7 Effective Ways to Automate and Grow Your Business

There is more scope for automation in your company than ever before. With automation, you can schedule emails to be sent at the perfect time, track leads who have left their cart, sync data between apps, and notify team members of new tasks.

However, all of these options can be overwhelming, especially if your business isn’t a large company with a lot of budget and resources devoted to automation.

You may be wondering:

• What types of automation will most benefit my business?
• What should I keep my distance from?
• How can I simply implement this and at the same time keep life simple?

Let’s explore the best types of business automation so you can start implementing a strategy in your own company.

7 ways to automate your business

1. Email Marketing Automation

When you think of automation, you might think of email marketing automation first. Not only is it one of the most popular types of automation, it’s also one of the most accessible.

Types of email automation:

• Trigger emails based on actions such as webinar logon confirmations or abandoned cart notifications
• Email drip workflows that send content at set intervals
• Providing content or requested information after completing a form
• A / B testing content and automatically sending the best performing version of the content
• Personalize every email you send
• Segment groups based on data and automatically send the correct email to each group

A great way to get started with email marketing automation is to look at the automation capabilities of your email marketing platform and think about how you can use them to execute your strategy.

All popular email marketing tools have built-in automation functions. However, if you haven’t already made your decision on which email tool to use, make sure you choose an option with enough automation to meet your business needs.

2. Marketing automation

What about the other types of marketing automation beyond email marketing? We can break these down into external automation, which is customer-centric, and internal automation, which helps streamline the workflow on your team.

Examples of external marketing automation:

• Automated SMS messages
• Schedule or republish social media messages
• Activation of new course content at set intervals after enrollment

Examples of internal marketing automation:

• Lead scoring and qualification
• Routing qualified leads between apps, e.g. B. from your CRM to your email marketing platform
• Notify team members when a contact meets conditions or takes certain actions
• Create a strong bridge between marketing and sales
• Streamlining multi-level processes such as publishing content or setting up a new marketing campaign

3. Sales automation

Sales automation is about managing your pipelines more effectively, reducing friction, and increasing conversion rates.

Advantages of sales automation

• Keep track of a busy pipeline
• Better calendar management
• Identify and focus on the top selling leads
• Gather and respond to data insights
• Sync the latest data across all apps
• Build a strong bridge with marketing
• Pass new customers on to onboarding
• Avoid spending time with poorly matched leads

To get started with sales automation, first take a look at all of the built-in automation features your CRM offers. You can then take over and integrate other apps to automate more powerful workflows.

4. Data automation

While automation is great for streamlining repetitive tasks and freeing time for important work, it is also powerful at managing data behind the scenes.

While our brains are good at looking at data insights to draw conclusions and plan actionable next steps, we’re not that good at managing that data manually. We don’t have the time, attention to detail, or accuracy to control large data sets – and neither do we.

With automated data management, you can leave the heavy lifting to the machines and instead have time to implement the findings.

Data automation options:

• Trigger / action workflows that transfer data between your apps
• Synchronize contact information between apps and update them automatically as soon as something changes
• Sending all contact details to your CRM for a central database
• Combine data from all apps for integrated reporting on one dashboard
• Automatically merge or correct duplicate contacts in your database

First, optimize the data in your individual apps. They can then use software integration tools to help them communicate data with each other.

5. Automation of customer care

What about your support and customer care teams?

Ways to automate customer service:

• Optimize the customer experience
• Personalize interactions
• Make sure your customer care team has automatic access to all available customer data

Automation is not about removing the human element from 1: 1 interactions. In fact, it’s about spending more time on them and giving your customers a better experience.

You can automate notifications to let you know when the time is right to contact a customer so you spend less time figuring out what you are should do it every day.

You can automate customer satisfaction surveys that notify you when a customer needs quick attention to reduce the risk of churn.

You can introduce chatbots or knowledge bases with built-in AI that answer simple questions quickly, or direct a customer to the best support person for their request if that doesn’t fix the problem.

Put simply, automation enables your account managers to manage larger numbers of customers more effectively without compromising or compromising the quality of 1: 1 interactions.

6. E-commerce automation

Before, you had to do it yourself to sell products. You had to monitor the production of your inventory. You had to open your shop in the morning, answer questions from customers and process their payments for your products.

But that has all changed. As the owner of an e-commerce shop you don’t even have to be there. You can keep your business open 365 days a year, even while you are sleeping or traveling.

Types of ecommerce automation:

• Purchases from an online shop front such as Shopify or WooCommerce
• Online payments through providers such as Stripe and PayPal
• Discount codes for prospects, first-time customers or dedicated buyers
• Abandoned cart notifications to customers
• Product suggestions based on previous purchases
• Inventory management
• Requesting reviews after the sale

With dropshipping, you can even automate all fulfillment work for an order. Since someone else creates the products, stores them in a warehouse, and ships them to the customer, all you need to do is create an online storefront and keep an eye on it.

7. Management automation

As with automating customer care, management automation is not about eliminating human-to-human interactions. Instead, it can buy a manager time to look after their team and support their growth.

Types of management automation:

• Team reminders to prepare for meetings
• Chasing overdue work
• Tracking of tasks at set intervals
• Share onboarding materials with new employees
• Gathering daily feedback on wins and blockers
• Self-assessment and performance tracking
• Report dashboards
• Sync data with meeting slides

For easy ways to start automating management processes, Trello, Slack, and Asana are tools you may already be using that have great automation features too.

Automation is a long-term strategy: it’s not about changing everything at once or creating processes that are too complex for your company’s stage.

See where your business is right now. Where are the blockers, manual tasks, and inefficiencies?

Wonder how you can start automating these areas so you can focus on the areas where you will have the greatest impact.