Best 8 E-Commerce Marketing Tools for 2024

If you are looking for the best e-commerce marketing tools in 2024, this guide is for you.

In this article, we’ll go over eight marketing tools, going over their top features, pros and cons, and pricing models.

TL;DR

➡️ Big Sur AI is the best e-commerce marketing tool, as it helps you create a human-like conversational experience in your store to increase your conversion rate. Pricing can be based on sales attributed to the software.

➡️ Optimizely helps you personalize your store’s customer experience in real time using AI. Pricing is custom.

➡️ Emarsys lets you set up product recommendations across multiple channels, such as email and ads.

➡️ Klaviyo helps your online store create personalized email and SMS campaigns at scale. The platform integrates with Big Sur AI to target customers with personalized email campaigns. Pricing is based on active customer profiles.

➡️ Zendesk is a customer support platform that lets you set up a customer support chatbot to help your customers resolve their common problems faster. Pricing is based on the amount of agents you have.

➡️ Sprout Social helps you manage all your social media profiles from a single platform, and also get crisis notifications, and AI suggestions. Pricing is based on seats.

➡️ Klevu lets you set up an AI-powered site search on your website with predictive autocomplete. Pricing is based on search requests.

➡️ Semrush helps you optimize your site’s SEO to rank for more keywords on Google and improve your organic traffic.

Before we begin, we will go over a few factors to consider when evaluating e-commerce marketing software for your online store.

Factors To Consider When Evaluating Marketing Tools For Your Online Store

#1: How Does This Marketing Tool Improve My Revenue or Operations?

There are hundreds of marketing tools for optimizing e-commerce in various aspects.

Here are the main use cases for improving your e-commerce website with marketing tools, which we will cover in this article 👇

• Bring a conversational experience to your online store to assist your customers in finding the right products for their needs.
• Improve your email and SMS flows by personalizing them with product offers, and automations.
• Increase your post-purchase customer satisfaction with problem-solving chatbots.
• Personalize the shopping experience to each shopper with AI-powered personalization tools.
• Improve your site’s conversion rates with AI product recommendations, which can recommend the right product, cross-sell, or upsell.
• Improve your site’s SEO by conducting technical audits, keyword research, and competitor analysis.

#2: Would I Be Able To Measure The Effectiveness of This Software?

➡️ Marketing tools should have strong analytical and reporting capabilities so you can measure their results.

Some of the software we will review have ingrained analytics and reporting on revenue generated and conversion rates.

However, for other tools, you will need your in-house data to measure the campaigns' real results.

#3: What is The Cost Structure?

When evaluating marketing software, you need to know if the pricing structure works for your e-commerce store.

There are tools that offer a % commission for each sale attributed to their software, while others require a monthly subscription.

💡 After considering all of the above factors, we selected the best marketing software for online brands:

What Are The Best Marketing Tools For E-Commerce?

Here are the best marketing tools for e-commerce out of all the software we reviewed:

#1: Big Sur AI - An AI-powered sales assistant who helps you increase your conversion rate by providing shoppers with a 24/7 real-time shopping experience.

#2: Optimizely - Personalize your store’s customer experience in real-time using AI by combining first-party and third-party data.

#3: Emarsys - Set up product recommendations across multiple channels, such as email and ads, based on pre-defined rules.

#4: Klaviyo - Set up highly personalized email and SMS campaigns to increase your sales volume.

#5: Zendesk - Set up a customer support platform to help your customers resolve their post-purchase problems via a chatbot or human agents.

#6: Sprout Social - Manage your social media profiles from a unified platform and get crisis notifications.

#7: Klevu - Set up an AI-powered site search on your website with predictive autocomplete.

#8: Semrush - Optimize your site’s SEO via website audits, keyword research, and competitor analysis to improve your organic traffic.

#1: Big Sur AI

Big Sur AI is an AI-powered sales agent that helps online stores increase sales volume and conversion rate.

The software provides shoppers with a 24/7 real-time personalized shopping experience to assist them during their product discovery journey.

Full disclosure: Even though Big Sur AI is our tool, we will provide an unbiased and objective perspective on why it is the best marketing tool for e-commerce in 2024.

The ability to replicate the personalized in-store shopping experience online is what makes Big Sur AI the best choice for online brands.

Here are the 4 best features of the tool that our merchants love:

Big Sur AI's Features

AI Sales Agent

Big Sur’s AI Sales Agent enables your customers to ask contextual questions about your products, and the software provides them with personalized answers.

Here's an example from Rad Power Bikes if your shoppers ask the sales agent to recommend them a bike for a height of 6'2 ⤵️

The sales assistant is trained on your product features and store details and can provide personalized product recommendations and in-depth responses to queries.

These personalized answers consider the customer’s shopping journey up to this point.

Here's why e-commerce brands choose Big Sur AI:

• 24/7 Shopping Assistance: BigSur’s AI sales agent helps shoppers find the right product for their needs at any time of the day without relying on human agents.
• Customized to your store: You control the AI experience to make sure the tone of voice represents your brand.
• Optimized for conversions: The sales agent's advice is designed to provide relevant recommendations and propose follow-up questions based on data on what would likely lead to a conversion.
• Conversational experience: Your customers can converse with Big Sur’s sales assistant as if they were messaging a human.

Conversion-Optimized AI Prompts

This unique feature prompts your customers to start more conversations, leading to more purchases and basket sizes.

Big Sur AI analyzes how each shopper engages with your site and predicts what questions they might ask before being ready to purchase.

The software then prompts shoppers to ask these questions throughout their product browsing experience.

Here’s an example from Wyze ⤵️

Wyze used our tool’s conversion-optimized AI prompts to help shoppers alleviate uncertainty before purchasing the store’s specialized products.

💡Shoppers who interact with Big Sur AI convert at four times the rate as the average store shopper.

The suggested prompts are embedded on your product and category pages and are personalized to each shopper.

💡That means every customer sees different questions crafted to maximize the likelihood of purchasing.

AI Product Recommendations

When customers go to brick-and-mortar stores, they are shown generic product recommendations, such as:

• Frequently bought together.
• Most purchased products overall.

These recommendations are not personalized, as they are shown to every customer.

Big Sur AI helps you increase your sales volume by making contextual product recommendations based on:

• Customers' engagement with your store, such as product views and buttons clicked.
• Information gathered through the conversational experience with the sales agent.
• The questions shoppers asked.

These AI-powered product recommendations are broken into three modules:

• Picked just for you: Displays a selection of products that your shoppers are most likely to buy based on what the tool knows about them.
• Frequently bought together: These recommendations appear once a shopper adds a product to their cart. They feature other products that customers typically buy based on their previous activity.
• Top sellers: The bestsellers in the same product category as the product a customer is considering, but the items are based on the shopper’s gathered information - not just generic recommendations.

These product modules are shown to customers according to the page they're on and how they landed there.

Your customers can receive these product suggestions on your product and collections pages or during a conversation with the AI Sales Agent, increasing your store's basket sizes.

Merchant Insights

The nature of Big Sur AI’s software helps the tool gather unique shopper insights, which allow merchants to make better strategic decisions.

Our tool’s analytics lets you uncover your shoppers' questions when browsing your products and how the questions correlate to purchasing behavior (what questions lead to sales).

You can also get insights into what questions lead to conversions vs. cart abandonment ⤵️

Your online store will get access to analytics on what products are frequently bought together, which will help you create product bundles and make other strategic decisions.

Merchants appreciate being able to understand the correlation between past purchases, customer profiles, and the customers' interactions with their online stores.

You can use these insights to optimize your store's product descriptions and build a marketing strategy based on what your customers truly want.

Lastly, you can see where your customers churn and where the Big Sur’s sales agent helped drive spikes in sales volume and conversion rate:

Pricing

Big Sur AI has two pricing models:

• Commission-Based Model - merchants only pay when conversions are attributed to the AI Sales Agent.

This is a pay-for-performance model, where you only pay a commission for each sale attributed to our tool.

The conversion window is negotiated, but it’s typically 30 days.

• Tiered Pricing Model - recurring monthly payment based on your website's average volume of unique visitors per month.

Think of these pricing models as if you’re hiring a salesperson.

You decide between paying per unique visitor to your website or a commission on each conversion attributed to Big Sur AI.

Pros and Cons

✅ Real-time AI conversational shopping assistant.

✅ Easy to set up with minimum developer resources required.

✅ Data-driven approach to optimizing for conversions.

✅ Hyper-personalizes the customer experience, increasing basket sizes and sales volume.

✅ Seamless integration with Shopify, which takes 5 minutes.

❌ As a new product, the software hasn’t been as tested as other personalization tools.

#2: Optimizely

Best for: Personalizing the customer experience in real-time in your online store.

Similar to: Emarsys.

Optimizely is an all-in-one marketing tool for e-commerce stores that combines web personalization, content management, and customer behavior analysis.

The tool stands out with its personalization features. The platform uses customer data, A/B testing, and AI features to predict shopper intent.

Top Features

• Personalize the shopping experience in real-time with a 90-second refresh rate - from customizing the home page to product offers.
• Build customer segments for personalization - define custom shopper audiences from first-party and third-party data.
• Ingrained analytics that shows you a breakdown of each personalized experience to summarize the what, why, and how of a campaign.
• Enhance any tech stack, such as Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Pricing

You’d have to contact Optimizely for a product demo and pricing.

Pros and Cons

✅ Personalizing the shopping experience with a 90-second refresh rate.

✅ Build customer segments with first-party and third-party data.

✅ Detailed analytics into personalization performances.

❌ Users report that the UI sometimes loads slowly.

❌ Steep learning curve.

#3: Emarsys

Best for: Setting up AI-powered product recommendations across multiple channels.

Similar to: Big Sur AI.

Emarsys is a marketing automation platform that helps online stores set up personalized product recommendations.

The tool can recommend products based on shoppers’ preferences across multiple channels, such as email, ads, and mobile push.

Top Features

• AI-powered product recommendations that use machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data, such as shoppers’ interests and behavior.
• The recommendations are generated in real-time, making sure that your customers always see the most up-to-date products based on their last interaction.
• Set up automated email campaigns that trigger personalized product recommendations based on pre-defined customer actions and business rules.
• Detailed analytics on how the product recommendations performed, which includes conversion rates, revenue generated, and CTRs.

Pricing

You’d have to contact Emarsys for a product demo and pricing.

Pros and Cons

✅ Predictive AI and machine learning to provide personalized product recommendations.

✅ Serve the recommendations across email, mobile app, and digital ads.

✅ Ingrained reporting and analytics on performance.

❌ Users report that the support team can be slow to respond.

❌ The contract has been reported to be with a high price tag.

#4: Klaviyo

Best for: Setting up personalized email and SMS campaigns.

Similar to: Emarsys.

Klaviyo is a marketing tool that offers advanced automations and personalization features across email and SMS.

The tool helps you use first-party consumer data to personalize your email campaigns at scale.

Top Features

• Set up automated email and SMS flows that are based on customer behavior, such as abandoned cart reminders and win-back campaigns.
• AI-powered predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms that recommend products to individual shopper preferences.
• Ingrained analytics and insights that give you visibility into campaign performance and the customer journey.
• Integrations with other marketing tools for enhanced personalization, such as Big Sur AI.

Pricing

The tool’s pricing model is based on how many active customer profiles your brand has.

There are 2 paid tiers. Assuming you have 3,001 - 3,500 active profiles, here's how much you'll pay:

• Email - $80/month, including mobile push notifications and 150 free SMS credits
• Email & SMS - $95/month, including mobile push notifications and 1,250 monthly SMS credits

On the Email & SMS plan, you'd be charged an additional $0.0120 per SMS after the 1,250 SMS limit.

Note: Klaviyo offers a freemium for up to 250 active customer profiles that includes 150 free monthly SMS credits.

After 251 active contacts, the pricing starts from $20/month up to $2,300/month.

Pros and Cons

✅ Engagement and personalization across email, SMS, and mobile.

✅ AI-powered personalization and automations.

✅ Predictive AI that recommends products to individual shopper preferences.

❌ Users are upset with the lack of a mobile app.

❌ Can get quite expensive as your contact list grows.

#5: Zendesk

Best for: Post-purchase customer support.

Similar to: Big Sur AI.

As an alternative to Gorgias, Zendesk is a help desk that allows online brands to handle customer queries.

The platform offers a comprehensive range of tools for managing customer interactions, such as a chatbot and a unified platform to handle complaints.

Top Features

• AI-powered chatbot that can resolve up to 50% of customer queries within minutes, so your customers would not have to wait for a human.
• Self-service portal where your shoppers can find the solution to their problem from a knowledge base.
• Omnichannel support from a unified platform where human agents can assist your customers’ complaints submitted from various channels.
• Reporting and analytics to help you make data-driven decisions on the post-purchase customer experience.

Pricing

In our Zendesk pricing guide, we mentioned that the tool bases its pricing on $ per agent per month.

Zendesk’s suite of marketing tools has 4 pricing tiers:

• Suite Team: $55/agent/month, covering all the essential features + AI agents.
• Suite Growth: $89/agent/month, covering multiple ticket forms, light agents, and self-service customer portals.
• Suite Professional: $115/agent/month, covering all advanced functionalities, such as custom analytics and skills-based routing.
• Suite Enterprise: Custom pricing that covers Advanced AI add-ons, Sandbox, and AI-powered Content Cues.

Pros and Cons

✅ Unified platform to help your agents solve customer problems.

✅ Customization and scalability of agent operations.

✅ AI-powered chatbot that can handle up to 50% of the customer complaints.

❌ Setting up all functionalities and customization can take some time.

❌ Users have pricing concerns on how expensive the platform can get.

#6: Sprout Social

Best for: Content scheduling and social listening on social media.

Similar to: N/A.

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool.

The tool helps you schedule and publish social media posts, get advanced performance analytics, and streamline your community management.

Top Features

• Social media publishing, where you can enhance the content with caption suggestions and AI for new ideas.
• Maximize engagement by optimizing the time of posting. The tool examines 16 weeks of audience data to recommend ideal posting times.
• Performance reporting across different paid and organic channels.
• Crisis notifications that help you to stay on top of brand damage and unhappy customers.

Pricing

The platform bases its pricing on seats.

Sprout Social has 4 paid tiers:

• Standard Plan: $199/seat/month, covering 5 social profiles, an all-in-one social inbox, and a social content calendar.
• Professional Plan: $299/seat/month, covering unlimited social profiles, reporting across all channels, and optimal posting times.
• Advanced Plan: $399/seat/month, covering crisis notifications, AI assist, and a rule builder for automated actions.
• Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing that covers professional consulting services and tailored onboarding.

Pros and Cons

✅ Content scheduling with optimal posting times.

✅ Data analysis and enterprise-level reporting features.

✅ Social listening and crisis management.

❌ Technical support has been reported to be poor.

❌ Custom reports are not easy to build.

#7: Klevu

Best for: Setting up an AI-powered site search on your website with predictive autocomplete.

Similar to: Emarsys, Big Sur AI.

Klevu is a marketing tool for e-commerce sites that offers an AI-powered site search functionality.

The platform is designed to deliver a personalized site search on your website that takes into account the shoppers’ behavior on site and preferences.

Top Features

• Personalized site search that utilizes machine learning to understand search intent and provide relevant search results.
• Analytics into the performance of the site search, going over what questions customers have, and what questions return no answer.
• The search results are personalized, as the site search takes into consideration the shoppers’ journey so far with your brand.
• Predictive autocomplete that uses AI to predict what people might mean as they are searching for products, and give them an answer faster.

Pricing

Klevu has 3 product plans that base their pricing differently:

• Site Search: Starts from $649/month, which includes up to 50,000 search requests.
• Recommendations: Starts from $449/month, which includes up to 500,000 impressions.
• Category Merch: Starts from $549/month, which includes up to 250,000 category page views.

Pros and Cons

✅ AI-powered site search with autocomplete to improve your product discovery experience.

✅ Detailed analytics into search performance.

✅ Dedicated customer success team.

❌ You’d require someone technical in-house to help assist and customize.

❌ Steep learning curve, as there are many features.

#8: Semrush

Best for: Improving your online store’s ranking on Google to attract more organic traffic.

Similar to: Ahrefs (not mentioned on the list).

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps e-commerce brands rank for more keywords and increase their organic traffic.

The tool has the largest database of websites and keywords, and can perform website audits, competitor analysis, and organic research.

Top Features

• Keyword research that will allow you to find which keywords to go after with your product and category pages.
• Site Audit that will crawl your website and find technical issues that are preventing you from ranking on Google.
• Competitor analysis that will give you insights into what keywords your competitors are going after which you are not.
• Backlink research of your website and competitor websites that will help you build your backlinks profile to improve your authority.

Pricing

Semrush bases its pricing on seats.

There are 3 paid tiers:

• Pro Plan: $117.33/month, giving you access to 5 projects, 500 keywords to track, and access to all basic features.
• Guru Plan: $208.33/month, giving you access to 15 projects, 1,500 keywords to track, and more advanced features like historical data.
• Business Plan: $416.66/month, giving you access to 40 projects, 5,000 keywords t otrack, and enterprise-level features like Share of Voice, and PLA analytics.

Pros and Cons

✅ Large database of keywords, websites, and backlinks.

✅ Find easy keywords for your brand to go after in content or in product pages.

✅ All-in-one SEO tool that you get all functionality you’ll need.

❌ You’d need an SEO specialist to use the tool to the best of its ability.

❌ Gets expensive if you want all functionality of the tool and/or have a large team of SEOs.

Wondering About The Different Use Cases of AI-powered Marketing Tools in E-Commerce?

Check out our AI in e-commerce use cases list, which covers ten use cases of online retailers using AI marketing tools to increase their revenue.

Next Steps: Personalize The Shopping Experience With Big Sur AI's Sales Agent

Optimize your online store with a conversational experience that works 24/7 to assist your shoppers and AI product recommendations.

Our AI-powered Sales Agent can guide customers' shopping journey with conversion-optimized prompts and product suggestions.

The conversational experience helps your shoppers find the right product for their needs.

Be data-driven about what pre-purchase questions customers have on your website to improve your product descriptions and double down on what works.