Running a business online has its own advantages. Building a website and then increasing your customers is great. But that can’t be done with ease. You need to have some tools that will help you grow. They help you in managing and maintaining traffic. Here are some tools to run a business online successfully!
The tools that I have chosen for this list are personally tested by me. All of them had proved to be excellent. These tools will let you manage your customers, social conversations, collaborate with a team, build and maintain your site and much more.
Contents
Tools to Run a Small Business Online
1. G Suite
G Suite is formerly known as Google Apps. It is a suite of Google applications created for business purposes. With this, you can have access to a number of applications including Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Hangouts, Slides, Plus, Forms, and Sites. Here are some highlighted features of G Suite:
- Access to Gmail on your preferred domain
- 30GB of Google Drive storage per user
- It makes collaborations effective and simple.
- Ability to share documents and spreadsheets
- Create video conferences using Hangouts
- Instant Messaging services
- Access to professional email, video meetings, online storage, shared calendars, etc.
You can get a single seat for G Suite for $5, 2 for $10, and 5 for $25 and so on.
2. Quick Books
Quick Books is another interesting tool for small businesses. It is accounting software used to supervise expenses and sales. It keeps a daily track of transactions. You can use Quick Books to invoice customers, generate reports, pay bills, tax filing, etc.
Small businesses use Quick Books for a number of purposes:
- Manage Sales and Income
- Keep track of bills and expenses
- Gain key reporting insights
- Balance sheet report
- Statement of Cash Flows
- Run Payroll
- Inventory tracking
- Simplify taxes and much more.
Before you buy the paid version of Quick Books, try the free version of 30 days. In case you are satisfied with the features and services of Quick Books, get the premium plans starting at $15 per month.
3. Slack
Slack is basically an instant messaging app. It is mostly used with steroids. We have seen a lot of collaboration apps come and go. But haven’t found any match for Slack yet! Due to its innovative features, it is just too useful to get matched.
- Channels: Create separate messages based on the discussions or notifications by department, topic, purpose, etc.
- Private Channels: Create private channels with invite the only option.
- Direct Messages: It is the traditional instant messaging service:”)
- Share your files: Use the drag and drop method to share your media files and documents.
- Search: Access the information quickly even if it is saved inside a document.
- Notifications: Tune your notifications by keywords, channels, etc.
Get a free account for 10k messages and then you can continue for $6.67 per month.
4. Zoho CRM
In Zoho CRM, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. As the name suggests, this is software to manage your customers effectively. Due to its extraordinary features, it has become one of the most popular CRM software nowadays.
You can easily manage your organization sales, customer support, marketing, advertising, and inventory. All these features are hosted in a single software. You will be able to take care of sales productivity, product customization, CRM insights, third-party integration, etc. Also, with the help of artificial intelligence, Zoho CRM helps you sell better, faster and smarter.
5. E-Commerce Website Builder (Shopify)
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce solutions. It helps you in setting up a new store to manage sales. It will help you in organizing your goods, payments, track, respond to customers, tweak your storefront and what not.
You can choose from hundreds of templates from Shopify. This will help you create the e-commerce site with ease. You don’t need to worry about coding and stuff:”)
Alternatively, you can also create your website using WordPress. Although to customize your store, you may require a web developer. If you’re a small business and can afford to have an in-house developer, nothing can beat the power of WordPress.
To host your site, you need to buy a domain name and a shared web hosting plan. There are many web hosting providers in the market that offer small business web hosting solutions. You may check out the top 10 web hosting for small businesses on alexwebhosting. The plans listed on the site starts from as low as $1 per month.
6. Hoot Suite
Hoot suite is another management tool for small businesses. It is basically a social media management tool. It helps you to schedule and post latest updates on any social media platform- Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
With the given dashboard, you can easily organize all social media profiles connected to HootSuite. Here are a few features of HootSuite:
- Direct posting of social profiles
- Schedule your posts before posting
- Manage up to three social media accounts from one HootSuite account
- Social content apps for additional profiles
- Targeted messaging
- Organize assignments and view analytics
Also Check: Three Tips to Ensure Your Online Account Stays Secure
7. MailChimp
Mail chimp is basically an email marketing service. With Mail Chimp, you can send an email to the customers providing latest updates about your business. At once, it can send an email to all your subscribers or customers.
But why you should prefer Mailchimp? Find it out here:
- Approved bulk emails
- Great accuracy of delivering emails
- Adherence to privacy laws
- Professional styling
- Compatible with a lot of email readers and devices
- Track if people are actually reading the emails
Up to 2000 subscribers and 12k emails per month, you can use MailChimp for free. Then you need to buy their plans starting at 10$ for 500 subscribers per month.
Couple these 7 tools with a business phone such as Canada hosted PBX and you are on your way to grow your business exponentially.
There are more than thousands of apps that manage a small business growth alliance easily. They can make your business grow and run in a composed manner. For example, a small construction company can choose the best project management software for construction industry to help them streamline their processes to help them get ahead of the competition.
Conclusion
All these tools will only help you with the business. The thing you need to do is to concentrate on quality, quantity, and affordability of the product. Also, give as much customer support as possible. Do let us know your feedback about these in the comments below. Our team wishes you all the best for your business
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