5 Areas of Your Business to Automate

Automation is quickly advancing and changing the way businesses conduct themselves; from marketing efforts to sales pitches and more. Automation can help save time and labor expenses, streamlining your business, and helping to increase your profit margin. But what areas should be automated? This question depends largely on the industry you’re operating within, but here are five areas of your business to automate no matter what your niche is. 

1. Social Media 

Social media can be a powerful marketing and awareness tool for businesses, but it can also become quite time-consuming to constantly update and post new updates on a daily or weekly basis. Tools like HootSuite can help you write several posts at once, and have them dispersed throughout the week or the month, so you won’t have to worry about keeping your accounts (and followers) updated. 

This automated process can help save both time and labor dollars for your social media manager. Hootsuite is one of the most widely-used and trusted social media management programs available, though there are others with various tools and features to help meet the specific needs of your business. 

By automating your social media, you’ll spend less time worrying about updating your pages. Some automation software will even notify you when you receive messages or comments, so you’ll always stay updated with the interactions of your followers and can follow up accordingly. If you haven’t automated your social media accounts yet, you should seriously consider giving it a try. 

2. Backing Up Files 

Manually uploading, downloading, and sending files can be exhausting. With cloud storage, you don’t have to do anything manually, except grant permissions to certain files so you can authorize users to access them. 

Cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox can back up your files; everything from photos to videos, documents, presentations, and even audio files automatically. Once you’ve created an account, you’ll log in into your computers or mobile devices, and “allow automatic sync” across your devices. 

This will not only automate storage and backup for your business, but it will also allow for everything to be stored in a secure central location that can be accessed by whomever you grant access to. This allows for greater security and a hands-off approach to ensuring that your business’s important files are always backed up to the cloud. 

You can even set daily or weekly backups if you don’t want your system constantly syncing. This level of customization for the low prices that many cloud-storage services offer is the single best way to ensure the safety and security of your files without having to upload anything manually. 

3. Online Cart Abandonment 

For customers shopping on your website who abandon their cart, it’s often the case where they’ll completely forget about their items and never return to the site without a reminder. Automated reminder emails can help potential customers remember their cart is full of items they wanted to purchase, encouraging a return visit to the site and (hopefully) a follow-through on their intended purchase. 

Your automated emails can be short and sweet, simply reminding the customer that their items are still awaiting purchase in the online shopping cart. Including pictures of their chosen items is a good way to spark the memory of why they wanted to purchase them, to begin with, invoking a much stronger reaction than simple words. 

Letting a customer simply abandon their cart without following up is detrimental to your sales effort. The customer was interested in those products, and any number of reasons could have caused them to abandon the purchase. Reminding them ensures that you did your part to bring them back to the sale. 

4. Email Marketing 

Marketing emails, such as coupons, birthday specials, or promotions, can be automated to be sent out at specific times or to specific customers. This means you don’t have to keep track of birthdays or write a custom email every time a promotion comes up. 

Automated emails will be sent every time a promotional period is approaching, or a customer’s birthday is on the horizon. This type of emailing keeps customers updated with your business’s promotions and products, without requiring you to manually create the emails and send them. 

Marketing is quite time-consuming, so any part of your marketing efforts that can be automated will help save you time and money. Don’t spend all of your time manually sending emails when you can automate the process and increase your efficiency. 

5. Help Desk Tickets 

Automated service tickets will help your customer service team keep track of who needs help and for which issue. It can be incredibly frustrating to both a customer who’s been on hold for several minutes and the customer service representative when calls are answered out of order or directed to the wrong support department. 

Keep track of your help-desk inquiries and keep the customers happy by automating your service ticket system for better accuracy and efficiency. You can use conference calling services in conjunction with your ticketing system for more personalized support calls as well. 

Conclusion 

Automation will soon be the standard for a variety of business practices, so getting a head-start by automating these five areas of your business will help keep you ahead of the game with a more efficient business. Automation saves both time and money on tedious tasks like promotional emails and social media posts and doesn’t cost a small fortune to do so. Automate today and see what a difference it can make for your business!