Improve efficiency and results with business automation
You might have received a birthday coupon from your favourite restaurant, or a reminder from an e-commerce site that you recently visited placed a product in the cart, but didn’t make the purchase.
More businesses are adopting automation to increase efficiency and improve customer experience. With these results, automation tools and automation software can help you grow your business. According to Hubspot, 79 per cent of high-performing companies have been using some form of marketing automation for more than three years.
One misconception is that automation is something that only large companies can implement. In reality, small business owners can use it to streamline processes and improve results.
If you want to increase efficiency, here are a few things you can automate:
1. Respond immediately to a contact request
When you use automation in your small business, you can take care of easy tasks more efficiently. For example, when new customers get in touch, you and your sales and marketing teams can reply quickly before they lose interest and look elsewhere.
By using a contact form that works with software such as Keap, you can automatically and quickly send an email reply to a prospect who fills out and submits a form. The email they receive is personalised to connect with them. For example, the content of the message might be, ‘We have received your request and someone from our customer service team will contact you as soon as possible.’
By letting the person know that you will be in touch, you show that you care about their enquiry and you make a positive impression. In addition, the software will automatically assign a member of the team to follow up with that person.
2. Assign sales representatives to prospects
Some people will prefer a human touch and pick up the phone to make contact with a company. Although a phone chat can be the best way to connect with a prospect, companies often don’t handle this task effectively. While their intention may be right, their execution is lacking.
But when you implement automation software, you can assign it first to fill in an internal form which will take all the details of the prospects when they call the direct line. Once the necessary information is collected by the software, it will assign a sales rep to handle the customer’s request. The sales representative can use the information about the customer and their business before contacting them.
In the meantime, the software will also send an introduction email that provides an overview of your company to the prospect. These contacts will feel more confident from associating with a team that values their customers and provides excellent customer service.
When salespeople make contact, they will make a positive impression by knowing the customer’s basic details and nature of their enquiry. Using this type of automation will streamline your sales process by eliminating time-consuming and superfluous sales activities.
3. Get more followers on social media
Social media marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to prospects. By using automation tools, you can reduce the time needed for managing social media platforms, quickly gain more followers, and make a bigger impact. For example, you can send an automated invitation to your clients to view and like your social media pages on various social media platforms, with the aim of increasing your social media followers and fans. Research by Invesp revealed that marketing automation drives a 14.5 per cent increase in sales productivity and reduces marketing overheads by 12.2 per cent.
4. Focus on the best leads
Focusing on prospects who will never become your customers is wasteful. This is especially if you have many leads and limited time to follow up with them, which is the case with many small businesses. But by using a marketing automation platform, you can focus on the most promising leads. It ranks each prospect according to the level of engagement they had with the marketing team. So, once you have the list in front of you, you can focus on prospects that have a high chance of becoming customers.
5. Send reminders to customers about an abandoned cart
It’s common for people to click on the products they feel like purchasing and then abandon their cart. But you can use business automation software to send reminders to customers who didn’t complete their purchases. According to Listrak, initial emails sent three hours after a consumer abandons their online shopping cart have an average open rate of 40 per cent and a clickthrough rate of 20 per cent.
6. Check customer satisfaction levels
Getting customer feedback is important for several reasons. It shows that you are engaged and value the opinions of your customers. You can find out what people like and don’t like about your products and services, and how they are delivered. It also enables you to benchmark and measure improvements over time. But getting feedback doesn’t need to be an onerous manual process.
Conducting a survey will help you gauge customer satisfaction and indicate what you can do to improve your business processes. With business automation software, you can email a link to the survey link to those who made a purchase, or set up alerts in the software when there is substantial negative feedback. This way, you can address any issues that are causing customer dissatisfaction, set up benchmarks, and determine if improvement measures are working.
Financing your small business automation efforts
While business automation can improve efficiency and save time and money in the long run, funds are needed for implementation. Unsecured business loans from Moula are a simple and quick way to fund small business automation initiatives.
