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Article. Published:
20-Apr-2015 01:00 pm
The Bureau Dubai
We all know that when you are starting up your own small
business you need to keep the costs down at the same time as being a
well oiled machine that can compete efficiently in the market. Here are a
few useful online tools that can help you startup and continue to grow
your business all at low costs or even for free!
1. DED E-services
This is a great local tool directly from the Dubai Economic
Department (the official licensing body for Dubai) when getting ready to
license your company. It’s a complete online tool which will help you
search for your preferred trade name within the Dubai Company Register,
search for you particular business activity and also allows you to
search other similar activities. It gives you detailed costs of issuing
the license (please note this does not always take into account fees
related to approvals from additional government entities so costs can
differ when finally receiving the payment voucher) and has the printable
application forms for registering and licensing your company.
https://eservices.dubaided.gov.ae
2. Insightly
Insightly is an affordable and flexible CRM solution to help maintain
a streamlined communication with your clients and to track their
progress as they turn from lead into a client. It’s a great tool to
manage your contact from clients to vendors and has lot’s of cool
features like social media integration which allows you to access the
contacts’ social media handles as well as a news function to be up to
date on news published about any organisations in your databases. Its
well connected to other leading online tools such as Dropbox, Google
Apps, MailChimp etc. It’s a great tool both on your desktop and even as
an App on your phone allowing you to get all important contact
information on the road!
https://www.insightly.com
3. Survey Monkey
One of the most important lessons we teach is that you must do
comprehensive research before launching your product or service on the
market. Part of this is to test a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or get
enough information from your target demographic. Survey Monkey is a tool
which allows you to create basic and even complicated surveys which you
can distribute to your target audience in a variety of ways. It has
social media integration as well as links to allow you to present you
survey on ipads etc in front of people personally. It doesn’t always
have to be for market research, this tool is just as effective to gather
customer satisfaction and even internal employee feedback.
https://www.surveymonkey.net
4. Outright
This is a useful solution to track your income and expenses.
Unfortunately it has limited currencies which mean that you may have to
use it as an $ currency but we are hoping they will introduce all
currencies soon. It’s very easy to use and you can simply add your
incoming payments and outgoing expenses. It also has functions to allow
you to send invoices and automated reminders to your clients and most
importantly provides Profit & Loss reports and even more micro
reports to help effectively manage your cash flow better.
https://bookkeeping.godaddy.com
5. Zopim
It’s all important to have a great website which is easy to use,
provides useful information and has effective call to actions allowing
your potential (and existing) customers to communicate effectively with
you (remember: this gets more complicated when you have an online shop)
but sometimes customers simply just want to speak to a person right
there and right now! Here is where adding the Zopim plugin to your
website is crucial. Zopim is a small chat box located on your website
which allows any visitor on your website to start a live chat session
with your company. You have various options to choose from which depend
on how devoted you are to your customers. Whether it’s through the
desktop version during working hours or whether you use the App on your
phone to allow customers to contact you 24/7.
https://www.zopim.com
6. MailChimp
MailChimp allows you to keep in contact with your clients through the
powerful tool of email marketing. Like all the tools mentioned it’s
affordable and easy to use and is a great way for a Startup to maintain
continuous communication with their existing leads, customers and
partners. MailChimp has various templates to choose from as well as the
function for a designer to design a coded email message for your
company. It will then send to a detailed and organised list of email
subscribers you have added manually, connected through some of the other
Apps mentioned here as well pop ups and signup forms from your website
http://mailchimp.com
About The Bureau Dubai
The Bureau Dubai is a social workspace that provides investment and
financing, trade licenses, sponsorship, and office support to help start
up business ideas and SMEs grow in the heart of Dubai.
Offering various packages to suit all sized companies from small
single-person startups to growing SMEs they are focused on providing
support for the SME community within Dubai.
Their mission is to create a community of successful SMEs and want to
foster home grown natural talent from Dubai entrepreneurs and show the
world that Dubai believes in SMEs being the backbone of a strong and
successful economy.
For more information please visit: www.thebureaudubai.com
Further Photos & Images available on request.
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