This year, more than any other, businesses are looking to save money and enhance workflow to run more efficiently. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools out there to help you do just this!
Some of the key areas where digital or automation platforms can be brought in to cut down on staff time and amp up productivity include marketing, team collaboration, and post-scheduling. With this in mind, these are the ones we’ve focused on in our list below, where you’ll find the four most helpful tools to help your business run more efficiently in 2023.
Spike
This isn’t your run-of-the-mill email app. In fact, Spike totally reimagines what an email client is; it’s designed to boost your business’s productivity, add jet fuel to your workflow and save you money as a result!
Rather than standard emailing, with its cluttered threads full of repeating headers and signatures that make it difficult to follow – let alone engage in – the conversation, Spike combines all the functionality of emailing with the benefits of instant messaging. This allows your team to converse more naturally and promotes enhanced workflow – even better, your employees can easily switch from text messaging to video conferencing to voice messaging, so if the ideas are coming thick and fast, there’s nothing to get in the way!
As a team app, Spike is hard to beat. It offers a range of collaborative features and tools, such as trackable notes, to-do lists, and calendars, to keep everyone on track and singing from the same hymn sheet.
MailChimp
This affordable email marketing tool is extremely popular with startups and medium businesses; it’s an all-in-one platform for creating custom email templates to connect with your target audience, manage your mailing lists, and effectively automate your marketing campaigns, saving you time and money. This solution also helps you to hone your efforts on where they’re likely to be most successful and allows for the sort of personalization that’s now a must.
As well as drag-and-drop email templates and sign-up forms, you can also deploy optional pop-ups and use the handy analytical tools to discover how far your marketing drives are meeting your goals and where things could be tweaked.
If you want to find out the benefits this platform can offer but aren’t sure about committing any cash just yet, why not try MailChimp’s free tier to give you an idea of what it can do for you? This option allows you to send a generous 1,200 emails per month. If you like the cut of its jib, then you could always consider upgrading to the Essentials or Standard plan to up these limits.
Postplanner
It’s now essential for every business to have a strong online presence. This doesn’t just mean a professional, high-functioning website, but it needs to be active on at least one social media channel, too, to maintain relevance, build brand reputation, and reach out to new potential customers.
Keeping your social pages updated with regular, high-value content and using these pages to market your business is extremely time-consuming, and it’s easy to miss opportunities. This is where the next tool on our list, Postplanner, comes in. It’s a cloud-based Facebook scheduling solution that you can deploy to ensure nothing passes you by and to help manage your social marketing campaign.
As well as content planning, this platform will also assist you in scheduling posts and tracking post-performance. Plus, you can use it to add a branded toolbar to increase viewer engagement with your page, while email opt-ins and text ads can be incorporated that link back to your business’s website.
There’s a free tier that allows you to connect and post to three Facebook pages – there are also the Guru, Master, and Agency paid plans which you can sign up to unlock a range of additional features.
ClickUp
Another cloud-based platform, ClickUp is a task-management tool designed to improve your team’s workflow and help your business run more efficiently day to day. You can manage multiple teams from a single platform to delegate and organize tasks and track their progress.
Gantt charts are a useful way to visualize and optimize your task scheduling, and the ability to sync your activities and workload in real-time with other apps and platforms, such as Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple, amps up the productivity potential even more.
As with the other tools on this list, ClickUp offers a generous free tier, while its paid Unlimited and Business tiers represent great value, coming in at just $9 and $19 per user per month, respectively.
Making 2023 The Year Of Efficiency
There are more tools out there than ever before to help your business save money, be more productive, and improve workflow. Whether you could do with some help in your sales department to get the sales funnel moving more efficiently or would like to boost your team’s collaborative practices, the solutions on this list could just be the ones you need to make 2023 your most profitable year yet.
