Automation creates more efficiency, efficiency saves business owners like you time and money. If you want to set your team up for business success, consider improving your systems by automating tasks and processes.
Types of Automation
4 main types of business automation can help business owners better serve their customers while saving money.
- Marketing automation can be used to track potential lead activity, post social media, manage drip campaigns, etc.
- Accounting and bookkeeping automation is used to automatically match invoices to documents, capture data, prevent fraud, route approval, etc.
- Process automation is used to perform data entry, transfer files and data, automate emails, generate and distribute reports, etc.
- Human resources automation is used to automate training, benefits enrollment, contract and agreement distributions, review job applications online, etc.
Automation Tools
Some of our favorite automation tools are easy to use and make our lives easier at Process Partners. Here are the automation tools we use daily:
Pipedrive is a “centralized sales hub designed to empower salespeople to collaborate, optimize their sales process, and forecast sales cycles. And that’s not all – a sales platform is excellent for enhancing the customer journey and experience, generating new business, and reducing overall costs.”
Zapier empowers you to create automated actions between your favorite key applications. You can automatically send weekly reminders to your team to fill out a meeting agenda.
Grammarly saves you from making basic spelling and grammar mistakes. Since we spend so much time documenting processes, Grammarly is a beneficial automation tool in our company.
Calendly allows clients to schedule meetings based on their calendar availability. Calendly is a great automation tool when scheduling sales meetings with potential clients because the last thing you want is a lead going cold because they cannot schedule a call with you immediately.
Processes to Automate
When deciding where to start in automating your processes, think about what department would most benefit from automation. What processes require efficiency improvements? There are so many things you can automate in your business, but here are our top choices to make it easier for you to decide what may work for your company:
Sales and Marketing Automation Ideas
- Clean up your email list
- Clean up your email list by targeting inactive subscribers
- Help grow your social media accounts
- Automate messages to new comments and messages
- Schedule posts ahead of time
- Respond to contact requests and send content
- Send emails with freebie content or information when a sales lead completes a contact form with their name, email address, and comment or question
- Assign inbound leads to a sales representative
- Prevent sales leads from falling through the cracks by automating the follow-up with new sales connections
- Focus on your hottest sales leads
- Set your priorities by ranking each lead based on their engagement with your marketing efforts
- Stay engaged with prospects who aren’t ready to buy yet
- Identify a lead as someone who needs more time, and send an email each month to gently push the lead toward a sale
- Welcome a new client
- Set up your software so that a purchase triggers an email
E-commerce Automation Ideas
- Generate repeat business for yourself
- Automate an email to a customer to anticipate when they should restock products
- Remind a customer about an abandoned shopping cart
- Send an email to a customer with a reminder to finish their checkout process
- Stay on top of failed billing charges
- Get notified when a billing charge fails so you can reach out to the customer and collect payment as soon as possible
Customer Service Automation Ideas
- Make it easy for clients to ask for help
- Include a “Contact Us” link in every email to spare clients the task of locating it on your website
- Prevent no-shows at scheduled meetings
- Send appointment reminders to customers and give them the option to reschedule to prevent no-shows and wasted time
- Gauge client satisfaction
- Email a survey link to clients who recently made a purchase
- Get referrals from clients
- Ask clients to give out referrals by sending an automated email
- Show you care about your customers by remembering every their birthdays
- Send automated emails on their birthdays wishing them happy birthday
Office Management Automation Ideas
- Make routine tasks more efficient
- Automate repetitive processes to help save time
- Track important documents and emails
- Track whether important documents and emails have been opened or not
Business automation saves you time and money since you are essentially delegating a redundant task to your computer. Never again do you need to enter data more than once. You can automate those pesky multiple data entry points.
We believe automation is a key factor in streamlining your business for increased efficiency, and we can help! If you are feeling lost in the automation world, ask us for help. We love helping businesses thrive! Click this link to get your free five-minute business checkup. See immediately where your systems are lacking!
