Freelancing success depends on several factors, such as being organized, having a process, and using the appropriate software tools to help you organize and streamline your process. A successful freelancer is only as successful as his toolbox and how well they know how to use these tools. So what are the most effective SaaS tools for freelancers to employ in their work?
To select the best tools, I considered factors such as cost, ease of use, and versatility. Income for freelancers can be quite fickle. Therefore, it would be best to use software that is cheap or free. Also, the average freelancer will be busy with securing and working for clients. Therefore, tools that would be easy to use would be ideal.
Lastly, software that can do more than one thing at once would increase speed and efficiency for a freelancer. This is what is meant by versatility. There is a relationship between software versatility and efficiency. A software tool that can both locate emails for prospects and help you track the emails that you send for such prospects would save much time and effort.
I chose to look at the five following tools that would be useful to every freelancer:
Streak, the email software tool
Apollo, the email location tool
Grammarly
These SaaS tools are excellent for both finding potential customers, as well as working on behalf of your customers. In the following sections, we will take a look at each in turn.
Table of Contents
View Tracking
Mail Merge
Snippets
Send Later
Thread Splitter
Apollo.io: A convenient Plug-In
Excellent for LinkedIn
Creating Email Sequences
Pricing for Streak
Pricing for Apollo.io
Pricing for Grammarly
1. Streak: An Email CRM Software SaaS Tool
Streak is CRM software that can be integrated as a plug-in into your Gmail. In many ways, it is similar to Mailchimp. The most prominent feature of the tool includes the ability to track leads, conduct mass emails, and see who has read your email. Here are five of the main features that I like the most about Streak:
View Tracking
Mail Merge
Snippets
Send Later
Thread Splitter.
Let's take a look at each of these features and what you will like about them.
View Tracking
This allows you to find out instantly who has read your email. And it doesn't just stop there. It also often tells you where this person is located. Now, this can be useful or overused. Someone reading your email more than once or frequently might be an indication that they are interested in what you offer. This might be a signal to follow up more aggressively.
On the other hand, someone who ignores your email or who doesn't read it al all might mean they are either a) not at all interested in even hearing you out or b) that it might be a good idea to try another email or means of communication. However, the danger in this approach is that you might be overthinking it. Someone constantly viewing your email might mean nothing at all.
There are also instances where I have gotten positive responses from prospects who appear not to have read my email at all. So, it's probably best not to drive yourself crazy overthinking this. Lastly, it seems a little stalkerish to see whether or not someone has read your email and to even see the location from which they saw your email. It would be quite a bad idea to follow up with a message that reads like, "Hey I can see that you've read my email. Why are you ghosting me?"
Mail Merge
This is the feature that makes Streak the most like MailChimp and other traditional CRM software. This allows you to send mass email pitches to dozens or even hundreds of people at a time. Now, this is not always a good thing. The best pitches are always personalized and customized. Showing a potential client that you know and understand their work is not typically scalable to the point where you can send several dozen templates to potential clients without making it seem inauthentic.
Mail Merge is a little complicated to use. First, you have to include all emails in a spreadsheet and include fields, such as Contact Name, Contact Email, Company Name, and so on. All this will be useful for the additional feature, Snippets, which I will get into later. Then the Excel sheet has to be downloaded or converted into a CSV (or comma-separated values) file. This is also pretty much the case when uploading email contacts into MailChimp.
After doing so, the Streak plugin allows you to upload the file into your Gmail recipient function. It's a pretty cool and seamless feature once you get the hang of it. It is more intuitive than working with MailChimp. In fact, it really feels as if it were something native to Gmail when using it.
Snippets
Snippets are a feature that allows you to customize your email. For example, I mentioned earlier that you should download your email list in a spreadsheet labeled with fields such as Contact Name, Contact Email, and Company Name. This is essential for Snippets.
These fields allow you to customize the various sections of your email, including the name in the greeting and words or phrases in the email. For example, this means you can address each recipient by name in the body of the email. You can make specific reference to a special feature or characteristic about the person or business you're pitching to.
Send Later
This is another feature that seamlessly integrates with Gmail. If you are concerned about keeping etiquette and sending emails only during working hours., you can draft your email during the middle of the night and schedule it to be delivered during working hours. This is especially useful if you are sending emails or pitches to clients who live abroad in different time zones.
Thread Splitter
Gmail typically relies on the subject of a message email to determine whether or not to include messages in a thread. Thread splitter allows you to separate these email threads into segments. After starting with Thread Splitter, you can select specific emails to shift into a new thread. You may choose to give this thread a different subject line. This means that these emails are now permanently removed from the original thread.
2. Apolloio: One of the Best Email-Finding SaaS Tools
Apollo.io is a prospecting software. Its main purpose is to locate the email of potential clients that you're looking for. It is quite effective in that regard. But that's not all it does. Apollo allows you to execute email sequences within the app immediately after scraping prospect's emails.
Another feature of this software tool is that it uses AI to guess a prospect's email. If the email can't be scraped, Apollo uses AI to guess the email using available information such as the first and last name of the prospect and the domain of the company email. Based on experience, it can be pretty accurate.
Apollo.io: A convenient Plug-In
Apollo is one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use email-scraping tools. This is based on the fact that it works best as a Chrome plug-in. After activating the plug-in, the tool has a tag that sticks out from the side of every web page. Just click on it, and you get an interface showing details such as the company name, employee and title, and email addresses of each employee.
This plugin can be effective on any website. This means you can simply Google a company’s name and after landing on their page, you can access teh email addresses of all the key persons that you might need to email or pitch to.
Excellent for LinkedIn
Apollo.io works as if it was just about designed for LinkedIn. LinkedIn, if you didn’t know, is the biggest B2B platform in the world. It is the prime venue for meeting prospects most qualified for pitches, such as CEOs and CMOs. With the Apollo plugin, you can access email information from attractive prospects.
It's true that LinkedIn has its own messaging function, which you could take advantage of. However, email still retains a certain level of credibility for B2B communication. Plus, it has several functions, which you won't find on LinkedIn's messaging function.
Creating Email Sequences
With Apollo’s email sequences, you can save time using an AI tool and automation to create email content that speaks directly to the needs of your prospects. These email sequences help you save time by repeatedly using email templates that ensure a consistent tone while preserving creativity.
Apollo email sequences allow you to benefit from Improved email response rates and A/B testing of scripts, templates for messages, and so on. This allows you to quickly figure out the strategies that are the most effective when reaching out or communicating with prospects.
3. Grammarly
Grammarly is probably the most popular among our three SaaS tools. Everybody uses Grammarly. It is proofreading software, which is excellent for proofreading all sorts of writing, especially online-based writing. That includes blogs, emails, and social media posts. There are several advantages to using Grammarly. It is the ideal software for our chronically online era. It can be used as a plug-in in your browser, your Word document, and even in Google Docs.
However, Grammarly is not perfect. Some of its grammatical suggestions quickly remind you that AI software is often little more than a stupid robot. Grammarly always errs on the side of brevity and technical accuracy, which too often leads to badly written sentences.
So, if you are a freelance writer, you better make sure that you have the fundamentals of grammar, punctuation, and writing down as Grammarly may not save you. Grammarly is best used to ensure that you avoid common errors in your writing. Lastly, Grammarly is ideal for business and professional content writing, it is not the ideal software for academic writing or academic editing.
Pricing for SaaS Tools
These three tools have pricing that varies based on the tier that is chosen. There are free versions of the tools and different tiers for premium services. The table below shows the prices associated with the various levels.
Pricing for Streak
The table below shows the various tiers and the associated pricing. The free and pro tiers would be ideal for you as a freelancer prospecting on behalf of yourself. However, as your operations scale, you may have to consider tiers such as Pro, Pro+, and Enterprise. This would be especially the case if you gain a large client that would require a scale larger than 50 mail merges per day.
Pricing for Apollo.io
Apollo.io’s free version is more than sufficient for small-scale freelancers, such as solopreneurs. However, the basic and professional versions, priced at $49 and $99, respectively, may be needed to service large clients. With these somewhat hefty prices, only larger clients that would compensate you fairly enough could justify paying for these more premium versions.
Pricing for Grammarly
From my experience, it is rarely the case that you need anything more than the free version of this software. Nonetheless, by paying for the pro version, you can benefit from having sentences re-written or reconstructed by the software. But as mentioned earlier, you should practice judgment when choosing to accept the corrections offered by Grammarly to make sure that your text matches the tone and intention of your writing.
Final Thoughts on Freelancers Using SaaS Tools
SaaS tools such as the ones discussed here can be quite useful for freelancers. They streamline processes and make you more efficient. However, they are not enough. A tool, after all, is only as good as the person wielding it. So you should ensure that you master teh fundamentals of your craft as a freelancer.
For example, although Streak and Apollo.io allow you to mass email prospects does not mean that you should. Making personalized emails that speak directly to the pains and issues affecting a prospect would be ideal.
These tools should only be used to support your efforts and the unique services or solutions that you offer as a freelancer. These are what will eventually win prospects over. Let’s take the example of a writer or editor. A freelance writer or editor who employs the use of Grammarly should already be a writer and educated in the basics of editing, proofreading, punctuation, and grammar. Grammarly is not going to teach you how to be a better writer or editor.
It can only support the current skill and prowess that you have as a writer or editor. In short, do not over-rely on SaaS tools. Instead, you should master your craft and use SaaS tools to make your processes and outreach as efficient and seamless as possible.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, July 08). 3 Best SaaS Tools for Freelancers. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/5-best-saas-tools-for-freelancers |
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