With the recent struggles brought on by COVID-19, businesses are trying to save time anywhere they can. Many companies have turned to software to tackle the repetitive tasks they cannot afford to spend their time doing.

We asked 7 thought leaders what tools they use to help automate their business. 

Read on to discover the different tools these leaders suggest for your day to day operations.

Zappier

For businesses looking to alleviate the tedious steps that come with the day to day tasks, Zappier is a great program to use. It allows users to create automated actions on apps like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. It also syncs up with programs like Asana and Slack. Zappier has really helped our office alleviate the pain of having to open an application and do the same repetitive tasks over and over. It saves us a lot of time and opens up space for other tasks to become a priority.

Megan Chiamos, 365 Cannabis

Outsource Shipping and Fulfillment

We outsource our shipping and fulfillment to a third-party company. This means, in practice, that when a customer places an order on our site, it’s automatically shipped out by our partner company. They have two locations (one on each coast) to maximize shipping efficiency. I know a lot of eCommerce business owners like to handle the shipping themselves, but there is a significant opportunity cost to making multiple post office trips daily. I’d recommend every business owner selling more than three products a day consider outsourced fulfillment.

Calloway Cook, Illuminate Labs

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the best and most affordable email automation tool I’ve ever used. It’s just incredible how many insights and how much data it gives you for a fairly affordable price. The standard membership gives you everything you need to understand what is and isn’t working in an email marketing campaign.

Blake Taylor, Synergy Business Brokers

StartingPoint

We have recently started to use StartingPoint and it has been amazing for our client and service management. It allows us to ensure clients and customers are answered. We have a company portal that looks like our brand. We are also able to automate rules for inquiries to route them to the right person. It is an extremely useful tool for small to medium-sized businesses.

Ray McKenzie, Red Beach Advisors

Intercom

I use Intercom to send automatic welcome emails to new people who sign up for a free trial and also to send educational and marketing emails automatically.

Jayson DeMers, EmailAnalytics

If This, Then That Tool

IFTTT is a simple marketing automation tool that creates automated tasks based on an “if this, then that” concept. You would need to create applets to connect social media platforms together in order to auto-post one piece to any number of social sites – IFTTT links them all using your credentials and does so automatically. You may have seen on Twitter or Facebook that some posts are published via IFTTT. Many bloggers or website administrators set up extensive IFTTT schedules to publish or collect data from their social media accounts using IFTTT.

Rameez Ghayas Usmani, PureVPN

Grammarly

Grammarly is an internet browser extension tool that we use on a weekly basis. Our team does a massive amount of article writing which also brings the task of editing for grammar and spelling mistakes. Grammarly allows us to run an article through the software and see any mistakes within seconds. It will also give you the option to automatically fix the mistakes and it truly saves our team so much time.

Brett Farmiloe, SaaS SEO Company