Time is money, so start freeing up time to make room for growing revenue.
#1 E-commerce & inventory management automation
If you run a business that involves selling goods or services online, it’s likely that you spend a significant amount of time managing everything from purchase ordering and inventory management to shipping and fulfillment. Utilizing dedicated e-commerce and inventory management software can positively impact your entire sales process by enabling automatic reordering, payment processing, stock updating and a host of other benefits.
Taking it one step further, some e-commerce and inventory software solutions like TradeGecko and Shopify can be integrated with other software, so you can manage your entire sales, ordering, accounting, and fulfillment process from the one place. This has huge time-saving potential that smart online merchants can’t afford to overlook.
#2 Digital marketing automation
Regardless of your type of business, having a defined digital marketing strategy is key to getting ahead. But for many businesses, especially new ones, there isn’t much spare time or manpower to dedicate to marketing. That’s where automated digital marketing solutions come into play. Tools like Hootsuite, for example, can be used to manage and schedule all your social media posts from a single dashboard, while a solution like Needls enables automated ad creation and targets prospective customers for you. Depending on what you want to achieve, there’s a tool to manage virtually every component of your digital marketing strategy. It’s just a matter of finding one that has the capabilities you need.
#3 Customer relationship management (CRM) automation
AI is a hot topic nowadays and while it may seem like a far-fetched concept, the fact is that it’s becoming more widely used in day-to-day business.
One of its major uses is for automated chatbots, which provide customer service and answer questions based on keywords input by the customer in a chat window. Although this technology isn’t yet perfect, it’s already revolutionizing the way businesses connect with customers by enabling 24/7 support in real time. Not only that, but it cuts out the need for a customer service team to answer the same or similar questions time and time again, which means money can be invested elsewhere in the business.
Likewise, email marketing solutions like MailChimp allow you to set up automated emails for your subscriber base. So, any time customers want to know something (for example, “When will this item be back in stock?”), they can click a button that triggers a personalized email response.
While these three software automation techniques can be beneficial to business’s efficiency and revenue, there are a huge number of business automation solutions out there to suit different needs. It’s all about finding the right one to help you meet your goals.
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