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8 ecommerce marketing tools to increase sales and customer satisfaction

According to Scott Brinker’s famous marketing technology landscape supergraphic, there are now 11,038 martech solutions to choose from—11% more than last year. 

But here comes the tricky part: how do you know which ones will really make a difference for your ecommerce business?

Use this decision-making guide to help you pick the right ecommerce marketing tools (spoiler: you don’t need all 11,000) to deeply understand your customers and create more effective, targeted marketing campaigns that boost satisfaction and drive sales.

Summary

To drive conversions for your ecommerce business, you need to deeply understand your customers. So if you’re a marketing manager or a product marketer, you need to analyze customer data and tailor your digital campaigns to user behavior using a suite of tools across key areas like

  1. Product experience insights

  2. Analytics

  3. Customer journey analytics

  4. Search engine optimization (SEO)

  5. Content optimization

  6. Customer relationship management (CRM)

  7. A/B testing and conversion rate optimization (CRO)

  8. Email marketing and social media management

8 ecommerce marketing tools to drive results (and customer happiness)

Nothing helps you create customer-centric marketing campaigns like deeply understanding, and catering to, your users. Here are eight tools that every online business can use to do just that.

1. Product experience insights: Hotjar

Hotjar (👋) is a suite of products that work alone or together to give you a deep understanding of how users behave on—and feel about—your site, so you can spot areas of frustration and usability errors during the checkout flow, optimize CTAs to boost conversions, and reduce cart abandonment.

Use Hotjar's PX insights tools to

  • Get visual representations of where visitors scroll, click, and move on your page with heatmaps, so you can see what captures their attention—and what they overlook

📖 Learn how to use ecommerce heatmaps to increase conversions and improve UX

  • Watch video playbacks that show you exactly what users did on your site with recordings, so you quickly identify and fix bugs, discover conversion blockers, and understand why users drop off in the sales funnel

📖 Learn how to use session recordings to increase ecommerce sales

  • See where users drop off in the conversion journey with funnels. Jump straight from your funnel analysis into relevant recordings to see the behavior behind the numbers, and filter and compare different conversion funnels to see which ones perform best

  • Send on-site or email surveys to customers after a purchase to find areas for improvement

  • Place feedback widgets (like the red ‘Feedback’ button on the right of this page ➡️) on your online store to make it super easy for users to share their thoughts in the moment

  • Schedule user interviews with a diverse range of participants to conduct market research and get unique perspectives that will enrich future marketing strategies and campaigns

💡 Pro tip: want to move extra-fast? Choose from our existing survey templates or use AI to generate surveys around specific goals and launch your next survey in seconds.

Use AI for Surveys to get voice-of-the-customer feedback even quicker and with less manual effort—win-win

Goals Hotjar helps you achieve: look for boosts in metrics such as

Use Hotjar’s suite of products to understand how users act and feel, then use those insights to create better experiences that drive sales.

2. Website analytics: Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that tracks quantitative data and gives you rich insights into your ecommerce website visitors and what they do on your site. 

Dive into metrics like page views and bounces, as well as visitor data such as traffic source and country of origin, to answer questions like

  • Which marketing channels are most effective (e.g. paid ads, social media, or organic)?

  • Which landing pages have the highest drop-off rates?

  • Which countries and markets have the highest conversion rates?

Then, double down on the strategies you know work best for your business.

📖 Learn more about ecommerce tracking in in Google Analytics

Goals it helps you achieve: Google Analytics gives you the raw data you need to analyze key metrics such as

  • Overall traffic

  • Channel performance

  • Abandoned carts

  • Customer segmentation

But remember: when it comes to qualitative vs quantitative data, you need both—and GA only provides half the picture.

🤝 Use Google Analytics and Hotjar together to get deeper insights: Google Analytics tells you what users do on your ecommerce website, but it doesn’t tell you why.

Combine GA with Hotjar to understand

  • The reasons people bounce from your pages

  • The motivations behind user behavior

  • What needs or goals drove users to your page

  • How users feel about your site, brand, and products

  • What’s missing from your site and how to improve the customer experience

👯 Learn why Google Analytics and Hotjar are BFFs

3. Customer journey analytics: Heap

Heap is a digital insights platform that gives you a deep understanding of your customer journeys.

It automatically captures and analyzes user behavior data so you can uncover key insights like

  • What high-performing (and low-performing) user journeys look like

  • Which landing pages get the most engagement and lead to the best results

  • Which actions or behaviors are associated with retention—or churn 

  • Which steps in the user journey are creating unnecessary friction

Goals it helps you achieve:

4. Search engine optimization: Ahrefs

Ahrefs helps you measure and report on SEO performance to improve your rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs). 

Leverage this data to find quick wins, make long-term optimizations, and ultimately drive more organic traffic to your ecommerce store.

Ahrefs has a number of SEO tools that allow you to

  • Spot technical and on-page SEO issues that affect your rankings

  • Discover and calculate opportunities with keyword research

  • Investigate the SEO performance and backlink profile of any website (your own or competitors’)

Goals it helps you achieve:

  • Increased organic traffic

  • More website and brand visibility

  • Higher SERP rankings

🔥 If you’re using Hotjar: filter session recordings by traffic source to see how users who found you via search engines behave—and what you can do to improve their user journey.

Add a filter in Hotjar Recordings to get granular insights

5. Content optimization: Clearscope

Clearscope is an AI-powered content optimization platform that helps marketers create content that ranks higher and better meets readers’ needs.

Use Clearscope to

  • Create highly relevant and valuable content that addresses people’s search intent

  • Monitor the performance of published content over time to identify trends and opportunities

  • Get alerts when pages are losing traffic, rankings, or relevance so you can optimize them

  • Audit your existing content to find new opportunities

  • Analyze competitors’ content and generate content briefs to help you stand out 

Goals it helps you achieve:

  • Enhanced content quality

  • Improved ROI for your content

  • Improved engagement and time on page

  • Higher SERP rankings

6. Customer relationship management: HubSpot

HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform empowers marketing and sales teams to connect with customers and drive growth.

HubSpot’s Marketing Hub helps you

  • Enhance and optimize workflows with marketing automation 

  • Connect with visitors at the right moment using personalized email marketing and orchestrated campaign flows

  • Analyze and report on your marketing efforts

Goals it helps you achieve:

🤝 Combine HubSpot with Hotjar to deliver an even more personal experience: use the Hotjar-HubSpot integration to bring behavioral insights from Hotjar into HubSpot. Then, trigger tailored marketing flows for a more conversion-focused experience.

Create custom lists in HubSpot using Hotjar session properties to trigger more personalized marketing experiences

7. A/B testing and conversion rate optimization: AB Tasty

AB Tasty is an experimentation platform that enables you to run A/B tests and multivariate tests, so you can compare different versions of the same page and discover which one yields better results.

Use A/B Tasty to

  • Test designs and layouts to see which ones have the greatest impact on conversions

  • Understand how different elements on your ecommerce store or landing pages impact click-through rate

  • Run experiments to turn hypotheses into data you can use to make user-centric UX improvements

Goals it helps you achieve:

  • Improved micro- and macro-conversion rates

  • Improved customer satisfaction and experience

  • Enhanced UX

🔥 If you’re using Hotjar: whether you run your experiments with AB Tasty, Optimizely, or Unbounce, use our integrations to find out not just which variant wins, but why. Watch session recordings, view heatmaps, and run surveys to understand what users loved about the winning version, so you can hit the ground running next time.

Discover how to use Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings with your A/B test to get deeper insights

8. Email marketing and social media management: Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a marketing automation, social media management, and email marketing platform that helps you connect with potential customers right where they are—in their inbox or on their preferred social channel.

Mailchimp’s segmentation and personalization features help you

  • Easily create, send, and analyze the performance of email marketing campaigns

  • Trigger automated email workflows, such as drip campaigns or abandoned cart emails, based on specific customer actions (like adding an item to their cart but never checking out)

  • Track and plan posts across a range of social media platforms (like Facebook ads)

Goals it helps you achieve:

  • Improved email open rates

  • Increased conversions and revenue

  • Better brand awareness

Connect with your customers to increase sales 

You don’t need every ecommerce marketing solution out there—you just need the right ones. Fill your toolkit with well-chosen software that helps you stay close to your customers, so you understand, empathize with, and engage them at every stage of their purchasing journey—and boost your sales.

Use Hotjar’s suite of products to understand how users act and feel, then use those insights to create better experiences that drive sales.

FAQs about ecommerce marketing tools