan for it, but you can buy individual tests to have a “trial” of sorts.
A/B testing tools
Most people think of A/B testing when they hear CRO, and for good reason – it plays a huge role in discovering what boosts conversion. To run A/B tests, you need tools that can technically handle multiple page variations, and help you determine the crucial statistical aspects of test validity. Here are our picks.
Google Optimize
While most A/B testing tools are paid (or have a very limited trial), Google Optimize has a free plan. You can run some basic tests with it, which might be enough if you have a pretty basic website. Fairly easy to use as well, we recommend starting with Optimize if you want to test CRO waters before going in deeper.
CXL Test Calculator
The great people over at CXL created an A/B calculator to help everyone run better tests. Remember, it’s easy to be misled by an A/B test. Always make sure you have the right sample size and are running it for the required duration. Open up this calculator before starting your experiment!
Hypothesis Kit
If you want to run a clean CRO program, you need to be organized. One important way to do this is to actually have hypotheses before testing.
This will standardize your current and future experiments and will help you clearly see what you were testing and based on what assumptions. Craig Sullivan created this formula to make hypothesis development easier, check it out.
Analytics tools
Data should be the central point of your CRO program. Without it, you’re fishing in the dark and running on presumptions that, most of the time, is not going to work out. Here are the main analytics tools which we recommend.
Google Analytics
You’ve probably heard and even saw screenshots of the famous Google Analytics before. It’s the bread and butter of web data for your website. You can see most of the stuff which you need to shape your experiment right here. Also, it’s totally free. Thank you, Google.
Amplitude
A step further than GA, Amplitude is an analytics platform that has more features, better tracking, and overall usability. If data is an important aspect of growing your online business, then consider trying Amplitude. It has a free plan which matches most of what GA offers.
Inner Trends
Next in line for more advanced analytics is Innertrends. Innertrends is awesome because it’s focused on answering your questions. You can actually type in questions like “Which users complete the checkout process the most at 10pm?”, and it will provide an answer based on data collected.
We highly recommend Inner Trends for SaaS companies which focus a lot on the user journey. The free plan is a good starting point, just connect your data sources and check it out.
Campaign URL Builder
While not a tool like Inner Trends, Google’s URL builder is something you need to have in your arsenal. If you want (should!) track URL’s on an individual campaign level, search term used, and platform the traffic comes from, use it. It’s free and very easy to use.
Other CRO tools
Here are a few more CRO tools that didn’t really fit any category above, but we think are important to be included.
Moqups
Most of the time, it’s easier to explain your vision of a web page through a mockup of it. Moqups is our favorite mockup tool for that. It’s not really a CRO tool, but every dedicated CRO person created a wireframe to present his idea at one point. The free plan covers a lot of needs.
Nudgify
Nudgify is a social proof notification app. Remember how Booking shows “10 other people are looking at this hotel”? This tool does that. It’s $1 per month on the cheapest plan, so basically we consider it free.
Pagespeed by Google
In a world where instant gratification and speed are important, your website needs to deliver content fast. Google has a great free tool which measures and grade your site’s speed, and provides insights into the stuff that’s slowing it down and needs work.
Social media
Social media undoubtedly plays a big role in many company’s marketing strategies. To make this activity easier and more insightful, here are some tools which helped us over the years and recommend.
Social media automation tools
It’s hard keeping track of posting times and always needing to log into and post. While Facebook offers its own posting automation tool, we find it a bit lacking when compared to the tools below.
Buffer
There are many social media automation platforms out there, and Buffer is our favorite. Very easy to use, you can rely on Buffer to always post on time and with the correct link. What’s more, it has a nice analytics reporting feature that lets you keep track of your social media performance.
The only downside is that the free plan is very limited, and is barely a taste of its power.
Hootsuite
A cute alternative to Buffer, Hootsuite does mostly everything which Buffer does, but has higher limits on the free plan.
Competitor tracking tools
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Jokes aside, it’s healthy to check up on your competitors from time to time and keep up with the market changes. Especially when just starting out your social media. Use the tools below to analyze post times, the volume of posts, and other shiny metrics from your competitor’s social media pages.
Smarterqueue
While not really free, Smarterqueue has a trial. We found that, during this trial period, you can take advantage of their really awesome competitor analysis feature and gather some insights into how your competitors run their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages.
Benchmarking tool from Socialbreakers
Really great rule-of-thumb tool which compares your Facebook page to a competitor’s, and generates a report showing stuff like best-performing posts on both pages, comparison of interactions, number of page posts per week, etc.
Social media regional report from Socialbreakers
Socialbreakers made the list again with another nice tool. This is an up-to-date report about the top-performing social media pages from all around the world. Use it to benchmark and steal ideas for your own strategy.
Social monitoring tools
If your brand is starting to get online traction, then you should try social monitoring. These tools basically “listen” on Facebook and other public internet pages for mentions of certain keywords that you type up, and send alerts whenever it finds activity. Great if you want to stay on top of conversations about your market, or just want to answer comments about your brand.
Social Searcher
Think of Social Searcher is a search engine for social media. We use it often to see what type of content is usually posted about certain topics and get inspired from it. Social Searcher can very easily monitor brand mentions as well.
Notify
This is a cleaner tool than Social Searcher which also sends notifications whenever your search term shows up online. The biggest downside to it is that the free plan only covers Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews, so you will be missing out on other large channels.
Content ideas from Socialbreakers
Another Socialbreakers free tool which we liked using – this tool searches all public posts containing a certain keyword on Facebook, ranks them, and shows them to you for inspiration.
Tweet Sentiment Visualizer from NCSU
Very awesome statistical tool if you know what to look for. It maps a certain word or combination of words with sentiments. For example, if you test the keyword “trump”, you will see the general sentiment about him, topic clusters around him, sentiment timeline (how people felt about him at certain time points throughout the day).
This tool is important if you ever run social media for PR purposes. Only works on Twitter, unfortunately.
Social media linking tools
Linking to pages on social media can sometimes be a hassle, either because the URL is way too long and ugly or you can’t link at all. Here are two links which we use almost every day to provide the right links to our audiences.
Bitly
Bitly is a free and easy-to-use tool for shortening links. It does not break the tracking parameters of the links when used, and you can customize a lot of stuff such as what the new link should look like.
Linktree
Linking pages through your Instagram profile is a pain in the a**. Linktree makes it possible to have multiple links show up in your IG bio by, basically, creating a landing page with those links. This is how everyone that drives traffic from their Instragam does it.
Ads
Most online ad platforms don’t really need external tools to get stuff done, but we do recommend some that improve your quality of life before running a new ad campaign.
Ad calculators
Unlike other marketing activities on this list, ads are very clear cut when it comes to success tracking. Most companies are looking at the bottom line on ad returns – did I generate more money than I invested? Here are two calculators that help you run those calculations before and after running your campaigns
Facebooks ads performance calculator by Socialbreakers
Big surprise, Socialbreakers is again on this list! We should start charging them money for the free exposure, but we are more than happy to use all the free tools they made available.
This tool is pretty basic, but you can see an estimate of how many clicks you can generate through your ad based on the region and budget you have available. Great for forecasting and telling clients what they should expect before running the ad on Facebook.
ROI calculator
A very basic calculator – just type in your amount spent on ads, how much you got from them, and the period, and you’ll have the Return on investment percentage. This is a sure way of making all your clients or managers happy to see.
Ad planning tools
Before running Google ads or Facebook campaign, it’s always a good idea to see what to target and what to show. Below are two tools that we use very often in planning our ad campaigns.
Keyword planner by Google
The bread and butter of Google Ads. Keyword Planner helps you analyze the amount of traffic certain keywords get before deciding to target them, as well as how competitive they are.
Our recommendation is to always run this planner before starting a campaign so you can avoid pricey keywords and maybe find other ones that serve your cause better.
Page transparency by Facebook
Ever wanted to see what ads your competitors are running? Thanks to multiple transparency laws that Facebook was subjected to, you can now see them! Each business page has this button that will show a list of all the live campaigns from that page.
Of course, targeting info and competitive information like that is not visible, but you can have an idea of what message your competitors and showing on Facebook.
Ad tracking tools
An important thing before launching a new campaign is making sure that you’re tracking data. This is especially true for retargeting ads, which heavily rely on tracking scripts firing back good info. We use two tools to track this, for Google Ads and Facebook.
Facebook Pixel Helper
This tool lets you see if a Facebook Pixel is installed on a page, and what data is being pulled from it. Before launching a campaign, make sure that your page has the Facebook pixel on it. You can also use this tool to see what type of data your competitors are tracking using the Facebook Pixel.
Google Tag Assistant
Similar to the Pixel helper, this is one for Google Tag Manager. Use it to see if you’re tracking conversion events correctly for Google Ads. In case you are not using Google Tag Manager to clump your data up, here is an alternative tool for checking if you have Google tracking script enabled.
I hope this list will prove useful for your work. Know any other tools which should be on the list? Tell me in the comment below!