Lead generation has come a long way from door-to-door and cold-call selling. As more businesses are investing in their online presence and perhaps setting up ecommerce functionality, the need to generate and track leads through their website becomes necessary. However, if they aren’t using a reliable tool to do so, then they may be missing out on opportunities to convert those leads into buying, paying customers.

Below are some of the best tools we’ve come across that will help you capture and convert more qualified leads, and increase your sales revenue.

HubSpot Marketing

“It’s a risk-free way to find out what inbound marketing can do for you. No budget necessary.” 

With the ability to start using their tool for free, HubSpot Marketing offers email marketing, live chat, forms, ads, analytics and reports to help you get started using a CRM for lead generation. Or if you already have your own CRM, you can easily integrate any of the HubSpot options into it.

Their dashboard is a central hub for your marketing analytics. See which marketing efforts are generating leads, track the channels driving the highest engagement, and monitor your sales team’s performance over time.

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Proof

Proof is an awesome tool primarily used by SaaS and ecommerce businesses to “hype” up their lead gen. They have created their tool on the basis that social validation and “FOMO” (Fear Of Missing Out) will convert more visitors into leads and customers. Businesses can build more credibility by showing visitors how popular their offer is to increase trust & brand leadership.

Think of when you’re looking at hotel rooms on a site like Expedia — have you ever noticed a little pop-up box in the corner that tells you “5 people have booked this hotel in the last 24 hours”? The sense of urgency you may feel to then book the hotel room yourself is exactly why Proof is successful.

They have three popular offerings:

• Live Visitor Count: these notifications show many people are currently viewing a page or an entire site in real-time, and is most commonly used by businesses to authentically create “FOMO” on popular offers.
• Recent Activity: these notifications show a stream of people who have recently signed up or purchased on a company’s site. This tool is best to be used on site pages that get at least 5 or more leads or sales per day.
• Hot Streaks: this notification shows the total number of people who have recently opted-in or purchased on a company’s site. This product is Proof’s highest converting product and is most commonly used on landing pages, demos, and checkouts.

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ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a really great tool that allows you to track every single interaction a visitor has had with your site, and then use this behaviour to trigger targeted email marketing campaigns. This means you can reach out to potential leads with exactly what they are looking for, and turn that site visit into a conversion.

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Hotjar

Hotjar is a great all-in-one solution which can help turn more of your website visitors into customers. Their analytics platform uses visitor recordings, heat maps, conversion funnels, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys to help you truly understand your audience on a deeper scale.

Their on-site polls and surveys allow you to collect a user’s email address in addition to their feedback, which will allow you to not only address customer experiences, but also add their data into your CRM for future nurturing.

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Hello Bar

Check out the banner at the top of Hello Bar’s homepage below; their tool gives visitors a CTA banner at the top or bottom of a page. This tool is a perfect way to announce a promotional discount or a new product release, and generate qualified leads in the process.

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Intercom

Intercom is a really cool tool that gives you the ability to have custom interactions with your site visitors. Their on-site chat feature allows you directly engage with on-site visitors, sending them targeted messages based on what they are looking at. You can set up rules that display certain messages when visitors are taking certain actions to initiate a conversation: for example, if a visitor spends greater than 1 minute on a pricing page, the chatbot tool will pop up and ask “Got questions on pricing? I’m here to help”.

Once a visitor engages with the chatbot and submits their contact information, their profile is saved within the tool for further on-site or in-app analysis, which will help to generate further targeted messaging to help that customer with onboarding, support or retention efforts.

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Turnstile

Have you started taking advantage of the power of video marketing? If so, this may be the tool for you.

Turnstile by Wistia is a simple tool that allows you to gate content by adding an email collector to your videos. It’s a clean form that can appear at any time during your video (beginning, middle or end) and will work on any  device. You can have your forms display discreetly on-hover, or pause the video to capture your viewer’s attention. Plus, you can customize the submit button language to align with your brand’s voice and tone. You can also integrate Turnstile to your email marketing and CRM software platforms for ease of use.

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Qualaroo

A user research and feedback software, Qualaroo offers on-site polling which not only collects visitor’s feedback but their lead information as well. This is a two-in-one kind of tool where you can primarily obtain UX feedback, but then use that same format to find out why a visitor is on your site and if you can do anything further to guide them towards a conversion.

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Sumo

Claiming to 2X your ROI, Sumo works to turn visitors into ecommerce customers. The Sumo tool uses pop-up functionality to help ecommerce sites in three ways: by reducing card abandonment, growing email subscribers, and increasing average order value.

With plugins to some of the top ecommerce tools like Shopify or Magento, Sumo can be set up within minutes, and offers a free 14-day trial for you to test it out.

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There are a ton of lead generation software tools out there, so this list is by no means exhaustive; these are just the ones we’ve worked with before, or have features we are impressed with. The good news is that the majority of the tools listed above have free options, or at least free trial periods, so you can have the opportunity to test them out before making a financial commitment.

Banner Photo Credit: Austin Distel on Unsplash