At Mention, we use several tools to help us be most effective and efficient at our jobs.
Tools are kind of like recipes — they provide you with what you need to get the job done. And like a good recipe, they need to be shared!
There’s value in transparency
We believe that if every startup shared which tools they used, it would broaden everyone’s knowledge, and result in all of us working more effectively, together. Some have gone so far to share their marketing stack in a very detailed way. With a post such as CB Insight’s, comes knowledge exchange and an opportunity to build new relationships, and maybe even partnerships among the tools listed.
This will be a series of blog posts covering the tools we use across departments and responsibilities, including engineering, sales, marketing, community, management, and more. These lists will be published through Product Hunt collections, and we are starting with our Marketing stack.
The outliers
Before we go into the most well known marketing tools, there a two totally — or at least largely — unknown tools I wish to put forward: Chatlio and Satismeter.
Chatlio
Chatlio is a live chat service, enabling us to talk to our customers on some specific pages… directly from Slack. Why are we using that and not the regular stuff?
Because I believe in limiting the number of interfaces we need to use, in order to answer to our users promptly. I want less, not more!
My criteria were:
- Direct integration with our current internal communication tool (Slack).
- A strategy to handle the chat when the team is out of office.
- Integration with Segment.io, the hub we use to centralize our analytics data.
I can not stress how much bringing live chat to Slack is a game-changer. Not having to open a browser tab, wait for the app to load, and hope the person on the other side is still there waiting for you. Bringing live chat to @SlackHQ with @Chatlio is a game changer.
Anyone on my team can hop in and answer, which means we can send someone from customer support to sales in seconds, without interruption. It’s the ultimate collaborative support tool.
Satismeter
Satismeter is an customer feedback tool based on Net Promoter Score, via in-app or email surveys.
Measuring the satisfaction of our users is crucial in SaaS (software-as-a-service) marketing, as it both allows you to understand if you’re successful in keeping your customers happy, and also gather invaluable feedback from. Plus, you can also develop and implement some nice growth hacks.
Just like with chat tools, a bunch of NPS tools already exist. And we’ve tried them all. However, none covered our requirements:
- In-app and email surveys (the first is best, but you need to fallback to email if the customer doesn’t log back into your app).
- Ability to ask additional follow-up questions: Drop down list of main reasons for the score, plus space for free answer.
- Conditional logic, so we can customize the reasons presented depending on the score the user selected.
- Integration from and to Segment.io, so the survey is loaded through Segment.io, and the results flow back (and sync to all our other tools).
To be clear, we did not find a tool that covered all those requirements. However, we did find someone who was ready to collaborate with us and develop what was necessary. And we believe Satismeter makes for a fantastic tool if you have a SaaS product.
Marketing tools: The usual suspects
Now, to the other more mainstream tools, listed by upvotes on Product Hunt!
- Slack: Our go-to communication tool. We use it more than email, even more than coffee. We use for company teams, Mention-wide chat, and even on a broader scale.
- Trello: We like to organize things visually. Everything, from weekly projects, product features, quarterly goals, has it’s board in Trello.
- Kissmetrics: Because getting aggregate from Google Analytics is not enough, we use Kissmetrics for diving into our data, understand how our product is being used. Plus, they have outstanding support!
- Google Analytics: Who doesn’t ? Really ?
- Intercom: We use Intercom for their in-app message tool, which is by far the best. This lets us communicate with users on a segment basis.
- Buffer: Buffer is the ultimate tool for scheduling social media posts. This is a great time-saver as you come across high-quality content to share with your audience spread over the day or week. The same goes for when you publish a blog post and want to schedule promotional posts throughout the following week.
- Mailjet: If you are a Mention user (if not, stop reading and head over here), you have certainly received an email notification containing the mentions relevant to your alert. To send all those emails, we use a dedicated service, and Mailjet is fantastic for that.
- Mention: Because duh.
- Zapier: This is the spark that ignites half our data marketing projects. Start with a Zapier, then move to internal code if required. We use it to push typeform surveys to Helpscout, handle our webinar registrations, and even integrate any third party tool with Segment (yes, we’ll do a dedicated blog post on that one).
- Segment: Wonder how we can keep so many apps up to date with our customer data? If you think I’m asking our dev team to implement a new tracking for each app, you’re wrong. Segment’s our single hub for all tracking data. If you don’t have that, and you’re a marketer, stop what’s you are doing, and try it out. Seriously.
- Customer.io: After reviewing ALL email nurturing solutions, we called this our new home for our emails. Emails is a complicated matter. Customer.io has the best features to cost ratio, fantastic tempalting, and a direct implementation with Segment. Priceless
- Fullstory: Data tells you where to look. Now that you know that customers are not using an important feature of your app, how do you understand why? Fullstory shows you what your users see as they use your app.
- SumoMe: SumoMe is our favorite tool for collecting emails to deliver our blog newsletter to. It’s simple and intuitive to use, and allows you to customize your pop-ups by time on site, colors, copy, and more.
- Helpscout: Our support ticket tool. Inexpensive, works well in a clean interface. Other tools have more bells and whistles, but we have not found the need for that.
- Unbounce: Ever had to create a nice looking landing page at the last minute? We do. Often. From webinars to special campaign landing pages, it’s faster and simpler for us to create a page in Unbounce than… any other method.
- Optimizely: Got featured on ProducHunt? We did. Four times. The best advice for when that happens, is to create a customized landing page. And that works for any other segment, traffic source, that you can think of. More personalized means better conversion. And I don’t need to tell you why that’s a good thing, right?
- CoSchedule: CoSchedule, which integrates with WordPress, is a cloud-based editorial calendar with team collaboration and task management features. Plan your posts from idea through promotion with just a few clicks!
- Preact : Preact captures all the user data, and predicts wether they will upgrade or churn. You can then act based on that information, and reach out to the user. How cool is that ?
Woof. Now that’s quite a stack, and you certainly understand why we want to try avoiding unnecessary tools by now! However, if there’s any killer tools we must know about, please share them in the comments below!
