Top Cost-Effective Small Business Tools To Save Costs During The Pandemic
This blog was written by our friends over at SendX.
It seems like a lifetime since this pandemic turned our lives upside down. It’s a calculated prediction that almost 30% of the population will be affected by COVID-19.
You might have already read the news about how industry giants and top businesses are telling their employees to work from home, such that the work doesn’t get affected and the money keeps coming in. Small and medium-sized businesses faced immense havoc in the initial phase but are now learning the concepts of remote work like a swing.
But amidst this pandemic and work from home situation, all businesses are looking for cost-efficient tools to keep their work running. Here are some of the tools that fit right into your budget.
Project Management Tools
With great projects comes great responsibilities. And you need to have the superpowers to manage them all. Here is the list of your cost-effective project management tools:
Asana
This tool comes handy in managing team projects and tasks. You can smoothly hop from checking emails, shuffling meetings, and analyzing spreadsheets, to chatting with team members. With Asana, you can coordinate and manage your entire team efficiently.
The daily tasks can be organized in a single place to have better transparency and clarity about the roles, tasks, and responsibilities of each member. Moreover, as a manager, you can track and monitor your employees’ work progress in real-time to keep the project running on time. It also comes with several integration options to enhance your workflow.
Capterra rating – 4.5 | Pricing – $10.99 per user per month
Trello
Trello has been a star performer in the field of project management as well as remote work. It is designed with utmost intelligence and runs with a concept of “boards”, and virtual post-it notes termed as “cards.”
When it’s about managing different projects, tracking different tasks, curating research links, or maintaining transparency, you can have it all through Trello. Also, it might serve as the best choice in these tough times of COVID-19 pandemic to maintain a transparent work schedule as anyone can view the board of any team member or manager.
Capterra rating – 4.5 | Pricing – $12.50 per month, per user
Float
Float helps you manage multiple projects and direct your team members through their task lists. It gives you live updates regarding your projects along with an option to track the availability of employees who are on paid time off, list of public holidays, and more. It works on a drag-and-drop concept with specialized search filters to track project timelines.
Float can help save your sinking projects with very fine reporting and analytics.
Capterra rating – 4.5 | Pricing – $5.00 per month per user.
Airtable
Speaking from personal experience, this tool is amazing for task management. It has a user-friendly interface and comes with a bunch of integration options.
It’s more of a database tool wherein you can put loads of entries as you work in spreadsheets. It offers many unique features like portfolio management, a client portal, options for tracking time and expense, milestone tracking and more.
Capterra rating – 4.7 | Pricing – $12.00 per month
Communication and Collaboration Tools
So working remotely from home doesn’t mean that you’ll cut all the ties to your team members. In a remote environment, communication needs to be a priority. In fact, the communication process becomes more active when working remotely. So look out for these tools:
Slack
Have you heard about it before? Or are probably already using it? Slack is the daily-bread for communication and is extensively used by remote companies and virtual offices.
Whether it’s about communicating, sending files, sharing water-cooler moments or funny gifs… everything is possible with Slack!
Capterra rating – 4.6 | Pricing – $6.67 per month, per user | Special Pricing – $2.67 per month
Flock
Flock is an upgrade of a team communication app. It is super easy to use and feels just like an instant messaging app along with built-in task lists, to-do lists for the day, integration options, and polls.
Audio and video calls are integrated to the Appear.in app,but it’s not a hassle as such. The Appear.in app for Flock allows a user to initiate a video or audio call from within Flock itself. Other features include sharing files in different formats, initiating group conversations, dispersing important updates with the team, and more.
Capterra rating – 4.5 | Pricing – $3.27 per month (Based on the number of users. In this case- 10 members)
Notion
This tool offers limitless opportunities to collaborate with your team members. It is a web-based tool that organizes and streamlines different online collaboration tools. It brings all your tools on one single platform.
It is an amazing choice for employees who have to take notes and share them further. It is a great tool for collaboration, task allocation, working on spreadsheets, and handling mini-sized projects.
Capterra rating – 4.8 | Pricing – $5 per month
Google Keep
This tool by Google is so simple to use that it’s addicting. Its interface is beginner-friendly and enables you to organize your tasks, notes, and checklists with ease and further share it with your team members.
It is an ideal fit for small teams or startups as it was initially launched as a note-taking application. But if you are a large organization then you might face several limitations. With Google Keep, you can set reminders for important tasks, or meetings, add collaborators, archive notes, make checklists, add images, and more.
Capterra rating – N/A | Pricing – Free
Social Media Marketing Tools
Let’s be honest. Most people are working from home and college students are not going anywhere. Everyone is spending their extra time on social media. Therefore, businesses have to game-up their social media marketing to improve their engagement. But which social media tool to go for? Pick from below:
Hootsuite
If this tool were a person, it would be one of those multi-talented kids that excel in almost every subject. Hootsuite is an all-rounder social media tool to manage your campaigns and build a top-notch social media presence. It covers all social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.
With this tool, you may schedule your social media posts for all or selective social media channels. You may schedule your posts according to the in-built calendar provided by Hootsuite.
Capterra rating – 4.3 | Pricing – $25.52 per month
Social Bee
Want one crazy all-in-one tool to manage your social media channels with ease? You can schedule your posts on multiple social media platforms along with monitoring your growth.
It has an amazing dashboard where you get an overview of all the posts you have scheduled on different platforms. SocialBee also allows you to segment your posts to different categories to keep everything organized. You have an additional option to make your content evergreen or just shared once.
Capterra rating – N/A | Pricing – $19 per month
Buffer
Buffer is an incredible social media scheduling tool with an unending content library and stellar analytics.
You can make a free account on Buffer to manage one page or profile on Facebook or Twitter, or LinkedIn. You may get as far as ten updates via scheduling options with your free account. While Buffer allows you to schedule posts for different social media channels as well, what stands out most is that it can also be used on mobile phones. Yes, Buffer mobile app can be downloaded on iPhones or Androids.
Capterra rating – 4.5 | Pricing – $35 per month
SocialPilot
We are talking in terms of cost-effectiveness, right? There is no other tool that matches the aforementioned factor as SocialPilot.
This tool allows you to post on many social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tik Tok, Tumblr, Pinterest, and even more! With a smart user interface, this tool makes scheduling and publishing your posts a breeze.
Capterra rating – 4.4 | Pricing – $30 per month
Email Marketing Tools
You can’t afford to lose on leads even in this situation. Our entire work routine has turned upside down but a marketer knows the value of a lead, and the most efficient way to capture leads is email marketing. Here are some extremely cost-efficient tools for email marketing:
SendX
This intuitive tool is proving a boon to most of the marketers out there. SendX is an affordable and excellent tool that you can employ in your business. Whether it’s about expanding your email base, segmenting your audience into target groups, creating automation sequences, or sending bulk emails, SendX can handle it all.
It doesn’t believe in putting limitations on their customers. That is why it allows you to send unlimited emails to opted-in email subscribers. Besides providing advanced features, analytics, and amazing email-deliverability, it comes with a Heatmap report to identify which links have got the most clicks.
Capterra rating – 4.7 | Pricing – $7.49 per month
MailerLite
This is a widely used email marketing tool by small and medium-sized businesses. It comes with a built-in CRM feature along with a beginner-friendly interface. With MailerLite you can send emails that look professional and are easy on the eyes.
This tool also works on the drag-and-drop feature and is quite handy for creating newsletters and creative emails. If follows a strict policy for account approvals that might take up one day. Overall, it is a very decent tool in comparison to other email marketing alternatives.
Capterra rating – 4.5 | Pricing – $10 per month
Sendinblue
This tool is an amazing fit for those businesses that want email and SMS marketing services and is very easy to use with its simple drag-and-drop technique.
You can create engaging emails, segment your email base, send bulk-emails, design workflows, and more. With its free plan, you can send up to 300 emails per day but if you want an email without Sendinblue’s watermark, you need an upgrade.
Capterra rating – 4.4 | Pricing – $25 per month
Moosend
So this tool meets the cost-efficiency factor with flying colors. It is an all-in-one email marketing and automation tool that deserves kudos. While many people are not aware of this amazing tool, this would come as a surprise to many that it has a forever free plan with all the features.
This tool can be a serious competitor to all the email marketing tools out in the marketing and is capable of giving a tough contest to Mailchimp’s pricing. Moosend allows you to create automated emails even in the free plan and gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of creating creative emails.
Capterra rating – 4.8 | Pricing – $8 per month
A Wrap-Up
This was a tiny tour of some of the most affordable tools to work remotely amidst the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Even in these challenging times, business must keep on running. With these tools, you can efficiently work from home without bearing too much cost.
Interested in learning more about cost effective tools you can integrate into your marketing strategy? Contact our team to get started!
This blog is written by Shivani Srivastava. A content marketer by heart, Shivani is passionate about writing anything in the field of the technological landscape. She’s written this guest blog for SendX: Email Marketing Software.
