It’s essential for any business to be equipped with the right set of tools to improve the management, streamline the workflow, and gain the competitive advantage of your rivals.
Fortunately, some of the best tools that make managing a business easier and take it to the next level are available for free.
Here is a collection of some popular free digital tools designed to help businesses in many different ways. They will help you to streamline your workflow, automate various processes and carry out specific tasks more efficiently.
1: Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool. It helps you to manage and keep track of all your social networking
channels in one place. Here is a list of things you can do with Hootsuite.
What You Can Do
- View the post stream from social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
- Publish or schedule posts on all your various social media accounts from one place
- Comment under various posts and respond to the comments under your posts
- View brand mentions on various social media channels
- Create a team and assign various social media management tasks to team members
Why Use It
- Single login to manage all your social media profiles
- Post same content across various social media simultaneously
- Free plan available with basic features
- Measure the success of content accurately with easy to understand analytics reports
- Save time by scheduling posts
- Get an organized view of the public conversations and private messages
Outcome
- Hassle-free social media management
- Better team coordination in social media management
2: Mailchimp
Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing tool. It allows you to send promotional emails to a huge audience
easily.
What You Can Do
- Send personalized emails to your email subscribers with one click
- Send automated emails like abandon cart notification and product suggestion emails from your online store
- Monitor the performance of email campaigns
Why Use Mailchimp
- Free plan with attractive features
- 300+ app integrations to scale
- Create campaigns quickly
- Massive free educational materials on Mailchimp
Outcome
- Increase sales through lead nurturing email campaigns
- Get a better insight into the target market by observing their engagement with the emails you send
3: Hubspot CRM
Hubspot is a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
It allows you to build a centralized information
system of all your contacts, leads, customers, vendors. You can add notes and to-do notes for each contact. It
allows you to keep all information and notes about all your contacts well organized.
What You Can Do
- Categorize contacts based on the sales funnel
- Enter notes about contacts for future reference
- Email marketing
- Customer supporting and ticketing system
- Schedule meeting/call with contacts and get notification
Why You Need It
- Sales funnel/sales pipeline overview with clean dashboard
- Get all the information about a contact from the list quickly
- Gmail and Outlook integration
- You can refer all information about the past engagements with a contact quickly
- The service team can refer the notes entered by sales person about any customer
Outcome
- Centralized database or information system of all your customers
- Hassle-free customer information management
- Better collaboration among the team members with a centralized system
- Email marketing becomes easy
- Customer support becomes easy
4: Asana
Asana is a project management system and task manager
It allows you to create projects, create tasks under each project, set deadlines for them and mark completed
tasks and projects. So, it helps you to keep track of the progress of your projects.
What You Can Do
- Create Projects
- Create tasks under project and sub-tasks under tasks
- Assign tasks and subtasks to team members
- Set deadlines for projects, tasks, and sub-tasks
- Mark completed tasks
- Set goals and keep track of progress regularly
Why Use It
- Project management becomes easier
- View the progress of the team members
- Simple and intuitive user interface
Outcome
- Get project progress overview anytime
- Better team collaboration
5: Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a task management application that allows you to create checklists and to-do lists. It helps you to
keep track of a list of things you need to do.
What You Can Do
- Create tasks
- Star important tasks
- Mark tasks as completed
- Delete tasks
- You can add descriptions for tasks
Why Use It
- Wunderlist is a simple and clean tool
- It can be integrated with other popular tools like Slack
6: Slack
Slack is a team communication tool. It organizes team communication and improves team collaboration.
What You Can Do
- Create a workspace and add team members
- Team members can create channels (groups) and add other members
- Sharing files and documents made easy
- Video and audio call with team members
- Group call and screen sharing on paid plans
Why Use It
- Slack organizes team communication
- Integrate with hundreds of popular tools like Asana, Dropbox, and Google Drive
Outcome
- Efficient team communication
- Efficient team collaboration
7: Chatbots
Integrating conversational chatbots on your website can provide a better experience to your customers. It helps
you to guide visitors through a conversation path based on their requirements and collect their details easily.
What You Can Do
- Interact with website visitors
- Collect details about the website visitors
Why Use It
- Provide conversational experience similar to your website visitors
- One chatbot can manage thousands of visitors at a time
- It works round the clock
Outcome
- Convert more visitors into leads
- Improved user satisfaction
8: Canva
Canva is a drag-and-drop online graphic design tool to create posters and graphics for social media, print and
other requirements. The hundreds of templates and design elements make creating designs less time-consuming.
What You Can Do
- Create graphics by customizing existing templates
- Change colors of text, background
- Replace images on templates with your images
Why Use It
- No design experience required
- You don’t need to be creative to customize beautiful templates
Outcome
- Beautiful designs with no design experience or knowledge
- Save hundreds of hours designing custom posters, ads, and other graphics
9: Pixlr X
Pixlr X is a powerful online image manipulation tool similar to Adobe Photoshop. You can do all the basic image
editing works on the online Pixlr editor from your browser.
What You Can Do
- Intermediate level image composition using multiple photos and elements
- Basic image editing like cropping
- Intermediate level image color correction
- Intermediate photo retouching
- Add filters and elements for creative photo editing
Why Use It
- Fast editor providing seamless editing experience online
- Intermediate to advanced image editing can be done
Outcome
- Don’t hire a graphic designer for basic photo editing works
10: Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps you to track and report the activity of visitors on your website. It allows you to monitor
how people interact with the website.
What You Can Do
- Track the activity of website visitors
- Get invaluable insights about your website traffic: number of visitors, number of average pages visited,
bounce rate, source of the traffic - View real-time traffic analytics from your website
- Find popular pages on your websites and average time spent by visitors on a page
- Conversion tracking
- Find out which pages your visitors don’t like
- Find out location, gender, age, device and OS of your website visitors
- Track sales activity in ecommerce websites
Why Use It
- Get invaluable insight into the traffic on your website
- Understand what works and what doesn’t work on your website
- Identify user experience issues with individual pages
- Seamless integration with Google Ads, Google Datastudio and Google Tag Manager
Outcome
- Improve your website based on the insight gained from tracking traffic
- Measure the success of the various pages and entire website
11: Google Search Console
Google Search Console allows you to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot the presence of your website on Google
Search Engine. It’s a platform for you to interact with Google regarding your website.
Google will also give you suggestions and notifications about issues with your website.
What you can do
- View which queries (keywords) bring traffic to your website
- Analyze your web pages impression rate, click rate, and position on Google Search.
- Submit your website’s sitemap for better indexation
- Submit new URLs from your website to be indexed on Google Search Engine database
- Request to remove unwanted pages on your site from showing up on Google Search (may not work)
- Get alerts about the issues with your website
Why Use It
- Control the presence of your website on Google Search
- No alternative for this tool
Outcome
- Your website gets better visibility on Google Search
- More traffic on your website
12: Google Calendar
Google calendar is time management, scheduling, and calendar app. It allows you to mark upcoming events and
meetings on a calendar so you keep track of them quickly from any de device. You can also create an event and
invite others. Once they accept the invitation, it will be marked on their calendar as well.
What You Can Do
- Add events with date, time and location (event could be offline or online
- Invite others to the events via email or sharing link
- View events on weekly, monthly or yearly calendar dashboard
- View the birthdays of your Google contacts
- Create reminders for time-sensitive tasks
Why Use It
- Sync events automatically from Gmail
- Get an overview of the upcoming event
- Get automatic reminder notifications for the event
- RSVP to event invitations right from your inbox
13: Zoho Calendar
Zoho Calendar is an alternative for Google Calendar. Both of them work pretty much the same way and offer similar
features.
14: Evernote
Evernote is a tool for note-taking, organizing notes, archiving notes and store images, audios, videos, and
documents. Apart from that you can also use it as an organizer and planner, bookmark manager.
What You Can Do
- Take notes, organize them with tags
- Create notes in different forms including texts, images, videos, audios and documents
- Create notebooks, memos, checklists, and to-do lists
- Share your notes and notebooks with others and start a discussion
- Clip and highlight articles from the web for academic research
Why Use It
- It organized all the information you need in one place
- Sync all your notes and other data across computer, phone, and tablet
- Access your notes from any device
- Clean, minimalistic, simple and intuitive interface
Outcome
- It becomes easier and less time consuming to access your notes and related materials
15: Google Keep
Google keep is a simple note-taking app. It helps you to save your thoughts which you can access from any device
later.
What You Can Do
- Take quick notes
- Set reminders
- Add to-do lists or checklists
- Organize your notes with tags and colors
- Add voice notes
Why Use It
- Create and access notes quickly
- Automatically sync across devices
16: Expensify
Expensify is a simple expense management tool. It allows you to record your expenses, keep track of them and
generate expense reports.
What You Can Do
- Enter each expense by taking a photo of the receipt
- Submit business expenses to the relevant authority for approval and reimbursement
- Categorize, tag and group expenses for organized reporting
Why Use It
- Record expenses quickly by just taking photos of the receipt
- Expensify automatically transcribes the receipt
- Generate expense reports within seconds
- Integrate with accounting software like QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, etc.
Outcome
- Well organized expense details
- Less time spend on entering, organizing and creating expense reports
- Expensify has different plans for different requirements.
- Individuals can use it for free but the smart scan feature is limited to 5 scans in a month in free plans.
17: Paypal
Paypal is a comprehensive payment system. It makes international money transactions easier. It’s not free, but it
makes international transactions a lot cheaper.
What You Can Do
- International money transaction
- Link your credit and debit cards
- Purchase items from anywhere in the world
Why You Use it
- Cheaper international transaction fees
- 180-day buyer protection
Outcome
- Less expense for international transactions
