Recently I introduced my cousin to the world of copywriting and in doing so, began compiling a list of apps to streamline her workflow. I may have spent collective days testing out various tools and apps to improve my work process, but that didn’t mean she should suffer the same fate. I was determined to give her a shortcut.
So, I did what any “work smart, not hard” person would do and doubled down on my list of recommended apps by beefing it up and turning it into a comprehensive list of the top 23 SaaS apps you should consider using as a copywriter.
To keep it simple, I’ve grouped the apps according to when I use them in my workflow:
- Client prospecting
- Closing sales
- Conducting research
- Delivering projects
Note: Some links provided may earn me a small commission when you use them to sign up. Using the link does not increase the cost that you pay but it does support me in creating more useful content for you.
My Prospecting App Toolbox
Hunter.io
Best for client prospecting
I use Hunter.io for tracking down email addresses of prospective clients and businesses I’d like to get in touch with. Their chrome extension lives right in your browser. It’s super quick and easy to find individuals within a company by job position or department to ensure you’re getting in touch with the right person.
Go ahead and check out Hunter.io, it’s free to sign up.
Snov.io
Best for client prospecting
Similar to Hunter.io, I use Snov.io for tracking down employee email addresses at a company. However, I use the free plan of Hunter.io which means I’m limited to how many email addresses I can search for and acquire each day. As such, my need for a second, redundant application to continue gathering emails when I hit my limits on Hunter.io springs up.
Snov.io allows me to continue my email-acquisition routine from where I left off with Hunter.io. Although I don’t use them - Snov.io also offers a suite of cold email/prospecting features to automate your outbound prospecting including multi-sequence emails, conditional sending, and advanced automations. It’s an all-in-one prospecting tool that covers all the bases you might need - but can feel a bit clunky and unpolished at times.
Click here to check out Snov.io.
Reply.io
Best for cold email automation
I love Reply.io, in fact, I have two accounts. I use Reply for automating my cold email outreach. After grabbing names and email addresses from Hunter or Snov, my next step is to automate a sequence of emails that I send to potential clients.
Although Snov.io also automates cold email outreach, I prefer the simplicity and polished feel of Reply.io. Plus, Reply’s Linked In extension/integration is the best Chrome extension around for grabbing individuals’ emails directly from their Linked In profile.
If you’re looking to set up a serious cold email outreach system, Reply.io is my top recommendation.
Best for client prospecting and networking
I treat LinkedIn prospecting as a separate process from cold emailing potential clients. LinkedIn has become one of my favorite tools for reaching out to prospective clients and building personal relationships with them. It makes networking much easier and a well-designed/written Linked In profile means prospective clients are more likely to connect and converse with me.
I still don’t use LinkedIn as much as I should, but it’s working its way up my priority list.
Apps to Close Sales
Bonjoro
Best for rapport building with prospective clients
I have a serious love affinity with Bonjoro and could (and should) write an entirely separate article on them alone.
Bonjoro gives you the power to “convert, retain, and grow customer superfans with delightful personal video messages sent at just the right moment.” I used quotes here to demonstrate just how good their copy is - they nailed it.
I use Bonjoro to send potential clients personalized videos who have booked me for a free 45-minute strategy call. When booking, I ask the client to answer a few questions so that I can prepare for our call together. I then reference that information in my Bonjoro video to help form a personal connection that drastically increases the chances of the prospective client showing up to our call.
Bonjoro has a super generous free-forever plan you can check out here.
Zoom
Best for client calls
Zoom needs little introduction. Although I’m consistently improving my asynchronous workflow to reduce the number of meetings that pull myself and clients away from our work, occasionally we still need to hop on a call together.
For these few and far between occasions, I continue to use Zoom. It integrates perfectly into my meeting scheduler - Book Like A Boss - and being one of the largest video conferencing platforms available, I rarely need to worry about call connection issues or server outages.
If you don’t already use Zoom for your meetings, I’d check it out.
Book Like A Boss (BLAB)
Best for scheduling online meetings
Disclaimer: I work with Book Like A Boss, so naturally I’m a bit biased.
I use Book Like A Boss to arrange all of my online meetings, internal client discussions, and free strategy calls.
Although there are plenty of free scheduling and appointment apps, they are all limited to simple booking forms. The biggest differentiator between BLAB and similar scheduling apps like Calendly and Acuity is that instead of a simple booking form, you’re getting high-converting booking pages that:
- you can customize to match your brand
- showcase your services with photos and videos
- build trust by displaying testimonials
- answer visitors’ burning questions with FAQs
The list goes on.
If you’re getting booked for any kind of appointment, product, or service online, we’re the place to be.
Click here to start your free 14-day trial of Book Like A Boss.
Signaturely
Best for signing agreements with clients
I use Signaturely to make it super easy for my clients to sign my proposals and service agreements. Gone are the days of downloading, printing, and signing an agreement before scanning, uploading, and returning to the sender.
Signaturely has a limited but awesome free plan that does exactly what I need it to do. No more, no less.
Check out Signaturely here.
WriterZen
Best for conducting SEO keyword research
WriterZen is a ridiculously well-polished app that I use for conducting topic and keyword research for any article I’m going to write, whether it be for myself or a client. If you were ever shocked by the price tag of services like AHREFs, then WriterZen might be worth checking out.
It’s also amazingly well-reviewed on Appsumo, and Sumolings can be a tough audience to please.
Click here to check out WriterZen and dig into your SEO research.
ClickUp
Best for project management
A little secret about me - I’m a huge organization nerd. I plan out nearly everything I do and track/manage it all inside of a project management tool. First, it was Todoist way back in the day, then Trello, later Asana, and finally ClickUp.
Now I track everything in both my personal and professional life with ClickUp, from my Youtube channel to my day-to-day tasks, to every one of my client projects, there’s a list for everything. Whether I’m delivering a client project and need to loop them in on the steps I’m taking, or just stay organized to stay sane, I use ClickUp.
With the most generous, versatile free plan of any project management tool I’ve explored, I recommend ClickUp to anyone who needs a productivity solution that extends beyond a simple to-do list.
Check out ClickUp here.
YouNeedaBudget
Best for managing finances
Admittedly I wasn’t always the best with tracking my spending, but as I grew older and began to focus more on both my personal and business finances, I knew I needed a technological side-kick to automate the process, save me time, and reduce any errors I might make tracking my purchases manually.
YNAB has become my go-to secret weapon for tracking and managing both my personal and business finances as a freelancer.
I’d be doing YNAB a serious disservice by not mentioning their level of customer support. It’s fantastic - and understandably so, it comes with a learning curve, but that curve is worth every moment it takes to get set up and track your finances responsibly.
Their customer service is so good that soon I’ll be writing an in-depth case study together with YNAB on how they’ve mastered customer service and what other SaaS tools can learn from them about championing customer success.
Click here to check out YNAB.
Porkbun
Best for domain hosting
Ok - this isn’t a SaaS app (really), but between all my personal websites and projects, a domain hosting service has become an essential part of my tech stack.
If you’re new to copywriting - you’ll want to set up a website of your own sooner or later. As someone who’s tried all of the big domain hosting providers like GoDaddy and BlueHost, I can safely tell you that PorkBun has always offered the best customer service at a fraction of the cost of the big guys.
If you’re looking to get a website up and running, check out Pork Bun for your domain.
Apps to Bolster Your Research
Otter.ai
Best for transcribing your research calls
The foundation of good copywriting is excellent, in-depth research. Nothing should ever get written without diving deep into the minds of your audience, readers, and customers. To that end, qualitative interviews are a fantastic way to gather hyper-unique insight into your client’s customers and write copy that makes the reader feel like you’re reading their mind.
I always recommend recording your video calls with customers so that you can spend time digging deeper into their responses instead of asking them to pause while you write down their answers.
Once you’re done an interview, transcribing your discussion by hand is a pain. That’s where Otter comes in. I upload the call recording to Otter and its spits out a neatly transcribed, searchable transcript that I can upload into Google Drive and reference when I write my copy.
Give Otter.ai a look.
Awario
Best for customer review mining
Data mining customer reviews in the comment sections of sites like Amazon, industry blogs, and review sites is quite handy, but another secret weapon I use in Awario.
Awario crawls the entire internet including every social media site and subreddit for mentions of your client’s product. It then displays those comments and mentions to you in a tidy little dashboard to make sure you can get eyeballs on customer feedback and reviews that would likely have never seen otherwise.
Words can not describe how useful Awario has been for finding absolute gems of customer insight for my copy.
Check out my secret weapon - Awario.
BlockSurvey
Best for customer surveys
BlockSurvey is my go-to tool for conducting customer surveys. Yes - I know that Google Surveys and Typeform are both free tools, but neither of them provides the advanced conditional logic features that I include with my surveys to double-down on more in-depth, detailed responses that I require from respondees.
BlockSurvey is committed to data protection and privacy and never has access to any of the information that you collect from your respondents. This is crucial for users with businesses in sensitive industries like mental health.
Grab yourself a free account with BlockSurvey.
Hotjar
If Awario and Otter support micro-level user research, then HotJar is my go-to SaaS tool for understanding customer behavior at a higher level on a client’s website.
I use Hotjar to assess a client’s current copy to understand what is/isn’t working. I then use it again after installing new copy to ensure users are interacting in the way that I expected/hoped with newly implemented changes.
When used in conjunction with Google Analytics, Hotjar is a real game-changer in the user-behavior world. It gives you tons of data and insight into what to touch (or not touch) on your site.
You can find Hotjar here.
My Project Delivery Suite of Apps
Clockify
Best for project time tracking
I no longer do hourly work for clients anymore, but Clockify was my go-to tracking app when I did.
Clockify is simple. It doesn’t have a ton of features and that’s o.k., because what it does do - time tracking - it does extremely well.
If you’re new to copywriting and are beginning to pick up some projects on an hourly basis, definitely give Clockify a shot. Their free plan is forever-free and quite generous.
Take a look into Clockify here.
Convert Kit & Mailer Lite
Best for email marketing
Whether you’re setting up a client’s email marketing initiative or just writing emails for them, I highly recommend Convert Kit or Mailer Lite. Which you choose really depends on the client’s budget. I prefer Convert Kit (but only slightly) over Mailer Lite due to their somewhat more extensive collection of automations and easy-to-set-up landing pages for lead magnets/giveaways, but Mailer Lite checks pretty much every box there is for nearly half the price.
Both offer free trials so if you’re not sure which to pick, try them both.
You can sign up to Convert Kit’s free-trial here.
Or take a gander at Mailer Lite here.
Pomofocus
Best for productivity
As a remote, work-from-home enthusiast that works comfortably from my kitchen table every day, it’s easy to get distracted and find yourself stepping away from your computer a little more often than you should.
That’s why I use Pomofocus, a productivity app that lives in my browser and allows me to customize my work and rest intervals. I complete 50-minute work rounds followed by 10 minutes of rest. Doing so ensures I get up to walk and stretch my legs at least once per hour and take a quick mental break before jumping back into my next work interval.
Pomofocus is clean, simple, and free. Check it out here.
Joypixels Chrome Extension
Best for hunting down the perfect emoji
I don’t use emojis often in my copy. In fact, I have a rule about using them sparingly. Use them too much and your copy looks like a poorly written Instagram ad, yet a well-timed, aptly placed emoji, can often add that extra level of emotion to your copy that isn’t easily explained in words.
Enter Joypixel - a free chrome extension that allows you to quickly search for an emoji, automatically copy it to your clipboard, and paste it into your copy 👏
Click here to download and set up Joypixel.
BerryCast
Best for client communications and explanations
I’m a huge proponent of asynchronous communication, especially as a freelancer who lives and works in various timezones around the world, often making it difficult to connect with clients for 1:1 chats. Enter Berrycast. I often send clients daily updates and narrated screen recordings are simply one of the best ways I’ve found to convey a huge amount of information to my clients in the quickest, most efficient way possible.
Click here to create a free BerryCast account and ditch (at least some of) the 1:1 live chats.
Hemingway App
Best for editing your copy
Although we all appreciate a spicy quip or cleverly-written prose, great copy is simple and easy to read. How easy? Well, depending on who you ask, your copy should be simple enough that a 5th grader could understand it perfectly. To make sure you’re hitting that benchmark of simplicity, you input your copy into the Hemingway App and have it spit out a readability and complexity rating to tell you whether you should simplify your writing.
Check out and use the Hemingway App for free here.
Grammarly
Best for writing copy
I saved one of the best for last - Grammarly. Typing several thousand words per day means I’m inevitably going to make mistakes here and there. Grammarly is the writer’s equivalent of a backseat driver. It’s constantly nagging you to make sure you’re writing everything correctly - which is a good thing. It’s free and easy to set up, so why not have it running constantly?
Get Grammarly installed and set up for free here.
The Wrap Up
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it is comprehensive and extends far beyond a starting point for anyone looking to jump into the world of copywriting.
Share this post