All businesses need money to launch – and with a startup, it’s probably your own money you’re spending to reach success. Which means that it’s important to be very careful and cost-effective when deciding where to invest your money, and where to save.
Here are four ways for startups to save money, across a range of departments and functionalities.
Replace A Range of Expensive Communication Apps With a Single Free Tool
In a modern workplace – particularly in hybrid workplaces – one of the biggest business outflows that can be easily streamlined is on communication tools. Like most businesses, you’re probably spending a whole lot of money on a range of subscriptions for communication tools (like Zoom, Slack, Gmail and associated Drive capabilities). And it adds up very quickly. But what if we told you there’s a way you can access all these capabilities – like chat, video calls, and email for entirely free? You may not believe us, but that’s exactly what Spike offers. Spike is an integrated team collaboration app – available both on desktop and mobile – that provides team chat, audio and video calls, email, calendars, and a whole lot more in one integrated and free to use app! Not only will Spike result in some solid cost-saving, it also provides a significantly better experience. No more scrolling through a range of apps to find the message you need, or missing meetings because the call you waited for on Slack actually took place on Zoom.
Free up Your Finance Team
Another great way to save money – without compromising on effectiveness – is to consider automations. One of the areas most primed for automation is undoubtedly finance, with its repeated incoming, regular outflow for bills, or even paying employees the same salary every month. In fact, apps like Quickbooks offer automations for this entire range of processes, so you need fewer resources to complete the same amount of work. Some of the automations offered by Quickbooks include recurring invoices to customers, recurring credit card payments for subscription or month to month services, or even automated reminders for overdue payments. In addition to collecting on bills, Quickbooks also allows you to automate the payment of the bills your business occurs, such as to providers or even to payroll employees. Furthermore, finance employees won’t need to waste precious time on creating reports and records – all that can be automated with the simple click of a button !
Let your Sales Team Focus on Just Sales
Automations are also a great way to streamline and nurture your lead pipeline – or to up-sell and cross-sell to existing customers – for example, through an app like Klaviyo. Klaviyo offers a range of pre-built automations, customized templates for sales and marketing campaigns, and robust data capabilities that allow for real time audience segmentation. This allows you to automate the entire process of sending emails or texts to follow up with leads, or sharing new offers and opportunities with existing customers. Instead of wasting time on this busy work, your sales team can focus on revenue generating activities such as generating leads and closing sales.
Klaviyo also offers some very powerful ecommerce automations, such as pre-built abandoned browsing or abandoned cart flows, back in stock sequences, post-purchase campaigns, and more. Another great feature: the automations don’t necessarily have to be just sales-driven. After all, so much of sales is about nurturing relationships. Klaviyo also allows you to set up personalized notes – for example, automatically wishing a client or potential lead a happy birthday email, or a work anniversary text, based on the data in your CRM.
Automated Social Media Marketing
Many social media automation tools allow for mass-posting across platforms, but still require the daily work of actually scheduling and creating those posts. That’s where DLVR.it stands out: it allows the automation of RSS feeds to Social Media, in addition to its content curation and scheduling capabilities.
With DLVR.it, all you’ll need to do is plug an RSS feed into the app, and it will consistently and continually post content headlines, text and links every few hours – without the user having to lift a finger to intervene! DLVR.it also offers the ability to add customized, automated hashtags to feeds, ensuring that your content isn’t just being posted – it’s actually being found !