Social media networks may be popular, but email remains the preferred means of communication today. The last thing your business needs is to have their emails hacked because the security of their provider was breached. From the time it entered the scene in , Gmail has revolutionised emails through its aggressive spam screening, ample storage space, and its ability to allow business startup owners to manage their company emails at very competitive pricing for teams. As a business product built by Google, you also get access to many of the other free and paid tools that form part of the Gsuite.
Discover other top rated Email software applications. Choosing the wrong company to do your web hosting can cause you to lose potential sales and customers when your site goes down. If this happens frequently, it can hurt your search engine rankings. That means that you can build exactly the kind of infrastructure you need for your online business.
The array of tools offered by AWS in addition to their hosting services make it an very attractive proposition for businesses to build their backend infrastructure on. Many email service providers are becoming increasingly vigilant with the kinds of emails that are received by your target market.
Mailgun by Rackspace is a cloud-based email delivery tool that not only helps your development manage email distribution to your users at scale. When compared to other email delivery solutions that work at scale, Mailgun offers the best value for money.
Business software
Videos are becoming an increasingly popular format to distribute content with higher levels of user engagement relative to static text content. The downside of this is that compared to text content, videos use up a greater amount of file space, which can cause your website loading speed to slow down. One solution for this is to use a specialised video hosting provider to host your videos separately.
It doubles up as a video sharing platform giving entrepreneurs a free video sharing platform, increasing their market reach. In , Google acquired YouTube, and now has a tendency to favour videos uploaded on YouTube versus other video hosting providers. This makes them more eye-catching and attractive to search engine users, increasing the click through rates.
The attention span of Internet users is very short.
With millions of websites on the Internet, no one will have the patience to wait for a very slow website to load. Having a slow site can seriously hurt your search engine rankings. This is why successful companies invest in a good content delivery network or CDN for short. Amazon Cloudfront is a great choice to consider. So not only does it make your site load faster, but it allows the mixing of dynamic and static data. This is handy if you have lots of videos and other kinds of dynamic content uploaded on your website.
Top 50 Small-Business Software Products | G2 Crowd
With the right social media advertising application, you can get your product or service in front of the right people using highly focused targeting techniques. Facebook is the most popular social media network platform today with 1. Many companies use the custom web audiences feature so that they can specify the demographics of the people that they would like to target their ads to. Successful companies take it a step further by using this to exclude groups of people from seeing their ads.
It does this by using different platforms like the web, mobile and social media to feature your products and service again, reminding them about it, and eventually convert them into actual buyers. Hiring is hard, but hiring for startups can be significantly harder. As a young company with limited cash flow, hiring the wrong employee can potentially break your startup.
Therefore, you have to be very careful with your decisions and do your best to hire top talent. Specialist recruitment software can he a huge help in helping you to recruit and manage your workforce. Workable works very much like a virtual Human Resources Manager in that it helps you find the right candidates for the job by providing you tools like building a careers page, posting job openings on multiple job boards, and shortlisting applicants that you can call in for an interview.
At the same time, it provides you with a host of other tools that will help you manage the candidates through the pipeline to help you hire the best person for the job. Discover other top rated recruitment software applications. At the heart of every business toolkit is an office suite. Collecting Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and a number of key business tools like email and cloud storage, G Suite is the most comprehensive cloud-based office toolkit on the internet. Quip is a free team document management tool with a beautiful distraction-free, markdown-supported writing environment.
As well as document files, Quip allows users to open and edit Excel files and CSVs, so any content teams that work with keywords or data will get use out of that, too. With comments, members, and a prominent activity feed keeping all members in the loop, Quip is great for content teams, technical documentation writers, and writing teams of any size.
The free plan is quite generous. It includes a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation tool, database tool, a formula editor, and a whole host of free extensions. Many organizations prefer the culture and transparency of open source software, but all small businesses will appreciate that LibreOffice is free. Dropbox Paper is a simple Medium -like platform for creating and managing collaborative documents.
Combined with Dropbox cloud storage, you can manage and collaboratively edit version-controlled documents. Creating workflow diagrams, automations, and watertight business systems is possible without spending a dollar. Process Street makes it easy for teams to create, track and optimize systems by using recurring checklists. Systemize employee onboarding, blog post production, graphic design approval, and more.
Process Street lets you document and track your business processes, and manage your personal tasks in one place. It also has a Zapier integration which links it to 1, apps including popular CRMs, document creation tools, and HR software. Use Zapier to connect over 1, apps like Evernote, Gmail, Microsoft Word, and Google Drive with simple rules that make it possible to automate practically any workflow.
Read our full guide to setting up custom workflows with Zapier here. Need a visual representation of your processes? It supports BPMN, which is the globally recognized standard for business process notation. On a business scale, it can be a pain to manage internal and external emails with your everyday, vanilla email tools. Here are our recommended free email management tools:. Inbox makes processing email on your phone super fast. However, the UI can be slower and more limiting than Gmail on desktop.
Email is a fantastic invention, but it is missing a few key features out of the box. And notifications on which emails are awaiting your reply. Streak is a CRM that lives inside your inbox. Here are three great solutions to get you started. Trello gives teams a visual way to collaborate over tasks, projects, approval flows, or the next big idea.
2. Project Management from Wrike
It is based on one of the most efficient methodologies ever conceived — Lean. Trello is totally free for as many cards, lists and comments as you like. For a free kanban board with a ton of addons and functionality, Trello is the clear winner.
Collaborate around tasks with your team, with projects, comments, and assignments. MeisterTask is visually similar to Trello, but supports a native integration to MindMeister for fast and easy mind mapping. Its integrations with Dropbox, GitHub, Zendesk, Box, Bitbucket, and Google Drive allow you to map tasks to one another and keep you from entering data in the same place twice.
The customizable dashboard is a big draw, as are its native integrations and linked tasks. However, the workflow automation features are only available on the premium plan. Avaza is a project management tool for client-focused teams. It puts emphasis on securely sharing project updates with clients, while giving employees full visibility over outstanding tasks and progress. Avaza is a hybrid between a project management tool and accounts software.
This makes it perfect for creating links between client work, tasks, projects, and invoices, and reducing the number of separate apps needed to get a single job done. An engaged email list is one of the most valuable assets a marketing team can have, but you will need a reliable tool to store the list, send messages, and track engagement. MailChimp is a fully-featured email marketing tool for everyone from solopreneurs and freelancers to SMBs and enterprises. It features free marketing automation, templates, reporting, and sign-up forms for 2, users and 12, monthly emails, for free.
MailChimp offers automated email workflows for free, which is a rare feature amongst email providers. It is one of the most fully featured free platforms. This is a simpler way to create emails, although it is more limiting. It can import subscribers from a plain text list, or capture up to 50 leads on your website with the free plan.
Over the past few years, a remarkable number of teams have chosen to kill internal emails in favor of chat tools with cloud features. Here are three stand-outs:. Slack is the original email killer — a cloud-based team chat tool with exceptional search and document sharing features. Add policy documents to channels, create group chats, and keep important information to hand. Slack works great for real-time conversations and as an asynchronous communication tool.
Like email, but better. Slack was the first success of its sort, so it has left a big impact in the industry. Samepage offers real-time document collaboration which can occur on the same screen as a video chat , diagram creation, code snippet sharing, team chat, and more. Its free plan limitations effect chat history, team member count, and storage space.
These security and anti-virus apps give small businesses protection and peace of mind. One of the oldest and best-known security and virus tools available, McAfee is available for your computers, tablets and smartphones, providing protection to small business owners no matter where they are. Another big name in the security and protection industry, Norton also offers widespread protection across PC, Mac and mobile devices. Depending on the plan you choose, you can obtain protection for as many as 10 computers and devices, all on just one subscription.