Automation in your business creates countless benefits, such as sending emails on a schedule, syncing data between apps, and assigning and notifying your team members of new tasks. You can also use automation for your marketing and focus more on sales.
Whether your organization has a considerable budget or is low in resources, there are effective ways to use automation.
This article will focus on the types of automation, allowing you and your business to concentrate more on your marketing and sales.
Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation is probably the first thing that will come to your mind when you hear the word automation since it’s one of the most accessible.
One of the advantages of using automation for your email marketing is you’d be able to personalize the message and reach the right target.
If you are running an eCommerce business, you can send email notifications to your customers regarding your new promotions. You can also send them reminders regarding the items left in their cart and waiting to be checked out.
Most email marketing tools have an automation feature. Make sure to pick the one with the suitable functionalities to meet your business’s needs.
Sales Automation
Sales automation is about managing your pipeline efficiently. It’ll reduce friction and increase your conversion rates.
Applying business intelligence automation makes accomplishing tasks relatively easier, especially regarding sales. It automates the responsibilities of sales representatives and managers on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.
One of the benefits of using it is to avoid awkward conversations with your clients regarding their payment due. Using automation, you’ll be able to send invoices and payment reminders.
If your company has a sales team process, automation allows you to train the new members. This will help you manage your time more effectively.
External Marketing Automation
External marketing focuses on the customers. This means the marketing strategies you create should reach your target audience.
You can use it to automate SMS to your customers and schedule or republish social media messages. Your customers can access new course content at set intervals after signing up using this type of automation.
For instance, you want to send a message to your customers regarding a promotion your online shop has. Instead of manually sending them messages, which is tedious work, it’ll be much simpler to send them automatically. You can also set the schedule for when to send it so the timing would be more favorable for you.
Internal Marketing Automation
Unlike external marketing, internal marketing concentrates on your employees. Simply put, it’ll allow team members to complete the tasks instead of doing them manually. This will help streamline multi-stage processes, such as publishing content or creating new marketing strategies.
Using internal marketing automation creates a vital bridge between sales and marketing as it notifies the members whether they need to focus on some marketing goals or accomplish one.
For example, when setting lead scoring and qualification. You have to check whether conditions were met and the next action plan. When automated, team members will receive notification and can follow up on each lead, turning it into a successful marketing campaign.
Data Automation
Automation isn’t only effective for dealing with repetitive tasks. Gathering and analyzing data is also critical to marketing. Getting the information manually is a heavy task as it consumes plenty of time.
Even if you are highly skilled in analyzing the data, ensuring everything is organized is a different case. You have to focus on each detail and be accurate.
When the data is relatively small, it might be manageable when the business is starting up. However, it can be instantly heavy once tons of information keeps coming in.
Data automation frees up your time from the tedious work of gathering and analyzing data. You’d be able to focus more on decision-making tasks for your business’s success.
One of the most common ways to automate data is to sync contact details between apps. If there’s a change on one app, it’ll also appear on the other ones, making the system centralized.
Customer Care Automation
Have you ever called and waited in a queue to ask for information? Many consumers call customer care teams daily to learn about policies and ongoing promotions.
Instead, you can use chatbots for chat-based systems. It can easily answer knowledge-based questions. If that doesn’t fix or they need further assistance, they will be rerouted to your customer care team.
This will optimize customer experience, and at the same time, you can personalize the interaction.
This automation allows your support team to deal with a higher volume of customers with urgent issues without decreasing the one-on-one personalized engagement.
Ecommerce Automation
With the continuous rise of online shopping worldwide, keeping track of stocks and sales becomes more challenging, especially when done manually. Fortunately, you can apply this type of automation as it allows you to manage your eCommerce site more efficiently.
Everything is done automatically; you don’t need to be in your shop. From managing the stocks, tracking the sales, and checking delivery statuses until the item reaches your customer, you’ll have eyes on everything.
Another advantage of using this type of automation is the payment process. You can use multiple channels to process your customers’ payments, such as PayPal, Visa, and Wise.
Management Automation
Like customer care automation, this type doesn’t diminish engagement between people. Instead, it frees up your time when dealing with your team and supporting their growth.
It sends reminders to team members for upcoming and overdue tasks. It’ll also notify them regarding changes in their projects if any. You can share materials automatically if you have new hires instead of sending them to them individually.
Since you’ve saved plenty of time, you can focus more on issues that require your management skills, such as dealing with clients regarding their purchase orders or perhaps analyzing the data more efficiently for an effective marketing campaign.
Sum up
There are many management tools available in the market. Some of them offer all-in-one functionalities, while some provide specific automated functions.
You can utilize all these types of automation to focus on your marketing and sales. It’s best to understand your needs first and choose which ones are ideal for your business.
Automation is not to change everything and reduce your workforce; it is a way to make complex things more straightforward. It saves you more time, allowing your business and teams to become more productive.