Automate These 7 Things Today
Automating your repetitive tasks makes you more productive and prevents the little things from keeping you from focusing on the bigger things. When you automate time consuming tasks, you can focus on the tasks that bring your company income.
Payroll
Payroll is necessary, but time consuming. Small business owners can spend an hour or more a week just running payroll. By automating payroll, you’ll spend less time on payroll and more time on tasks that bring in money.
Inventory Management
If you’re manually keeping track of your inventory on spreadsheets, you’ll have a hard time scaling as your company grows. Manual tracking of inventory also creates a greater possibility for human error, so your staff might be trying to sell products you no longer have in stock. Automating inventory management reduces the risk of human error and lets you easily scale as your company grows.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to make a personal connection with your consumers. Automating your emails can help drive your sales without requiring too much of your time.
Through programs like MailChimp, you can create personalized emails based on how consumers interact with your company. For example, you can set up triggered emails that send automatically on a customer’s birthday or to remind a customer that they still have items waiting in their cart.
Customer Service
Customer service is an extremely important part of your business, but it can cause you and your staff to lose focus on bigger tasks. Most customer service issues are things you’ve seen before and things you’ll see again.
A key aspect of good customer service is that it builds relationships with your customers, so you don’t want to fully automate your customer service. You can, however, automate parts of it. You can create a knowledge base to help customers find solutions themselves, set up common replies to answer emails faster, or use chatbots.
Social Media
Social media allows you to interact and build relationships with your customers, but it can also be very time consuming. Automating allows you to schedule your social media posts in advance and can also monitor when someone mentions your company or leaves a comment. You can automatically post new blog posts to your social media accounts and discover other industry-related content to share. You can automate your social media using products like IFTTT and Hootsuite.
Event Registration
If your company hosts events, you can automate registration. Through products like RegFox, you can integrate with social media, automatically send out emails and confirmations, and organize your guest list for an easy check-in process.
Scheduling
If you’re a service company who relies on scheduling appointments, scheduling manually can take a lot of time and runs the risk of human error. Using programs like MyTime, ScheduleOnce, or Calendly, customers can see your availability and make an appointment easily and quickly.
