8 Things Every Small Business Should Automate
For any small business, automation is one of the advanced and key features that can take over mundane business activities. Whether it’s payroll, bookkeeping, blogging, or recruiting, automating these tasks enables you to concentrate on other important areas in the company.
Automating duties in your company can save you time, reduce the risk of errors, boost efficiency and productivity. Here are just some things all small businesses can automate which can truly elevate how you run your operation.
Social Media
Whether you love it or loathe it, all small businesses need to have some kind of social media presence. It’s where customers flock to when checking out a company. To build your brand and bring in more revenue, you’ll need to get to grips with social media marketing. This can help in boosting engagement, helping more people find your brand, and build trust and recognition.
Rather than having to sit behind a screen manually posting and going over your social media feeds, you can bring automation into the mix. This involves pre-scheduling social media posts, setting up bots to respond to basic queries, and pre-planning social media updates. Rather than wasting time maintaining and expanding social media brand accounts, you can use specialist tools to do the job for you – perfect!
Meetings
Meetings are part and parcel of business. Whether you’re having a one-on-one meeting or a company-wide discussion, they’re in place to ensure the business is ticking along nicely and everyone knows where they stand within the operation. However, the labour involved in scheduling such meetings can be stress-inducing!
From finding a time to bring everyone together to filling out contact information, these tasks are deemed monotonous, not to mention time-consuming. Thankfully, you can keep track of meetings by using a scheduling tool for automation. There are various tools that can empower your supplier or customer to select time from available slots, rather than an unending chain of emails.
Customer Feedback
Your customers are the ones who keep your small business growing. While many will be more than satisfied with your products or services, others may need to get in touch if they have a problem. You’re able to make changes to what you provide based on your customers’ requirements. This all falls in the realm of customer feedback.
Of course, you haven’t got the time or luxury to go to each customer manually to ask for feedback. But, what you can do is collect customers’ input with the help of mobile questionnaires and website surveys.
Document Production
If there’s one thing you’re going to sift through a lot in business, it’s documents. Whether it’s income statements, payroll records, receipt records, or bank statements, all of these are critical documents that help small businesses monitor their income and expenditures.
When it comes to document production, have you ever thought about automating the process instead? You can automate PDFs, for example that can eliminate manual errors and boost accuracy. Automating can also make data processing easier, and speed up large volumes of document creation. You can enlist the help of Pdftools who can let you automate all things PDF with flexible pricing. With their help, you’re able to run and manage tasks and actions to create, generate, and extract certain content in your documents.
Invoices
Another core responsibility small businesses need to manage is invoicing. Invoice automation is a positive step forward. This is because it’s able to free up a huge chunk of time, even for the smallest of companies.
Invoice automation involves sending out pre-scheduled invoices at a certain date and time. Taking this step helps you process invoices quicker, reduces errors, avoids delays and late fees while maximising visibility in the process. Other benefits include improving vendor relationships, and most importantly, ensuring clients are paid on time!
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a crucial aspect of business life. All your audience base are going to have an email address, so you need to make sure you’re targeting them and sending out specialised emails that are tailored to their needs. As you can imagine, doing this manually can be time-consuming and send your stress levels through the roof! Thankfully, automation can be your best friend here.
You can use an email automation platform to send out emails with the right messages to your audience. This will be done at the right time too and you won’t have to worry about doing anything manually. There is the option to utilise automated email responses to create email sequences specifically customised to your customers’ needs.
Automated Reminders
If your business website sells products, you’re bound to want to gain as many sales as possible. To increase sales, it’s important to remind clients who have abandoned their carts to take a second look. The good news is this is easy to automate, and you can incorporate it into your email marketing program too.
When you send out automated reminders, customers will get a ping to check whether they’re still interested in the product or not. If you’re hosting an event, you may wish to send out pre-written emails with instructions on what to bring, directions, and other vital information.
Customer Support
Organising customer service with automatically-generated help desk tickets is brilliant for saving time and effort by enabling your team to know in what order they need to respond to inquiries, as well as tracking resolutions.
For example, you may not like the idea of sending out a robot-generated email to every customer who asks the same question. Instead, you have the ability to set up prefabricated responses in email. This allows you to make changes if you so wish before sending them out.
As a small business, you may need to wear several hats to get projects and tasks completed. However, with the help of automation, you can use technology to your advantage to get the job done while you concentrate on other areas of the company. Automating tasks can lower stress levels too, making it a no-brainer to implement for small organisations.