Guest post by Exon Nkemchor.
As marketing has gotten more complex, marketing pros have had to embrace a wide variety of sophisticated tools to remain competitive and meet customer expectations. 
Based on extensive research, here is a list of some of the best tools to help support your marketing activities and achieve your objectives of increasing your brand awareness and generating high-quality leads.
Top 10 marketing tools in 2023:
- Mailchimp
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- CloudTalk
- Visme
- UXtweak
- RingCentral MVP
- LiveAgent
- Post Affiliate Pro
- Monday.com
- Marketing 360
Here’s a deep dive into what these tools have to offer in terms of features and pricing, as well as some of the main pros and cons.
1. Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s all-in-one marketing platform helps small businesses market smarter so they can grow faster. As the backbone for customer relationships, it provides AI-powered, user-friendly tools for any marketing team.
Features:
- Behavior Analytics
- Lead Nurturing
- List Management
- Landing Pages/Web Forms (including subscription pop-ups and fly-ins)
- Multi-Channel Marketing
- Dynamic Content
- Lead Management
Pros:
- Strong marketing automation features.
- Transitioning to Mailchimp and its integration is extremely easy and smooth.
- High quality of email formats for mobile users.
- Effective features for in-house collaboration between marketing teams and designers.
Cons:
- Poor merge tags functionality that leads to customers’ dissatisfaction.
- Restriction to specific designs and formats.
Pricing
Mailchimp has a free plan, while Essentials start at $11/per month and Standard runs $17/per month.
2. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a leading marketing solution to increase engagement with consumers. You can use it to collect, organize, and securely store data alongside offline data to create complete consumer data profiles.
Features:
- Landing Pages/Web Forms
- List Management
- Dynamic Content
- Lead Nurturing
- Multi-Channel Marketing
Pros:
- The support and training from Salesforce are excellent.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud can greatly improve your email strategy.
- Ability to promote campaigns by reaching the customers at a faster pace and exposing them to various channels easily.
Cons:
- Their reporting is limited to Journeys and you’ll need to extract all the data to do any deep dives.
- It is rather costly.
Pricing
Salesforce pricing starts at $4800/year.
3. CloudTalk
CloudTalk is cloud-based call center software that helps companies improve their sales and customer support operations with 70+ advanced features and 35 integrations, including HubSpot, Zendesk, Salesforce, and more. Join big names like Mercedes-Benz, DHL, Revolut, and over 2,500 more of CloudTalk’s satisfied customers in providing the best customer experience possible across 160+ countries.
Features:
- Leverage powerful automation tools (including Interactive Voice Response (IVR))
- Power Dialers
- Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
- Click-to-Call
- Call Recording
- Call Tags
- Advanced Analytics
Pros:
- High call quality with a variety of support features (e.g. taking notes during the call)
- Clear user-friendly interface
- Integrations with HubSpot, Front, Salesloft, and other software programs
- Responsive customer support
- Exceptional statistics dashboard
Cons:
- No Refund policy
Pricing:
CloudTalk offers three paid plans – Starter, Essential and Expert, with pricing starting at $25 per user per month, billed annually. If you want to have a customized solution, custom planning is also available, as well as a 14-day trial.
4. Visme
Visme is an easy-to-use visual content creation and collaboration platform. Visme is the only tool that allows you to create various forms of content as simple graphics but with a series of interactive features to bring static content to life, such as the ability to animate any object and assign actions.
It includes a drag-and-drop editor and a library of hundreds of templates to create videos, infographics, charts, presentations, and more.
Features:
- Visme comes with hundreds of templates with a large variety of design types.
- You don’t need prior design experience.
- Create, store, and collaborate while maintaining brand consistency across your whole team.
- Easily store, organize, and search the assets and designs for your team’s projects.
- It has a collection of native integrations so you can connect Visme to other tools you already use
Pros:
- Visme gives you complete control when creating visual content and you can animate content to make it more engaging.
- You can also record voiceovers to add to your graphics.
- Visme offers a large collection of fonts, high-quality images, and icons to choose from.
Cons:
- More expensive than other SAAS platforms
- The search feature needs improvements
- Limited variety of animated content
Pricing
Visme offers a free Basic plan, Personal plan for design professionals at $29 per month, and Business plan for SMBs at $59 per month. An Enterprise plan for corporations is also available; contact the Visme sales team for details.
5. UXtweak
UXtweak is an all-in-one user experience (UX) research platform that provides research tools for improving the usability of digital products. It has all of the capabilities you need to create the ideal website or app that people will want to visit again and again, optimize it for conversions, and fine-tune its UX.
Features:
- Website Testing
- Session Recording
- Mobile App Usability Testing
- Tree Testing
- Card Sorting
- Preference Test
- 5-Second Test
- First-Click Test
- Surveys
- Competitive Usability Testing
Pros:
- UXtweak allows you to do as many tests as you like.
- For smaller tasks, there is a free plan available, or you may design a custom plan to meet your needs.
- They provide a respondent pool to recruit from.
- It provides powerful analytics that are simple to understand.
Cons:
- Mobile testing only for IOS
Pricing:
UXtweak offers a free starter plan, ideal for smaller projects.
You may also choose between a pro plan for $80 per month (annual billing) or a custom plan tailored to your specific requirements.
Create a free account or try UXtweak’s Professional plan.
6. RingCentral MVP
RingCentral MVP is a robust unified communications as a service (UcaaS) platform perfect for marketing teams that need video calling software, team chat, and a cloud phone system. It unifies all your communications in one system, with advanced features for better marketing team management and collaboration.
You can improve your team’s productivity and overall customer service as RingCentral MVP allows for real-time communication, automation, and unified team workspaces. It is a cloud-based business service that supports different types of VoIP phones and hardware, so you can work from anywhere using any device.
Features:
- Video conferencing
- Screen sharing
- Meeting recordings
- Team messaging/ Direct messaging
- Custom integrations with marketing automation apps, such as Zapier, Mailchimp, and Marketo
- Document sharing
- 24/7 Support
- Cloud VoIP phone system
- Quality-of-service reports
- Multi-site admin and management
- Real-time analytics
Pros:
- Great support for internal communication between internal teams and external communication with the customers
- Advanced features to host product marketing meetings, such as screen sharing, overlays, and live transcription
- Hassle-free setup process that works on web browsers and mobile devices
- Integrates with other apps for extended functionality, like Slack and Dropbox
Cons:
- It doesn’t provide a free plan. However, you can check out their free trial.
Pricing
RingCentral MVP offers different packages according to your business needs, so you can go with the plan that fits your budget. Pricing depends on the business size and the features needed. The lowest tier starts at $19.99 per user/month billed annually.
7. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is omnichannel help desk software that allows you to provide excellent support and build long-lasting relationships with your customers. This platform also lets you study reports and analytics in-depth, to help your business continually grow and improve.
Features:
- Ticketing software
- Call center
- Customizable live chat widget
- 200+ integrations
- Social media customer service software
- Knowledge base builder
- Automation rules
Pros:
- Easy organization and division of tasks among team members.
- Effective location reporting feature that allows you to prevent unnecessary disruptions and scams
- Excellent technical attention
- Ease of set-up and implementation
Cons:
- Some interface features are outdated and provide a poor user experience
Pricing:
With some limitations, LiveAgent is free to use. If you wish to use more advanced functionality, paid packages start at $15 per agent per month.
8. Post Affiliate Pro
Online retailers use Post Affiliate Pro’s software to manage their affiliate systems, detect trends, and increase sales while keeping their costs low. Launching affiliate campaigns, setting up commission methods, and managing affiliates is super easy from start to finish.
Features:
- Affiliate marketing software
- Affiliate tracking
- Comprehensive analytics and reports
- Automation
- 220+ integrations
- Discount coupons
Pros:
- High quality of modules for tracking purposes
- Responsive customer support
- Excellent, easy-to-understand UI design
Cons:
- Email delivery is shaky, frequently goes into spam
- Banner section is confusing and is missing Facebook Image Ads, Youtube Video Ads, and Instagram Ads
Pricing:
You can set up an affiliate program with an unlimited number of affiliates starting at $129/month.
9. Monday.com
Monday.com manages your team’s marketing projects allowing you to integrate all of the tools your team currently uses so you can collaborate in context, streamline creative processes, and visualize important data.
Features:
- List Management
- Lead Management
- Landing Pages/Web Forms
- Lead Nurturing
Pros:
- The automations and the ease of collaborating across boards and tasks. Customizing automatic movement of items and notifications is also great.
- Easy to use, flexible and functional, a product with excellent service.
Cons:
- The “info boxes” feature has limited formatting.
- Some of the metrics or fields that you might need on the report are missing.
Pricing
Monday.com offers a free basic level plus advanced paid plans that start at $10 per seat per month.
10. Marketing 360
Marketing 360 helps you to manage and grow your business, all from a single platform.
Features:
- Lead Nurturing
- Behavior Analytics
- Multi-Channel Marketing
- List Management
- Dynamic Content
- Landing Pages/Web Forms
- Lead Management
Pros:
- Helpful, detailed insights into marketing strategies
- Lots of features, data and analytics, nice UI design, and creation of great reports
Cons:
- Lack of results, lack of creativity, lack of support
Pricing
Marketing 360 has a free plan and also a pro plan that starts at $25/month.
Fire up your marketing with these tools
The marketing tools offer a range of different features that ultimately help in automating the marketing process, increasing conversions, and improving the user experience of your products. Hopefully, this article helps you choose the right tools to add to your marketing technology matrix.
Exon Nkemchor is a user experience designer who values design thinking, transparency, and collaboration, with the capability to bring a product from conceptual stage to launch.