If you’re looking for lead generation tools for growing your business, you might find the options available to you a little overwhelming. But don’t let that deter you.
Lead generation is the lifeblood of growth, especially if you’re a B2B company. So it’s no surprise that 53% of marketing professionals allocate more than half of their annual budget on generating new leads.
And yet 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge.
Finding the right lead generation software for your business can also be tricky. Start exploring this space and you’ll find that the many offerings you come across all do slightly different jobs.
But that’s a good thing. It means that, once you know what your business needs, you can pick the lead generation tool that’s right for you.
Most of these tools require you to have a robust website in place, since many will integrate right away with WordPress and other content management systems. Some tools are free, but you might need to upgrade to a paid version to get full functionality.
Let’s see what’s out there. 👀
What is the best lead source?
If you’re looking at it from a purely ROI perspective, the best lead source is actually email. Multiple studies online have shown that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a return of anywhere between $36-$42 in business. That’s pretty huge compared to other forms of lead generation (despite all the hype that influencer marketing or paid advertising tends to get).
But that begs the question—how do you get the emails of your leads to begin with? This is the part of the marketing puzzle that requires you to think bigger. Because you can’t just rely on cold outreach alone… you need a full-scale strategy that brings leads consistently and predictably into your brand’s orbit.
Ideally, you should start out by picking a few tools from this list that span all the different categories of lead generation: outbound, inbound, email automation, on-page optimization tools, and lead tracking tools. Because there’s not just one lead source that will do all the heavy lifting for you—it’s when you combine these together that you unlock their true potential.
Outbound lead generation tools help you to find and connect with potential leads via email, social media or over the phone. It’s about reaching out, as opposed to inbound lead generation, which is about bringing leads in.
1. Magical 🪄
Want to make your outbound lead gen effortless? Look no further than Magical. Magical allows you to populate outreach messages, fill lead generation sheets, and update your databases (without the time-consuming copy-paste between tabs).
Messaging leads: Quickly create a keyboard shortcut for your lead gen templates. For example, you can key in “//outreach1” or “//outreach2” and drop lines of proven outreach content into any email or LinkedIn message.
But using Magical doesn’t mean your lead gen messages are all copy-and-paste. You can personalize everything in a flash, dropping contact details, job roles, and other info into your message too. And you can tweak whatever you need for the final touches.
You can even move lead data from your open tabs to other sheets with one click. (And you can autofill any form field and pull info from anywhere, including to and from your sales and CRM systems.) This makes prospecting a breeze.
User Ritik G. is a big fan of Magical, noting "I recently started using Magically to help streamline my workflow and save time on tedious tasks like copying and pasting. The tool has been a game-changer for me! With Magically, I can set up unique shortcuts for frequently used text and phrases, so I don't have to copy and paste them constantly. Instead, I can type in the shortcut and Magically automatically expand it."
Magical is super easy to set up. No coding required. Simply download the app to Chrome and it works wherever you go on the web. 👍
Also read: 5 helpful tips for winning outbound lead generation
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you add leads to your CRM and makes it easy for you to send direct marketing content to engage and convert them. It also allows you to target specific types of people within certain industries. Build engagement by sending direct InMail messages to let leads know about new content and offers they might be interested in.
As with writing emails, personalize your LinkedIn messages to connect with your readers.
As marketing expert Shannon Prager says, "Unfortunately one size doesn’t fit all, and no one lead generation strategy works for for every lead. Each of your leads face different obstacles that need to be overcome in order to move forward in the sales process."
3. Outreach.io
Outreach.io lets you manage the whole account-based sales process. It integrates sales management and AI tools, like conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence, so you get better, more insightful information on your customers. With this handy info, you can drive engagement.
Things to consider when choosing an outbound lead gen tool:
Identify your ideal customer. You need to know exactly who you’re targeting, including their interests, habits, and behaviors.
Your marketing and sales team must be talking to each other. The tool you use can help to prevent this by allowing teams to collaborate easily.
Adopt a multi-pronged approach. Outbound lead gen works well when it’s also paired with an inbound lead gen strategy.
User Brian S. says "Outreach is a great platform that integrates with many other useful tools for a sales organization. It allows for automatic email/call sequences to occur and it is very easy to use platform. I love the simplicity and navigation tools to set up sequences and call steps to properly contact customers and potential customers. I love the notifications as well. This allows me to see who has clicked, replied, and opened the emails to have "warmer" leads than initially expected too. Overall a great tool for a sales organization to have!"
Inbound lead generation software
These tools are all about driving leads to your website, app, or platform, or helping them stay there. Here are some of the most popular tools out there to help streamline your process.
4. Semrush
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a major part of inbound lead generation tools. If you’re maximizing your visibility in the search engines for relevant terms at different stages of the buying funnel, you’ll get more relevant traffic that’s ready to convert into a lead.
Semrush helps you to find effective SEO keywords for your business, track your SEO strategy, and improve the technical aspects of SEO, like backlinks and metadata. You could also try Ahrefs or Moz—there are lots of SEO tools on the market that do roughly the same things.
Riya T. says "I work in SEO, which means I use Semrush for at least 5 hours a day out of the 8. Semrush has an easy-to-use interface, offering a great experience to beginners as well as professionals. It provides comprehensive insights into keyword analysis, content research, and a lot more. The recent update introducing keyword clusters has elevated the platform even more. This has not only helped in saving time while researching content silos but also improved the precision of content strategy."
5. Drift
AI chatbots help you to be available to your customers 24/7, deliver a consistent customer experience, and direct customers to the right people in your sales or customer service teams.
They’re so useful, they’ve helped some companies to increase their sales by as much as 67%. Drift tailor-makes its chatbots so that you can assess customer interest, share relevant content easily, and schedule meetings with potential new clients.
User Andrew M. shares, "I am a big fan of Drift, my account team and customer support. My account team is always providing insights and recommendations on what we can do to improve our playbooks. They are very responsive and address questions promptly. They also do a very good job onboarding new users."
6. Typeform
Polls and surveys can also help you to draw people into your company. Typeform lets you create interesting, engaging and brand-specific forms and surveys that connect you with potential leads. It’s simple and easy too; no coding skills required. The fact that it's free makes it easy to start using immediately.
Typeform is a relatively simple tool, so you might need something more robust to execute on other aspects of your lead generation, but this is a great way to capture important details.
User Collette A. says "Creating questionnaires and surveys was so simple and allowed me to create multiple pathways depending on answers. I loved being able to style the questionnaire in line with my brand. It was easy to implement and integrate with other tools."
7. Hubspot
Hubspot is an all-in-one inbound marketing solution that includes a free CRM platform, a landing page builder, email management features, ad tracking and workflow management. It’s the whole package. It’s particularly useful if you’re developing lead generation campaigns.
Things to consider when choosing an inbound lead gen tool:
In inbound lead generation, content is king. Spend time creating interesting and engaging information that is relevant to your brand.
Use calls to action cleverly. Encourage your potential leads to read more, sign up, or contact you today!
Analyze the results you get. Do more of what does work and less of what doesn’t.
Email automation tools are creative campaigns that keep prospects interested and engaged and help you to convert them to customers. Bear in mind that the HubSpot tiers with the highest level of lead generation tracking and reporting can be costly for small businesses. Note that some users find that HubSpot is not as all-in-one as advertised, such as Greg B.
"Many features are unavailable or limited even after paying for professional. This has require us paying and integrating other tools to be able to send text messages, emails, phone calls, automations, calendaring, website, email responses to advertising and contact forms, etc. Many of the features or functions we have found included in many competeting solutions aren't available in HubSpot such as automations (workflows) sending webhooks, being triggers off of webhooks, sending auto emails to Paid Ad forms, etc. We found ourselves constantly being disappointed that Hubspot features were unavailable and going off Hubspot to find effective tools to accomplish sales. Our team runs into "upgrade to use this feature" so often, it seems more like a free trial even though we're paying for the Pro level."
8. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a lead generation tool that manages the sending of marketing emails and nurture sequences. It has plenty of features to make your life easier, including detailed scheduling tools, A/B testing, and a powerful analytics suite to get insights into open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics you might want to keep track of.
Mailchimp stands out with its user-friendly interface, acknowledged by many users for its intuitive design that facilitates easy navigation. The platform offers a suite of robust email marketing tools, empowering users to create and manage compelling campaigns. From designing visually appealing emails to audience segmentation and campaign performance tracking, Mailchimp provides a comprehensive toolkit. Notably, its automation features enable users to establish targeted and personalized email sequences based on customer behavior. The platform further enhances user experience through detailed analytics and reporting, allowing users to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns with metrics such as open rates and click-through rates. Mailchimp's seamless integration capabilities with various third-party applications and platforms enable users to synchronize their marketing efforts effortlessly. Additionally, the platform's responsive and helpful customer support has garnered appreciation from many users for its effectiveness in addressing queries and issues.
-Agata M.
9. Mailshake
Mailshake allows you to optimize, personalize, and automate cold emailing. It’s easy and intuitive to use and has some useful, ready-made templates that you can implement straight away.
Things to consider when choosing an email automation tool:
Personalize, personalize, personalize. If your leads feel like you’re lazily spamming them, they’ll move on. That said, automate whatever you can. Reports suggest that 80% of marketers who use automation software increase their leads, and that 77% convert more leads than those who don’t use automation.
Magical helps here of course—you can focus on personalizing your templates in a compelling way, and you can pull insightful prospect data to and from your records easily.
On-page lead generation tools
On-page lead generation tools help you keep the attention of leads who are already on your website or social media pages.
10. Unbounce
Unbounce helps you capture lead details and store them. It allows you to set pop-ups and sticky bars that appear on your website to get attention and persuade people to sign up for more information or an offer. It’s highly customisable so you can personalize the pop-ups and sticky bars to match your branding and style.
Matt G. says "Really easy WYSIWYG, drag and drop editor for landing pages, forms, etc. Also has integrations into things like Hubspot so our Marketing and CS teams can use them without the help of a web developer to quickly turn around content for webinars, etc."
11. OptinMonster
With OptinMonster, you can create smart, snappy and eye-catching on-site lead campaigns. Pop-ups, slide-in windows, and captivating games are all available to reel your potential lead in even more. The tool is easy to use and beginner-friendly.
Things to consider when choosing an on-page lead gen tool:
On-page lead gen tools work well with inbound and outbound marketing tools. Use the former to get someone to your site and, once they’re there, use your on-page tool to keep them there.
Who’s visiting your site? There might be potential leads out there that you haven’t considered.
Pop-ups can really help you gather more valuable data from your website visitors, as shared by user Michelle K.
OptinMonster allows us to place different types of popups on our websites. I love how we can place subtle pop ups or something more flashy depending on our needs. You can set it to appear on only certain pages or the entire website, create from scratch or build from a template, and schedule them to appear at certain times and disappear at others. It does everything that we need it to do.
-Michelle K.
12. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder connects to your Google Analytics account to help you see which companies are visiting your site. This information can be hugely valuable: knowing who’s checking you out can make you aware of new and untapped markets. Leadfeeder offers detailed insight about companies, and includes information on employee numbers, behavioral info and contract details.
13. Hotjar
This user-friendly platform helps you see exactly who’s viewed your website and how they’ve behaved while interacting with your content. Use this info to run surveys to find out what people enjoyed or why they moved away.
HotJar's free plan gives you a lot of solid data. If you're really investing in your SEO strategy, though, consider the upgrade so you can really learn how people use your site.
Things to consider when choosing a web tracking tool:
Keep your business objectives in mind. Are you only using this data to generate leads, or are you also looking for ways to improve your products and services? Analyze your information closely and use it to your advantage.
Is your tool scalable? As your business grows, you need a tool that can grow with it over time.
How do you generate leads automatically?
Imagine if every day, you had more leads coming into your funnel than you knew what to do with. This isn’t impossible—in fact, there are several ways to generate leads automatically using the tools and software above.
The better you get at generating leads, the easier it is to close those clients. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Tools can help close that gap.
With the right combination of chatbots, automated emails, landing pages, and evergreen SEO content—you can create a self-sustaining lead generation engine that feeds itself.
Looking for an easy way to automate your lead generation? Try Magical—our text expander, autofill, and data entry features will superspeed your lead gen activities and help you get more done in a fraction of the time. 🚀
