5 Best Productivity Tools for Your Online Business
“Improved productivity means less human sweat, not more.” – Henry Ford
Are you looking for the best productivity tools for your digital business? If time is money, productivity is like the golden egg-laying chicken, and it has the power to make you the next Warren Buffett.
As an online business owner, if you feel like there should be 25 or 30 hours in a day to accomplish everything that needs to be done– you’re not alone. Between assigning tasks, answering emails, wearing 20 different hats, and completing deadlines, it becomes an uphill task to remain productive. Job scheduling tools can help bring more efficiency to your business.
Productivity isn’t about ticking a goal off from the checklist; it’s more about doing more with less. When you accomplish more in as little time as possible, you strike the right productivity cord. The rule here is simple, the more productive your employees are, the more work they will complete, and the more profit your business will earn.
Apart from monetary benefits, productivity reduces the overall cost of business and helps achieve the goals timely. Today, increasing productivity is imperative, and with rising competitiveness, it makes sense to take help from a myriad of productivity tools available in the market.
These productivity tools will help streamline the processes, improve the productivity of the remote as well as an in-house team, and save time. Use the precious hours you save for enticing the customers or enhancing the online presence of your business.
We have listed the best productivity tools to assist you with every aspect of your business. These tools will help you focus on tasks that matter instead of wasting on the less critical tasks.
Hubstaff – time tracking tool
There are many reasons why a team is unable to complete projects on time. One of them, ironically, is because time is wasted on trying to keep track of what has or hasn’t already been done.
Hubstaff is designed to automate the process of tracking your team’s work so you can focus on finishing projects. It tracks every second that your team spends on different tasks.
Hubstaff can monitor the apps and the websites that your team uses. You’ll also be able to see each team member’s activity rate, which is based on keyboard and mouse input. Hubstaff’s time-tracked data greatly helps in understanding how your team works so you can help them be as productive as possible.
Top features
- Accurate time tracking for different tasks and projects
- App & URL tracking and activity monitoring
- Optional screenshots for easy progress tracking
- Online timesheet review and approval
- Automated payroll and invoicing
- Integrations with many project management, accounting, CRM, and help desk apps
In short: Hubstaff streamlines team management and task tracking so you can get things done more efficiently.
Slite – Knowledge management tool
Though knowledge is power, it doesn’t alone suffice – it’s the way you obtain, store, distribute, and utilize the information that puts you ahead in the race. According to a report, UK office workers waste over one million hours a week searching for misplaced documents. Having a useful knowledge base influences how you do business, both internally and helps in building customer relationships.
A knowledge base like Slite is a centralized online repository where information is stored and shared. It can contain process documents, company policies, employee onboarding procedures, FAQs, or intellectual data.
Source: https://twitter.com/sliteHQ/header_photo
An external knowledge base is usually public and helps customers. It can include FAQs, user guides, or DIYs. In contrast, an internal knowledge base is for the employees and comprises HR policies, product launches, manuals, etc.
According to a Mobility Performance and Engagement report, 42% of employees said that access to information quickly and efficiently has the most significant impact on their productivity.
When you spend time creating such a base by putting together all the relevant business information, you build a valuable source both for the employees and the customers. Your employees no longer have to spend hours searching for particular information.
A tool like Slite is a long-term investment for increasing productivity, ensuring smooth workflows, and ensuring transparent processes inside the business.
Slite helps you write and work together. And, you focus on building the knowledge base instead of formatting it. It also helps you collaborate, share, and manage all the company’s documents and files. With Slite, you no longer have to juggle between tools and apps to search for data or information.
Top Features
- Supports all content types, including documents, wiki, tasks, and tables
- Real-time editing and formatting of text
- Finds relevant information within seconds in real-time with a smart search
- Integrates with other apps such as Trello, Slack, Github, Asana
- Easy document linking helps in building an internal wiki and a robust knowledge management system
- Sort the documents in separate channels for each project or team
- Highlights the new and popular documents to keep everyone in the company up-to-date
- Allows mentioning the name of team members on the documents
In short: Knowledgebase is a secret ingredient of productivity and tools like Slite helps in searching a needle in the haystack
Maze – UX design tool
Like a picture that conveys complex ideas, a prototype is a clickable journey of proposed designs. It conveys concepts clearly to the customer and helps turn the vision of your company into something tangible. It helps the designer paint the broader picture, test, and build the design while maintaining consistency.
Source: Twitter
Before making the UX design a part of your portfolio, you need to find the right UX tool to streamline the workflow and increase productivity. A UX design tool helps save precious time as many of the tasks are automated, increasing productivity.
Maze is one such powerful design tool. Apart from offering usability methods, Maze can validate design ideas, run surveys, and test prototypes. The tool collects user insights and validates all the ideas before commencing the design process. Furthermore, you can test InVision, Sketch, or Marvel prototypes to understand the performance of the design.
Top Features
- Evaluates the design performance based on actionable metrics
- Useful customer insights for creating designs that work
- Organizes the testing sessions and gathers data in a single place
- Removes the guesswork from building digital products
- Split-testing multiple designs
In short: Maze saves precious time, increases productivity and delivers client satisfaction.
Tye – Mailing list management tool
You have noticed that your email campaign or newsletters are not receiving an adequate response from the customers – or maybe they are landing in the spam folder instead of the inbox!
What do you do?
You look for inactive accounts or change the email campaign for increasing the inbox placement. But still, no luck as your target audience is ignoring your emails. Excellent deliverability is the key to a successful mail campaign. Irrespective of the efforts you put in creating the campaign and crafting the content if your emails don’t reach the customer’s inbox, you will never see results. Furthermore, with email service providers (ESPs) continually changing their algorithms, maintaining a good sender reputation is imperative as it decides the fate of the email.
One of the most cost-effective ways to increase engagement and deliverability is by using a mailing list management tool like Tye, which cleans your list and customer data.
Tye, an email list management tool, lets you focus on your customers and ensures a sparkling clean customer data. Apart from increasing productivity, Tye protects you from breaching federal guidelines and focuses on improving the marketing metrics such as email deliverability, bounce rate, and sender’s reputation. Tye is your one-stop destination when it comes to email list management and will increase email ROI.
Top features
- Connect to your ERP or CRM or directly upload data into the web app
- Merges different customer’s lists and removes the duplicate content
- Checks the overall quality of data to ensure compliance with different laws
- Cleans the data for incorrect, missing or duplicate entries
- Analyzes the data to provide useful customer insight
- Changes in the list are automatically reflected in the CRM
In short: A mailing list management tool gives a fresh start to your email campaign.
GanttPro – Project management tool
With companies working on more than one project, the absence of a project management tool makes it challenging to accomplish a task. Such a tool helps in establishing a hierarchy of tasks for efficient and timely completion. It enhances productivity and ensures everyone in the team or the project is on the same page.
With GanttPro, you can track the tasks of a team member and use a visual interface to schedule projects. From resource allocation to time management, and from project planning to documentation, GanttPro helps in every aspect to make the project successful.
Top features
- Automatic project scheduling
- Team management and resource allocation
- Estimate project cost
- Export and sharing using a public URL
- Track progress
In short: GanttPro maximizes the performance of the project teams and streamlines the workflow.
Hootsuite – Social media management tool
For an online business, social media is a boon in disguise because it’s one of the leading platforms for connecting and interacting with the customers. With the growing popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest – businesses are trying to lure customers by having a presence on almost all social media platforms. It can be overwhelming and time-consuming to manage the accounts.
This is where you will need a social media management tool like Hootsuite. From content creation to RSS integration, and from analytics to team management, the tool gives you control and helps save precious hours.
Top features
- Manage all the social media accounts from a single-dashboard
- Create and send social media posts to all accounts in one go
- Track, monitor and analyze the social media campaigns
- Assign tasks to the team members
In short: Hootsuite is your one-stop destination for managing all the social media accounts.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are bouquets of productivity tools to make your life easier and grow your online business. Think hard about what your business requires before jumping into any process which might prove costly. If your online business is facing productivity issues, there is a definite digital solution for it.