Are you looking for quick and efficient ways to grow your business? Do you want to know about the best growth hacking tools to achieve business goals faster?
There are a lot of business growth tools out there, and sometimes it’s hard to know which are the most useful. In this post, I’ve curated the best growth hacking tools that you can use to scale your business.
If you aren’t aware of what growth hacking tools are and why you should use them, here’s a quick overview.
What Are Growth Hacking Tools?
The standard business marketing funnel starts with brand awareness and ends at customer referrals. This is also known as a growth hacking funnel, and here’s what each stage of the funnel looks like:
- Awareness
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Retention
- Revenue
- Referral
The growth-hacking funnel is often abbreviated as ‘AAARRR,’ which is why it’s also called ‘pirate metrics’ (since it sounds like a pirate’s growl).
If you have worked in marketing for a while, you know that growing a business organically is tough. It’s hard to create a marketing funnel that flows smoothly from start to finish.
That’s where growth hacking comes into play. Growth hacking tools help you achieve goals faster and with minimal spending. In simple terms, growth hacking is about finding innovative tools and ideas to grow your business rapidly.
To keep things simple, I have segmented the list of growth tools based on different stages of a business funnel.
You can use the links below to jump directly to the section you’re most interested in. By the end of this post, you’ll be familiar with 30 growth hacking tools that can skyrocket your business’ revenue potential.
- Growth Hacking Tools to Improve Brand Awareness
- Growth Hacking Tools for Customer Acquisition
- Growth Hacking Tools for Customer Activation
- Growth Hacking Tools for Retaining Customers
- Growth Hacking Tools for Boosting Revenue
- Growth Hacking Tools for Getting Customer Referrals
- Bonus Growth Hacking Tools
Growth Hacking Tools to Improve Brand Awareness
Growing a brand requires using tools and ideas that can help you get in front of the potential buyers. In this section, I’ll talk about 8 tools that are designed to enhance your brand awareness and attract the right kind of customers to your business.
1. Semrush
Semrush is one of the best keyword research tools that can help you boost your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). And when your site shows up in search results, more people will discover your brand.
With Semrush, you can get a complete overview of keywords that your competition ranks for and how much traffic those keywords drive to your site.
There are many ways to use Semrush to improve your website’s visibility, but I’ll talk about 2 easy ways to make the most of the platform:
- Use its Site Audit tool to get a quick snapshot of your website’s health and see if there are issues that might be driving customers away.
- Use the Organic Research tool to check the keywords your competitors rank for. Optimize your content based on the findings to drive more traffic to your site.
Semrush also offers other tools to help you improve your on-page optimization, build a content strategy, and refine your link-building strategy. The platform gives you in-depth details on traffic stats, ads cost-per-click (CPC), domain comparisons, backlinks analytics, and keyword difficulty.
Pricing
Semrush offers a 7-day free trial. Its paid plans start at $129.95 a month.
2. Reddit
Reddit, arguably ‘the front page of the internet,’ has communities (called subreddits) for everything. That’s not an exaggeration, Reddit has 2.8 million subreddits at present.
That makes Reddit one of the best growth marketing tools to find and talk to your target audience for free.
As an example, Slidebean used Reddit to share its blog in relevant communities and got in front of thousands of prospective customers. The pitch deck design software company considers Reddit a key driver of growth.
And if you use the right keywords in making Reddit posts, or reply to threads in subreddits, you can get referral traffic from Reddit to your site. That’s because Reddit threads have a high likelihood to rank in Google search results.
Pricing
Free.
3. Quora
Quora is another place to learn what your customers are asking so you can provide the answers they need.
Subscribe to topics related to your business so you’ll know when new questions are asked. You can chime in with helpful answers that will make Quora users want to follow your profile links back to your site.
You can also use Quora to curate the most common questions people are asking in your niche. Then you can create blog posts addressing those questions to flesh out your content marketing strategy.
Pricing
Free.
Growth Hacking Tools for Customer Acquisition
Some of the best growth hack strategies focus on innovative ways to get new customers. Here are the business growth tools I recommend for the acquisition stage of the growth hacking funnel.
4. OptinMonster Exit-Intent®
OptinMonster has a ton of features that make it a great all-around tool for growth hack marketing.
One of the most important ones for customer acquisition is our proprietary Exit-Intent® Technology. Exit-Intent® detects when visitors are about to leave your site, so you can grab their attention with a targeted offer, message, or lead magnet.
Travel site Anywhere.com used OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® Technology to recover 56% of abandoning visitors and turn them into customers.
You can combine Exit-Intent® with OptinMonster’s Page-Level Targeting to create highly targeted campaigns personalized to your site visitors’ interests.
Page-level targeting lets you create specific offers based on your site visitor’s behavior or interests. For instance, you can promote an email course to people reading an article on how to create an email marketing strategy.
Targeted campaigns are incredibly effective. Check out how Kennedy Blue used Exit-Intent® popups to improve sales by 50%.
OptinMonster’s integrations with the leading email service providers, CRM software, and eCommerce platforms make it a great growth marketing tool to acquire new customers.
Pricing
OptinMonster’s plans start at $9/month.
5. WPForms
WPForms is a user-friendly form builder that lets you add simple but effective lead generation forms to your WordPress website. With 1400+ pre-built templates, you can embed the perfect form on your site in just a few clicks.
Sign-up forms are still an excellent and reliable lead generation tool.
Here’s a quick overview of the features that WPForms offers to help you acquire more customers:
- Drag-and-drop builder to design lead generation forms easily.
- Smart conditional logic to help you create high-performing forms.
- User Journey addon to track your customer behavior for better conversion.
- Form Abandonment addon to collect partial leads and follow up with prospects.
Pricing
WPForms is available from $49.50/month onwards.
6. Constant Contact
Email marketing is a great way to nurture leads and convert them into customers. And one of the best growth hacking software for email is Constant Contact.
The tool offers a ton of useful and beginner-friendly features compared to other email marketing tools like Mailchimp.
Constant Contact offers extensive online training, a huge resource library, and even webinars. Their support is second to none and includes email, live chat, and an active community of users.
Constant Contact also lets you create lead capture forms and popups that you can embed in your landing pages. It even has a WordPress plugin so that you can build and automate email campaigns from your site’s backend.
Pricing
Constant Contact’s pricing starts at $12/month.
7. Manychat
Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram are all good sources for lead generation. But engaging with leads across these platforms can be time-consuming.
If you want to keep a tab on all the queries that you get through these social media channels, there’s no better tool than Manychat.
Manychat integrates with all the above channels. It lets you easily create bots that work 24/7 and engage with prospects even outside your business hours.
Automated bots help you deliver customer service and win business even when you’re not online. For instance, Facebook Messenger marketing helps you deliver personalized content, offer round-the-clock customer support, and generate leads on autopilot.
Manychat’s drag-and-drop interface means you don’t need to know complicated code. Once you set up the bots, they can prevent leads from slipping through the cracks.
Pricing
Manychat offers a free version. Its paid plans start at $15/month.
8. Beacon
One of the best ways to acquire more leads online is to offer a lead magnet on your website. Beacon lets you do exactly that, and then some.
Beacon offers 3 products to help you acquire more customers:
- Lead Magnet Creator to create ebooks, checklists, or workbooks without hiring an expensive designer.
- Lead Capture Forms to build highly customizable lead-gen forms on your best-performing landing pages.
- Free Resource Library to create a library of gated content without any technical setup.
The Lead Magnet Creator comes with a drag-and-drop builder and multiple templates to save you time.
The Lead Capture Forms also handles the content delivery to customers and lets you track conversions from Beacon’s dashboard.
And you can use the Free Resource Library to create a library of lead magnet content within 23 seconds!
Pricing
Beacon has a free forever plan. Its paid plans start at $19/month.
Growth Hacking Tools for Customer Activation
The growth hacking tools in this section aim to get customers to use your product. Of course, the email marketing tools listed above can also achieve this goal with the right marketing campaign.
But the following tools are built especially for getting leads to actually start using your product as paying customers.
9. Userlane
Userlane calls itself a ‘navigation system for your software.’ In other words, the tool shows your customers how to use your product so they can start getting results fast.
You can use Userlane to create interactive onboarding guides that reward users with a checkmark every time they complete a step. This helps you offer a delightful user experience while improving retention.
Gamification is a proven growth hack, so this one’s worth checking out.
Pricing
While Userlane doesn’t disclose its pricing plans publicly, it lets you try its products for free for an undisclosed number of days.
To know about Userlane’s pricing plans or to request a free trial, you have to get in touch with its customer success team.
10. Google Analytics
If you want to activate your new customers, you need to understand what’s working well for your existing ones. Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytics tools to help you understand customer journeys and improve your onboarding success.
Google Analytics offers insights about customer data, their behavior, and conversions to drive more growth. For instance, the tool also helps you understand user flow in granular details, identify the bottlenecks that are preventing visitors from converting, and fix the gaps.
Its Users Flow visualization offers you data on:
- The relative traffic volume to your website by the dimension you choose, such as traffic sources, campaigns, or browsers.
- The relative volume of pageviews per page or per collection of pages.
Pricing
Free.
Pro-tip: Having too many tools in your browser is often confusing. If you want to access Google Analytics reports from within your WordPress dashboard, try MonsterInsights.
In addition to getting Google Analytics data in your WordPress dashboard, MonsterInsights also offers custom reports so that you can measure what matters the most to you.
11. Userflow
Userflow lets you build engaging onboarding guides, in-app help guides, product tours, and feature announcements without the need to code. You can customize each step in the onboarding flow either as a modal, tooltip, or speech bubble.
With Userflow, you can add links, images, videos, or user attributes in its drag-and-drop designer. The tool also allows you to create your own Resource Center that users can access directly from within your app or website.
And the best part? You can analyze the performance of each onboarding campaign to improve your onboarding rate.
Pricing
Userflow is available from $240/month. It offers a 14-day free trial for 2 of its paid plans.
12. YouTube
Marketers don’t usually think of YouTube as a growth hacking tool because of its perception as the most popular video streaming website.
But if you want your customers to use your product, you need to show them how it’s done. And video is the best way to communicate your product’s value to new users.
According to research:
- The average successful conversion rate of YouTube ads is 12%.
- Adding a video on a landing page increases the conversion rate by 86%.
- 70% of users say that YouTube video ads help them discover new businesses.
Since YouTube is free, there’s no reason for you to avoid investing in a video marketing strategy. Try adding YouTube videos to your onboarding sequence to help your customer ease into your product usage.
Once you create videos, you can use YouTube Analytics to track your videos’ performance, measure audience preferences, and research new video topics that appeal to your viewers.
Pricing
While it’s free to upload and manage videos on YouTube, you’ll have to pay Google Ads to run ads on YouTube.
Related Content: How to Get Subscribers on YouTube (Reach 1000 Subscriptions FAST!)
Growth Hacking Tools for Retaining Customers
Customer churn is an inevitable metric for most companies. But you can keep churn under check and retain as many customers as possible. This next set of growth hacking tools will help you to do that.
13. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is an event-driven web analytics tool that helps you track user behavior and avoid customer churn. An event in Kissmetrics is the action that users take on your site or within your app, such as logging in, completing a check out, or subscribing to a newsletter.
The tool offers useful features like a cohort report that offers data on users who complete specified events, such as uploading a profile picture. Another functionality, activity report, shows you what features most customers use versus the ones they don’t.
This data can help your product, customer success, and marketing teams engage with users proactively and prevent those customers from churning.
Pricing
Its fixed plan costs $25.99/month. But you can also opt for a pay-as-you-go pricing model that charges you by the number of events you want to set up.
14. Lyssna
Want to know if your site design is giving customers the information they need? You can test this for free with the Lyssna.
After you sign up, you can upload a page design. The testers (people Lyssna enrolls and pays to test sites from the user point of view) will see it for 5 seconds and will be asked about what they remember. This feedback can help you target your page design to improve your product messaging and customer retention.
Pricing
Lyssna has a free version. Its paid pricing starts from $75/month.
15. HubSpot
The best way to retain customers is to build better relationships with them. HubSpot offers products and plans that help you across all stages of your business growth. These include:
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that integrates with your email provider for better contact management.
- Lead management software, including lead analytics.
- Sales management software, including email tracking and scheduling, meetings, and reporting.
- Marketing automation software to create workflows, build bots, and scale your digital marketing efforts across multiple channels.
HubSpot’s all-in-one CRM suite offers everything you need to scale your business growth, without the need to spend on costly CRM suites like Salesforce. When your business is ready to scale, you can use HubSpot’s paid products to make the most of the platform.
Pricing
HubSpot has a free CRM with limited features. Its paid plans start at $18/month.
16. OptinMonster A/B Testing
If you want to know which marketing messages work best, you can use OptinMonster’s built-in A/B testing to measure the success of your campaigns. Eczema Company used OptinMonster’s A/B testing functionality to boost conversions by 158%.
You can duplicate a campaign in a single click and it takes only a minute or two to get your A/B test up and running.
OptinMonster automatically collects conversion analytics for all campaigns. You can use the data to see which one is best for getting leads and sales and make that the main campaign.
Pricing
OptinMonster is available from $9/month onwards.
17. Baremetrics
Baremetrics is a subscription analytics tool that lets you measure a handful of metrics, such as:
- The effectiveness of your free trial marketing.
- How you fare against industry benchmarks.
- Insights about cancellations.
Baremetrics’ Trial Insights feature allows you to track new trials, active trials, average trial length, and free-to-paid conversion rate.
You can set up Baremetrics to send you automatic daily, weekly, and monthly reports on Slack or email so that you can take measures to avoid churn.
Pricing
Baremetrics has different plans based on different modules, such as metrics, recovery, cancellation insights, and forecasts. Its most basic plan starts at $58/month.
Baremetrics also offers a 14-day free trial.
18. Groove
Groove is the #1 helpdesk software that lets you manage all your customer support activities in one place.
With Groove, you get 3 powerful features:
- Shared Inbox for your support team to respond to support queries across email, Stripe, or Facebook.
- Knowledge Base to build self-service content, increase customer satisfaction, and deflect support traffic.
- Live Chat to automate customer service and continue the conversation through email even after a customer drops off.
Groove also offers analytics and insights to help you measure your support team’s performance and fix the gap in your service delivery. Its integrations with Gmail and Slack make it easy for you to get real-time notifications and respond to customers instantly.
The tool helps you improve your customer retention and build long-lasting customer relationships.
Groove’s budget-friendly pricing makes it a perfect fit for cash-strapped startups operating on tight budgets.
Pricing
Groove is available from $4.80/month. It also offers a 7-day free trial on 3 of its plans.
Growth Hacking Tools for Boosting Revenue
Ultimately, the goal of all growth hack experiments is to boost revenue. Here are 4 tools that let you uncover hidden revenue potential.
19. Zoom
Did you know that webinars rank second in generating qualified leads, with a 73% effectiveness? Running webinars for both new and existing customers is a great way to boost your revenue potential.
While there are lots of webinar tools to choose from, I recommend using Zoom. It’s free for up to 40 minutes and up to 100 participants. You can also record a webinar in Zoom to use as a lead generation tool or a lead magnet later on.
Pricing
Zoom has a free forever version. Its paid plans start at $159.90/month.
20. OptinMonster OnSite Retargeting®
OnSite Retargeting® can help you easily show new information or promotions to returning visitors. This feature helps you reduce website bounce rate and increase conversions.
With OnSite Retargeting®, you can create special offers aimed at returning visitors so that you can increase sales conversions. OnSite Retargeting® also lets you target multiple audience segments, personalizing your communication for each group.
OnSite Retargeting® can unlock the revenue possibilities hidden in plain sight. Here are some case studies to read up more on this functionality:
- Podcast Insights Grew Conversions 1099% with Onsite Retargeting®
- IncStores Converted 2.65% of Its Abandoning Visitors and Grew its List by 300%
- Olyplant Used Onsite Retargeting® to Increase Pageviews by 157%
Use OnSite Retargeting® with OptinMonster features to create urgency-based campaigns, like a countdown timer that triggers fear of missing out (FOMO).
Using scarcity in your marketing can do wonders for your website conversion. Take a look at some FOMO statistics to understand why urgency is so effective.
Pricing
OptinMonster’s price starts at $9/month and comes with a risk-free, 14-day money-back guarantee.
The OnSite Retargeting® feature is included in its Growth plan, which costs $49/month.
21. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a heatmap tool that you can use to see where the most and least active areas of your site are.
The tool displays areas that get a lot of clicks as hot (color-coded as yellow and orange), while those that customers ignore will appear cooler (color-coded as blue or green).
This helps you optimize your landing page’s design or tweak individual parts of campaigns, such as improving the call to action (CTA) button’s color for higher conversions.
For instance, you might use the Crazy Egg Scrollmap report to discover that a significant number of prospects navigate to the customer testimonials section on your homepage. That’s likely, since testimonials can increase conversions by 34%.
Based on the finding, you can add testimonials or other forms of social proof on your pricing page to increase pricing page conversions.
Pricing
Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial. Its paid plans start at $49/month.
Pro-tip: If you want to choose a heatmap tool with similar features at a more affordable price, try Hotjar. It has a free forever plan while its paid plans are available from $32/month.
22. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
A lot of marketers use LinkedIn to write social media posts to promote their brands or network with other professionals. But many growth teams use LinkedIn as their go-to social media platform to research prospects and build an effective sales outreach plan.
LinkedIn also has useful social selling tools like Sales Navigator that can help your marketing and sales teams run an effective social selling strategy.
Sales Navigator is an automation tool that offers advanced search filters, lead recommendations, and personalized insights to help you find and engage with your target buyers.
Pricing
LinkedIn doesn’t disclose the price of Sales Navigator on its website. According to JB Jezequel, Sales Navigator is available from $99/month. You can also try Sales Navigator free for 30 days.
Growth Hacking Tools for Getting Customer Referrals
According to research by Nielsen, 92% of buyers trust referrals from people they know, and they are 4X more likely to buy through referrals. Referrals also cost less to acquire customers as opposed to other acquisition channels.
This makes referral marketing a must-have strategy for your business growth. The following batch of tools will help you leverage growth through referrals.
23. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for monitoring the social media buzz around specific brands, products, topics, and competitors.
You can use it to keep a tab on your brand mentions, competitors, and industry updates. BuzzSumo lets you streamline your marketing efforts based on what people are talking about.
BuzzSumo can also help you track down influencers who have shared your content. It helps you find industry-specific creators and thought leaders who have a highly engaged social media following.
With BuzzSumo, you can build an effective influencer marketing program and work with creators to drive business growth through social media referrals.
Pricing
BuzzSumo is available from $199/month.
24. FindEmails
Want to find the email addresses of your potential buyers? FindEmails gives you an advantage in collecting email addresses of prospects you can reach out to directly.
The tool lets you look up people and find their verified email addresses so that you can pitch them in their inbox.
FindEmails helps you find email addresses of prospects within an industry even if you don’t know the domain name. You can use this information to build your sales outreach and referral marketing program.
Pricing
FindEmails’ pricing starts at $29/month.
25. trackdesk
Affiliate marketing is a great way to promote your products or services through affiliate partners who can refer you to potential customers.
If you’re already running an affiliate program, or considering investing in one, trackdesk is an easy choice. It’s one of the best affiliate management platforms that lets you do the following:
- Track and automate commission payments to affiliate partners.
- Design and manage special campaigns for selected affiliates.
- Fraud detection to secure your website against fraudulent traffic.
trackdesk’s affiliate management features help you scale your affiliate marketing program and reach out to new customers fast.
Pricing
trackdesk has a free plan that caps at 10 affiliates, 500 clicks, or 50 conversions. The paid plans start at $67/month.
26. Aklamio
Aklamio is a customer incentives platform that lets you improve your word-of-mouth marketing across multiple channels.
With Aklamio, you can build rewards and referral programs for your customers to promote your business in their network. As a result, the referring person can earn rewards or cash incentives for each purchase that a buyer makes through them.
With Aklamio, the advantages are threefold. You can use it to:
- Make your existing customers happy.
- Expand your customer base.
- Increase revenue.
Pricing
Aklamio doesn’t share its pricing information publicly. You have to book a demo to learn about its cost.
27. SparkLoop
With email generating $36 for every $1 spent, email marketing offers one of the best returns on investment (ROI). And there’s no better way to generate revenue through emails than a newsletter.
SparkLoop is a newsletter referral platform for growing your email list. The tool lets you grow your list by offering existing subscribers incentives to share your newsletter.
For every newsletter subscriber, SparkLoop generates a unique referral link that they can use to promote your newsletter in their network. You can also partner with a sponsor to earn extra ad revenue from your newsletter.
Pricing
SparkLoop costs $2000/year.
Related content: How To Create An Email Newsletter in 3 EASY Steps
Bonus Growth Hacking Tools
Here are 3 more tools that you can use to support your growth hacking experiments.
28. Fiverr
Fiverr is not a tool, but more of a marketplace. It’s a place where you can find all kinds of specialists at an affordable price. You can browse the platform to find the top-rated professionals who can help you grow your business.
Fiverr is a great place to hire freelancers to create and edit blogs, videos, podcasts, ebooks, or other marketing assets that you want to launch.
Pricing
For businesses, Fiverr doesn’t have a standard pricing plan. That’s because the platform takes a percentage cut out of the freelancers’ pay.
29. Zapier
Zapier lets you connect multiple apps together so they work together seamlessly. It allows you to automate common tasks so you don’t have to spend time thinking about them.
If you don’t have native integrations with 3rd-party tools, you can use Zapier’s API integrations to push or pull data from one app to another. It supports over 6,000+ app integrations and is easily one of the best online automation tools.
Pricing
Zapier’s paid plans start at $29.99/month. It also offers a free version of the tool.
30. Facebook Messenger
One secret to engaging customers is to connect with them where they are. That’s why Facebook, with a global audience of more than 3.03 billion monthly active users, is a great place to start.
The social site’s messaging platform, Facebook Messenger, makes it easy for you to reach customers who are active on Facebook. Messenger helps you connect with customers through smartphones and answer their questions on-the-go.
Messenger has over 931 million monthly active users globally, which makes up for 28% of all mobile phone messaging app users worldwide. As we discussed earlier, bots are a great way to maintain a continuous connection with customers.
Pricing
Facebook Messenger is free to use. You can also find plenty of 3rd-party Messenger bots to build and use.
Pro-tip: You can run Facebook ads on Messenger to maximize your growth hack marketing efforts. This means you can retarget ads (called ‘Sponsored messages’) to customers on Messenger who have interacted with your brands previously.
To learn more about Facebook retargeting ads, read our guide on Facebook Retargeting Ads and How to Create & Install a Pixel.
Use Growth Hacking Tools to Unlock Hidden Possibilities
If you use these growth hacking tools effectively, you can blaze through all stages of your marketing funnel. Remember that growth hacking is all about rapidly experimenting with new ideas and implementing the best ideas to fast-track your success.
Be flexible about learning from your experiments and finding better ways to use the tools in your marketing stack.
Next, learn about the best growth hacking strategies, with real-life brand examples, to unlock new business possibilities.
- What Is Growth Hacking? Simple Definition + How to Get Started
- 23 Proven Growth Hacking Examples You Can Steal to Gain Traction
- The Ultimate Guide to Growth Hacking for Exponential Success in 2024
Want to start your first growth hacking experiment?
Sign up with OptinMonster to create a lead generation marketing campaign. See how you can explode your email list, get more leads, and increase sales by designing irresistible offers.
Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.
