Did you know that the average person spends 13 hours a week processing and managing an email inbox? With employees being constantly bombarded by emails, the whopping 13 hours seem like a lot of wasted time. So, how do you reduce the inbox overload without getting frustrated and spending all day organizing and replying to emails? The answer is by using email management tools.
Are you the type of person that can’t answer all the emails? Does your inbox get so full you start feeling anxious about checking it and answering all the emails? To help you get rid of email clutter, we’ve gathered the top eight email management tools worth setting up.
Best Tools for Taming Your Email Inbox
Gmail
Being the most dominant email platform in the world, Gmail currently has over 1.5 billion users. Gmail is extremely easy in use and includes many features for inbox management.
By learning to use the following built-in Gmail features, you can declutter your inbox and keep it organized.
Automatic responses. Setting up automatic responses is a great way to manage tons of incoming emails. Additionally, you can set up the vacation responder functionality to notify people that you’re out of the office and will get back to them as soon as you can.
Labels. Gmail’s labels are something in between traditional folders and tags. They will help you organize and sort your incoming emails by specific criteria set by you.
Labs. Hidden under Settings, Labs are a Google’s playground for testing new features. Labs contain various add-ons and extensions you can use in Gmail to add additional functionality and manage your inbox. To access Gmail’s Labs locate the Advanced tab under Settings.
Filters. Gmail Filters automatically receive and mark as read promotional emails, like newsletters, sales emails, and other marketing copies. By setting up Gmail Filters, you can have specific emails bypass your inbox and thus declutter your inbox. Here’s a step-by-step guide from Google on how to create a filter for your Gmail inbox.
Mailstrom
Mailstrom is a tool designed to help email users organize their cluttered inboxes. This inbox cleaner identifies and compiles groups of related emails from the same sender. This way, you can act on them collectively instead of deleting or achieving every email separately.
By default, Mailstrom supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Outlook. If you have another email provider, there is an email checker that allows you to check whether or not Mailstrom is compatible with the email service you use.
Boomerang for Gmail
Boomerang is an inbox managing tool that adds additional functionality to managing your Gmail account. As the name suggests, Boomerang sends an email back to you if your recipient hasn’t opened or replied to your email. You can set a specific time limit for unread emails or emails with no reply after which you’ll receive a notification.
Besides scheduled response tracking and read receipts, Boomerang offers the email checker functionality. The tool helps you check how well your emails are written and indicates whether or not you’re using strong language choice to craft your email copy.
Boomerang can also help you manage your Gmail inbox by pausing it for a set time and letting you send automated replies. This feature is also useful for business, particularly for eCommerce stores. So, if you want an email tool that will help you manage your online store communications, Boomerang is a great option worth considering.
Gmelius
Gmelius is a Gmail extension that lets you run marketing campaigns from your Gmail account. Initially designed to help remote teams communicate, collaborate, and automate workflows, Gmelius is a powerful tool for managing and decluttering corporate inboxes, as well as running marketing campaigns. You can use the extension to manage your business account and create strong lead magnets in exchange for user information.
Gmelius allows you to create a shared inbox. This eliminates the need for help desk software and enables you to reply promptly.
Also, Gmelius offers the shared labels functionality to help you organize your inbox by project and client communication. This allows effective cross-department collaboration and helps to declutter your inbox.
Inbox When Ready
Inbox When Ready is a Google Chrome extension for Gmail that has a single main functionality. It lets you pause the inbox at certain times, so you can check all incoming emails in bulk at set times.
Studies show that on average, people check emails 15 times a day. This email over checking wastes away 21 minutes per day. The Inbox When Ready tool helps you save time and focus by scheduling inbox checking time.
By hiding your inbox by default, the Inbox When Ready extension allows you to see your inbox only when you intentionally press the Show Inbox button. Additionally, you can configure the extension to fit your schedule and other needs.
Simple Gmail Notes
Simple Gmail Notes is another Gmail add-on that lets you attach private notes to any email for your reference. This add-on is perfect for you if you’re looking to quickly jot down a note or a few on an important email.
The notes you add appear above the message in the web interface and right next to the subject line in the main Gmail inbox view. This way, you can manage your emails much quicker and underline emails that require your attention.
Both Gmail and Firefox support Simple Gmail Notes.
Taskforce
Taskforce is a Gmail add-on that allows you to turn emails into tasks. Taskforce’s functionality allows you to create to-do lists based on your emails.
The add-on allows you to convert particular emails into tasks, create and manage to-do lists, and share your to-do lists with other team members. By creating your to-do lists concerning your emails, you can spend less time scheduling and have your work emails organized neatly.
Unroll me
Unroll me is an inbox cleaner that allows you to mass unsubscribe from emails you don’t want to receive. It also helps you to combine the newsletters you want to stay subscribed to into one batch that doesn’t distract you from work emails.
Here’s how it works. Unroll me identifies and goes through the mailing lists and newsletters you’re subscribed to. Then, it allows you to choose which subscriptions to keep and bulk unsubscribes from the rest emails automatically.
Conclusion
When you see that email clutter makes you waste time and sacrifice productivity, you know that it’s time for a change. By decluttering your email, you can encourage a better workflow and stay on top of things. These eight tools will help you declutter your email and experience the magic of the inbox zero moment!
Featured Image via Tetiana Yurchienko / shutterstock.com
Between network issues, server maintenance, and user support, maintaining a web application can get super complicated. But there are only so many hours in a day.
APM is a system that provides unified monitoring, tracking, and analytics for both the frontend and backend of an application. All of this information makes it much easier to diagnose and correct problems, in order to provide the best possible user experience.
In this article, we’ll explain exactly what an APM tool is and why you should be using one.
Then we’ll take a look at the best solutions on the market today, including several open source options. We have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s dive right in!
Introduction to APM and APM Tools
APM stands for Application Performance Management. It’s also sometimes referred to as Application Performance Monitoring, especially in recent years.
Although the phrases are often used interchangeably, there is a slight technical difference between management and monitoring. Management implies a more active role than monitoring, which typically means automated, regular scanning of web apps.
So, what is APM? In short, it involves monitoring speed from both a user-facing and a backend perspective to find potential issues and performance bottlenecks in web applications.
The data is then used to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve issues in order to improve the user experience. APM tools are the software suites used to gather and analyze all of that data.
The APM industry is a pretty broad one and lots of companies offer tools that could technically be called APMs. The phrase has become ambiguous enough that research firm Gartner created a list of criteria that software should meet to qualify for the term.
The original definition included five key elements:
End-user experience monitoring
Application runtime architecture discovery and modeling
User-defined transaction profiling
Application component monitoring
Reporting and application data analytics
However, that’s a fairly technical definition, and the landscape is constantly changing. So a few years later Gartner revised its guidelines, and pared the list down to just three essentials:
Digital experience monitoring
Application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics
Purpose-built Artificial Intelligence (AI) for IT operations
The revised list is much easier to understand in a practical sense.
Digital experience monitoring refers to the experience your users are having with your application. Are they happy with how everything works? Are they having trouble, or running into bugs and glitches? An APM tool should help you discover these issues.
Application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics is exactly what it sounds like: digging into the details of your software to discover and diagnose potential problems.
Finally, artificial intelligence is commonly used to support the automation of these processes.
These are the core elements you’ll want to look for when considering any APM solution.
Why You Should Be Using an APM Tool
An APM tool provides a single platform where you can monitor and manage all of your software and applications. This consolidation alone can be a huge boost to efficiency and productivity.
The unified dashboard of most APM tools provides a one-stop-shop for PHP performance monitoring, managing updates, watching for conflicts, and correcting errors. This enables developers and IT teams to provide the best user experience possible for their customers.
Other benefits of an APM include:
In other words, APM doesn’t just benefit you, but your customers as well. It’s a win-win scenario for all parties.
3 Examples of APM in Action
If you’re wondering how all this translates to real-world business use, here are three examples of organizations implementing APM to great effect:
Cornell University found itself in a bit of a bind: a mission-critical software platform used by the university was crashing several times a week due to complex transactions. By leveraging APM tools, Cornell was able to more easily find the bottlenecks and drastically reduce turnaround times on user complaints.
Alaska Airlines deployed APM to help optimize its complex cloud-based systems and maintain customer satisfaction. APM tools helped the company reduce critical outages and other issues by 60%, and catch problems before they had a chance to impact the user experience.
Here at Kinsta, we use New Relic APM to monitor and optimize client websites to ensure maximum performance and satisfaction. This enables us to easily drill down to the lowest levels of a WordPress site, and pinpoint plugins, themes, and coding errors that are causing problems.
APM tools can be used in a wide range of scenarios to achieve many and diverse goals. Whatever your business might do, it’s likely you can put APM to work for you.
How APM Benefits WordPress Users
APM tools can be leveraged by uses of all platforms.
WordPress site owners in particular benefit from using them to monitor and maximize performance. You can keep tabs on plugins, themes, database calls, and other transactions on your site to find bottlenecks.
This enables you to quickly fix problems and maintain an excellent user experience on your site. You can use APM tools to debug slow-loading pages and check for unnecessary processes that could be causing high overhead and server strain.
Most APMs will work with WordPress installations, but some offer features more specifically tailored to particular platforms.
We’ll touch on those in our list below.
How to Choose an APM Tool
Here are a few features that should be included in any APM tool you consider:
In-depth monitoring of business transactions, infrastructure, user experience, and network performance.
Solid reporting and analytics from a single dashboard.
The ability to dive deep into the data.
Beyond that, price will obviously be a consideration. Some of these tools, particularly those meant for enterprise use, can be expensive. However, when looking at price, make sure to factor in the savings you’ll accrue from increased productivity and reduced downtime.
The 8 Best APM Tools
With the preliminaries out of the way, here are our picks for the best APM tools on the market. There are options here for everyone, from small businesses and developer teams all the way up to full-scale enterprises.
We’ve included five premium tools along with three free and open source options, so every budget is covered as well.
Starting Price
Free Trial
Standout Feature
Who It’s For
Datadog
$31/month
14 days
Clear visualization of performance data
Small business
Loupe
$50/month
30 days
Powerful web client
Enterprise and IT specialists
AppDynamics
By request
15 days
Business insights based on data
Enterprise
Stackify Retrace
$79/month
14 days
App scores for quickly gauging performance
Software developers
New Relic
$99/month
Limited free plan
Powerful WordPress-specific monitoring
WordPress-based businesses
Stagemonitor
Free
N/A
Browser widget for monitoring during the development process
Java-based developers
Scouter
Free
N/A
FOSS alternative to AppDynamics
Small business
Pinpoint
Free
N/A
Broad data overview, down to code-level transaction visibility
Enterprise
Let’s take a closer look at each APM tool now.
1. Datadog
The Datadog APM.
Datadog offers full-stack visibility into your applications, servers, and cloud-based platforms. It works across a wide range of products, using a built-in integration system to make connecting easy.
Datadog features powerful user experience monitoring, enabling you to keep an eye on network timing, transactions, and more. It also provides notifications of problems across the entire software stack.
The best part of Datadog is how clearly it visualizes performance. The customizable dashboard enables you to build a personal monitoring system that gives you visibility into what you need when you need it.
Pricing for Datadog starts at $31/month per host. There are a variety of plans and add-ons available, so you can ensure that you get the features you need. There’s also a 14-day free trial available. Its reasonable pricing and ease of use makes this a solid APM for businesses of all sizes.
2. Loupe
The Loupe APM.
Loupe is designed primarily for enterprise customers and IT specialists, although its ease-of-use and fast setup make it a decent option for small businesses as well.
While it doesn’t cover quite as many applications as some other APM tools, Loupe offers all the basics you’d expect from an APM suite. What’s more, it does stand out from the rest with some unique features.
One of the most useful options is automatic grouping of your log events, so you don’t have to waste time digging for the source of an issue. There’s also an excellent web client, so you can pull up your information from any computer or device.
Loupe starts at $50 per month for the Basic Plan, with enterprise solutions starting at $500 per month. There’s also a 30-day free trial available, so you can take the software for a spin before committing.
3. AppDynamics
The AppDynamics APM
The standout features of AppDynamics are the extremely high visibility offered, even in complex environments, and its AI-powered system for catching performance problems and bottlenecks and quickly correcting them.
Apart from that, AppDynamics offers the usual features of an APM suite: application, infrastructure, and end-user monitoring. It can also provide business insights and recommendations by translating performance data into business outcomes.
What’s more, this solution is backed by the software giant Cisco. So you don’t have to worry about unreliable support or a lack of updates.
AppDynamics offers a 15-day free trial. After that, pricing is available upon request. It can be quite expensive (in the thousands-of-dollars-per-year range), so it’s probably best suited for enterprises and medium-to-large sized businesses.
4. Stackify Retrace
The Stackify Retrace APM.
Stackify Retrace is an APM tool designed specifically for developers. It monitors for bugs and bottlenecks, and then sends alerts to your channel of choice such as SMS or Slack.
This tool is designed to be easy to deploy. For that reason, it’s a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that’s easy to scale.
It also pulls all of your logs into a single centralized location, making them easier to review. Probably the best feature on offer is the app’s performance score, which lets you get a quick picture of how your app is running.
Stackify Retrace comes with a 14-day free trial. After that, pricing starts at $79 per month.
5. New Relic
The New Relic APM.
New Relic is a powerful APM tool that bills itself as an “observability platform”. It lives up to that promise: one of its strongest features is the extremely clear visualization it offers of your entire software stack.
Another area where New Relic stands out is its unique WordPress-specific functionality. When you set up New Relic on a WordPress site, it opens up several new monitoring features that let you easily keep tabs on WordPress hooks, plugins, and themes.
New Relic offers a lifetime-free plan (albeit with some limitations), as well as several premium tiers starting at $99 per month.
6. Stagemonitor
The Stagemonitor APM.
Stagemonitor is a Java-specific APM that’s designed primarily for web applications. That makes it somewhat more limited than the other solutions on this list. If you work primarily with Java-based apps, Stagemonitor might just be the ticket.
This tool’s standout feature is definitely the browser widget that enables you to monitor and gather analytics while you’re developing the application. This unique ability makes it easy to review your code while you’re working, making Stagemonitor ideal for web developers.
Best of all, Stagemonitor is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). In other words, it won’t cost you a thing to use.
7. Scouter
The Scouter APM.
Scouter bills itself as a FOSS alternative to AppDynamics. We’re not sure it quite lives up to that hype, but it’s still a solid and well-rated APM tool that won’t cost you a dime to use (while AppDynamics doesn’t even list a price on its website).
Scouter can monitor Java-based apps, both web-based and native. It’s also able to monitor the most popular web server database platforms, including Nginx, Apache, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB.
This isn’t the prettiest software we’ve ever seen, but it covers all the basics of an APM tool, including user activity, resource metrics, and response time. Scouter is a FOSS APM solution, so there’s no cost to use it.
8. Pinpoint
The Pinpoint APM.
Pinpoint is one of the most popular open source APM tools. Aimed at enterprise users, Pinpoint is designed to monitor large-scale Java and PHP distributed systems.
The primary strength of this solution is the powerful overview it provides, showing how all the parts of your application stack integrate and work together. Pinpoint also boasts code-level transaction visibility, and the ability to set up monitoring without altering the code.
Since Pinpoint is a free software option, it won’t cost you a dime to try it out.
Summary
Whether you’re trying to streamline your IT budget, ease the burden on your support team, or just provide the best possible user experience, APM tools can help.
This is a competitive space and choosing the right solution for the job can be tough.
If you look for an APM tool that provides these basics, however, you should be off to a strong start:
Comprehensive monitoring for user experience, business transactions, infrastructure, and response times.
The ability to dive deep into that data.
A robust dashboard for tracking analytics and reports.
Do you have any questions about application performance management? Let us know in the comments section below!
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1. Marketplaces and classifieds – are the sites that combine goods and services.
One of the most popular resources is:
OLX
Amazon
eBay
Craiglist
Google MyBusiness
Facebook Marketplace
Classifieds, online directories, and other portals have huge attendance and extensive advertising opportunities for attracting new audiences. You can fill in company profiles – addresses and contacts. And it will be to be displayed in search engines. You can also place ads and find an audience interested in your goods and services.
2. Business Review sites are specialized resources, on that user who has tried out the product can leave reviews.
Trustpilot
Sitejabber
Capterra
Reviews.io
Goodfirms.co
Yelp
Tripadvisor
Google Maps
Facebook Pages
3. Forum marketing is an activity that is aimed to promote products or services on hidden/open forums.
4.LocalSEO (MAPS) – Companies with a physical address that provides most of the services offline is the most suitable type of business to promote yourself on these types of platforms
this includes
Google Maps
Apple Maps
Bing maps
5.SEO this promotion method has long-term effect and allows to attract the most traffic for lower cost per target user.
Allows: – to quickly reach a large target audience; – attract new visitors to the site; – increase loyalty and trust to the company; – to return departed clients to the site; – increase sales. Used: – to promote products and services; – to inform the audience; – attracting/retracting subscribers’ attention.
7.Social Media Marketing – allows you to promote brands in social networks.
Allows: – increase the loyalty of current and potential customers; – to form a positive brand image; – to raise brand awarenes; – increase traffic and conversion. Promotion in social networks includes: – developing an original concept of community in social media; – creating and hosting all types of content, including online broadcasts; – continuous targeted communication with users; – long-term effect of social media by attracting new visitors.
8.Influencer Marketing
a new way to create positive brand image.
The main thing is to choose the right influencer, depending on the target audience and the objectives of the advertising campaign. Types: – Celebrity; – Professional big influencer; – small influencer. Allows: – increase brand recognition; – increase user loyalty and trust in the brand; – increased demand for company product or services; – to make sales.