Every business wants to grow. With the proper tools and tactics, making more sales can come easy. But with more sales comes more work…unless you add automation to the mix.
Automation can both reduce a company’s workload and bring in more customers. Here are five ways that businesses can utilize automation to grow and develop:
1) Automated Live Chat
Offering customer service is vital to keeping your clients happy. When they have a question, they need (and deserve) an answer. However, it can be tough (and costly) to offer one-on-one assistance for every inquiry.
Automated live chat helps solve this issue.
An automated chat system allows customers to ask a question and gain an automated response that could help solve their problem. Think of it as an interactive help page.
If customers are empowered to find a solution to their problems without picking up the phone, that frees up the customer service team to handle more serious inquiries. This saves everyone time and effort.
2) Automatic Social Media Posting
Social media has long been a major part of business marketing. From advertised posts to organic ones, companies of all kinds have benefited from these platforms.
But it can be a hassle to keep up with regular posting…unless you automate the process.
Tools like IFTTT and Buffer allow users to schedule their posts ahead of time and trigger posts to be shared in certain situations. Social media coordinators can write countless posts and create just as many images, then set them on a regular schedule instead of posting throughout the day.
Social media automation isn’t totally hands-off but it can make the job much easier and more consistent.
3) Email List Building
Everyone has the experience of placing an order or signing up for a service and ending up on an email list. Sometimes it’s seen as inconvenient when other times it’s just what we want.
Email list building is a great way to stay in regular contact with clients. Customers that make a purchase once have shown an interest in the business and may be interested in updates and deals. Automating an email list can keep your clients up to date on your work and lead to countless more sales.
4) Subscription Options
Subscriptions have cropped up in all industries in recent years. It seems any service can be turned into a subscription these days.
The same can now be said for products.
Some businesses offer the ability to make a purchase and set up a “subscription”, shipping another batch of the product every week, month, or quarter. These automated services ensure that customers get the products they need while the business can enjoy a continuous source of income.
Subscriptions help ensure that, the next time your customer needs a product, they will come back to the same source.
5) Customized Messaging
When a business understands its customers, it can customize the messaging that reaches them.
Using analytic software, surveys, and other data collection techniques, any business can learn more about the people who visit their website or buy their products. This information can be used to discover where their customers reside online and what they need to see or hear in order to make a purchasing decision.
Once these customized messages are developed, they can be sent to visitors or customers in an effort to make more sales.
Automation can make any business easier to manage and lead to more sales than ever before. Using these techniques and tools can make for a better experience for business owners as well as customers.
