Editor's Note: Adrian DeGus is the founder of team collaboration company Nuvro, and joins us today to discuss up and coming productivity suites in time for the New Year.
If you ever search for software to improve your productivity, the same big names are routinely echoed: Trello, Asana, Hootsuite, Zendesk, Hubspot, {insert-billion-dollar-company-name-here}. But these aren't the only options, or even necessarily the best for your needs: they are simply the most promoted, and easiest to find. This is unfortunate, because for users with very specific needs, there might be much better options hiding in the forest.
Every single year, new productivity, marketing and support tools are released, and some are growing in leaps in bounds. These are tools that people are leaving Asana, Hootsuite and Hubspot for. They're the next big things in productivity because they work, because they have impressive customer service, and because they're truly innovative.
Here is a list of the best new productivity tools in 2018, which may very well become the top tools for 2019 and beyond.
Nuvro: Best New Team Collaboration Tool
Nuvro is an online project management tool that helps companies manage all projects, tasks, documents, notes and even team members.
Nuvro was engineered to fill a gap among all project management tools: the ability to manage your team as efficiently as you manage your projects, tasks and documents. It’s perfect for people who are looking for something more than Trello or Asana, but less than enterprise tools like Wrike or Podio.
It’s also the only project management tool so far to offer integrated team management. Managers can see everything team members are working on, have worked on, will work on, their performance over time and can even review performance in private with other managers.
Some key features unique to Nuvro include:
- A centralized team management dashboard
- Individual team member performance reviews
- A company project health dashboard
- An integrated email messaging system that keeps intra-company communication centralized and easy to reference
Time Doctor: Best New Time Management Tool
Time Doctor is a time tracking utility that helps you get a lot more done each day.
The tool helps you accurately track where you and your team’s time is spent by giving you a detailed breakdown in reports. Reports include timesheets, optional screenshots, website and application monitoring. All of these help in tracking work efficiently and also monitoring productivity.
One unique feature that Time Doctor has is the ability to keep you focused on work by gently nudging you when you get distracted in unproductive websites and apps. This helps make it easier to focus on important tasks instead of getting sidetracked.
Though Time Doctor is already a powerful tool on its own, its integration with project management tools takes productivity on a whole different level. It will smoothly sync with some of the popular management platforms out there like Asana, JIRA, Basecamp and Trello. This adds a whole layer of productivity to your projects.
eClincher: Best New Social Media Management Tool
eClincher is a powerful, feature-rich social media management tool adopted by many marketing professionals, brands and agencies. It provides some robust features that put it in a class of its own during 2018 including:
- A centralized social inbox
- Easy content curation
- Integrated marketing automation
- Hashtags and keyword tracking
- Influencer discovery features
- Well designed analytics features
Social media managers will find they're able to manage multiple social media accounts from a centralized dashboard and perform many automated marketing tasks with just a few clicks. eClincher comes with some very useful social media management tools including the ability to recycle content for amplified exposure. You can publish and schedule your posts, pins, and tweets to all popular social media networks.
eClincher also makes it easy for you to create and run social campaigns on various social accounts simultaneously. The ability to track clicks on embedded hashtags as well as top industry influencers makes this tool one of the more robust solutions currently available.
Front: Best New Customer Support Tool
Front is a multi-channel inbox designed for collaborative teams. Easily manage group emails like support@ or team@, SMS text messages, social media, and live chat, all in one place — without switching tools.
Front is designed to help your team deliver the personalized support your customers deserve. Features like assignments, tags, reminders, and snoozing ensure messages never slip through the cracks. Internal-only comments, message assignments, and draft sharing help your team collaborate behind-the-scenes to get work done. Your team can also set "rules" to automate workflows you often repeat, allowing you to work productively and respond to customers faster.
Front also offers a live website chat solution, Front Chat, so your support team can help customers in real-time. This feature allows you to shift from chat to email quickly. By enabling all members of your team to see and work on tickets, Front is a great way to respond to address customer needs quickly and efficiently.
Robly: Best New Email Marketing Tool
Robly offers email marketing built for sales. Robly’s modern drag and drop editor and proprietary automation tools like OpenGen and RoblyAI (Artificial Intelligence) make designing and sending out email campaigns easy and can boost open rates by up to 50% or more.
OpenGen automatically resends your email to those who didn’t open it the first time, while Robly AI delivers your email to each subscriber’s inbox the moment they’re most likely to open it.
In addition to robust reporting data and engagement management tools that easily remove non-responsive contacts, Robly offers Autoresponders, A/B Testing, and Exit Intent Popup forms. A newly launched CRM tool allows the ability to integrate with Gmail and Outlook to add notes, tasks, track one-to-one email opens, and sync to your calendar.
Robly’s award-winning support and white glove migration makes getting set up easier than it does with other providers. They’ll help you move your contact lists over from Constant Contact or Mailchimp as well as build a free custom template for you, free of charge.
WebEngage: Best New Marketing Automation Tool
WebEngage is a marketing automation platform built for consumer businesses. In its previous iteration, it was an onsite engagement tool that was present on more than 30k websites across the globe. However at the onset of 2016, it was upgraded into a full-fledged marketing automation platform.
In its new form, WebEngage allows consumer businesses to contextually interact with clients across 6 channels including:
- Push notifications
- Web push
- SMS
- Web and in-app messaging
The tool provides a highly scalable platform to collect and analyze consumer data, enabling you to engage with your users more intelligently.
What makes WebEngage a top contender for 2018 is a unique feature called Journey Designer, a drag and drop builder that lets you create and implement cross-channel engagement campaigns throughout the customer lifecycle. Whether it is a simple autoresponder or an end-to-end retention journey, Journey Designer visually lets you design and implement them all.
To learn more about building your business with productivity tools and techniques in 2018, check out our classes on the following topics:
What Is Social Media and Why It Matters
Successfully Measuring Email Performance
Data and Analytics: Web Analytics
Visit the Online Marketing Institute to browse over 400 classes in the digital and social media marketing space.