Regardless of the size of your company, you can’t sell productivity short.
With hyper-efficient productivity, your startup can fulfill more orders, market your services better, and skyrocket your sales, while keeping your costs to a minimum.
If you’re looking for tried and tested tips to improve your productivity, consider using the tried and tested tips below.
1. Use employee shift rostering software.
Scheduling your employees’ shifts, including their absences, overtimes, etc., entails several to-do’s. They’re often so tedious that they can consume a huge chunk of your work hours.
Simplify this task with robust employee scheduling tools. They have nifty features to help you manage your workers’ shifts, such as:
- Neat-looking calendars with daily, weekly, and monthly views of employee shifts and availability.
- Payroll integration. Working hours automatically convert to their salary equivalents.
- Communication tools. Negotiate with willing employees to swap shifts with unavailable workers.
- Employee-initiated swapping. Allow workers to initiate swapping negotiations with others. The tool then calendars the new schedules instantly.
- Worker assignment via artificial intelligence (AI). Use AI to assign shifts according to employees’ skills, availability, and other pre-set factors.
2. Leverage project management tools.
Implementing projects requires tons of supervision and team collaboration. Using manual or inefficient tools for that task won’t give you the needed visibility over your progress.
Stay on top of your projects and team accomplishments through collaborative project management tools. These solutions offer helpful functionalities such as:
- Drag-and-drop features to classify tasks under their corresponding stages or categories
- Commenting on tasks
- Uploading, storing, and sharing files on the cloud, and others.
With these features, you can get a project status overview, discuss issues and updates, and follow conversation threads faster. This way, you minimize the need for unproductive meetings.
3. Automate your email marketing.
Sending promotional emails is essential to your startup. It builds customer loyalty and encourages subscribers to take your offers. Unfortunately, it can eat up your time if you’re doing everything manually, solo, or from scratch.
Designing newsletters, delivering various messages to specific audiences, and classifying subscribers are examples of tedious email marketing to-do’s.
Unless you have a dedicated team to handle all this or if you work with a web design and digital marketing firm, a chunk of your time and resource can be poured into these tasks alone.
Automate and delegate some tasks to email marketing platforms.
Through them, you can quickly create audience segments according to their website activities, interests, and other factors. The platform then automatically adds anyone who belongs to your pre-defined categories.
You can also automate sending personalized emails based on those mentioned factors. The software can instantly add customers’ names, welcome new shoppers, greet them on their birthdays, etc.
You can even create email marketing pipelines for particular sales campaigns. Your platform delivers pre-crafted messages to designated segments on the best schedules according to your defined triggers.
MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Sendinblue are some popular email marketing tools to leverage for your startup.
4. Outsource your social media management.
Social media management is another critical part of your promotional efforts. It helps foster customer relationships and increases their engagement. However, this task takes much of the attention you should also give to other business aspects.
For example, you have to create and publish posts, track your performance, and reply to comments. That won’t be a problem if you only have 10 followers to respond to. But what if you’re engaging thousands of followers — on top of other to-do’s?
An excellent option here is to outsource.
Tap expert freelancing social media managers to take care of all associated tasks. Hiring them is a worthy investment since you can now attend to more profitable activities.
Get social media managers who are good at their jobs. Ensure they have proven top-notch track records on freelancing platforms, e.g., Fiverr and Upwork. Check their portfolio, previous clients’ reviews, and other relevant selection factors.
After hiring and onboarding, equip the freelancer with tools that can schedule and publish posts automatically, provide analytics, etc. Request periodic updates as well.
5. Use automated backup tools.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past years, you know that operating online brings many security threats. If you aren’t mindful of that, you can easily fall prey to cybercriminals’ tactics.
You’ll lose access to your systems and thousands to millions of dollars worth of data. That leads to reputational losses and destroyed customer relationships. Worse, you can even shut down your business.
Daily back up your website data — including software code and updates if you develop apps. Keep your information in a separate secure storage location. If they get stolen, you can quickly bounce back since you have a copy of everything your startup is built on.
When backing up, though, don’t use manual approaches since they will eat up your productivity. Automate the process with efficient tools.
Let’s say you built your app on Microsoft Azure DevOps. You can use backup tools such as Backrightup. Every day, it automatically duplicates all your repositories, work items, etc., and provides updates on its Azure DevOps backup activities. That way, you’ll always know which files have extra copies (and get peace of mind about your site and app security).
6. Simplify your prospecting efforts.
To run cold email outreach campaigns, you need your prospects’ corporate email addresses. However, not everyone displays this information on public online forums or their websites.
To get their email ads, you need to subscribe to their newsletters, look them up on search engines, etc. This makes manually hunting for potential clients’ email addresses challenging and time-consuming.
Simplify your search with lead prospecting tools powered by AI, automation, and other modern technologies.
Leverage them for generating leads on LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, Facebook Ads, and other networking platforms.
These tools can yield a complete set of contact details you can integrate into your CRM. Your lead prospecting software can even accomplish that (and more) within minutes and without your close attention. Run the plugin, close its window pop-up, get back to your work, and receive updates on the search.
This way, you can focus more on implementing your email outreach activities and engaging new clients.
Ready to make your startup extra-productive?
Boosting your productivity can be as easy as 1, 2, 3 with these tools and tips. The advantage with them is that they are not too strenuous for your startup to adopt. So you can quickly boost your efficiency in no time.
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