Business process automation lets technology work for you by freeing up time and allowing your business to run more efficiently. The average small business owner has to manage a lot of items on their daily checklist. One thing they don’t have time for is endless hours working in an accounting management system. Time is money, and automation software saves an organization time. That time can be focused on more critical business areas like customer service or new product development. This article shares five tips on how small businesses can grow by using automation software.
1. Accounts Payable Automation Software
Accounts Payable automation software has become one of the top ways small businesses save money by freeing up valuable resources. AP automation gives companies complete control over their AP process by making it 100% paperless and putting accounting departments in charge of their own AP workflows.
AP automation frees up time you’d otherwise spend adjusting manual processes, moving transactions manually from department to department, and double-keying data, which costs your company money via wasted wages or missed billable hours. This results in fewer resources required for AP activities and a smaller labor cost overall. Fewer people are necessary to do AP work, which means better cash flow and increased profitability.
This helps companies streamline their check approval, pre-audit, and matching processes. Which means less employee involvement and faster processing times from start to finish. It also reduces human errors, like wrongly categorized expenditures or unapplied credits. Automating AP accounts helps organizations decrease AP settlement times and get paid faster than their competitors.
2. Automated Client Communication and Email Marketing
The days of manually sending out repetitive emails to clients or leads are over. Email applications can now auto-respond, manage mailing lists for you, and automatically blast your content at predetermined triggers. These tools are excellent for customer engagement, content distribution, and sales lead generation.
Auto-responding to new inquiries, auto-releasing sales campaigns at different times in your sales funnels, and releasing content campaigns to nurture leads are three great ways businesses can automate marketing. Auto-responding is important because it ensures you respond quickly when there’s a customer inquiry. Automation creates time for each campaign, ensuring they don’t fall into one big clump. Communication automation can help customers more efficiently by breaking down emails with relevant subjects and content according to where they are in the funnel. Last, email newsletters allow you to keep clients informed without having them constantly check back or reach out about what has been going on since their last visit!
3. Automated Customer Support
Customer Support is an essential part of ensuring a fantastic customer experience. Manually tracking customer requests can be time-consuming and disorganized; help desk software allows for quick responses ensuring problems are followed in one central place with customizable workflows or actions depending on your business’s specific needs. Helpdesk software is essentially a suite of tools that streamlines the customer support process by allowing you to monitor, track, and respond quickly. Automatically send template responses to customers with an intelligent self-service knowledge base that keeps all customer interactions in one place.
These tools allow businesses to respond quickly and efficiently even during off-hours. Automating this entire process allows for less employee time spent on support while providing an improved customer experience for your clients/customers.
4. Sales and Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a new technological innovation that allows small businesses to reach customers on multiple channels, including email, social media, and websites. It can help generate leads for them while allowing them to act on these leads more efficiently.
How can automation help small businesses? Research shows they can easily access how potential customers react to marketing efforts. This is especially useful for small businesses because it helps them adapt their marketing campaigns accordingly to entice more leads and convert these into sales.
Many small businesses struggle to identify how customers are reacting to their marketing. This can prevent them from making necessary adjustments that would entice more potential leads and sales conversions. Automation helps solve this problem by providing access to data on customer reactions, so business owners know exactly what changes need to be made in order for the campaign’s message to resonate with its audience better than before.
5. Automate Social Media
Social media marketing can be time-consuming. However, if it is not managed correctly and consistently, a small business will waste its efforts on scattered activities with little to no results. A social media strategy ensures that the best practices are being executed, so you get more out of your daily posts.
Automating your social media can help you reduce the manual load on the marketing team. It can free up their time to focus on more important projects.
Reap the benefits of social media cross-posting by automatically sharing or creating new posts. Share your latest blog post to all of your platforms, and generate leads with a single click using pre-made social media images for each account. Or create one long automated message detailing everything you’ve been up to across multiple platforms in seconds rather than hours!
As business owners, we all feel pressed for time. That is true when trying to grow our businesses and take them up a level. The realization hits that we can’t keep going as we are because automation will help us recover lost time and focus more on what matters—running the business! Automation will provide you with the best return on your business investment. You’ll have more control over your time which allows for a better work-life balance and less stress. Leading to an efficient and profitable business.