Do you ever feel like you could get so much more done in a day if you only had more time? You’d love to follow up with your leads better, there just never seems to be enough hours.
One of the most helpful things that small businesses can do with their cloud applications to create automations that take over certain manual tasks and give them an extra pair of virtual hands.
For example, say you know that people respond well to your product case studies when you email them. But you can’t just put them in a general auto responder because not all customers should get the same case studies. If you know how to tag and automate, instead of spending hours doing those follow up emails and painstakingly attaching each case study yourself, an automation could do it all for you.
Marketing automation is shown to offer 17.27% higher click through rates and 250% higher purchase rates.
When planning your initiatives for 2020, by including a few easy IT automations, you could end up saving time while also improving your lead and sales conversions.
How to Get Started with Automation
Automation can be done in any number of cloud-based programs, including VoIP, and by integrating those programs, you can share data from one app to another. For example, if you use Slack for team messaging and Zendesk for customer service, anytime a new lead comes into Zendesk, it could alert a specific Slack channel automatically.
To begin with automation, let’s look at an important building block of the communication, which is a trigger and action application.
While some applications will integrate without this “middleman” if you want to take full advantage of automation for all your programs, you’ll most likely need one of these. They connect one application to another and transfer data.
Two well-known trigger and action applications are:
- IFTTT
- Zapier
The basics of automation is that you create a trigger and an action. This is also known as “if this, then that.” Meaning if this happens (the trigger), then do that thing (the action).
Once you have that basic concept down you can automate multiple areas of your workflow to do things like:
- Improve productivity
- Save time
- Reduce manual entry
- Improve response times
- Reduce keying errors
Benefit from These Simple Automations
It’s amazing what a difference an automation can make. It can free up hours per week by replacing the need for manual entry, and ensure your customers are getting responded to quickly.
Here are several easy automations that can boost your business in the year ahead.
Email Nurture Campaign
Using a program like MailChimp, you can set up a form that will tag customers, and based upon that tag and their actions, feed them appropriate information at time intervals you set up.
Leads that receive targeted content have 72% higher conversion rates.
If you sell work boots and ballet slippers, here’s how you might set that up:
- Have a radio button on your form that asks, “Boots or Slippers”?
- The automation tags the lead based upon that choice
- The “Boots” tag gets an email immediately with a coupon off a pair of boots
- Two days later, if they haven’t used it, they get another email with a video about how your boots are made
- When they watch the video, they get a Thank You email with a reminder about their coupon and some testimonial quotes about your great boots
Once the nurture campaign is set up, all that happens without you doing a thing.
Sales Team Lead Notification
Most business have leads coming in from different areas – email, phone, webform, chat – and a salesperson might not get it while it’s hot, which is the best time to interact with a lead.
Use a central CRM program that will capture all your leads then automate a notification to your sales team, via app message or text, whenever a new lead comes into the system.
Connect Your Shopping Cart to Your Cloud Accounting
Keying errors can cause a product to be shipped to the wrong place or cause a bounced email. Reduce the chance of errors while also freeing up some time for your accounting team by using a “middleman” program to automatically send cart sales from your website into an accounting program, like QuickBooks online.
Send a Follow Up Email After a Missed Call
Playing phone tag can be time consuming and unproductive, but you can get a step ahead by using your VoIP program to trigger a call result and then create an action based upon that which automatically sends a follow up email saying something like “Sorry I missed you! I just left you a voicemail. Let me know when’s the best time to reach you.”
Automate Review Requests
72% of customers won’t decide to do business with a company until they’ve read their reviews. By automating your review process, you can earn more reviews for your company without spending a lot of extra time.
Using a simple trigger from your accounting or inventory program that designates something has shipped or a service has been completed can trigger a review request automatically, including links to sites like Google My Business or Yelp.
Capture More Cart Sales
If you sell products online, you’re most likely used to people abandoning their cart because they’re still the decision-making process. Using a website plugin can automate follow up emails like “You left something in your cart…” or “Here’s a coupon…” and help you capture more of those abandon cart sales.
Need Help Making the Most of Your Cloud Solutions?
From custom VoIP setup to helping you chose the best technologies for your home, business, or classroom, Cris’s Tech Repair can help you optimize your technology to its fullest.
Contact us today to for a cloud optimization consultation. Call 561-985-4961 or reach out online.