8 Best Lead Generation Tools Small Businesses Should Use

Sales are crucial for small businesses as you can’t afford money to go in vain. You need to focus on the most converting practices, implement modern technologies such as headless eCommerce elements, and optimize the website.

One of the most challenging steps when achieving success is lead generation. It’s the process of obtaining prospects to fuel the interest in your products and services.

What can go wrong here is that you may start marketing to everyone. Some people will respond to these strategies. But most of them won’t even visit the website, let alone buy something. 

Lead generation aims to convince clients to take the desired action, such as purchasing what you sell. How can you achieve it? Collect information from prospects’ online activities and personalize communication.

That’s where lead generation tools will be of much assistance. This software automates lead generation on various sources like landing pages, social media, etc. Let’s overview the best lead generation tools for small businesses to manage customer interactions and grow the company.

Top 8 Software for Small Businesses to Generate Leads

1. HotJar

The first tool for small business lead generation is HotJar. It’s a solution for analyzing user behavior and collecting feedback to optimize the customer journey and increase conversions.

The company provides heatmaps, feedback widgets, session recording, and surveys. They work together to show what happens on the website and the reasons for that.

A case in point is a heatmap. You can see what buttons get the most clicks, the depth of scrolling a page, elements with the highest engagement, and other insights. They can help you optimize the website not only to capture leads but also to reduce bounce rates and improve other metrics.

HotJar has 900,000 users from more than 180 countries. It provides a free version if you’re tight on the budget and don’t need custom integrations.

The free plan covers 35 daily or 1,050 sessions/month. It automatically collects data and supports unlimited heatmaps.

Paid plans start from around $31.43. They handle up to 3,000 sessions per month, track custom user attributes, and pinpoint where customers get frustrated.

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2. Hubspot

HubSpot’s marketing automation software includes a broad set of lead generation and nurturing features designed to help move prospects throughout the sales funnel as seamlessly as possible.

Here’s more on what HubSpot can do for you: 

• Lead capture. Capture leads with landing pages, chatbots, pop-up, exit-intent, or embedded forms, all built in HubSpot.
• Lead scoring. Automate the lead scoring process through rule-based workflows. Set up automation workflows via an intuitive no-code interface. 
• Lead nurturing. Leverage the same workflow builder to set up email drip campaigns. Segment your audience, then add triggers and conditions to make sure your emails reach the right recipients at the right time. 
• Dynamic personalization leverages customer data from your CRM to help create personalized experiences across multiple channels. 
• Retargeting ad campaigns for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google with the option to create custom audiences. 
• Email testing tools with A/B testing, reply tracking, and health reporting features.  

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HubSpot also offers social media management tools as well as SEO recommendations and analytics to help boost your online presence and attract more leads.

You can HubSpot for free, while more advanced marketing features are available in paid packages, which you can find in the platform’s Marketing Hub. Paid plans start at $15 per use per month.

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3. Sumo

Sumo is one of the best lead generation tools for small businesses for collecting email addresses. You can utilize it for free or pay $39 monthly for advanced visitor targeting, A/B testing, email integrations, and sending up to 50,000 emails per month. The brand assists its customers with the help of the following features:

• List Builder. This solution deals with creating popups with email collection fields and call-to-action (CTAs) buttons. You can specify the rules when the popup should appear: 

• 1 second after page load;
• while the user’s mouse cursor is over the address bar;
• upon clicking the button below the first paragraph;
• after page load on user scroll.

• Welcome Mat, displaying email collection field, CTA buttons, or video background. You can regulate whether it appears above the page after loading, embed it within an article, or when scrolling in the middle of the article.
• Share, which are buttons on the left of the screen or before/after the article.
• Smart Bars on a particular part of the page.

Sumo increases customer engagement and relies on precise targeting rules to encourage visitors to act. The tool integrates with CRM and email marketing software. It allows you to transfer leads in real-time.

It is a great accessible starting point for small organizations and individuals.

4. Marketo

Marketo is one of the most well-known lead generation tools for small businesses. Adobe owns this SaaS marketing automation platform and it aims to assist companies in automating and measuring marketing interaction, tasks, and workflows.

Core Marketo features include:

1. Cross-channel Marketing with social media, email, digital advertising, and other tools. They help you convert visitors into buyers on various touchpoints with personalized content, dynamic chat, and in-app messages.
   
   
2. Sales & Marketing Partnership. This feature deals with lead generation. It provides valuable marketing insights, integrates with CRM, and leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to segment and target prospects with personalized ads and messages. 

It gathers the following data:

1. IP address;
2. pages people visit;
3. companies they represent;
4. keywords they insert when searching;
5. among others.

You get high-quality leads thanks to analyzing customer behaviors and responding in real-time. Another crucial feature is advanced lead scoring.

Advanced lead scoring illustrates how close a prospect is to purchase by assigning a numerical value to them. These figures update as people increase their engagement with the brand. Thus, sales representatives can step in at the right time to nurture leads.

3. Content Intelligence allowing you to manage content for every website visitor and predict user preferences.
   
   
4. Data & Insights to measure the performance of the involved touchpoints to optimize them for a higher return on investment (ROI). This feature helps you identify stages where you lose potential clients. So you can intervene, enhance the strategies, and increase marketing qualified lead volume.

There are several packages, one of which is perfect for small businesses. The price information for small business lead generation services and other plans is available upon request.

5. Picreel

Picreel is another excellent lead generation business focusing on exit-intent technology. Exit-intent popups and overlays appear when users are about to leave.

It happens by identifying the cursor movement to the upper part of the screen where the “Back” and “Close” buttons reside. As for smartphones, the trigger for exit-intent popup may be rapid scrolling in the upward direction.

Picreel streamlines the creation of such popups and promises to generate leads and boost sales. How? It allows businesses to build and show scheduled and attractive popups to website visitors.

The software provides over 100 popup templates for you to edit fonts, colors, text, and even HTML/CSS. You can gather email addresses, promote deals and products, engage viewers to leave a review, etc.

The tool employs AI for better analytics, reporting, and A/B testing. It integrates with more than 700 apps. Picreel also enables you to transfer leads into CRM, content management system, and marketing software and use it in different departments.

All lead generation features are available regardless of the pricing plan. The cost depends on the number of monthly visitors, from 3000 in a Starter plan to 300,000 in a Pro. You’ll need to pay a minimum of $14 per month if you purchase for the year.

6. Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell is a sales CRM with user-friendly and customizable capabilities. It lets you organize leads, tasks, and sales, boosting team productivity, customer experiences, and pipeline visibility. Here is a closer look at the Zendesk Sell features:

• Email integration enhances email marketing by syncing emails to the CRM. It sends alerts, offers templates, and automatically tracks send-outs.
• Sales engagement tools deal with building targeted prospect lists and creating customized email sequences.
• Task Player streamlines task completion and shows duties at the top of the screen.
• A centralized platform stores a complete client overview in one place before contacting them.
• Marketplace lets you integrate apps with the CRM.
• Accurate forecasting enables informed decision-making based on predicted revenue growth and deal volume.
• Pipeline analysis provides insights into lead and deal progression to spot possible bottlenecks.

Zendesk Sell dominates the market of lead generation tools for small businesses thanks to automation capabilities. Users can set up automated email nurturing campaigns within the CRM, find duplicate contacts, and update profiles. There are other options for programmed lead distribution and lead scoring.

One of the drawbacks for small businesses is that this tool doesn’t have a free option. You have to pay from $19 to $99 monthly based on the required features.

7. OptinMonster

OptinMonster  is one of the best tools for generating leads, preventing lost sales, and increasing conversions. The toolkit lets you create popups, floating bars, scroll boxes, gamified wheels, and other functionality. These solutions are essential for collecting email addresses or interacting with visitors.

The best part is intuitiveness and a drag-and-drop campaign builder. You can customize popups and welcome mats to your needs. Case in point: you can add animation, sound effects, text, buttons, countdown timers, and more.

OptinMonster has more than 100 templates to ensure you spend less time inventing popups but more on converting leads. But you can design overlays from scratch without coding skills.

The tool also supports mobile-friendly popups to satisfy all types of visitors. You can specify when the overlay should emerge and options include:

• after scrolling a certain percentage of the page;
• when the tool spots exit intent;
• or based on other conditions.

OptinMonster is also good at geo-location targeting to address groups according to their location. Besides, it delivers actionable insights into campaigns. You can get conversion analytics, A/B test strategies, and automate personalization and content targeting.

Prices range from $16 to $82 a month. However, the company provides lucrative time-sensitive deals like in the screenshot below.

8. Qualaroo

The last one on our list of lead generation tools for small businesses is Qualaroo. It’s a feedback collection solution for creating pools.

It lets you survey users’ experiences, learn what visitors like, or improve your products and services. Plus, they leave contact information for you to follow up later.

The company enables you to kick-start the campaigns with ready-made templates. Once everything is up and running, data analysis comes in.

The tool collects data and implements AI to determine sentiments, automate feedback mining, and trigger the needed response. For instance, it can transfer negative replies to customer support specialists to handle the complaints.

How does it work? Qualaroo identifies keywords and assigns scores, such as “Joy”, “Anger”, “Disgust”, “Sadness”, and “Fear”.

You can set the rules for showing polls, namely:

• when a person is going to exit a website;
• confirmation page surveys after making a purchase;
• to name a few.

Qualaroo supports the Net Promoter Score as a tool to measure how likely customers are to recommend your business to others. It integrates with Salesforce, Slack, Zapier, and more to manage data efficiently.

The price ranges from $100 to $200 per month, and you can contact the team to have a custom Enterprise solution.

To Sum Up

What is lead generation software? It’s a tool to automate lead generation, communicate with people on various platforms, and gather data on the user experience. 

Such tools do more than just gather data and bring customers. They rely on AI and automation to qualify, nurture, and score leads while amplifying team productivity. 

We’ve looked at eight lead generation tools for small businesses. Each has its own distinct features and operates differently depending on the channels used to find potential clients.

Determine your goals and test free versions of the proposed solutions. Automate your strategies to focus on what matters most and increase conversions.

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About the Guest Author

Kate Parish, chief marketing officer at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in Digital Marketing and website promotion. Kate always strives to stay in pace with the ever-advancing online world and the sphere of Magento PWA development. Her expertise includes in-depth knowledge of SEO, branding, PPC, SMM, and the field of online sales in general.

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