10 things your small business should automate

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    Consider this: You have an important meeting coming up and a lot of work piling up on your plate. At this time, all the manual work looks tedious. But what if you could automate everything so that the meeting can be held effortlessly?

    Here, we will be discussing the following concepts:

    Why automate business processes?

    Automation is one of the advanced features that can take over general business activities like bookkeeping, payroll, blogging, recruiting, and more while leaving the employees to focus on other responsibilities.

    Not only can automating your business save you time, minimise errors, and increase efficiency, but it can also allow you to focus on the other central aspects of the business.

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    Things to automate in your business

    The first step in deciding how to automate your organisation correctly is to determine which of your business procedures should be automated. Routine tasks can be automated easily. However, tasks that demand problem-solving and analytical skills are challenging to automate.

    You can say goodbye to the tedious tasks and errands by utilising the vast selection of applications, programs, and subscription services. Thus, it’s time to automate your business and reclaim those squandered hours.

    The following are ten things that you can automate in your small business:

    1. Managing social media

    A significant component in every business is its social media management since it aids in the growth of your brand and company.

    Social media marketing aids in:

    • brand discovery by more people 
    • engagement
    • building trust and relationships with potential and existing customers
    • gain customer loyalty
    • strengthening brand position in the market
    • acquire new customers
    • communicate with potential stakeholders

    Enhancing social interactions through automated tools is known as social media automation. It involves pre-scheduling social media posts, consolidating all posts under one platform, setting up bots to reply to basic queries, pre-planning social media updates or republishing popular content.

    The time spent maintaining and expanding brand accounts is reduced by automating social media posting, engagement, and management. There are several tools available, like Sendinblue, Hootsuite, HubSpot, to name a few.

    2. Scheduling meetings

    Meetings are necessary for every business. They are a way to ensure that informed decisions are taken after discussing with the other team members. 

    However, the labour involved in scheduling those meetings (like finding a time, issuing conferencing links, arranging calendar events, and filling out contact information) is time-consuming and monotonous. You can easily keep track of all your meetings if you use a scheduling tool for automation.

    Tools like Calendly, will empower your customer or supplier to select time from available slots instead of an unending chain of emails.

    3. Customer feedback

    Customer questions and feedback are essential to consider while running a small business.

    You can make changes to the products and deliver services based on your customers’ requirements with the help of customer feedback.

    Instead of going to every customer manually and asking for feedback, you can collect customers’ input using website surveys and mobile questionnaires.

    4. Managing invoices

    Invoicing is one of the responsibilities that a firm has to manage. Invoice automation is a positive move forward, as it can free up a significant amount of time for even the smallest business.

    It involves sending out pre-scheduled invoices at a predetermined time and date. One example of automated invoices is one-time invoices that can be readily issued even from mobile devices, without the requirement for a bookkeeper.

    5.  Email marketing

    Email automation can be done using an email automation platform.

    It will send automated emails with the right message to the required parties at the right time without doing anything manually. You can also utilise automated email responses to create the email sequences specifically customised to your audience’s needs and send them out at a predetermined time.

    When the company’s website statistics are linked with email marketing tools, you can identify the customer needs based on their activities, interests, and past sales. This can help you to increase the relevancy of your marketing.

    6. Sales funnel

    Sales are critical since they produce revenue for the company. An automated sales funnel is just a regular sales funnel with automation to keep things moving along. However, you will require software to set up the automation.

    7. Maintaining records

    It is critical to maintain business records to track all transactions for the year-end and management reporting purposes.

    A workflow management platform can help you to assist your business operations by automating record-keeping.

    To do so, you will need to create a workflow that captures the tasks that repeat themselves in your business operations. With this, you can easily maintain employee records, sales and purchases records, among other things.

    8. Bill payments

    Setting up automatic payments with your bank is a simple way to ensure your office has electricity without having to write cheques every month. Make sure regular payments like sales tax, purchases, and more are included in your profit and loss statements. Just because you are not writing checks doesn’t mean you are not spending any money.

    If your firm has a lot of receipts, scan them into automation apps to automatically receive the information you need from them. To avoid a slog during tax preparation, create a habit of not leaving the receipt tracking at the last minute.

    9. Automated reminders

    If your website sells products, you will want to increase your sales by reminding clients who have abandoned their carts. This is simple to automate, and you can easily do it with your email marketing program.

    If a customer’s shopping cart has been abandoned, send them a ping to see if they are still interested. If you are hosting an event or sending a client or employee to one, you might want to send out a pre-written email with directions, instructions on what to bring, and other pertinent information.

    Having a typical one-pager will save you from having to have dozens of one-on-one conversations.

    10. Customer support

    Organising customer service with automatically-generated help desk tickets can save time and effort by allowing your customer service team to know in what order they should respond to questions and track resolutions.

    Suppose you do not want to send a robot-generated email to everyone asking the same inquiries. You can set up prefabricated responses in mail, in which you can make the needed changes before sending.

    Sending out emails on customers’ or vendors’ birthdays or business anniversaries might help to build strong relationships.

    Hire a Small Business Accountant

    Work with a London-based accountant for tax, accounting, payroll, & EIS/ SEIS needs.

    Have a question? Call us on
    0203 900 3500
    Monday to Friday 9am – 5pm

    Wrap up

    Thanks to technological advances and cloud computing, many automation functions are available at a fraction of the cost. Automate these tasks at a minimum and buy yourself extra time to focus on serving your customers better.

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