2020 is just around the corner and smart business owners are already planning and making adjustments for the new year.
Last week, I had paid strategy sessions with 2 clients who needed help with mapping a better actionable strategy to boost leads and sales in 2020, complete with fill-the-blank templates and tools.
These clients are already getting ready to run their businesses in a better way come 2020!
In this piece, I have made a comprehensive list to help you and everyone else who has asked to get themselves equipped to do business online in a better way, next year.
I’d be giving you a list of the tools in my toolbox that will help me run my online business effortlessly in the year 2020.
Read on…
Marketing & Funnel Automation Tools:
Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and an email marketing service which manages your email list and automates your email activities. With mailchimp, you can design email newsletters and share them to a mailing list of your customers or prospective customers, mailchimp also lets you track your email marketing results by giving you a comprehensive information on your email subscribers, those who receive as well as read your emails.
Ninja forms for Mailchimp helps you create customized forms for your prospective clients without much work, all you have to do is, select an already made form, modify and add to your mail.
Brizy Pro is a WordPress page builder which is both innovative and very easy to use. To install and use Brizy Pro, you’ll have to first install the free version before uploading and installing the Pro .zip file. Brizy Pro is one of the most popular wordpress page builders. It helps you build landing pages without coding.
If you have a Whatsapp or Facebook account, then you can easily create a group on either platform where you can add your prospects, customers for webinars.
Typeform is an online form software for building online surveys. With Typeform, you can create dynamic forms based on the uniqueness of the information and data you intend to get from your prospects. Typeform presents questions which slide down one after another showing only one question at a time to keep users engaged. You can include images, and GIFs or videos in the forms. The form can be embedded into a website, open in a pop-up, or be accessed through a unique URL.
Whether you’re just getting started or have been doing webinars for a while, Webinarninja gives you everything you need to run your webinars without the stress that comes with running webinars.
With webinarninja, your attendees can join your webinar with any web browser, on desktop or any mobile device. There is no need for them to download or install any software.
Zappier allows you to integrate the web applications you use for your business and and lets you build automated processes with them. Zappier brings all your work apps like MailChimp, Google Sheets, Asana etc. to one central platform from where you can control them without switching between platforms.
ManyChat is a service that allows you to create chatbots for Facebook Messenger which would serve as a first line of response to your customers without you being online at every given point. You can use these chatbots for a range of other purposes, such as marketing and customer care. You can use Manychat to set-up your chat bot in about two minutes and the awesome part is that, you don’t need any knowledge of coding to set it up.
Zoom is a video conferencing software using cloud computing for video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration. Zoom is easy to use and supports work collaboration as well as online meeting with prospects regardless of their location.
Calendly is a simple software for scheduling meetings. It makes it easy for you to schedule, access and share your meeting schedules with your clients or team members.
Countdown timers create excitement among your customers, enticing and giving them a sense of urgency by giving them a hint that your service or product is “about to be finished from the shelf”. Thereby, nudging them to purchase a product, hence boosting your product sales. Want to create such feeling of urgency among your customers? Then you should use the Waiting plugin and Sendtric
Customer Communication:
Want to bring your customers up to speed with work progress? G suite or Whatsapp Group does a good job in providing a platform to carry your customers along as you make progress with their jobs or purchases. Just pick the one that works best for you among the two.
Want to comprehensively track your website performance? Google analytics allows you to analyze in-depth details about the visitors on your website, where they came from, the pages they spent the most times viewing as well as other details on your website performance. These data if properly utilized would help you plan better strategies for your marketing campaigns.
Google Data Studio and Google Sheets is part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite, you can use these online software to create beautiful and explanatory reports for your clients. If you need a software for data visualization, I would recommend Google Data Studio and Google Sheets.
Finances:
Paystack is an online payment platform that makes it easy for merchants to accept card payments online from customers. It is easy to setup and the great part is, you don’t need to own a website to create a Paystack payment link for your business.
Woocommerce is a wordpress plugin for building and setting up your online store. Want to sell your products online? You should go for the Woocommerce plugin, it is quite easy to set-up on your WordPress website.
Waveapps is an accounting software that provides accounting features such as invoicing, billing, payment tracking, payroll management, finance management, and receipts. Waveapps provides a very easy means of managing your small business accounting online.
Website Management:
For easy and affordable web hosting, you should try out syskay.com, Syskay is a Nigerian web hosting company with offering high performance SSD Web Hosting very ideal for WordPress and Joomla Websites.
WordPress is an open source website creation tool written in PHP. But totally simplified for use by those with little or no knowledge in coding, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (CMS) in existence today.
Want to create and sell your own courses or just educate your customers? Thinkific and Teachable provide the platform for you, all you have to do is, create your account, sign up and start creating your courses and content.
MaxCDN is a network of caching servers. It delivers content fast and reliable to end users. CDN pulls content from an origin server with client’s request and caches it on the server that is closer to a client.
After installing the WordPress CMS, you need a theme to build your website or landing page on. The Pinnacle theme is a beautiful and easy to use theme anyone can use to setup landing pages in very little time.
Team management:
You can easily assemble your team on whatsapp by creating a whatsapp group where tasks can be tracked and progress updated. Once you have a whatsapp account, you can create a whatsapp group for your team.
Asana is a work management tool with which you can organize and plan workflows, projects, and more, so you can keep your team’s work on schedule.
Dropbox is a cloud storage service, where you can upload for safe-keeping or share files between your team mates for easy work flow. There are different plans to which you can subscribe to depending on how you want your files to be stored or shared.
Want to properly manage the payment process of your staff salaries? Then you should use Verifi, an online platform used to calculate and pay salaries, pensions, taxes, health insurance and more
Avoid those embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors in your mails and articles, use the Grammarly extension which automatically scans your texts for errors. It also provides real-time suggestions and guidelines on how to correct these mistakes.
These are the tools in my toolbox for the year 2020. Hope you find them useful.
Now you know what’s in my toolbox. Let me know the tools in yours and any adjustments you are already making for next year.
Happy 2020 Planning.
You can choose to pass my recommendation to your in-house team to implement and start seeing results or you can outsource the whole stress to my agency for a fee that will be discussed during the strategy session.