It’s 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic is making it more difficult for businesses in all industries to stay afloat. However, in these trying times, you may have an idea that could make a difference for the world and your bank account and you’ve decided to start a new business.
If you have a solid business idea but you have no idea what kind of infrastructure to use to get started, we have a few tips for the best tools to use as a foundation for your business. These are the tools that A) we have used and B) have a proven track record with small and large business.
Better Proposals for writing, sending and managing proposals
No matter what type of business you run, you will need to dedicate a large portion of your time to sales. Business proposals are one of the most important sales documents because their sole purpose is to convince potential customers that you’re the right person, agency or company for their business needs.
Better Proposals is a piece of software that automates writing, sending and managing business proposals. Instead of writing them in Word or sending them in PDF, you can create them within the software. Moreover, you can use proposal templates or business proposal templates so you can get going within minutes instead of taking hours to write something.
One of the best features is the ability for the clients to sign and pay directly from the proposal, which cuts down the time it takes for the customers to both convert and pay. One more feature that makes it easier to win clients is the dashboard with proposal analytics – you can see who opened your proposal, how long they spent reading, which section they spent the most time on, and much more.
Getting paid is super easy because Better Proposals let your clients pay you through one of the many payment integrations. No more chasing invoices – clients can pay using credit cards or business credit cards, Paypal or Stripe.
Making a great first impression is key to success. With SlideModel, you can easily create professional presentations that will impact and inspire your audience. SlideModel has a fast-growing and huge catalog of presentation templates for PowerPoint and Google Slides, all of which are easy to use and customizable. Browse thousands of PowerPoint templates and graphics to find the perfect design for your next presentation. Make a great first impression with SlideModel.
TextUs
Engage with customers and leads in real-time like never before with TextUs, the revolutionary business text messaging platform. This powerful platform provides you with comprehensive communication tools that help facilitate efficient conversations via text while remaining secure and compliant. With TextUs, you have the ability to reach out to customers right away no matter their location or time zone. They provide an intuitive interface so businesses of any size can easily connect with their contacts quickly and effectively – enabling better customer service engagements!
Say goodbye to slow, outdated communication methods with TextUs – the revolutionary business text messaging platform. Reach customers, leads, employees and candidates quickly and easily – in real time! Improve your customer service experience with two-way conversations at lightning speed. With TextUs’s simple design and powerful features, you can manage incoming messages from one place. Plus, the platform is fully customizable – allowing you to tailor it exactly as you need for your business.
Poptin for capturing visitors’ emails and data
There’s a running joke that everyone hates popups and that they belong in the past. The truth is, as an addition to your marketing strategy, popups can be very effective. The standard click-through rate for them is around 2%, which is nothing to be scoffed at, especially if you’re getting plenty of visitors to your website.
While there are lots of products in the market that do popups, none of them work as elegantly as Poptin. Using the built-in drag-and-drop editor, you can create a popup within minutes and with some extra tinkering, you can make some amazing designs. Installing it on your website is a matter of copying and pasting a few lines of code and you’re good to go.
One thing that makes them so effective is not the design but the placement. You can set up advanced display rules so that popups show up at exactly the right time you want. You can use them to engage visitors. From showing upsells to enticing more people to get on your subscriber list, there is a wide range of benefits to using popups for your business. If you don’t know how to get started, there is a wide range of templates in the Poptin library.
Mailchimp for building and managing your email list
Speaking of emails, an email list is a must for any entrepreneur looking to grow their business and earn more from their existing customers. For years now, it’s well-known that email marketing has incredible ROI. Some sources state that it’s 4400%. In other words, for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you’ll get $44 back. There are lots of email marketing tools out there but Mailchimp is one that has been around long enough to become a household name.
One of the major reasons for its popularity is the famous forever-free plan. It allows you to have up to 2,000 contacts on your list and it gives you access to its marketing CRM, form and landing page builder, website builder, as well as its creative assistant.
When you have a new business idea, you may consider Mailchimp precisely because the basic plan is forever free. When you just launch, you will only have a handful of subscribers and this plan will let you grow without forcing you to pay for extra features which are unnecessary. The best part is that you’ll also get their form builder, which you can incorporate directly into your website and start collecting emails 15 minutes after signing up.
Easysendy For Email Marketing
Easysendy is the most satisfactory option for marketers to send marketing emails and d
rive better results. Easysendy is an all-in-one email marketing solution that allows you to carry all your various marketing channels together and accelerate traffic, a
higher conversion rate, and better ROI for online geeks, marketers, small businesses, and startups. In addition, you can easily design email templates for your campaigns.
Increase your sales with Easysendy email marketing solutions across all industries; Easysendy can help businesses extend their reach, boost conversion rates, create a bond with their audience, and increase sales.
EasySendy’s free plan involves up to 2,000 connections. As a result, its platform is most effortless to get used to, with drag-and-drop features that enable you to stylize your emails.
Chanty for business communication
Long gone are the days when we communicated internally through email. Not only is it slow, but it’s also impractical, which is why many businesses switched to communication tools such as Slack. With the coronavirus pandemic taking its toll on all of us, we’re working remotely more than ever before and business communication tools are more popular than ever before.
Chanty lets you communicate and collaborate with your team with ease. Besides sending text messages, you can also send voice clips and make audio and video calls. You can also share your screen, which comes in handy for remote teams that need this type of collaboration.
Speaking of which, Chanty even has a project management feature – you can turn messages you send and receive into tasks. You can then assign these tasks to different team members, set deadlines and view them from a single dashboard in a list or Kanban view.
Small teams and fresh startups can especially benefit from Chanty because you can use it completely free with up to 10 team members. And don’t worry if you’re moving there from Slack – data migration is super easy.
Pixpa for building your online portfolio
Pixpa is an all-in-one platform for creators and small businesses to create beautiful, professional websites complete with a built-in online store, blog, and client galleries.
Pixpa’s versatile platform has everything you need to showcase your work, share ideas and sell your stuff online, without any coding knowledge.
Building your website on Pixpa is super easy. Begin by signing up for a 15-day full-featured trial. Pick a template of your choice as the starting point.
Pixpa offers a multitude of stunning, pixel-perfect, mobile-friendly templates. You can customize your site design using a simple and powerful visual style editor. Adding pages to your website is a breeze with Pixpa’s drag-and-drop page builder. With a host of built-in tools such as SEO manager, Marketing Popups, Announcement Bar, and much more, you don’t need any extra plugins to start growing your traffic and converting more leads
Right Inbox for email productivity and management
peopleHum – AI-driven HR software
Everytale virtual events platform
Everytale is a virtual events platform that provides an easy-to-use tool to create, promote, broadcast, and scale events of any size.
Everytale’s platform is simple and carefully designed for all events and participants. It offers event organizers, experts, and learners a 4K LIVE video broadcasting platform & tools powered with advanced A.I.
With essential features from other virtual event platforms in the market, it offers additional game-changing features like live language translation, speech transcription, and a fully functional learning ecosystem for participants to drive event retention. Record and upload events to our global event library for re-visits.
Event hosts save on marketing costs by expanding reach to global users with A.I. targeted tools – activating additional registrations. Get a customized profile for individual needs and event satisfaction. Establish diverse contacts, interact with sponsors, pitch, discuss ideas also privately, and access an open platform of video content in the native language.
PhotoADKing
Every business depends initially on marketing to increase their visibility and brand awareness. Usually businesses these days prefer digital marketing to promote their products or services around the globe. To make your designing work effortless photoADKing provides you with a variety of options including Flyers, pamphlet creator, brochure templates, and so on. You don’t need any skills to do so, just select the design and edit it with your brand name and product information.
InvoiceBerry
When you’re running a small business, you’ve got your hands full making sure your clients are happy. You’re too busy with customer experience, marketing, finances – and you know what else you need to be on top of? Invoicing and getting paid.
Invoicing is a key part of running a successful business, ranging from e-commerce ventures and startups to specialized firms such as divorce mediation practices. That’s why they’re making it easier to send professional invoices by using professional invoice maker for any purpose with their free collection of editable invoice templates.
Fyle
A very important aspect of running and scaling a business is efficient financial management. Expense management can be tricky especially because employees have to perform thankless and error-prone tasks like expense reporting, verifying and processing reports for reimbursements, credit card reconciliations, etc. All of these can be streamlined, automated, and free of manual work with expense management software like Fyle.
Fyle gives Finance teams and business owners complete control and real-time visibility into company-wide spending, allowing them to make data-backed decisions in time. Further, Fyle’s tight-knit with major accounting software like NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, and Xero help marry pre-accounting into a fully automated, error-free process.
Automatic Time Tracking
When you are just starting out, money is probably a bit tight. That’s why it’s even more important to make sure you aren’t leaving money on the table by forgetting to bill your time. Luckily, tools like Timing can automatically record how much time you spend in each app, document and website. That way, you’ll know exactly how long you worked on a particular project, and will be able to bill that time accurately. And even when you are not billing by the hour, time tracking can help you stay on track and not waste time on unimportant tasks. All of this works without start/stop timers, so you can focus on doing your best work without getting interrupted.
Receipt Makerly for generating online receipts and invoices
Receipts and invoices are an indispensable part of any business. Based on the type of the business, you can use receipts or invoices; sometimes both are required. Receiptmakerly is a premium receipt generator software consisting of 50+ premade templates. Using this tool, anyone can generate receipts for their businesses. Templates of companies like Amazon, Uber, Walmart, etc are included in this tool. Once the receipts are created, they can be downloaded in pdf or image and sent to the customers quickly.
Wrapping up
There are lots of tools out there for launching and growing your business but choosing the right ones can be as challenging as finding the right niche and product. The tools we picked are great for absolute beginners, as well as seasoned pros that have a business that performs well but could use the extra revenue.
Andrej Fedek is the creator and the one-person owner of two blogs: InterCool Studio and CareersMomentum. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers with White Hat SEO techniques. Besides being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.