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If you want to succeed in business, it’s in your best interest to automate menial, repetitive tasks. Your time is better spent making crucial business decisions, negotiating new deals, or figuring out how to increase revenues.
Luckily, we live in an age of automation. You can use software to complete undemanding but important tasks, sometimes at no cost to you. Below is a list of tasks you should consider automating using online tools.
Client Outreach
Your business can’t grow unless you keep looking for new customers. The problem: client outreach isn’t always a success. To increase your chances of landing an interested customer, you must contact lots of potential clients.
There are a few ways to contact leads. The most common method is to look for their email addresses and reach out to them manually. The process is tedious and often results in emails being flagged as spam.
A better solution is to contact leads through their website’s contact forms. You see, contact forms exist to help website owners receive messages without revealing their email addresses.
When you send your message, the web form forwards it to the site owner’s email address. By using automatic web form filling software, you can save time and reach out to hundreds of leads in a short time.
Posting Blog and Social Media Posts
Blogging is an excellent way to build a community for your business. Social media helps you expand this community. But as you probably know, running a blog and social media requires a lot of commitment.
However, you can save plenty of time by automating one aspect of blogging: publishing. By automating social media and blog posts through tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, you can focus on more important aspects of your business.
Sure, you’ll still need to create content for your blog and social media. But these too, are tasks you can outsource. You could work with freelancers to create awesome posts for your blog and social media.
Then you can add these posts to your automation tools and have them publish one after another. Henceforth, your only job will be to respond to fans who comment or ask questions related to your posts.
Scheduling Appointments
Scheduling appointments can be a pain in the neck. You may think a specific date will work for everyone, only for the other person to claim it will be inconvenient to them.
Now, you don’t need to go back and forth with clients before you all agree on the best date to meet. You need to find a great tool for scheduling appointments. Square Appointments, Zoho Bookings and Acuity Scheduling are all excellent examples.
These tools feature a calendar that helps you pick your preferred date and time for a business or personal meeting. You then share a link with your partners asking them to also book dates when they will be available.
If you all choose a date to meet, the app blocks it from your calendar. They also notify your clients that they have an appointment with you on their preferred date.
Customer Service
More businesses are investing in chatbots and CRM software than ever before. The simple explanation is that automating customer service can help your business save money and earn the loyalty of your customers.
Besides, modern Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software automates more than one task. It might include a web form designed to help you receive messages and complaints from clients without revealing your personal email address.
It might also feature a ticket system that helps you sort ought customer queries chronologically. This in turn helps you respond to customers fast and efficiently because you can sort out their questions, and contacts and respond promptly.
With the addition of a chatbot, you can improve your customer relationship greatly. Chatbots help your customers find answers to popular problems fast. In doing so, you can reduce traffic in your inbox and still have satisfied customers.
Simple Business Tasks and Projects
They say if you’re not ready to outsource, you’re not ready to be an entrepreneur. Now, you can’t outsource everything. But you can give out tedious but important tasks you don’t have to do.
Think of creating blog posts as we mentioned earlier. Maybe you have data that needs to be cleaned and organized. You can outsource these tasks. And to ensure they’re done diligently; you can rely on tools like Trello.
Trello gives you a platform to title new tasks and allocate them to different people. The tool then notifies them via email. You can attach supporting files, set deadlines, and add comments to each task.
When your employees or freelancers complete the tasks, they then upload them onto the same platform. This process helps you run your business in an organized manner. And you also get to save time.
Accounts & Payroll
Whether you want to send invoices to your clients or pay your employees, you can save time by using an automation tool. Take Xero as an example. It’s based on the cloud, meaning you can access it in any part of the world.
With Xero, you could also add a shopping cart to your website. This way, your clients buy and pay automatically. That being said, it also lets you add an accountant to fix errors you might make while completing payrolls.
If you need to be more efficient with money, consider buying another tool for budgeting. This way, you can track how your business is spending money and determine whether to make budget cuts on certain things.
Data Backup
Backing up data is essential for every business. Although you can do the process manually, it’s a waste of time. Nearly every data storage platform gives you the choice to automate the process.
It doesn’t matter if it’s word documents, photos, or videos. If you have a cloud storage platform on your desktop, you can have it back up your files automatically. It’s safe and in the best interest of your business.
