If you’re a relatively small business you may be juggling doing your finances, managing social media, networking and stock taking, all whilst successfully running a business, so your time is precious and you need to make the most of what you have, here’s five free business tools you can use.
1. MailChimp
Sending marketing emails may not be at the top of your list of things to do, however if you’re tempted to see what you can achieve by sending marketing emails MailChimp is a easy platform to start.
MailChimp offers a ‘forever free’ service which allows you to send 12,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. MailChimp lets you look into subscriber profiles, such as someones engagement, clicks and opens. Even if you have no skills in HTML or coding, MailChimp makes it really easy to create appealing emails, the designer is a ‘drop and drag’ system which allows you to place images and text, and it also integrates mobile responsiveness so you don’t have to worry whether your emails will look right on a mobile, which we all know is pretty important now.
2. BufferApp
BufferApp is a simple social media tool which allows you to schedule tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates and Google+ posts; all you have to do is link the accounts to BufferApp. BufferApp allows you to set up your own schedule for each day, so you can post at 8:00pm on Monday and then 6:00pm on Tuesday. Or if you didn’t want to that you can schedule a time per each post.
3. Dropbox
Dropbox is an easy way to save your files in a ‘cloud’. With Dropbox you can download Dropbox to your computer and save files directly to Dropbox, then you can access them via the internet or via any device you have synced to Dropbox.
4. Trello
Trello is an organised persons dream. Trello operates in the form of boards, which separate into lists, the idea being you have a ‘to do’ list and ‘doing’ list and a ‘done’ list with the options to add people to the lists. You can allow people to post comments for instant feedback, add checklists, labels and due dates.
5. Appointlet
If your business involves customer scheduling appointments, Appointlet could be just what you need. Appointlet connects with your Google Calendar and allows customers to schedule their own appointments online. Unfortunately the free plan is only for one type of service and one employee, but for a small business it could be a simple solution.
6. Canva
Need some fab graphics for social media, leafelts or events? But dont have the budget for a graphic designer? Canva takes away the complicated and is left with a easy simple way to design. With a search and drag function, you can browse through hundreds of free graphics and fonts that you can easily use in your design.
7. Mention
If you’re a company that has a lot of people communicating with yourselves but don’t have the budget to have a dedicated social media person, mention could be extremely useful for you. Mention allows you to track mentions on the web and social media. You can set up alerts which sends your mentions directly to your email, so you can see who’s talking about your brand and you can react or reply without missing anyone out! I just set up mention to track ‘Hilton Smythe’ on all sources, so this includes websites, Twitter, Facebook etc so whenever someone mentions our brand I’ll get a notification.