Build A Digital Marketing Toolbox
Equip your team with the tools that help you achieve real eCommerce growth. These are all tools that I use daily and recommend to clients, and will scale up from free or nearly free plans.
These are all tools that I use daily and recommend to clients.
They also scale - so you can start most on a free or low-cost plan and then expand as you grow.
- Save time as you automate key marketing processes that help scale the human touch
- Grow profitable sales by delivering your customers a more personalised shopping experience before and after the sale
Hosting
I prefer GCP for cloud hosting.
I use Cloudways for a fully managed hosting solution. They provide Magento 2 with all the fiddly bits put into their admin panel. A very solid option cloud-agnostic solution for hosting - you can spin upo an instance on AWS, Azure, GCP and others. Scaling the instance is as simple as a slider.
I would recommend Cloudflare for any medium traffic and above website. It is a single point of failure, but I think they have more than proved their resilience and transparency when they do have issues. I use Cloudflare for DNS, SSL, Caching, Image Optimisation, Firewall, WAF,
If self-hosting then I use NGINX for the webserver and any caching frontend. I used to think Apache was easier to use, but once you start to use NGINX the config files become much more manageable.
I use Netdata for server and infrastructure monitoring. It has agents for almost any OS and is brilliant for providing all the server monitoring data you could need in beautiful graphs and charts.
Website platforms
Magento 2 is a very powerful eCommerce platform. With the Adobe purchase, the future of Magento is uncertain but the open-source community will always keep some version supported (see the Mage One project that is keeping Magento 1 up to date)
A headless ecommerce platform for a post Magento/Adobe world
The ecommerce solution with less technical knowledge required.
The Ghost blog and CMS platform. Blows WordPress out of the water for ease of use, extensibility, security and general awesomeness. This website is built on a modified version of the default Ghost theme, Casper.
Website addons
Log in
Expand the capabilities of your Magento store with Amasty modules. They are rock solid and we have battle tested them on 1000+ transactions a day Magento stores.
Xtento make the best import and export modules for Magento.
We use Sendgrid for high volume transactional emails (order conformation, delivery updates etc)
Create forms quickly and easily without janky iframes everywhere
On Technology
Price monitoring software.
Marketing
Fresh Relevance product machine learning generated product recommendations and the ability to personalise the website based on the customer profile.
Klaviyo is the best plaform for email marketing. The data collected alone is gold dust.
Fulfilment
Postcode lookup and validation
We use Metapack for high volume shipping, automating the creating of shipping labels at the packing station.
Customer Service
Nicole Snow, Founder & CEO Darn Good Yarn
Analytics
Google Marketing Platform
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Google Data Studio dashboard
Panintelligence is an excellent Analytics platform that can be self-hosted. It hooks into SQL databases and can build powerful real-time reports.
Tools
InVision is a great online design tool that I use to create flow diagrams and upload designs from Illustrator to feedback.
Organise and plan. I prefer ClickUp to Asana and Monday.
A free online tool to convert images to webp
Rafael Corral Senior Software Engineer at Medium
A free tool to check and report on core web vitals
