Blue Eyed Sun

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Our Top 10 Business Tools

Top 10 Business Tools

For small businesses it’s difficult to keep up with all of the technology available to us these days, much of which is actually free. We've done quite a lot of work on this ourselves over the last few years and are constantly learning new tools that we love to share. Here are the top 10 business tools we use daily and find most valuable to our business:

Magento  Bought by Ebay in 2011, this easy to use ecommerce software does exactly what you want when setting up a webstore. It’s free open source software, which means that it doesn’t matter if the company who created it goes bust (I’ve had this happen previously). We run our Blue Eyed Sun trade website and our Ivy Ellen consumer site on Magento. Both allow us to sell a variety of products in a number of ways online. Magento really comes into it’s own for those selling to the public online as it can link into larger marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. It also taps straight into Paypal and Sagepay to receive credit card payments securely. Most importantly, our team can easily update new product images and descriptions. You will need help from an expert to set it up correctly and a little support from time to time to tweak things, but generally you can keep costs down on an ongoing basis by doing most of it yourself. 

Google Analytics This tool starts with a small piece of code that you can have your web developer add into your website and link back to your free Google Analytics account. Once it’s set up, you can see huge amounts of info on who’s visiting your website, what sites they are coming from, what search terms they are using, what browsers or devices they are using, where in the world they are viewing your site from and so on. Knowing the number of visitors to your website, how many of them are new and how long they are spending on your site is all incredibly important for improving your customers’ experience. Analytics also tells you your bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave the first page they land on) which is really important for ranking well on search engines (i.e. search engine optimisation or SEO). It also helps us to track the success of our Google Adwords when we pay to advertise on Google searches. 

Dropbox This free online data storage tool is incredibly useful for backing up digital files in the cloud (i.e. on the web). You can also use it to share files with anyone in the world. For instance we’ve created a dropbox folder that only our printers and our office can see. We can then drop our artwork into the folder when it’s ready to go to press. It has the advantage over email when sharing large files like graphic artwork which can clog up inboxes or be blocked at server level. We know sales agents that use Dropbox to share PDF brochures quickly and easily with customers just by emailing them a link to their drop box folder rather than emailing large files. The recipient can then choose when they want to download the info. 

Sage When we first started our business, we managed our accounts and payroll manually. It was a hugely time consuming and thankless task. I remember being on the verge of tears pouring over grids of numbers trying to figure out PAYE and NI amounts for our first staff. These days we run all our accounts and payroll through Sage and it is a pleasure using this powerful business software. We subscribe to SageCover support which provides us with telephone help, data repair and software updates all through the year. It’s expensive, but I always say it’s like having a good bed. You sleep every day, so it’s worth paying for a good one. We use Sage daily to manage all of our customers, invoices, bills, suppliers, staff, etc. If you’re going to run your business well and make a success of it, up to date numbers are crucial.  

WordPress We use this fantastic free blogging software every week, as well as a number of plugins to it which help us get the most out of this great tool. There are two ways of using Wordpress: You can create a blog at wordpress.com or you can add the WordPress software to your website. We use the latter as we prefer all of the content that we create to stay on our web domain. Essentially the first option is like renting a house and the second is like owning your own home. Our blog is an essential way of keeping our customers up to date with useful information and improving our SEO. 

MailChimp This tool helps us automatically email our customer base with nice looking emails that have a higher rate of success at getting through and being seen. MailChimp is so powerful it can tell us when our customers opened our emails, what they clicked on and their location when they clicked. This helps us to adapt and taylor the emails to our customers’ needs and make them more relevant to them in the future. You pay for credits which allow you to send a certain number of emails. On average it works out at less than half a penny an email. MailChimp will update you when people unsubscribe, help you figure out the best time of the day to send your emails and help you reduce the number of unsubscribes so that your list stays strong. 

Hootsuite I’m not going into all of the different social media tools in this article as there are too many and they have different strengths and weaknesses for different businesses. Having said that, we rely on Hootsuite on a daily basis to manage most of our social media interaction. This dashboard style tool allows us to schedule all of our posts to Twitter, Facebook, etc and to track keywords used on Twitter throughout the day. It saves us hours of time and searching. 

Microsoft Office What would we all do without Microsoft Office? Love it or hate it it’s still the king of word processing, spreadsheets and email. Even though I regularly use Apple’s Pages and Mail, I find that Word, Excel and Outlook are vital on a daily basis throughout our office. Despite having Sage we still run all sorts of reports on Excel to track sales, stock control, etc and keep on top our numbers. It’s indispensable to most businesses despite other alternatives. 

ACT One of the best CRM (customer relationship management) tools on the market, we use ACT to manage our marketing database of customers and prospects. If you want to serve your customers well you need a tool like this to help you do it. It is hugely flexible and allows us to securely hold a great deal of info on our customers. We have it networked in our office so that team can see histories of discussions between any specific customer and any member of our team. It’s all noted down so that nothing is missed. It also plugs into Sage so that we can access financial data on customers from inside ACT if we need to. 

Adobe Creative Suite The tool on which our company most relies for design, pr and marketing is the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. All of our cards, press releases, adverts and images are created using Photoshop and Illustrator. All of our brochures are created in InDesign which is a layout package used most often by magazines (as an alternative to Quark). Photoshop allows us to manipulate images so that they look their best for the printing press as well as saving them in different formats for different purposes like high quality print jobs or websites. Illustrator is used to create what are known as vector graphics. These tend to be images containing sharper lines like logos that can be scaled up or down without losing quality, something that’s not always possible with regular photoshop images. There’s a steep learning curve with the Adobe Creative suite and it is expensive to run, but once you’ve mastered it your artwork will never be the same again.  Well there's our list. There are others that we use and our list does change over time. Some of these top 10 business tools may be very familiar to you and some you may already have found alternatives for. If not, do take a look at them and see if they can help you improve how you run your business. Please feel free to share this post if you enjoyed it. 

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