8 Must-Have Marketing, Sales, and CRO Plugins for Squarespace
Squarespace is a great platform to host a website, but it only has so much functionality built into it. That’s by design, of course. Squarespace has made a conscious choice to limit its extra functionality in favor of a streamlined and beginner-friendly platform. However, you can use third-party plugins and integrations just as easily as any other website on any other platform, so you have a lot of options available to you.
For this post, I’ve put together the most comprehensive guide I can on marketing, sales, a conversion rate optimization tools you can use with a Squarespace site. Many of these are tools I’ve used myself and can heartily recommend. If you know of a tool you think should be on this list and isn’t, feel free to let me know!
FOMO stands for the Fear Of Missing Out, but that’s not a tool. FOMO.com is. You’ve probably seen it before on another website. When you visit a website – a restaurant, a store, a membership page – and you see a box appear in the corner telling you about someone else buying a product, that’s FOMO.com.
As the name implies, this app plays upon the natural fear of missing something good that your users feel. Seeing other people sign up, buy products, or reserve a space in your store/restaurant/webinar/whatever makes other people feel as though they should too. When combined with limited quantities of available spaces or products, this puts double the pressure on the user to make their purchase or reservation now, before they miss out and they’re all gone.
FOMO also helps as an element of social proof. It’s a visible indicator that other people are making purchases or reserving spaces, and that proves your site is trustworthy enough for people to make purchases, thus encouraging further purchases. It’s a little cyclical, but it works.
2. Live Chat
This is the first of two live chat systems I’ve found and can recommend for Squarespace users. This one is provided by Live Chat Inc. and is a powerful, centralized hub for communicating with your customers. On the surface, it looks like a simple website based live chat app. On the back end, it aggregates a variety of different channels, including SMS messaging, WhatsApp, Email, Messenger, and more. It gives you a central dashboard you can use to communicate with anyone who wants to reach out to your business.
Live Chat can be used in a variety of different ways. Well-timed prompts can allow you to reach out and answer questions your visitors may have, which gives you a chance to convert them into customers. Accessible chat apps serve as a great customer service portal, to address service and support issues your existing customers may have. Lie Chat has a variety of useful features as well, including the ability to embed product links as recommendations.
An optional (but useful) feature is the AI-powered chatbot. One of the problems with live chat systems is that you don’t always know the intention of a visitor. If a customer is browsing your page and you pop up a chat asking if they have any questions about your service as a sales push, you’re wasting your time. Conversely, if you pop up a message offering support for issues to someone who isn’t a customer, it does you no good. You can spend time customizing every page’s chat prompt for the people most likely to be on that page, sure. Or, you can use a chatbot to serve as a filter and screener. The AI can interpret the first few messages from a user, and refer the chat to the appropriate team within your business.
3. Pure Chat
Pure Chat is the second of the two chat apps I’m recommending today. It has the same sort of value proposition as Live Chat, so I’m not going to dig into it quite as deeply. It’s a little less sophisticated, though. It doesn’t have as many channel integrations, it has canned responses but only a basic trigger-response system rather than an AI, and while it maintains customer profiles so you can customize responses, it doesn’t do so automatically.
So why recommend this one when Live Chat is arguably better? Two reasons. The first is that sometimes a simpler system works better for a business. You don’t need robust integrations with a dozen communications channels if you don’t use those channels. You don’t need a complex AI when you only have a handful of reasons a user might chat with you.
The other reason is the pricing. Pure Chat has a simple two-tier pricing structure with a handful of included agent accounts. Live Chat charges per agent, which can quickly ramp up if you have a mid-sized or larger team, and their pricing structure is more complicated. In general, I think Pure Chat is better for small and mid-sized businesses, and Live Chat is better for larger brands. I’ve included both of them so you can make your own decision.
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a great marketing and sales tool. It’s primarily focused on email marketing, and it covers every stage of that process.
Landing pages. ConvertKit allows you to make landing pages in just a few minutes using an interface quite similar to the Squarespace page builder. This page single-mindedly promotes your product/course/project and encourages users to sign up for your mailing list to learn more.
Opt-in forms. Sign-up forms embedded on various pages on your site – whether it’s on a sidebar widget or the primary focus of a page – allow you to capture interest no matter where on your site a user might be.
Email designer. No email marketing program would be complete without the ability to create beautiful, engaging emails. The email designer ConvertKit uses lets you create gorgeous emails that work for conversions, newsletters, or other purposes, and function equally well on desktop and mobile viewers.
ConvertKit also has a suite of automation features that let you set up trigger and event chains to automatically kick off welcome campaigns, drip marketing, ongoing newsletters, new product ramp-up, onboarding, and other email chains. They have some example chains, but you can create your own from scratch as well.
5. MemberSpace
MemberSpace is an app that some people love and other people hate. It allows you to set up a members-only area and lock content on your site so that only people who sign up can view it. A lot of people use it for courses and other content-based products, but you can use it for anything you like, it’s very flexible.
MemberSpace also has a host of features for pushing that membership. They integrate “abandoned cart” recovery features, failed charge recovery, alternatives to cancellation to retain members who might want to cancel, automated upsells, and more. You can use tiered membership plans, the ability to smoothly upgrade and downgrade plans, and an unlimited membership roster.
Overall, this app is very good if you want to lock content or products behind a membership. Some people love it. If you don’t have a compelling reason for people to sign up, though, it won’t work very well. Since content hidden behind a paywall isn’t visible to Google, you can’t just lock a blog and expect it to work, it’ll tank your SEO, so you need something above and beyond your basic marketing to compel people to sign up.
6. SEMRush
SEMRush is probably the best-known tool on this list, and it’s certainly among the most powerful. It’s a very powerful and very robust tool for analyzing a website, whether it’s your own or a competitor’s.
SEO. SEMRush helps perform a keyword analysis of a site to see what keywords it is targeting, what domains are linking to it using what anchors, and more. It can also do SERP tracking and has an SEO auditor that can analyze your site for technical and general SEO mistakes.
Content Marketing. When SEMRush scans a site, it can analyze what kinds of topics you cover, as well as what kinds of content in that same niche are ranking well online. It can give you content ideas and recommendations, track brand mentions, and even analyze your existing content and find ways you can improve it.
Competitor Research. While scanning your website is powerful in its own right, so too is scanning your competitors. Analyze their traffic, discover competitor promotion strategies, and uncover keyword coverage gaps you can take advantage of.
Advertising. Analyze your or a competitor’s paid advertising campaigns, look for strategies you may be missing, and find the best keywords to target with your campaigns.
Social Media. SEMRush allows you to schedule and post your social media content through it, analyze your article performance, monitor and analyze competitors, and handle social media ads.
All of this is extremely powerful, and I wholeheartedly recommend that anyone with the budget for it buys access to this tool. That’s the kicker, though; you need the budget. Even the basic plan costs $120 per month, though, so it might be out of the range of many small businesses.
7. MySiteAuditor
SEO is a huge part of online marketing, and it can be distressingly difficult to figure out where your site is weak and what mistakes you’re making. MySiteAuditor does two things for you, as a business owner.
First, it offers the ability to perform an automated SEO scan to audit your website and find SEO mistakes you might be making. It’s not the most robust SEO auditor out there, but it covers most of the bases and gives you actionable ways you can improve. You can see their example report here.
Secondly, it gives you the ability to “sell” these SEO audits. You can embed a form on your site to, essentially, refer users to MySiteAuditor for their SEO scan. The primary benefit to you is that, to claim that audit, they have to sign up for your mailing list. You can make the opt-in and even the report branded with your brand as well, which helps encourage users to believe it’s your offering, not a resold offering.
The biggest drawback to this as a lead generation tool is simply that it might not be in line with what you already sell. A marketing company, a web services company, a consulting company; these kinds of businesses can give away an SEO audit with some semblance of authority. A clothing retailer, a gardening consultant, or a musician? People outside of marketing will have a harder time using a marketing service as an incentive.
8. RightMessage
RightMessage is a service that is centered around one primary idea; that the best marketing involves delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Marketing is about timing just as much as it is about persuasion and value propositions.
RightMessage goes about this from several angles. First, they help you uncover who your visitors are, what they’re interested in, what they’re looking for, and what their needs may be. Second, they let you use that information to personalize – automatically – the calls to action that appear on your site. Three users visiting the same page on your site can get three different CTAs based on how much the system knows about them and their stage of your customer journey.
The best part is, none of it requires tedious coding or developer implementation. Much like Squarespace and many of the tools I like to recommend, it can all be done through WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop editors, templates, and a little data-based analytics.
Wrapping Up
So there you have it; my list of highly effective and extremely useful tools for marketing, conversion optimization, and sales. To review:
Live chat software makes for a powerful call to action that gets the conversation started with your visitors, helping to improve conversions, reduce friction, and solve customer pain points.
FOMO is a set-it-and-forget-it CRO plugin to give your customers a sense of what’s popular and let them know about other customers who have purchased from you. This instills a sense of trust in your business and relieves checkout friction.
Convertkit makes it easier to create new pages for email blasts, sales, pay-per-click campaigns, and any other marketing tests.
SEMRush takes the guesswork out of your content strategy and gives you unique insights into your competitors. It helps to know what is working (and what isn’t working) for your closest competitors, so you can focus on topics that drive a large amount of traffic.
MySiteAuditor will find errors on your site and areas for improvement. If you’re in the marketing industry, you can even offer this to customers and turn their auditing tool into a lead gen tool.
RightMessage lets you set up customized calls to action. Trust me, this is a very sophisticated and effective solution compared to using the same call to action on every page. You can give your users exactly what they are looking for, depending on which page they land on.
I know it’s still a fairly short list of tools, and that’s why I’m asking you what you think.
If you have a moment, I’d like to ask you two questions for the comments below. First, have you used any of these, and if so, what do you think? Second, do you have other suggestions for tools and platforms I should check out? I always love hearing from my readers, so feel free to leave your feedback!
