24 Must-Have Tools for Starting Virtual Assistants

Helping other virtual assistants and sharing what we know is part of Ripple’s advocacy in serving communities. Thus, we present you with a list of selected software, applications, and strategies starting Virtual Assistants can use. These strategies involve a combination of Gsuite tools, market scheduling, managing emails, creating beautiful websites, graphic editing, as well as bookkeeping tools for finance.

Ripple uses these social media platforms for their advertisement.

Facebook

Provides the ability of businesses to manage their page and go into online shopping. Facebook's Page Insights and Analytics determine if your business page requires improvement or it is on track. It is a popular social network among rural and urban areas, every income level, and any educational background. Facebook is suited for small businesses and gives you an idea of how to match your target audience.

Instagram

For younger generations around the ages of 18 and 19. Photo-sharing and site-visits are increasing daily and commonly accessed through a mobile device. With photo and video content as its primary source of customer engagement, Instagram is a great way to build a brand. Utilizing the right hashtags will make the users find the post quicker.

Pinterest

Focused on discovering and acquiring content from other users. It is like a search engine where users can find specific content or products on that platform where they can pin it. With visually appealing boards, every pin has a link to the source of the picture on an external site. Hence, businesses aim to generate website traffic and use Pinterest for Search Engine Optimization purposes. It is a sales generator for retail companies.

Twitter

Allows users to 'Tweet' messages in a few sentences publicly. It gives users the ability to follow real-time news and for advertisers to promote their targeted messages. The demographics involve ages of 18 and 29 and consist of individuals more likely living in urban areas and are wealthy and highly educated. Most celebrities, politicians, journalists, and news outlets are using twitter.

LinkedIn

Is a business-focused site that can help run a company page, run LinkedIn Polls, and engage in groups. It is an excellent way to target sales prospects and can be used to brand your business as the best, providing networking opportunities. LinkedIn's tools will enable enterprises to fine-tune and reach an ideal audience.

These Gsuite Tools help Ripple carry out mundane tasks such as organizing schedules, creating documents, and delivering presentations.

Google Calendar

Is an online scheduling service that assists users in organizing and scheduling events.

Google Docs

Is a free word processor program that can be accessed by anyone that can enter the database with an internet connection. It offers import and export flexibility, making each document compatible for secure sending and receiving of files. Users can also control the document's collaborators, which helps track changes in the document done by multiple people.

Google Sheets

Is a spreadsheet program where users can store, compute, and analyze data.

Google Forms allow the user to collect information efficiently by creating surveys to gather information from clients and employees. The data will be stored in a Google Spreadsheet in which the user can analyze.

Google Slides

Is a presentation program that provides users with a platform to design and edit presentations.

These Social Media Marketing and Scheduling Tools help Ripple manage all their social media platforms in one place.

Hootsuite

Is an application tool that manages social media network channels in one place. It allows users to view multiple streams and observe what customers are saying, post updates, read responses, schedule messages in advance, view statistics, and much more. Using Hootsuite to manage the company's social media presence will increase social media strategy that incorporates specific times when postings are most often read and get more followers to see its content. Aside from that, the user nor company will need to memorize many passwords, Hootsuite will do it for you. It has an analytics feature that provides charts and an in-depth view of how well the company social media strategy works.

Later

Is a Hootsuite alternative with its user-friendly interfaces, seamless scheduling for social channels, and overall, more wallet-friendly. With its powerful software, Later can create user-generated content features like smart scheduling, where the system learns when Instagram followers are engaged and suggest the best times to post and create stories. It has a visual Instagram planner that will help the user see the aesthetic appeal of the company's feed by seeing the feed the way your followers will see it. The Linkin.bio by Later converts your Instagram feed to a shoppable page that Hootsuite does not have.

Buffer

Is a web and mobile software application that is intended to manage accounts in social networks by providing the user with the ability to schedule posts to various social media platforms and analyze their results. It offers easy scheduling, where the posting time is preset so that the user won't hassle setting the times individually for each post. Buffer also features several options on posting. Its analytics software includes analyzing specific date ranges, comparing custom sets of detailed analytics, and exporting the data.

Ripple manages Email marketing strategies with these programs.

WoodPecker

Is an email marketing automation tool that lets users send emails and follow-ups and is used by business to business companies to personalize, schedule, automate, and track outbound sales campaigns quickly. Woodpecker automatically tracks multiple email metrics of marketing and sales emails. It measures various stats, such as the percentage of email IDs that opened the user's email, the percentage of people that clicked the links in the email, the number of sent emails and received, and more. This information helps WoodPecker analyze and determine the number of positive responses received for a campaign. It identifies which email templates, subjects, and links that yield the best results. With custom snippets, emails are more personally tailored to every individual. And it is also designed to stop delivering follow up messages if the recipient will respond. For added versatility, it imports contacts as CSV files for quick personalization. However, WoodPecker cannot send email attachments, it is a separate inbox, and expensive.

MailChimp

Is also an email marketing automation platform for getting an insight into valuable data through its detailed analytics software. The interface is well designed because it is simplistic and customizable. It is effortless to use, creating custom email campaigns quickly. MailChimp is excellent for small businesses that are developing since it is free. And for new business owners and bloggers, this is very beneficial.

ActiveCampaign

Is a Chicago based cloud software platform for small and mid-sized businesses. It offers the best customer experience through email marketing and sales automation with auto-responders, elegant email templates, drag and drops email designers, social media monitoring, short message service marketing, customer relationship management, and customized forms for landing pages. Meanwhile, it has a user-friendly interface and requires little experience to manipulate. ActiveCampaign uses "tags" that create segments in your email list. Email segmentation is a good strategy in increasing subscriber engagement, click-through rates, and sales conversions.

GetResponse

Is an email marketing platform for small businesses where users make critical marketing lists of prospects, partners, and clients to form strong relationships with the company and the client. It has features and tools that set up and track email marketing campaigns, smart automation for converting leads, develop a subscriber list, as well as a simple email creator that lets users create appealing emails. This helps the company increase the effective implementation of their campaigns.

ConvertKit

Is a full-featured email service provider that offers fast automation and gives customizable sign-up forms and landing pages to draw more email subscribers. Unlike MailChimp that charges per mail list, ConverKit only charges once since there is only one list. The subscribers of the mail list have unique profiles where segmenting and tagging will be easy. It has good looking and customizable Opt-in Forms combined with lovely built-in landing page templates. Users can easily follow their autoresponder sequences and make displaying all email messages in the dashboard convenient. Emails can also be broadcast as one-time messages which will be distributed to the subscriber list. Users can exclude specific segments of the list. It has easy to understand analytics as well as the ability to integrate with other software applications.

MailerLite

Helps users create advanced email marketing campaigns with automation features, landing pages, and surveys. It is designed to help the company develop more subscribers and build stronger relationships. MailerLite also has an intuitive user interface, which decreases the need for training and extra support because of its concise explanations and guided approach. With automated workflow as well as excellent sign-up form functionality, MailerLite can establish and increase your email lists. And its automated workflow creates tailor content to user behavior and advance campaign performance.

These platforms help Ripple create beautiful websites.

Wix

Is a software company from Israel, giving cloud-based web development services and online drag and drop tools to create HTML5 websites and mobile sites. It grants users access to social plug-ins, e-commerce, online marketing, contact forms, email marketing, and community forums to their websites utilizing a variety of Wix-developed and third-party applications. This website builder has a free business model and earns its revenues by premium upgrades. It is small to midsize business-friendly because all important features are available for free. The process of designing a website will demand no coding skills since it has a drag to drop designer along with 100 beautiful templates. Users can rely on the SEO-optimized hosting services with a free domain name, automatic mobile-optimized websites, state of the art Wix Artificial Design Intelligence, and Wix Code. These features enable Wix to improve its database collections and make the user's offerings more visible by search engines. Additionally, it works seamlessly with several third-party solutions with excellent customer support, making connectivity, not an issue.

Squarespace

Is a private American company that gives software for website building and hosting. Clients can use beautiful pre-customize website templates as well as a drag and drop designer to create webpages. It is fast, secure, and has no trouble with compatibility issues and data export since everything is developed and built-in by Squarespace. They also have 24/7 customer support with live chats and email tickets. However, unlike Wix, it does not support third-party applications.

WordPress

Is an open-source content management system coded in PHP paired with MySQL or MariaDB database. It features plug-in architecture and template systems and evolved to support different types of web content. Users can add new pages, blog posts, and images with its intuitive interface. Its design is customizable, and the technology is simple: it requires no HTML editing and less formatting, which saves you time. WordPress's code makes it easy for search engines to find and index a website's content. These sites are scalable, helping one or multiple users manage, access, and create hundreds of pages or blog posts.

These editing tools help Ripple create beautiful posters, graphics, and infographics.

Adobe Photoshop

Is a software application for photo editing, image manipulation, and retouching. It allows users to design, improve, and edit images, artwork, and illustrations. The software tools make it feasible to edit large batches of photos. Photoshop is a popular option since the user has full control of the projects. These projects will remain at a fixed size, and editing can be done pixel-by-pixel.

Adobe Illustrator

Is also a software application for creating drawings, illustrations, and artwork widely used by graphic and web designers, visual artists, and professional illustrators to produce high-quality artwork. It includes many advanced drawing tools that reduce time to create illustrations. Illustrator is ideal for a vector graphic since it will never lose its quality if it is scaled up or down. Meanwhile, it also provides better print output since it is not resolution-dependent.

Canva

Is a graphic design program that enables users to design free graphics, presentations, posters, and other visual content. Canva gives a multitude of features, a drag-and-drop designer tool, and millions of templates, fonts, illustrations, and images for businesses, organizations, and professionals to design high-quality graphic designs. It is a user-friendly and reliable designer tool.

Ripple manages finance through Bookkeeping Tools

QuickBooks

Is an accounting software package equipped for small and medium-sized businesses that give cloud-based version accounting applications accepting payments, managing, and payroll functions. This platform has the best accounting software overall. Additionally, it has the most robust sales tax configuration and reporting along with its advanced invoicing features. QuickBooks works best for most businesses with several employees.

Wave provides free cloud-based financial services and software for small businesses with numerous features and support materials. Users are greeted with attractive invoice templates, suitable support materials, and available assistance from expert accountants. However, it is not suited for large businesses due to limited mobile apps and poor customer support. Wave is ideal for a self-employed professional who doesn't have complicated bookkeeping needs.

Xero

Is a public technology company that gives cloud-based accounting software platform for businesses. Its products are based on the software as a service model and marketed by subscription. Xero has a strong inventory, sales tax features, and does not charge an invoicing fee. They offer the best options for sales tax configuration and reporting. Likewise, it operates well for only small businesses, startups, and e-commerce businesses.