11 Best Growth Marketing Software for SaaS

Growth marketing involves experimentation and optimization across the marketing funnels. Marketers today are moving from the traditional “set and forget” approach to a continually evolving growth-focused approach.

According to Ryan Holiday, author of Growth Hacker Marketing, being a growth marketer is about “throwing out the playbook of traditional marketing and replacing it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable.”

But doesn’t it come with an increased need for coding or technical knowledge for marketers?

Well, not necessarily. You can find a range of growth marketing software that require little to no coding knowledge and are best suited for SaaS products.

In this post, we’ll share the 11 best growth marketing tools for your SaaS business, based on categories such as in-app marketing, email automation, and more.

Table of Contents

• Analytics Tools for Growth Marketers
• In-App Product Growth Marketing Tools — for User Onboarding, Activation, Engagement, and Retention
• Email Automation Growth Marketing Tools for SaaS
• Website Chat Growth Marketing Tools for SaaS
• Conclusion

TL;DR

• The right analytics tool can help you optimize user segmentation, identify bottlenecks, increase conversion, and track what’s clicking with users and what’s not.
• Google Analytics allows you to track a range of visitor activity, including how they arrive at your site, where they navigate, and the time they spend on each page.
• Session recording tools like FullStory, Hotjar, and LogRocket offer insights into the reasons behind user actions by providing a first-person view.
• HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-in-one digital marketing solution that comes with a great analytics tool.
• Userpilot is a product growth platform tailored for product teams. It helps you activate, engage, and retain users at any stage of the user journey, including onboarding and retention.
• ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform (CXA) that offers pre-built automation combining email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM.
• GetResponse is an all-around marketing platform that includes a powerful email automation solution.
• User.com is an all-in-one Marketing Automation platform that comes with brilliant email automation and live chat features.
• Drift is a cloud-based revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses automate sales processes by adding live chat functionalities to their websites.

Analytics Tools for Growth Marketers

Analytics helps marketers understand how their target users are interacting with the product. It helps them assess each channel in terms of traffic and engagement.

While user feedback provides marketers with valuable opinions of users through surveys and interviews, analytics provides objective information and insights on user activity. It helps marketers find patterns among data points and narrate how users are engaging with the product.

The right analytics tool can help you optimize user segmentation, identify bottlenecks, increase conversion, and track what’s clicking with the users and what’s not.

Growth Marketing Software #1: Google Analytics

Google Analytics is easily one of the most popular analytics tools in the market, and it’s free. You can track a range of visitor activity, including how visitors arrive at your site, where they navigate, and the time they spend on each page.

Getting started with Google Analytics is quite simple (even simpler if you already have a G Suite account set up). You can easily add a verification tag to your site’s HTML.

Moreover, Google Analytics allows conversion tracking, which helps you track each conversion source once you set up your conversion points.

To make it even better, you can link to Google Search Console to help you analyze search traffic to your website or mobile app.

However, keep in mind that Google Analytics is built for websites, not for standalone products. You’ll need a different tool if you are looking for product analytics.

Did we also mention GA’s standard version is completely free? In most cases, the standard version is more than enough. But if you’re scaling and need extended functionalities offered by its enterprise version Analytics 360, it can get quite expensive (pricing starts from $150,000 per year).

Session Recording Tools For Growth Marketing

Session recording tools offer insights through a first-person view.

You can go through every action users are taking to complete each task and assess how easily they can navigate the UI. Observing the user’s experience and potential issues can help identify reasons for churn.

While there are a lot of session recording tools out there, FullStory, Hotjar, and LogRocket offer the best functionalities for SaaS products.

Growth Marketing Software #2: FullStory

FullStory is a popular session tracking platform that recreates user sessions by incorporating user data to ensure accuracy.

This tool combines session recording and product analytics. It captures page views and clicks that visitors make on your site and has the ability to track and measure “rage clicks’’.

FullStory comes with AI and machine learning features and lets you calculate and track KPIs, including conversion rates.

You can visualize data using dashboards and integrate with Slack to share user sessions with your team.

FullStory offers a limited free plan, restricting your access to three seats and 1,000 sessions per month. Its paid plans (pricing information unavailable) come with a 14-day free trial.

Growth Marketing Software #3: Hotjar

Hotjar uses a range of tools to collect user behavior data, including heatmaps and session recordings.

It captures the actions of the users landing on your website, including mouse movements, clicks, taps, and scrolling across multiple pages on both desktop and mobile devices accurately.

Hotjar also helps you visualize conversion funnels, which allows you to find loopholes easily.

Hotjar comes with a free basic version under its Personal plan. Its paid plans start from $39 per month and include a 15-day free trial. You can also opt for the agency plan for unlimited client sites in one central account and custom branding options.

Growth Marketing Software #4: LogRocket

LogRocket is primarily a behavioral analytics tool that also collects user activity data using session recordings and heatmaps.

With LogRocket, you can combine the session recordings with network logs, JS errors, and console analysis, making it valuable for bug tracking.

You also get a co-browsing feature that helps you share your screen with the user. This lets you easily guide your users while resolving any issue.

LogRocket also comes with in-depth user behavior analytics that provides valuable insights that can help you make more informed decisions.

Like FullStory and Hotjar, LogRocket also comes with a free plan with limited features. You are restricted to 1,000 sessions per month, with up to a month of data retention. Its paid plan starts at $99 per month, which gives you access to a minimum of 10,000 sessions.

Growth Marketing Software #5: Hubspot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-in-one digital marketing solution that includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Email Marketing, Campaign Automation, and of course, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software.

With Hubspot Marketing Analytics Software, you can track the complete customer lifecycle, create behavioral events to track user actions on your website and measure the quantity and quality of website traffic on a page-by-page basis.

You can also filter your analytics using specific metrics to track down the sources of key metrics like sessions and conversion rates.

HubSpot offers detailed reports pulling data from multiple sources, including your website, emails, blog posts, social media accounts, and more.

The pricing plans of HubSpot Marketing Hub start from $50 per month for 1,000 marketing contacts. If you need extended functionalities like single sign-on and predictive lead scoring, you can opt for its Professional or Enterprise plan.

In-App Product Growth Marketing Software — For User Onboarding, Activation, Engagement, and Retention

Product-led Growth is a growth model that relies primarily on the product for customer acquisition, activation, and retention.

The trend of product-led growth has caused a shift in marketing practices, making way for product marketing.

Product marketing focuses on delivering a great user experience for promoting the product to your existing customers (as opposed to using advertising or content marketing to build brand awareness).

The ultimate goal of product marketers is to ultimately drive customer acquisition through happy customer referrals.

Growth Marketing Software #6: Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform tailored for product teams, helping you better activate, engage, and retain users throughout their user journey.

Here’s what Userpilot can do for your product growth efforts.

New User Onboarding

User activation is the moment when your users get value from your product. It’s what makes them use your product and convert from trial to premium users.

Improving user activation is key since users who don’t activate usually churn before their trial ends.

To push users to activate, they need to experience the ‘aha moment!’ (aka the moment they suddenly grasp the true value of your product), and they need to experience it as fast as possible.

To show users value quickly, Userpilot offers interactive walkthroughs based on in-app events. Making the onboarding process contextual and more effective than regular product tours.

First, welcome screens with micro surveys can help you learn more about your users and segment them accordingly. One way to create a more personalized intro is to ask the user’s role and goals of using your product.

Want to see this in action? Get in touch with a product marketing specialist.

Based on the micro survey answers, you can then make the experience more relevant to each user. For example, you may get a social media marketer to complete one set of in-app events, and an agency owner to start on a different set of in-app experiences.

Want to build growth marketing experiences code-free? Get a Free Demo.

Retention

Among the 5 AARRR Pirate Metrics for SaaS, retention is the most important one. In fact, reducing churn by only 5% can increase profits by as much as 25–125%.

Retention marketing focuses on existing customers and spans their whole customer lifecycle. While acquisition marketing focuses on building brand awareness and converting leads into customers, retention marketing aims to re-engage the ones already familiar with your product or service.

Userpilot can help you focus your retention marketing efforts more effectively. It allows you to analyze user behavior in-app, detect the user segments that are struggling, and create specific user experiences that will help them get back on track.

You can create secondary onboarding experiences that can help existing users unlock more and more value within your tool.

Maybe you notice issues where basic users don’t seem to discover certain features on their own. Creating continuous onboarding experiences can increase product stickiness and reduce churn.

Kommunicate, a chatbot tool, had the same issue.

The Kommunicate team realized that all of their paying customers are using 5–7 key features. Consequently, they plugged those into Userpilot’s product adoption feature.

After releasing small feature adoption cues, they were able to increase usage rates from 28% to 41%.

They also focused on another ‘AHA moment’ — chat widget customization.

Once they introduced that cue, 86% of people completed the chat widget customization goal, resulting in a 3% increase in the feature’s usage.

This, in turn, led to a 2–3% increase in revenue along with a substantial impact on Kommunicate’s MRR.

Wanna start creating similar experiences without a line of code — and boost your feature adoption? Sign up for Userpilot for FREE now and start increasing your product usage today!

Email Automation Growth Marketing Software for SaaS

Email automation can be a powerful growth marketing tool for your SaaS business at every stage of the user journey. While tools like User.com, ActiveCampaign, and Get Response make email automation a breeze, it might be tempting to overdo it.

However, when it comes to automating emails, context is key. Understanding user needs and making email communications contextual based on these needs can help you make the most out of email automation to achieve growth.

Growth Marketing Software #7: User.com

User.com is an all-in-one Marketing Automation platform that comes with brilliant email automation features.

User.com offers snippet tags, which you can define to make your message specific to individual users. You can personalize the email by adding the receiver’s first name and unique website history.

You also get access to its analytics module that lets you track open rates, click-through rates, and the number of unsubscribed users.

The best part of User.com is its built-in drag & drop editor that helps you create visually appealing emails easily using its layouts or by importing your custom layouts as ZIP files or by using the HTML editor.

Growth Marketing Software #8: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform (CXA) that offers pre-built automation combining email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM.

The platform has a built-in drag-and-drop email designer to help you set up attractive email campaigns in no time.

Its segmentation and dynamic content features let you customize your message easily and send targeted emails. You can also personalize your emails based on the existing contact information of the users.

ActiveCampaign also offers reporting features to give you access to analytics that help you understand which emails are performing and which ones aren’t. You can also perform split testing to find the best version of your emails and get more opens, clicks, and buys.

ActiveCampaign can integrate with popular third-party apps and services like PayPal, Shopify, WooCommerce, Facebook, and more.

Growth Marketing Software #9: GetResponse

GetResponse is an all-around marketing platform that includes more than 30 tools, including a powerful email automation solution.

Like User.com and ActiveCampaign, GetResponse also boasts an easy-to-use drag and drop tool to design emails. You can also choose from its collection of customizable email templates.

You can build custom segments to send targeted emails and use dynamic content for personalizing your emails.

Another brilliant feature is the option to make your emails shoppable by adding products from your GetResponse store or integrating your existing online shop.

GetResponse offers analytics that lets you track opens, bounces, and more. You can also track user behavior and conduct A/B testing. You also have the option to receive automated reports whenever you want.

Website Chat Growth Marketing Tools for SaaS

Growth Marketing Software #10: Drift

Drift is a cloud-based Revenue Acceleration platform that helps businesses automate sales processes by adding live chat functionalities to their websites.

You can create multiple Drift inboxes if you need to manage different types of conversations. Drift also allows sending preset replies for answering common questions.

The tool also offers Conversational Ratings that customers can use to provide feedback.

Your team can use Internal Notes if they need to communicate in the middle of a conversation. These notes are kept hidden from visitors and are only accessible to team members.

Drift also comes with a Conversational Analysis feature to provide you with insights that’ll help you find ways of improving future customer interactions.

Growth Marketing Software #11: User.com

Apart from its brilliant email automation features, User.com also comes with a great live chat feature.

Like Drift, this software allows you to send preset replies for answering the most common questions asked by customers. You can also connect the knowledge base for automatic links and messages.

User.com lets you assign agents to specific conversations or have a chatbot take over for scheduling a demo or sending a link to the pricing page. The chatbot can also gather lead information and take NPS scores while your staff is away.

The chat interface can be customized by changing chat widget colors, icons, or appearance.

Conclusion

Selecting the right set of growth marketing software and tools will allow you to build an effective omnichannel growth strategy for your SaaS business.

Here’s a quick recap of the tools that can make your journey as a growth marketer easier:

• Google Analytics and Hubspot Marketing Hub for website and app analytics and FullStory, Hotjar, and LogRocket for session recording
• Userpilot for in-app product growth marketing, including user onboarding, activation, engagement, and retention
• User.com, ActiveCampaign, and GetResponse for email automation
• Drift and User.com for website chat

While the list of tools we’ve compiled for you can be a great starting point, keep in mind that your SaaS business might have different needs that these tools cannot cover. That’s why it’s important to stay in the loop and join conversations that are happening around product!