The best lead generation tools make it easier to increase your customer base and maximize sales, while also integrating with existing marketing or CRM software for better analytics and KPIs.
Lead generation tools are essential for capturing the interest and contact information of your audience. Finding the right ones for your business can help it scale faster, make vital contacts and discover new opportunities.
You can do this by a number of methods, such as by customer tracking, by inviting customer feedback, and by exploring customer connections online. This can be done directly or indirectly, by targeting sales, marketing, or customer relationship management, or even all three.
The result is that lead generation tools aim to help increase sales by turning visitors into customers.
Whether you’re aiming to turn visitors into customers, gather insight from potential buyers of your products or services, or otherwise, the best lead generation tools can often also automate processes for you, making the whole process more efficient.
Additionally, it can help you streamline your customer strategy and focus on delivering what your customers need without having to resort to paid advertising just to get their attention.
Here therefore are the best lead generation tools currently available.
You may also be interested in our featured best email marketing software.
HubSpot (opens in new tab) is usually one of the first names on people’s lips when lead gen tools are mentioned. It’s a bit of a Swiss army knife, combining sales, marketing and customer relationship management all on a single platform. Its many features allow you to create automation workflows, email campaigns, and manage social media (opens in new tab) accounts in addition to carrying out lead generation activity. It’s perfect for SMBs that are looking to scale and don’t want yet to dip their toes into enterprise CRM software and its associated challenges (and not to mention cost).
Read our full HubSpot review.
We’re big fans of Albacross (opens in new tab), which is about identifying potential leads who are visiting your website in real-time and recognizing (before ultimately acting on) their navigation habits. If you’re targeting your product or service at a particular demographic, for example, you can see if anybody belonging to it is browsing your homepage, specific channels or other pages before emailing them. And by showing what kinds of companies and individuals are visiting your site, Albacross helps you tailor your messaging to better attract the leads you desire.
Finding new leads on social media can be a frustrating and time-consuming task. Google Chrome add-on Discover.ly (opens in new tab) aims to change that by revealing more information about somebody and who they are connected to when you visit their profile on a social media network. On LinkedIn, for example, visiting a person’s profile will bring up a pop-up window that shows who that person is connected to on LinkedIn, in addition to Facebook and Twitter. It’s a simple yet ingenious way of quickly finding new leads without having to navigate your way around individual networks.
Website pop-ups have earned a bad rep over the years, but research shows that they’re incredibly useful for lead generation. Wisepops (opens in new tab) helps you create beautiful pop-ups using a drag-and-drop builder that gives you 60 templates to pick from. It’s also possible to set different actions for when visitors first visit and then ultimately leave pages, click on links or hover over specific elements on your organization’s website. Wisepops offers the ability to activate multiple campaigns at the same time, target visitors according to their location and browser, and you can even craft dedicated messages for new customers and returning ones.
OptinMonster (opens in new tab) is a lead generation software tool that makes it easy to capture, share and manage marketing leads. It provides high-converting mobile-friendly forms and uses behavior detection rules to find success. integrates with major email marketing and CRM platforms, and you can set advanced targeting rules for marketing campaigns – from page-level targeting (running campaigns on different pages, targeted to page content) to OnSite Retargeting (creating special offers and promotions for returning visitors). It’s also possible to target campaigns by location, activity or inactivity, and by device type.
Effectively a database of B2B contacts, Lusha (opens in new tab) can be deployed by sales and marketing professionals to find leads, boost their campaigns and ultimately drive revenue. In short, it provides the ability to find information on people who are publicly listed without spending hours doing so. It also offers a browser extension for Chrome that automatically scans the profile page you are visiting when on social networks to provide up-to-date contact information – something that Discover.ly, also on our list, does for free.
Starting out life as a notification bar, Hello Bar (opens in new tab) has evolved into a flexible marketing tool that lets you design messages for your website visitors. To get started, all you have to do is enter your website URL and you will be shown how to make display ads and install bar codes. From there, you can set up email integrations, choose goals for your campaigns, install modal pop-ups, full-site takeovers, slide-ins and more. Additionally it lets you set up simple announcements and direct website visitors to social media channels.
ReferralCandy (opens in new tab) is a great ecommerce tool for generating leads. As its name suggests, it’s centered around helping businesses generate leads and sales by offering its customers discounts for sending new customers their way. It’s offered as a free 30-day trial which you can use to test out its features that include email campaigns and data-driven insights dashboards. ReferralCandy also integrates with a range of marketing stacks – from Shopify and WooCommerce to BigCommerce, Magento, Mailchimp and Google Analytics.
Ideal for businesses of all sizes, JotForm (opens in new tab) helps companies create survey forms without any knowledge of CSS, JavaScript or other programming languages – though if they do, there’s plenty of scope for diving into the code and tweaking designs. Forms are highly customizable and can be set to show different content based on users’ location, and field types can be further customized to show properties as required, setting character limits and pre-populating fields. There is a free trial available.
Read our full JotForm review (opens in new tab).
Additionally, you may be interested in our featured best content marketing tools.
