by Nancy Hassel of American Pet Professionals

If you listened to our Podcast episode on Tools We Love, here is the list of platforms we mentioned during the podcast.  While we use a lot of other platforms to run different areas of our business – here are some of the tools we love to help run our business.

For email marketing we have been using Constant Contact since late 2009 for our Pet Events Newsletter.  Over the years, they have evolved and adapted their technology and they listen to their customers’ feedback, provide great customer help and also integrate with many platforms now, I can’t imagine switching to another platform.  You can try Constant Contact for free by clicking here.

We were also customers of Leadpages for lead magnets, which is a great option, but since we were already using Constant Contact that has landing pages for lead magnets, we decided to eliminate Leadpages from our platforms.  However it is a great platform that offers many options, so it could be a fit for your business.  Try Leadpages here.

I love Calendly. it makes scheduling calls and meetings so much easier, rather than the back and forth of 5 emails to figure out each other’s schedule.  We have multiple calendly links depending on who the meeting is being set up for, and it incorporates with so many calendars like outlook, google and apple calendars. There is even more we could be doing with Calendly – and they intergrate with a lot of platforms that you are probably already using.

Wufoo is a company created by Survey Monkey, and is a cloud-based form builder that makes it easy to create registration forms, application forms, surveys, contact forms, payment forms and more. We have been a Wufoo customer for years for many years creating many forms to help us automate people who submit pet events for our Pet Events Newsletter, sign up to attend one of our  Pet Industry 101™ sessions, sign up to attend free pet events, and much more.  You can do so much more with Wufoo for your own business.  

Thinkific – We use Thinkific for course creation, for digital online courses and have a couple different courses that are evergreen Planning the Purrfect Pet Event, PR Unleashed hosted on Thinkific.  It is incredibly user friendly for both the course creator and the student to use.  You can see what courses we have by going to our website AmericanPetProfessionals.com and scrolling down just a bit to Online Courses.
Try Thinkific out today.

Stan.Store is a link platform that has been created for creators help monetize and grow your businesses. You can incorporate your Stan.Store into your social media to capture leads, sell digital products (ebooks/webinars), and so much more.  They are newer so they are taking a lot of feedback from customers and growing rapidly.  I think they may be a game changer as they grow.  Try them out here. 

We have been using Linktree for our social accounts for a few years now and primarily my personal IG and my dog Cody’s account, (yes, he’s a micro influencer) – check him out on TikTok @Codythebluenose.  I still love Linktree for lead-magnets and we have received about 100 new subscribers from one of Cody’s videos, and of course that lead goes right back to Constant Contact. 

And of course for our Podcast platform of choice is Buzzsprout.  They make it incredibly easy to host your podcast, and distribute through channels like iTunes, Google, Spotify, iHeartradio and so on. It is super user friendly and intuitive, it’s so easy to use, I think anyone who is about to launch a podcast should check them out and save $20 by clicking here.

I would love to hear from you what you use for your business – as everyone has a favorite