The importance of automation in the world of business continues to grow. Provided that it’s executed correctly, its benefits are numerous and clear – in a nutshell, automation helps you save time, energy, and valuable resources, allowing you to spend them elsewhere.
However, different businesses will benefit from different kinds of automated processes. In this post, we’ll take a look at four essential automations that most businesses can apply to ultimately achieve growth.
Automating your emails is one of those upgrades that tend to quickly and straightforwardly change the way you do business.
Email marketing is one of the best digital marketing tactics you can choose to implement, and it has the potential to return your investment manifold. Combined with email automation, it turns into a multifaceted marketing beast.
Start by automating your newsletters, as well as signup and welcome emails. Just make sure to segment your list well.
You should also automate cart abandonment emails, as well as emails that remind a customer to reorder an item they already own and love. These kinds of emails are especially valuable for ecommerce brands like Gourmesso, who can easily ensure they get more orders just by reminding someone to make another purchase.
The same principle applies to any recurring service, too: dentists, car mechanics, and so on.
Along with email automation, another very lucrative area to automate is customer service. Especially if you offer your services internationally and can reasonably expect to receive queries and questions from customers at all hours of the day.
With the simple implementation of a chatbot, you can easily circumvent the issue of having to hire a customer service representative to work around the clock. Chatbots are also much more affordable, and newer generations also prefer to deal with them over live customer service agents.
Here is a simple example from Mongo DB – it is unobtrusive, yet always ready and available to answer any questions a visitor may have.
While there are certainly aspects of social media marketing you can (and should) automate, we have to keep in mind that a lot of success on social media depends on personalization and individuality. This means that you will need to engage with your followers manually as well.
But the one thing you can certainly automate is a large portion of your social media posts. By using a tool like Buffer, Hootsuite, CoSchedule, or any of the smaller ones, you can schedule your posts across all of your social media channels and not have to worry about having nothing to put up.
This enables you to take a part of one day a week (or every two weeks, or even once a month) and set up and schedule all of your posts, adding the right hashtags and tagging the right people.
This will cut down the time you need to spend on socials significantly, and you can use all that freed up time to engage with your audience and facilitate meaningful interactions.
Finally, there is a very offline aspect of business operations you can also automate: the ordering of all of your office supplies, accessories, food, drink, snacks, and so on. Think of all the items that you use on a regular basis and need to keep repurchasing.
You can start by using an office supply management tool – one that will keep track of your stock for you, so that you don’t have to manually count anything.
You can also set up a calendar reminder that will tell you to place such and such an order on a specific date (based on the rate you usually run out of certain items). Or you can set up an automated recurring order with your vendors.
Make sure to check for expiration dates, the current state of your stock, and ensure that you are not repurchasing items you no longer need or use.
By automating these four processes, you should be able to save yourself a chunk of time that can more efficiently and effectively be devoted to a different task – one that will allow you to grow and prosper even further.
