Business automation is especially valuable to entrepreneurs, because your greatest constraint is often on your time. You’re likely running your startup with a lean staff, but you still need the results and growth of an established company.
Below are a list of simple-to-use, affordable tools that can help you scale and automate your business for faster growth. Best of all, these tools were designed to be affordable.
1. Dasheroo
Today’s business environment requires numerous third-party apps for success. Many entrepreneurs are promoting their businesses on Twitter and Facebook, measuring their sites’ performance on Google analytics, marketing email through MailChimp and the list goes on and on.
These platforms individually are great at what they do and provide valuable data, but require unique logins for each platform, but more often than not, their analytics don’t talk to each other. That’s where Dasheroo can help. All your platforms can be found in one central dashboard, accessible through a single sign in and with analytics that work together between platform silos. It’s brilliant for the busy entrepreneur who wants it all in one place.
2. Shopify
Whether you have an online storefront or a physical presence, Shopify can help you process payments easily. For online entrepreneurs, you can plug your unique business URL into the Shopify platform and build out a customized online storefront inside its vast library of templates. Add products, build in return and exchange policies, set up state taxes and shipping rates all with a few simple mouse clicks.
Shopify has great customer support, sends informative and helpful set-up instructions and handles all the aspects of your online storefront for your end user. It also offers a retail location application for a checkout register so you can get the best of both worlds.
3. ClearVoice
Content marketing is an essential aspect of today’s sales environment. You drive visitors through your purchasing funnel with effective, valuable content-marketing campaigns. However, content takes time to ideate, create and seed out into the world to effectively drive visitors to your site and get them into your funnel.
How do you have the bandwidth to handle all those steps for your business? ClearVoice is your solution. Inside the platform you can start ideas, get expert feedback and hire great content creators. You can then manage the creation process through its dashboard and when content is completed, use ClearVoice’s third-party publishers to get the content out to the masses.
It couldn’t be simpler and is the most automated content-creation platform on the market.
4. Infusionsoft
This is the gold standard for small businesses and startups needing a sales and marketing solution. Infusionsoft offers entrepreneurs a complete end-to-end sales and marketing-automation software that includes customer-relationship management, email marketing and effective lead capture. Perhaps the most brilliant thing about Infusionsoft is the platform’s ability to simply plug in other applications you might need.
For example, if your online business storefront is set up through Shopify, Infusionsoft offers integration between its platform and Shopify, so your online shopping cart sales get captured and your leads and customers get plugged into your Infusionsoft CRM.
5. Printful
Printful will create and ship on demand a wide variety of custom products so you don’t have to carry inventory or take on the stress or risks of printing and shipping. Printful offers a wide variety of print-on-demand products ranging from hoodies and tees to coffee mugs and posters, so there are lots of options to choose from.
The Printful interface plugs easily into Shopify and other online shopping-cart solutions, too, which makes setting up an online store a cinch. No products to carry, no shipping to worry about, just make your designs and upload them into your Printful account, then as your products sell, the Printful folks manufacture and ship for you automatically. It couldn’t be easier to start creating products.
6. ClickFunnel
A great sales funnel is a highly automated way to convert your site visitors into clients. When you have a great piece of content you’ve created in a platform such as ClearVoice, you’ll want to get it out to the world, but what happens when the world clicks on your content? Driving your content viewers into a sales funnel is a great way to effectively monetize your content.
ClickFunnel has the templates for effective, easy-to-create sales funnels. You can choose from all types of layouts, such as landing pages for webinars and white paper. There’s bound to be a template for the type of funnel you need to create and ClickFunnel automates the process, so once you set it up, the process is automated and done.
7. Sprout Social
Social media is a necessary tool for every entrepreneur and the expected standard for communicating, sharing and distributing your content. However, measuring the engagement, scheduling your messages and interacting with your social followers can get complex and time-consuming, especially if more than one person on your team is responsible for social media.
Keep track of the conversations that are happening and understand the metrics behind all your various social-media content with Sprout Social. Its interface keeps the lines of communication clear, while providing valuable insights into the conversations that are happening on your accounts and between your team and social followers. You can also automate sending messages with its great scheduling tool.
