Competition is fierce in the business world – both in terms of sales and efficiency.

This is where automation comes in handy. If you want to remain competitive, you need to automate or someone else will automate you out of business. By automating you can put routine, redundant processes on autopilot and shift your focus to more important tasks that make or break new ventures.

There’s no shortage of efficient and effective solutions to business automation on the market today; you can automate and streamline everything from customer service to marketing to payroll. However, just because you can automate a process doesn’t mean you should.

Automation in the right way gives your company legs to scale upwards and grow, because it helps you engage with customers in a way that makes them more likely to buy. Here are four strategies that can help you automate your business the smart way.

#1. Let Your Email Marketing Strategies Generate More Sales

Many businesses avoid using email automation because they fear it will look inhuman and robotic. While these can a turnoff to many customers, automating your email sales funnel doesn’t have to be impersonal. If you do it right, you’ll see a huge increase in your conversions.
Link for more information – https://tweakyourbiz.com/sales/5-ways-use-marketing-automation-get-repeat-business

By automating your company, you can put together a few different campaigns – newsletters, internal sales campaigns and specific campaigns – to showcase different offers. With marketing automation software in place, you’ll make your business more efficient and scalable. However, remember that email marketing isn’t about mass emails; it’s more about giving your customers what they need.

Set up a series of emails to create your marketing campaigns. And use these emails to nudge leads down the sales funnel and encourage them to make a purchase.

#2. Make Your Customers Feel Valued

Just like most businesses, most of your customer queries likely come in through email, right? If so, chances are you can’t respond as quickly as you’d like to each request. And wait time can negatively impact your customer retention numbers.

To most people, waiting in line for help is frustrating. And waiting online, the time can feel even more frustrating. How does a customer know you’ve received their query? How do they know when to expect a response?
Link for more information – https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting-in-line-is-torture.html?_r=0

This is where automation comes into play. By setting up an autoresponder that acknowledges receipt of customer queries, you can offer your customers a sense of security. And when you respond with an estimated answer time, this immediately reduces the anxiety of the unknown. The customer knows you’ve received their email and you’ll get back to them soon.

If you want to scale and grow your business, it’s important to deploy this strategy.

#3. Nurture Your Customers after the Purchase

Making a sale feels great. But don’t sit back and relax!

Once a customer makes a purchase, interacting with them is more important than ever before. If you don’t do so, you’ll lose a valuable opportunity to connect with them. Interacting with customers after purchase helps you make sure they’re happy with their experience and it boosts the chances that they’ll buy from you again.

Like your pre-sale campaigns, you can automate your post-sale campaigns to make your customers happy without having to make an extra effort.

For instance, in 2008 when Coca-Cola noticed a decline in their sales among teenagers, they introduced a new campaign on pack point rewards. So when a customer bought a product, they’d enter the code on a website called Coke Zone to get reward points. This got customers to give Coca-Cola their personal information, and the company would they target them with an automated ongoing campaign to get them to buy more.

This strategy worked. Coca-Cola saw a 49% open rate and a 71% click-through rate increase.
Link for more information – http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/intelligence/2012/07/case_study_how_coke_zones_cust.php

#4. Keep Your Social Media Accounts Active

Managing and keeping social media accounts active is time-consuming. It takes time to create a post, and it takes even more time to respond to comments. And you don’t have time to keep checking your Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts.

But if you want to scale your business, you have to maintain an active presence on your social sites.

There are many ways you can automate your content to keep your social media accounts current while saving time to make connections with potential customers.

* Hootsuite has a great tool called Suggestions. By entering a few keywords for content you care about, you’ll be able to see several pre-populated tweets related to those keywords. And with one click, you can schedule them so that your Twitter stream is always full of interesting content.
Link – https://hootsuite.com/

* Another automation worth checking is Social Jukebox. It’s useful if you have a marketing campaign that you want to promote for a specific period. Type your tweets and schedule when they can automatically publish.
Link – https://www.socialjukebox.com/

To scale your business, stop trading hours for dollars. Growing a company needs you to give robotic tasks to software and tools whenever possible. And you’ll be shocked at how much more you can achieve and how fast you move to the next level once you invest more of your time in creative, human aspects of the company and less time in the redundant tasks.