According to the Harvard Business Review, existence and survival are the first two stages in any small business of the 5 stage business model.
Starting and running a small business is expensive and tough. You will come across many setbacks, hurdles, and challenges that you would not imagine. With limited budgets and time, each and every business tries to get the maximum out of its team.
Important of having Business Tools for Small Ventures
In today’s digital era, tools and software have become the best friends of small business owners. To survive and make an impact on your business, every company needs some automation tools, POS billing software and other digital aids to stay ahead in the competition as they help in accelerating your business and save a lot of time.
According to the survey conducted by McKinsey & Co in 2020, 66% of the small businesses use at least one Automation Software, up from 57% two years ago. 31% of the small businesses have completely automated one of their business processes compared to 28% in the year 2018.
Business processes can be anything right from software such as Google analytics to the best accounting software for businesses. These technologies have helped small business owners to compete with the big players in the market.
5 Essential Software Solutions for Small Businesses
From building a solid brand to engaging your clients, every business requires some essential tools to increase productivity and make up some free time to invest in some other task.
While you must have chosen the best Accounting Software for businesses for your venture, there is a lot more that you need.
Here are the 5 essential tools every small business owner requires:
- Email Marketing Software
There is no other better form of customer retention than email marketing. Many marketers assume that email marketing is dead, but it is not. 40% of B2B marketers say that email newsletters are the most important factor for their content marketing success, it is because 90% of the surveyed people check their emails every day for updates. This shows how important it is to have an email marketing strategy for your business.
Email marketing helps businesses create personalized and targeted content, get feedback from customers using surveys, increase sales, launch campaigns and increase traffic to the site. Using inbound marketing you can also nurture leads and improve conversions. Some of the most famous email marketing are constant contact, Mailchimp, Sendinblue, drip, and convertkit.
Constant Contact: This is one of the most leading email marketing software and gives access to unlimited emails, easy tracking, and also has built-in social media sharing tools. This also comes with features like email automation, A/B testing to send targeted emails to maximize open rate.’
Mailchimp: Mailchimp comes with easy drag and drop features and autoresponders for segmenting emails and can also integrate with WordPress, Shopify, Magento, and many other platforms.
- Customer relationship management
One of the biggest challenges small business owners face is growth and sustainability. In order to increase the revenue, the company needs more leads, more conversions, and ultimately more sales. For a company to be successful the organizational processes and workflows have to be streamlined so that they run smoothly and seamlessly.
This is where Customer relationship management becomes essential for your requirements.
CRM helps businesses organize their contacts, segment the customers and report their conversion and sales. The most famous CRM software used is Zoho CRM, Hubspot, and sales cloud by salesforce. With new technologies coming in companies are also developing SaaS that is easily scalable and can be used by organizations of any size.
- POS System
A point of sale or POS is a place where your customers can pay for the product or services that are offered by your company. A complete POS is a package of hardware and software which combines payment gateway/processing, inventory and customer management, payroll management, and accounting and invoice generation.
Some POS software solutions are available for free but with limited capabilities of POS billing software.
A POS for a retail store comes up with monitors and screws, barcode scanners, cash drawers, credit/debit card readers, and many more. POS software can be customized based upon the requirements of the businesses.
When it comes to online POS billing software, it usually includes a smooth checkout process which includes payment and tracking of sales & inventory for efficient management of the online store. One of the most popularly used POS is Moon Invoice.
The features offered by Moon Invoice are invoicing, payments, sales tracking, reports and insights, track expenses, and many more.
- Social Media Platform
According to reports from sprout social, it is estimated that 3.6 Billion people use social media globally. This shows how important it is for a business to have a social media presence to target its audience.
Choose the right social media platform for your business by knowing where your target audience is hanging out and also post the content that your audience is struggling to find. Social media itself can be considered a tool. There are many other tools such as Dynamics 365’s SM module, with which you can post on all the social media platforms on a scheduled date and time.
- Shopping cart software
With an increase in the number of mobile users, online shopping has become a trend and also an essential part of many lives. If you run a business that involves selling products and services online, then your website or app must be equipped with a shopping cart.
Drop-shipping sites use the shopping cart feature. A shopping cart allows users to add or drop products and services and also enables payment options using the payment gateway services. Some of the shopping carts also come with PayPal integration or any third-party apps.
These software tools help shoppers in calculating the total costs of all the products including shopping and any other extra costs. Some of the famous shopping cart software are 3D cart, X cart, Shopify, pinnacle cart, etc.
The Final Word
For small businesses to survive and thrive in the markets, business owners and entrepreneurs need tools that help maximize the productivity of their team and increase profits. Leveraging the potential of the above-listed tools and your online billing software defines the success & failure of the businesses.