5 Ways To Automate Your Business To Reduce Cost.
As a small/medium business owner, trying to keep up with every aspect of your business may get overwhelming, especially when the business is beginning to rake in lots of profit. Most business owners may make the mistake of employing more individuals to handle more tasks as the business expands, but there is another route to take to reduce cost- automation.
Automation involves the use of (advanced) technology to complete business processes with minimal human intervention. Many aspects of a business can be automated, but that would be costly for you as a small business owner. Nonetheless, there are some aspects of your business that you can automate that can even save you resources like time and especially money, which can be reinvested in other things.
- Repetitive Tasks.
If you are usually faced with repetitive tasks done frequently (such as daily inventory) or require a similar skill set to complete, such tasks are ideal for automation. Using tools such as Zapier or Make help take some of the work out of repetitive tasks.
For example, as a business that uses social media to reach out to new and existing customers, using a good social media scheduling tool can be a game changer for your marketing team. A good social media scheduling tool will enable you to create and schedule relevant content for your business in advance and automatically post on relevant platforms, thus saving time and data costs.
In addition to automated social media marketing, your business can also invest in automating SMS messages. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an increased amount of screen usage, resulting in a resurgence in SMS marketing.
If it’s not too much work for your marketing team, adding automated SMS marketing can help your business follow up with leads and convert potential customers. Such automation includes promotional messages about products and discounts, shopping cart abandonment reminders, restock alerts for products the customer may be interested in, and event reminders.
2. Streamlining Accounts and Business Expenditure.
Indeed, managing the finances of a small business is a job of its own. If you are struggling with this, you may consider using an account and expense system with automation capabilities. One such tool is QuickBooks Online, which helps your business track its financials. It can also be connected to your CRM, so you can see which contact purchased from you in real time.
Such an automated system also helps with receipt management by categorizing receipts that arrive in your inbox alongside corresponding charges on your financial statements.
3. Setting Up Automated Email Campaigns.
This is one of the most popular and accessible types of automation you can use in business. There are several ways to implement email automation in your business strategy, some of which include;
- Delivering content after filling out a form (such as a welcome email after a potential customer signs up for your platform)
- Sending personalized emails
- Segmenting customers into groups based on data automatically sends the right message to each group.
- Email drip workflows that send content at set intervals.
- Triggering emails to be sent based on actions, such as sign-up confirmations, signing in on a new device, and so on.
Furthermore, you can also send automated emails to customers who have not visited your site in a while, customers who have not emptied their shopping cart due to distractions when placing an order, or who are entertaining second thoughts and need a little more time to mull over the purchase. As a business owner, you can make your sale by sending an email after a certain period to remind the customer that they have a few items left in their shopping cart. This feature is an effective tool since 50 percent of users who click on these emails usually return to complete their purchase.
4. Create a centralized database by uploading contact data to a CRM.
A CRM refers to a technology used to manage all of a company’s interactions with its potential and existing customers. To this end, an enterprise’s goal is to improve business relationships to grow the business. Small businesses tend to struggle with sorting customer data across various spreadsheets and finding out when the last interaction with them was. This makes the need for customer database automation imperative.
To automate customer information, you can use a CRM as a centralized database and sync contact data between the apps you use to automatically update as soon as a customer makes changes to their account. This will drastically reduce the manual workload on your team and improve the existing relationships between your business and your customers.
5. Using AI as Customer Support.
To further improve existing business relationships, you can invest in using chatbots and AI to answer FAQs. AI is expected to unlock over $2.6 trillion in value for businesses in the coming years. These chatbots will use AI to provide feedback to the customer’s questions. You can use Facebook Messenger’s chatbot features if you do not have enough funds to pay a developer to create a chatbot. This will drastically reduce the time spent by your support staff in helping customers, and they can now focus on more productive tasks like assisting with more difficult problems. This will further improve your business because the more you can help with your customer’s problems, the more positive reviews you will get, further strengthening the relationship between your business and customers. This is especially important if you run a web hosting business or a similar business requiring a little technical know-how.
In conclusion, one must note that automation is a long-term business strategy. It is not a method to replace the need for human workers either. Instead, using automation ensures that your team works as effectively as possible and focuses and more productive tasks. As a small business owner, it is not necessary to implement all the automation methods explained above. Still, it is best to pick the few methods that suit your business strategy best and then work towards automating other aspects.
