As a small business owner, you have plenty to worry about. You might be doing everything from staffing to payroll to website building and so much more. Ultimately, no organization will be at their best with one person stretching themselves too thin.
With so much to balance, it can be easy to lose focus on bringing in new customers and retaining existing clients. Fortunately, there’s a way to take some of that work off your plate.
Enacting business automation is just one of the ways you can free up time and improve your company’s marketing effectiveness at the same time.
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What is business automation?
Business automation is the use of software to perform marketing tasks and campaigns without human intervention. This can include sending out automatic email responses, moving leads through your sales funnel and creating marketing flows for specific use cases.
By integrating automation into various aspects of a business, you can save time, reduce errors and focus on more strategic activities that drive business growth.
In fact, marketers report saving 25 hours per week with automation, according to a 2021 poll by Zapier. And customer service representatives, salespeople and accountants say they save up to 16 hours a week with automation.
Why is small business automation important?
Automation can solve several small business challenges, and ultimately save you time and money when running a business. Some benefits include:
Efficiency: You can streamline repetitive tasks that don’t require critical thinking or an expert’s touch.
Consistency: Ensure that tasks are performed consistently and remain on brand all the time, even across multiple locations or users.
Scalability: Automation makes it easier to scale operations like follow-up emails or appointment confirmations without a proportional increase in workload.
Cost-effectiveness: By reducing the need for manual labor, you can save on labor costs and reduce errors that could lead to costly mistakes.
As Adam Tuttle, ActiveCampaign’s senior business activation director says:
“Automations are a driving force behind creating a quality customer experience. From the moment a lead is captured, automations empowers small businesses to create consistent and engaging brand interactions with potential customers, customers and former customers.”
28 things your small business should automate
There are dozens of different types of business automation worth exploring. While you might not necessarily need to automate all of these things, implementing even just a few of these examples could save you precious time and money—whether you’ve owned a business for years or are just learning how to start a business.
Ecommerce automation
01. Abandoned cart emails
Often, potential customers put items they’re looking at in their cart but don’t complete the purchase for one reason or another. An automatic abandoned cart email is a great way to personally target those customers with the specific product they’re interested in.
02. User accounts
User accounts allow customers to securely store passwords and payment information, which allows for quicker transactions and makes it easier for repeat customers to return. Plus, accounts allow users to set up alerts for when a product is in stock or discounted, and more.
03. Inventory management
Regardless of your scale, your customers must have the right information. That’s why implementing an inventory management system (IMS) is vital; an IMS automatically updates inventory levels in real time, reducing the risk of overselling.
04. Order confirmation emails
After each purchase, a confirmation email can be instantly sent to each buyer with specific information, like their order number, product details and a shipping code if necessary.
05. Customer feedback requests
A great way to iterate on your products or improve the experience when making a website is to solicit feedback. You could send an automatic customer feedback request within a week of purchasing to invite your customers to share their honest thoughts.
Sales automation
06. Sales pipelines
Manually tracking potential sales is a time-consuming process that’s prone to error. With customer relationship management (CMS) software, you can automatically track and manage leads and conversations through custom sales funnels that you created.
07. Sales reporting
Another helpful CRM automation is the ability to generate sales reports automatically to monitor performance and make data-driven decisions.
08. Customer quotes
If your small business deals in quotes, an equation system can automatically generate and send quotes to potential clients based on predefined criteria.
09. Upselling and product recommendation emails
A personal touch is huge when it comes to sales. While email marketing might not seem personal, it can be with personalized emails suggesting related products or upgrades based on a customer’s past behaviors.
Lead generation automation
10. Electronic signatures
Use tools like DocuSign or DocHub to automate the process of collecting signatures on important documents. This helps you to stay organized and close deals quickly.
11. Follow-up emails
Much like abandoned cart emails and order confirmation emails, you can create automated follow-up emails any time someone contacts you, confirming that their request was received. Follow-up emails can even be used as transactional emails after a customer expresses interest in a product.
12. Lead scoring
If you have a lot of leads, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start. A lead scoring system will automatically score and prioritize leads based on custom parameters and their behavior and interactions with your business. This allows you to prioritize hot leads and close those sales fast.
13. Landing page creation
One of the most popular ways to generate leads is to use a landing page. This can be for specific campaigns or long-term strategies like email collection. Automated tools can create and test various landing pages on your behalf.
14. Lead inquiries
Chatbots and other tools that automate lead responses have been spurred on by the recent AI boom and will be a crucial asset going forward. This large-language model can give potential customers some of the key information they need, and generate leads for you at any time of the day or night.
Marketing automation
15. Social media scheduling
Schedule social media posts months in advance with social media software. This allows your company to plan out marketing initiatives and stay consistent with branding across social media channels.
16. Email marketing
Use platforms like ActiveCampaign to automate email campaigns and newsletters that consistently engage customers and allow your company to market your products at a lower cost than most marketing channels. You can also auto-segment users and leads into particular categories based on their interests or behaviors, and send them marketing communication that fits their needs.
17. PPC campaigns
Take advantage of AI-powered tools offered by Google and other ad platforms to automate your PPC campaigns. Stay within your bidding and keyword parameters without having to check them daily.
18. A/B testing
Automatically run and analyze tests to optimize your marketing strategies and website design. For example, you can send out an email with two different subject lines that run to 200 people each. After those 400 sends, the better-performing subject line will automatically become your only subject line.
19. Analytics and reporting
An easy way to stay on top of your numbers is to set up automatic reports in whichever analytics program you use. This is ideal for weekly sales reports and reports on specific marketing campaigns.
Task management automation
20. Project management
Platforms like Asana or Monday centralize all tasks that need to be done for specific projects or on a daily basis. They can also perform automation, including task due date reminders, stuck task notifications and recurring task creation.
21. Spreadsheets and databases
While business software like CRM is great at collecting and organizing data, sometimes you need an old-fashioned spreadsheet to do the job. Fortunately, tools like Zapier can automate data entry updates to important sheets and other databases as sales are made or leads are generated.
22. Business operations
Invoicing and payroll processing can be a huge headache. Sites like Wix, ADP and Workday make routine business much easier by automating payroll processing, storing past paychecks and automating invoices.
Discover all of Wix's features, including its built-in automation tools and free invoice generator.
23. Internal communication efforts
If you have several employees or locations, you can use Slack or other instant messaging services to auto-post major company announcements and other internal communication so all your employees are sure to see it.
24. Document management
An asset management system is a great way to use automated systems to manage, store and retrieve business documents. Document management systems allow for automatic storage and filing so you always know where important documents are stored.
CRM automation
25. User segmentation
Auto-segment users and leads into particular categories based on their interests or behaviors, and send them marketing communication that fits their needs.
26. Customer support
Software like Zendesk allows any customer support tickets to be automatically applied to people on your customer experience team. You can even set up rules for specific types of tasks to go to specific members of your team.
27. Loyalty programs
If you have a customer loyalty system, it’s far easier to use
automation to keep track of rewards as customers complete purchases—specifically because the alternative is manually keeping track of points as purchases are made.
28. Customer data syncing
If you’re using several pieces of software, check to see if you can integrate your platforms with your primary CRM so that customer data is synced across all your platforms and tools.
Get the Wix Loyalty Program app for free.
Trends in small business automation
Business automation has never been more popular, and that is not expected to change. Rather, the type of technology available to small businesses is apt to change.
We asked ActiveCampaign’s senior business activation director, Adam Tuttle, what he sees when it comes to small business automation trends to get an idea of what to expect in the future.
AI and machine learning
“AI and machine learning are fed by data. Marketing automation is an incredible resource for gathering data and using the data that is being collected. It is no longer only used to send emails, but rather used to gather and manage data collection in real-time. This technology is now available to small businesses and is not isolated to enterprise organizations.“
Advanced chatbots
"Chatbots are incredible resources to collect information in real time and feed that data back into a marketing automation platform. This provides the marketer with more opportunities to create personalized experiences along the customer journey. “
Hyper-personalization
“Personalization in 2024 goes far beyond inserting a name into an email. It looks at the culmination of actions, non-actions and first- and third-party data to build an individual profile. It also provides the opportunity to react to the data when determining the types of messaging, and when determining the content of those messages, including text, images and colors. Personalization today means creating a unique experience on every level of interaction.”