10 Martech Tools For Your Startup’s Martech Stack

As a chief marketing officer or marketing manager at a startup, you're likely working with a small team or even no team at all. That also means it can be more difficult for you to run marketing campaigns efficiently, keep track of social media performance, and generate leads, without a large, dedicated team backing you up.

Building a marketing technology (martech) stack can help overcome some of these challenges. An ideal marketing stack, if employed properly, can help target the right audience online, improve customer engagement, and make your team's workflow more efficient, resulting in the overall growth of your marketing operations and your business.

Keeping your small team in mind, we created this list of the 10 best tools from categories such as marketing automation, lead generation, social media marketing, content marketing, and email marketing in order to start building your martech stack. This list is based on reviews from users just like you, and products are listed alphabetically (you can find our methodology at the bottom of this page).

Encharge is a marketing automation platform built for digital businesses.

The software helps launch email marketing campaigns and send emails based on what people do on your website. Encharge analyzes website visitor behavior and collects traffic data from your website. The software also helps nurture leads into sales opportunities throughout the customer journey and gets them to sign up for your product or service.

You can segment your audience based on their position in your sales funnel and send targeted emails for different purposes, such as converting trial users, product activation, and reactivating current users whose subscriptions are about to expire.

Encharge offers chat and email support. The software is web-based.

Workflow builder in Encharge (Source)

Envoke is a marketing automation platform that helps create marketing campaigns and manage and nurture leads for your business.

With Envoke, you can send and track bulk emails to potential leads and build email marketing campaigns. The software offers a drag-and-drop email editor to create customized emails and run A/B tests to maximize open rates.

You can also create customizable and embeddable forms for your website to convert website visitors into potential leads. Additionally, you can segment audience lists using internal tags and custom filters. The software offers data analytics to measure open rates, unsubscribes, delivery failures, and overall campaign performance.

Envoke offers chat, email, and phone support. The software is web-based.

Sample report in Envoke (Source)

INBOX is an email marketing solution that offers drag-and-drop newsletter creation, campaign automation, subscriber management, and real-time reporting.

With INBOX, you can create custom newsletters from scratch, send them to your subscribers, and analyze your email marketing campaigns. The software also helps you create landing pages and embeddable forms for your website to target website visitors.

The A/B split campaign feature lets you create multiple versions of your campaigns based on your subscribers' behavior. The software also integrates with third-party communication and eCommerce applications to migrate data and simplify your workflows.

INBOX offers chat, email, and phone support. The software is web-based.

Analyzing campaign performance in INBOX (Source)

MailerLite is email marketing software designed to help people create professional and personalized marketing campaigns.

The software comes with multiple design editors such as drag-and-drop, rich text, and custom HTML editors to create landing pages and newsletters to cater to your audience. Additionally, MailerLite offers a library of pre-designed templates.

With MailerLite, you also get advanced email automation that helps build subscriber trust and boost engagement by launching highly targeted and personalized emails based on your audience's behavior.

MailerLite also lets you verify email addresses and filter low quality email addresses with past delivery issues, improving the quality of your email lists.

MailerLite offers chat and email support. The software is web-based and has a mobile app for iOS devices.

Drag-and-drop editor in MailerLite (Source)

Paperflite is a content management platform that helps digital marketing and sales teams curate, organize, and distribute content to their audience.

Paperflite helps you centralize all your sales collaterals, playbooks, digital marketing material, and content that your team needs and uses every day into a single dashboard.

The software identifies your sales rep's intent during customer calls and suggests the right content at the right time with the help of its SmartSearch algorithm. Additionally, you can develop multiple interactive and personalized microsites to share your content with your audience throughout the customer journey, instead of just sending bulk emails.

Paperflite integrates with all your social media accounts and makes it easy to share content through email systems, social media platforms, and during live meetings with potential customers.

Paperflite offers chat and email support. The software is web-based and has a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Personalized storyboard to share with prospects in Paperflite (Source)

Poptin is a lead capturing and marketing tool for online marketers, digital agencies, marketing professionals, and eCommerce businesses.

The software helps increase website visitor engagement with the help of surveys and smart popups with targeted messaging that get triggered as your audience navigates your website.

You can create popups and forms for your website with a drag-and-drop interface that lets you add and remove images, text, and CTA buttons, and change the website background.

The software also lets you automate welcome emails for new subscribers and send them coupons and download links for your services.

Poptin offers chat and email support. The software is web-based.

Drag-and-drop editor in Poptin (Source)

CONTENIVE is a social media marketing platform that helps you plan your content strategy and increase your social media outreach.

The software allows you to create, schedule, and promote content on multiple social media platforms. You can also develop visual content with a built-in graphics editor.

CONTENIVE features AI algorithms that analyze your audience and detect the best time to publish your content online. The software also has a template library that you can use to create new content. The software integrates with multiple third-party social media and communication platforms to share information easily.

CONTENIVE offers 24/7 live rep support. The software is web-based and has a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Content planning in CONTENIVE (Source)

SharpSpring is a revenue growth marketing platform that helps small businesses generate leads, improve conversions to sales, and drive higher returns on marketing investments.

With a built-in content and landing page builder, the software helps you build dynamic and personalized content to convert website visitors into customers.

SharpSpring also offers a visual workflow builder to assist with your marketing operations. You can create multiple buyer personas, assign leads to different team members, and send targeted messages to prospects.

SharpSpring offers chat, email, and phone support. The software is web-based and has a mobile app for Android and ioS devices.

Campaign insights in SharpSpring (Source)

Spott is a content marketing solution for small businesses aiming for better online outreach.

You can embed your content with shoppable links and PDF documents to make your content more interactive and incentivize it.

Spott has a drag-and-drop editor that lets you upload your assets online and customize them. You can add 360° effects on images and turn them into a catalog.

With multi-channel publishing, you can integrate your social media accounts with Spott and publish your content directly on third-party platforms.

Image editor in Spott (Source)

Zoho Social is a social media marketing platform that helps businesses strengthen their online presence and increase their brand recognition with their audience.

Zoho Social lets marketers schedule posts across different social media platforms and create custom reports with a built-in analytics tool to analyze social media performance. The software has built-in AI algorithms that provide best-time predictions for your posts so you can schedule your posts when your audience is most active.

Additionally, you also get a monitoring dashboard with multiple listing columns so you can manage all your social media handles from one place. Zoho social also provides built-in audio and video calling to collaborate with teammates and build your marketing strategy. You can also tag them in discussion threads.

The software also lets you give roles to specific team members and access permission for sensitive data.

Zoho social offers chat and email support. The software is web-based and has a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

Analyzing brand health in Zoho Social (Source)

How to choose the right tools for your martech stack

Every decision is crucial when you're working with limited marketing spend. Here are some things to keep in mind when picking marketing technology for your business:

• Assess the level of integration that each software offers: Whether it is content marketing, lead generation, or social media marketing, marketing technology tools that you pick should be able to integrate smoothly with the rest of your stack. Make sure to confirm the integrational capability of the software with the vendor.

• Check how well the tools segment customer data: Personalization and good customer service is key to winning customers, and to achieve that, you need a marketing tech stack that offers detailed segmentation capabilities. Your ability to offer a great customer experience depends on how personalized you can make your offers, and you can only do that when the tools you pick help you effectively segment your audience.

• Assess the learning curve for each new tool: Your team should be juggling multiple marketing campaigns and not how-to manuals for each software you pick for your marketing stack. Make sure that the tools you choose to be a part of your martech stack are easy to use and don't have a steep learning curve.

Common questions to ask vendors when selecting a martech tool:

These are some common questions you can ask software providers before making your final purchase:

• How robust is your customer support? Sometimes you will experience glitches with a tool. Other times, navigating a particular section of a new tool can get confusing for your team. Whatever the reason, your chosen software should have an easily accessible customer support team for all your needs.

• Does your product integrate with the rest of my stack to facilitate a single view of the customer? Irrespective of the number of tools you're working with, you should be able to have a single view of your customer across all tools. If your stack isn't in sync, it will cause problems when it comes to developing marketing campaigns and analyzing performance.

• Does each tool offer real-time analysis? All the tools in your stack should be able to provide real-time reporting and analysis to measure performance, check on leads, and respond to customer complaints. Without real-time analysis, you run the risk of working with unsynced data and backlogged customer queries and complaints.