10 Things Small Businesses Must Automate
4 min readNowadays, companies want to save time and money; and, that’s understandable because they want to focus more on the customers. That’s why companies are seeing good progress when they choose to automate some (or most) of their tasks so that they can focus on more important things.
And, the good news is, automating tasks isn’t just for large corporations and organizations. In fact, small businesses can automate tasks too! Here are 10 things that small businesses can start automating today!
- Workflow
“When you automate your entire workflow, you can boost how efficient your organization is,” says Frank Cooper, a business writer at Writinity and Lastminutewriting. “When you have a workflow for sales, marketing, and so on, it’s easier to streamline different tasks to different areas of your organization.”
- Sales
When sales operations are automated, the pipeline will be organized for your sales team to handle. Just define the stages in the typical customer journey, and then automation will do the rest. In other words, automation will get accustomed to the established customer journey, and then be able to track any trends for you.
- Customer Support
Customer support can also be automated.
For example, if you want to implement chatbots on your website to better assist customers online, you can! By doing this, you’re able to send customers to the right representative to better serve them.
- Customer Reach
With automation, you won’t just send emails to customers and leads every once in a while. In fact, you can extend your customer reach by including follow-up calls/messages based on specific customer behavior. Automation software can help you look for customers in real-time that are either tired or discouraged by their previous interactions with your company, and then your organization can work to improve their customer reach tactics or adopt new methods.
- Email Marketing
Want to plan and execute your email marketing campaigns more effectively? Then automation is the way to go! Automation can help you build and maintain your email list by adding each new contact to the right segment, and by sending personalized messages to each person that’s on there.
- Social Media Marketing
Nowadays, many companies are turning to social media to reach more people. Now, automation can make sure that your social media content is published and distributed based on the schedule that you set for it. Thus, this gives you more time to not only do other things in the company but also allow you to spend more time creating high-quality content.
- Onboarding Clients
Client onboarding is similar to customer support because it helps you reach more people at a faster rate, without having to garner a lot of complaints. Therefore, it’s important to automate this task, because you want to show your prospects how and why your company and its products/services should matter to them. And, if your product or service is simple to understand and use, then there’s no need to waste people’s time with tedious details.
- File Backups
Now more than ever, there’s a need to be able to back up digital goods for safekeeping and for future reference. Automation helps you back up your files without having to worry about human error accidentally altering or jeopardizing employee or customer data.
- Financial Operations
“Automation has grown important for organizations when it comes to finances,” says Edgar Thomas, an IT blogger at Draftbeyond and Researchpapersuk. “Since e-banking had emerged, there’s a need to have automation for things like invoicing, bill payments, payroll, receipts, and renewing cards.”
- Feedback
Finally, it’s important to listen to your customers. Therefore, let automation help you collect useful feedback from your customers by automatically sending them email surveys once they’ve shopped from you, or just visited your site. Once the results from said surveys are collected, you’ll get a report showing you how satisfied or unsatisfied customers are, and what needs to be improved (if applicable).
Conclusion
While automation won’t take away too much from human need, it’s still nice to implement it on tasks – such as these 10 described here – just to save time and resources. And, you should still make an effort to create strong relationships with your customers.
We hope that this article has shown you the numerous ways that automation can help your small business thrive for many years to come. We wish you the best of luck!
Ashley Halsey is a writer at Belfast Writing Service and Gum Essays. As a professional writer, she has been involved in many projects nationwide. In her spare time, she enjoys reading and traveling with her two children.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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