Cloud Services To Keep Your Remote Business Ticking Over
Raise your hand if you still go to the office every day.
(Special shout out to my home office peeps :D)
If you do, you’re a rare creature indeed. Most of people are now stuck at home, trying to make a living while being denied all the usual resources of the workplace.
In a way, it is a good thing that the pandemic happened now and not ten years ago. In 2010, options for conducting work over the web were few and far between. Most people still had to show up to a physical office to access the tools that they needed.
Now, though, you have a plethora of online tools at your disposal. And they could be just what you need to keep your remote business ticking over in these challenging times.
MailChimp
If you haven’t heard of MailChimp, you’re in the minority. This helpful app makes creating and distributing email campaigns a cinch.
All you do is create the email template and then upload your contact list. MailChimp will then use special software to bypass all the usual spam filters and send mail directly to your contacts’ inboxes.
It sounds complicated, but the software uses a bunch of wizards and tutorials that make it simple. Fundamentally, it makes your digital marketing more efficient and lets you get the word out.
Office 365
If you’re working from home, you will undoubtedly need a productivity suite of one kind or another. No doubt, you will still need to churn out documents and spreadsheets for your clients and colleagues.
You could choose to go down the old route and put Microsoft Office (or a competitor product) on your computer. But why bother when you can get the whole lot through the cloud at a much lower cost?
With services like Office 365 (also from Microsoft), you pay a monthly premium and get to use its services as you need them.
PayPal
As a business owner or manager, you still need to be able to quickly and efficiently take payments from your customers. You don’t want to spend all of Thursday evening invoicing, trying to get everything done.
PayPal is by far the most straightforward and cheapest solution, and an easier option for most firms. While there are other options, you can’t really go wrong with the market leader. You just connect it to your bank account, and then you immediately have a resource that you can use for all your transactions.
If you’re a retailer, you can also connect it to a variety of platforms, including WooCommerce and Magento.
Slack
Communicating with people in your company via email is a chore and something you’d prefer to avoid. Slack is a tool that you can use to communicate with people at work in real-time, instead of having to wait for ages for a response email. What’s more, you can have multiple people in the chat, cutting out the need for Zoom calls or potentially hazardous in-person meetings.
In summary, the cloud is making life easier for remote businesses. Are you using any of these cloud-based software solutions?
