Discover 3 easy-to-use apps that no small business can do without
If you’re running a small business, you know how important it is to automate as many tasks as possible to free yourself up for the real work.
But with so many apps promising to make marketing admin simpler, it can be hard to know where to begin.
Luckily, we’ve done the trial and error for you, and have distilled the best apps for small business.
Read on to discover 3 easy-to-use apps that will simplify your marketing – and your life.
1. Zapier
Zapier claims to make your life happier – and we can vouch for that. It’s an automation tool that can save you hours each week.
Use Zapier to create ‘zaps’ from one app to another. For example, create a zap so that when someone books an appointment with you, Zapier automatically creates a zoom meeting and sends out the invite via email.
Zapier lets you do things such as:
- Sharing content to social media
- Sending new leads a personalised message
- Notifying your team about new leads
- Adding new leads to a database or CRM
- Saving files and media to the cloud or a local hard-drive
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing automation platform and one of our favourite apps. We recommend it to all of our clients because it is so user-friendly and has so much functionality, even on the free plan.
As an essential tool in a small business’s arsenal, email marketing can seem like a lot of work. But Mailchimp is so intuitive, even for complete beginners.
To highlight just a few of Mailchimp’s impressive functions, it lets you:
- Manage mailing lists
- Design professional emails
- Customise emails to your branding
- Create signup forms
- Automate newsletters, blog posts or abandoned cart emails
- Segment audiences into groups
- A/B test your emails to see what works best
- Track campaign performance
3. Airtable
Who wouldn’t love an app that boasts “the power of a database with the familiarity of a spreadsheet.”
It’s an online platform for building and sharing relational databases, like Excel on steroids. It has a straightforward, vibrant, and user-friendly interface that anyone can use to create a database in minutes.
Use Airtable for task management, project planning, and tracking inventory. Aside from storing databases, Airtable can even serve as a basic customer relationship manager (CRM) if you don’t have one yet.
Use Airtable to:
- Create a database that fits your flow
- Configure the perfect view for different cases
- Extend your solution with Airtable Apps
- Put Airtable Automations to work for you
- Interconnect with Airtable Sync
- Collaborate with anyone, any time, from anywhere
You can also use Airtable to create different workflows. You might use it to track important information, get notifications for activity in your Airtable base, create backup spreadsheets, or keep your information in sync across other databases.
Got app fatigue? We hear you
When you’re trying to run a business, the last thing you want to do is learn another new app. Sure apps have the potential to save you admin and marketing time, but the effort involved in trialling, learning and then keeping track of all your apps can be just as much work.
The beauty of these three apps is that they’re the most essential, and there are only three of them. You’ll note that each of these apps probably strikes two or three others off your list. Another benefit of these three great apps is that they integrate seamlessly with your bread-and-butter platforms, such as Google Apps, CRMs, social media, and others. These three apps will work in tandem with your existing tech to make your life easier.