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Five FREE Tools to Grow Your Business
We are process driven junkies that want to ensure our clients have an awesome experience, and that means we’ve spent a lot of time testing software to see what works best for our website design studio. So this list isn’t just what we have used and loved, but the ones we scouted out against competitors in order to help our company scale without hurting the pocketbook.
Yep, we still say… Pocketbook. So, let’s get to it:
1. Canva For Marketing Design
This one is especially great for those of you who wouldn’t consider themselves very creative or very techie. And, for those of you who are creative - there’s still some really great use you can get out of this free tool because sizing, finding icons to use, and exporting is incredibly easy.
You can also create templates for your social media channels and make it easy for marketing to change the text and post updated images.
They offer a library of templates for just about anything - from a proposal to an instagram post. It’s a great place to find ideas, but more importantly - it can spit out a design at the perfect size in just a couple of clicks.
Small team? Check out their Pro plan - you’ll get full access to all premium illustrations, vectors, videos, EVERYTHING and pricing starts at $12.99 for a team of 5.
2. Calendly For Easy Appointment Scheduling
Looking to automate your calendar bookings? Calendly offers a free, integrated, online appointment scheduling tool.
It syncs up with your calendar and you can even embed the booking page directly into your website.
You can also include questions for your attendee to fill out prior to the meeting, which is super helpful if you do a lot of consultations and want to have a little more knowledge going into the call.
Afraid your prospect might not show up? Send customized reminders prior to the meeting.
The best part is it’s totally free for 1 calendar, 1 user, 1 meeting type. Need more? It’ll be a rough $8 bucks a month for UNLIMITED MEETING TYPES.
3. Whereby.com For Free Video Meetings
Formerly Appear.in - Whereby is a free video conference tool. Just access your personal meeting room with one click of a link, no logging in, just straight to business. We love the interface of this tool! It’s clean, modern, allows you to easily share your screen and chat with up to 4 attendees - but the best part is that there’s no time limit! Unlike, the very popular, Zoom.
This tool is free for 1 user and 1 meeting room - perfect for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Need more? For just $10 a month you can expand to 3 meeting rooms.
4. Asana
Asana is a very intuitive, powerful project manager that allows you to easily create projects, assign them to teams or individuals, collaborate on projects, and track progress. It’s easy to set up workflows so your team knows what needs to happen, and when.
We love the kanban boards - think Trello but with a lot more power! You can easily add checklists, connect tasks to multiple projects or team members. As with any project manager there’s a learning curve, but, if you’re a smaller sized team or a design team, Asana is awesome.
It’s also free for up to 15 users.
5. Boomerang for Gmail
If you struggle to keep on top of your clients but aren’t quite ready for a full suite CRM system, Boomerang is a fantastic in between!
This handy little tool allows you to write and schedule emails to go out at a later time, like 7am to drop your email on top of all the other noise in their inbox!
The reason it’s called boomerang isn’t just for the scheduling, but because you can set an email to boomerang back to your inbox if a person hasn’t responded within a certain number of days - which you set… Ya know, like an email reminder!
