At Averment there are some application we use daily and could not live without! All of these tools are free to use for small businesses.
1. Slack
url: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb
Slack is a team communication tool which has only been around for six years (started August 2016). But in that time it has moved on team communication hugely.
What do we love about slack?
As a digital development company, we interact with multiple platforms such as Github, Trello as well as business-level services such as FreeAgent on a daily basis. With Slack we can integrate all these services in one place and keep the internal team notified.
2. Trello
url: https://trello.com
Trello is a simple, dynamic project management tool. Actually, it is so flexible, you could use it for whatever you wanted. You can create lists and cards to organise work.
Why do we use Trello?
We use it at Averment to plan our projects with small clients. It gives us 90% of the functionality of a kanban board but with zero cost. There are a million and one different alternatives to digital kanban boards. But, we always feel like most of them have over-complicated a very simple concept. Trello has always been simple and clients who have never used a kanban board before are able to understand it straight away.
3. Hubspot CRM
Hubspot CRM as the name suggests is a customer relationship management tool. In the early days of Averment I was of the mindset that a CRM was for big businesses and we wouldn’t have any use for one for a long time.
But you realise very quickly that you need to start organising your clients, leads and marketing.
What do we use Hubspot CRM for?
Hubspot offers a huge amount of functionality, of course there is the CRM functionality, but also tools for email marketing and campaigns as well as sending out proposals and getting documents signed.
We believe in using the right tools for the right job. Some of the tooling around marketing and proposals do not meet our needs. So we use the Hubspot CRM purely as a CRM service and for this it is brilliant!
4. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing tool. As with many of these platforms, they spill out functionality into other areas such as CRM functionality. But we use it for its core platform, which it is great at! It is free to use for small audiences and has rich editing, reporting and analytics.
5. G Suite
url: https://accounts.google.com/signup
Can you do anything in this world without using a Google product? We use a huge amount of the tooling from Google. From their email platform, Google Drive and webmaster tools to manage web performance and set up campaigns. And whilst strictly speaking we pay a monthly fee for our Google account (a nominal fee which is around £6 per email account). The entire package is free without a custom domain.
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