The daily processes and transactions involved in operating a business can mean long hours of repetitive tasks and occasional oversights due to human nature. Automating these tasks can result in significant savings in resources and eliminate mistakes caused by human error. The key, however, is to know which tasks should be automated and which ones warrant staff intervention and guidance. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Here are six activities that you should definitely be automating for your business.
1. Abandoned Online Carts
Not following up with visitors who’ve abandoned shopping carts on your site is just leaving money lying on the table. They’ve already expressed interest in your products. Automated engagement touch-points can create the perfect follow up to prompt them to finish their purchase. Exit pop-ups and follow-up emails are great devices to use when reaching out to visitors who’ve abandoned carts on your site.
2. Lead Capturing, Nurturing, and Scoring
Automating your lead development process can do wonders for your company’s conversion rates. Both hot and cold leads require attention and targeted engagement in order to convert into paying customers. Using automation software can help sales reps to strategically guide prospects to end of the sales cycle, and it can also direct you towards the leads that will convert the fastest.
3. Engaging New Contacts
Entrepreneurs meet new contacts all the time. Whether it’s a potential business partner or prospective customer, automating your engagement with them can help you forge a solid rapport after your initial contact. There are several CRM options that’ll allow you to group contacts by event, type, company, and location, amongst other settings to ensure that your business card collections don’t go to waste.
4. Personal Direct Mail
Outreach efforts with a personal touch tend to garner higher engagement rates, which explains why businesses send out birthday cards, calendars, seasonal greetings, and other materials to customers. With the right software, you can set up automated, sequenced events to gather customer personal data and incorporate it into specific marketing activities.
5. Hiring Processes
Automating your hiring process is one of the best things that you can do for your business. Everything from receiving applications and interviewing to setting up drug tests and completing new-hire paperwork can easily be done with automation. First, outline what your hiring process looks like. Next, determine staff member roles and duties within your process. And lastly, establish time frames that each activity should fall within. There are tons of HR software programs that can make automating your hiring process a breeze.
6. Word-of-mouth marketing
Numerous marketing studies show that consumers are more likely to buy from companies if they’ve been referred by a friend. Encourage customers to give referrals about your products by simply asking for them. There are several ways to automate this, including adding referral mentions to order confirmations, discount offerings, and email outreach campaigns.
Set aside a week or two to take a look at any processes that can be automated within your business. Automating repetitive and tedious tasks can aid you in uncovering hidden cost-savers and potential sales opportunities for your business.
7. Data entry
Receipt Bank is the award-winning Xero add-on that automatically converts all your invoices and receipts into data by using either the Receipt Bank App or via email (you can choose whichever method that suits you best).
Using Receipt Bank’s easy submission methods means that:
- You save time on no longer having to manually enter in your invoices and expenses, time that you can spend on your core business services.
- You save space as there’s no need to retain your physical documents, with all documents easily searchable and securely stored on the cloud.
- You now have real time information flowing into your accounting package, providing you with insights to improve your business decisions.