Smaller businesses usually have limited budgets and need some time to make a stable groundwork to start growing. That’s why you should have access to tools, apps, and software that can help you scale up your business effectively. However, some of these tools can be pricey and are intended for bigger businesses and companies, making them an unprofitable investment for small businesses.
Luckily, there are a lot of useful apps with reasonable prices, made exactly with smaller businesses in mind, to help them get to the next level. The app market is constantly growing and new apps are popping around the clock. That is why it is smart to be up-to-date and use the most recent, high-quality apps.
Here are the top 11 apps for smaller businesses to use in 2021.
1. Handwrytten
To keep pace with the rising number of competitors that use personalization, your small business needs a way to effectively create and send gift cards, birthday wishes, or business letters. Handwrytten offers just that—a simple, but still creative and effective way to create birthday cards, thank you cards, or personalized cards with a customer’s name and a small note.
Letters are written using AI-powered robot-writing hands that resemble human handwriting and you can enrich it with many templates and other visuals.
Handwrytten can also automate the creation of cards and schedule the delivery to fit the desired date and time.
2. RoundPie
Productivity is essential for every small business in 2021 and it is a never-ending challenge. You can always find ways to be more productive and RoundPie offers a vetted approach to boosting productivity.
It is based on the Pomodoro technique principles incorporated in this app, you will effectively balance between working (for 25minutes) and taking a break (for 5 minutes). RoundPie also helps to track and analyze the time you spend completing tasks across Trello, Asana, Jira, and other task management platforms.
3. Navexa
If your industry is investing and you are just starting or simply want to make things easier, then Navexa is the app for your small business. It provides metrics and tools for the analysis of your investment portfolio.
This app's features are fit to work with NASDAQ & NYS funds, S&P 500 index, and other popular juggernauts. The best thing is that Navexa offers intelligent analysis of all your investment data to help you make informed, data-driven decisions, at a more than affordable price.
4. Wiza
LinkedIn is a powerful business platform, swarming with all kinds of professionals and businesses. Smaller businesses should definitely use LinkedIn to scale up their business and build their presence.
Wiza is an app for automating LinkedIn Lead generation. It saves searches from LinkedIn sales navigator and verifies and extracts email addresses by creating downloadable lead lists. That way, you will have a pool of relevant leads and their email addresses without manually collecting them. It is a true time-saver.
5. SendX
An Intuitive and affordable bulk email tool. With one of the simplest UIs in the industry, SendX provides unlimited email sends with every plan, powerful automation capabilities, best of breed email deliverability. 3000+ companies worldwide trust SendX for their email marketing. Small businesses can make their marketing go into auto-pilot mode. Segment the customers on the basis of demography, subscriber behavior and more than 25+ other parameters. There are nearly 50 email templates inside SendX which can be used for various use cases like the holiday season, newsletter, product launch, promotions, eCommerce, online courses, etc. SendX has a simple drag and drop email editor. You can just drag the blocks to create beautiful emails.
Customers can easily integrate SendX with the following applications Zapier, Wordpress, Upscribe, SumoMe, Slack, WooCommerece, Medium, Getsitecontrol, Thrive Leads, Optin Monster, Stripe, PayPal, Facebook, Google Analytics, Click Funnels, Instapage and many more.
6. Evernote
Every small business faces a lot of challenges with storing and jotting down all that information and ideas, especially in the beginning. Therefore, it is important to have an app at the tip of your hands, to effectively note everything down. Evernote is somewhat an older app but is still a versatile solution for smaller businesses in 2021.
Some of the best features include integration with other popular productivity tools like Gmail, Slack, etc. It also supports document scanning, well-optimized search options (like handwriting search), and creates a centralized, in-app workspace for your team’s insights and notes sharing.
7. Mailchimp
Made for small businesses, Mailchimp is an all-encompassing solution to build your audience and extract valuable insights. It comes with a lot of other features like creating email campaigns, automating customer journeys, and linking it with a wide range of tools and platforms.
The best thing is that it helps you extract valuable insights from all its features, on a deeper level, so you can measure the effects of your marketing efforts. It is also versatile, offering various useful options to use with each of its features, like survey-auto-tagging.
8. HelloSign
In the times of the COVID-19 pandemic, all businesses are more actively shifting towards digital. Business activities like meetings, payments, and even signatures are becoming contactless. Among many apps invented to make things contactless, HelloSign specializes in creating eSignatures.
This app takes care of legal aspects like signing different paperwork effectively and securely. It comes with features like making an audit trail, branding, data validation for all your documents, depending on the plan you choose. Various integration options are also included so you can seamlessly connect it with Salesforce, cloud solutions, etc.
9. Slack
It is important to have an effective way to communicate and exchange information within your team. Slack is an app that does this and includes an array of communication & sharing options like audio and video calls with rich chatting options.
Slack basically creates a virtual office for your business and allows the team to have resourceful conversations and create dedicated channels according to the project, customer, etc. You can also cross-connect with other businesses to join forces virtually or open important discussions.
10. Xero
With Xero app, you can handle all your accounting endeavors hassle-free. This app is designed to help with a multitude of activities like sending invoices, paying bills, bookkeeping, and tracking expenses.
It allows small businesses to connect with their banks to get automatic feeds to track their money. There are a lot of additional features like sales tax calculation, multi-currency conversions, and many other features for generating valuable reports.
11. Awario
Awario is a platform that makes social media and web monitoring affordable for businesses of any size. The platform allows monitoring your brand mentions, competitors, industry, or niche. With Boolean, you can set up complex search queries. Awario discovers unlinked mentions of your brand, monitors competitor activities, detect influencers talking about you, your industry or marketing trends. The platform also offers a social selling tool as a free add-on to all users. Using predictive insights, it finds people who’re asking for recommendations about a service/product similar to yours or they may be looking for an alternative to your competitors.
You can try with a free 7-day trial. Pricing starts at just $29/mo for the Starter plan and goes up to $299/mo for Enterprise. Custom plans are available for agencies and bigger brands.
Bonus tools
Fyle
Fyle is an employee expense management software best known for its easy expense tracking features and ease of use. This AI-powered expense software gives Finance teams real-time visibility and control over all employee spending. It is present inside everyday apps, making submitting and approving expense reports a one-click deal. Further, it automates credit card reconciliations, helps shorten reimbursement cycles with ACH, and integrates seamlessly with all major accounting software - making expense management easy for all stakeholders involved in the process.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook is a CRM for small business that offers everything independent business owners need to elevate their client experience and streamline their processes. From capturing leads to sending online contracts and processing payments, independent business owners can leverage HoneyBook to build their ideal client flow. The platform also offers templates for invoices, digital brochures, automations, online contracts and more. HoneyBook makes it easy for Independents to get organized and provide top tier service every step of the way.
Integrately
Integrately is an automation tool for businesses of all sizes. You can use it to automate your workflows and connect apps and services in just a few clicks.
For example, you can use Integrately to automatically add new leads from your CRM to your email marketing list and post new blog articles to your social media accounts.
With millions of such ready-to-use automation, you can set up your workflows in just a few minutes and be hassle-free. Its user-friendly UI, zero-learning curve, and affordable pricing make it the preferred choice for small business owners. You can even customize and create complex workflows with ease.
Groupboss
Groupboss is a Chrome extension that helps Facebook group owners collect the answers to the questions asked to the new members in a Google Sheet and sync the emails to the email marketing autoresponder with a single click. By copying and pasting the answers to the group membership request, Groupboss significantly reduced the group owners' pain. This lead generation platform can help your small business flourish in a quicker time and explore possibilities with unlimited lead generation.
This terrific Google Chrome extension can be downloaded and installed in seconds. When correctly configured and managed, you can connect to many Facebook groups and obtain the information of the requested members. Integrations with 18 autoresponders, including Moosend, SendGrid, ActiveCampaign, and GoHighLevel, enable you to utilize these leads in email marketing campaigns. Groupboss's pricing is affordable, and its functioning is as effortless as you'll ever encounter!
Final words
Small businesses should be creative and inventive when they start out. The path to building a proven pattern that standardizes your business activities might be a long one and you need to be ready to experiment and improvise.
These 11 apps to have in 2021 will back you up and ease off some of your regular activities. You will have more time to focus on building your strategy and figuring out how to level up your business.
About the author:
David Wachs is a serial entrepreneur, David's latest venture, Handwrytten, is bringing back the lost art of letter writing through scalable, robot-based solutions that write your notes in pen. Developed as a platform, Handwrytten lets you send notes from your CRM system, such as Salesforce, the web site, apps, or through custom integration. Used by major meal boxes, eCommerce giants, nonprofits and professionals, Handwrytten is changing the way brands and people connect.
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