There are so many tools out there that you can use to make your life easier. Today I dig into the best tools for copywriters going into 2022.
Pitching Potential Clients and Sending Proposals
At all stages in the process of onboarding clients, anything that saves you time searching for information is a win right?
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Hubspot free
Hubspot free is the basic version of Hubspot’s CRM. I love the email tracking function of this CRM. Hook up your Gmail account and it means that you can send emails as normal, but Hubspot will track them – so it will notify you of any opens, which lets you know how successful your pitches are.
When it comes to sending follow up emails, you can go into Hubspot’s dashboard on the day you send the first pitch, and it will let you set up reminder tasks for as many follow up emails as you want to send. You just check out your tasks list every day, check them off and send via your Gmail inbox.
It’s great because it eliminates the time taken searching around in your sent items, for emails you need to follow up.
Hunter.io
This is the most awesome tool I have come across for figuring out client emails. Basically it lets you type in a domain and gives you email addresses it can find online.
This has helped me so much when I am trying to connect with potential clients via cold pitching.
You can also verify an email address, and check whether an email address is working.
I use the free account, which lets you do 25 free searches a month.
Pro tip – register with 2 or 3 different email addresses and then you have enough searches enough for when you are pitching. Shhh – don’t tell them!
Go to Hunter.io
Canva Pro
I love to wow my potential clients so I use Canva Pro to create my project quote templates.
Here’s my quote template. It really has made the clients feel special and gets them ultra clear on what you will be providing them, and why they should choose you for the project.
The beauty of Canva Pro is that you get everything included – so access to stock images, shapes, templates, animations for social media. You can even do things that Photoshop will do – like background removing.
All for about $12 a month. (Check Ts and Cs for image sizes you are allowed to use)
If you want unified branding, Canva is the way to go. The bonus is that it’s so easy to learn.
Invoicing Clients
Of course you can always design one on Canva Pro, or use Microsoft Word or Sheets on GDrive. These are great cheap options and you may be happy using these as you start out.
HelloBonsai
Personally, I have moved to Hello Bonsai because it tracks my earnings over time and it’s easy to download this when it comes to tax time.
If you wanted, you can add Bonsai tax to HelloBonsai, but I thought that was a bit much for my budget.
Also, you can make proposal documents on Hello Bonsai, but for my brand, I felt they looked wordy and I’m loving the look of my Canva proposals, so for now I’m not using this function.
The peace of mind, knowing how much I’m earning and how much tax I need to save from this, is worth the monthly fee.
Payments are also easy to collect and Hello Bonsai allows clients to choose Bank Transfer, Stripe, Paypal and Credit Card.
Pro tip – set Hello Bonsai to charge the client the Paypal fee, so that you aren’t having that cut your project fee down.
If you need to charge a deposit in advance – create the invoice and set the values to whatever they are paying.
If they are paying 25% upfront, set each line of the project to 0.25.
Then when you have completed the project, copy the invoice and set to 0.75
Unit Price Payment due
Eg. Home page copy 0.25 $400 $100
Here’s an example using 50% as the deposit amount.
Check out Hello Bonsai
Writing grammatically correct copy
Understanding grammar is a must for us as copywriters. That said it shouldn’t lead us completely. Some brands love wordplay and slang language so we shouldn’t feel like grammar tools are the be-all and end-all.
Here is one I love, that helps me daily!
Grammarly
I have fallen in love with Grammarly. This is especially because I write mainly for the US audience and you can set it to US grammar. So many times, it has given me awesome suggestions for how to tweak the grammar from UK to US English phrasing.
With the Pro Version, you also get access to tone tools. Grammarly gives you an idea of how your writing is sounding. I have found this so useful also.
In conclusion
These tools are my humble opinion, are the best tools for copywriters I have found so far. Tune in regularly to this post, and related ones, as I find more and more that are fab and will save you tons of time.
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