Dhawal Shah
The most expensive resource in your business is not your brand or campaign cost; it is your time. To succeed, you must manage your time effectively via automation and optimize your organization.
Everyone has the same amount of time to work every day. Software Escrow Sales Director Mark Ryan believes that a business that has control of its time can stay focused, make better decisions, and produce a higher quality output through consistent productivity.
Modern technology can now automate 45% of a business’ activities, according to McKinsey. This potential saved time can enable your company to focus on improving your brand and profitability.
Automation relieves a business owner from multi-tasking and “micro-thinking” every process. The right tools allow SMEs to enhance productivity and eliminate human error. Automating simple recurring tasks can free up a significant amount of time for you. Entrepreneurs who believe they can do everything by themselves can lead the business to fail. Don’t let it be you.
So how can automation software help your business with your marketing, sales, and research?
The Five Ways Automation Helps Your Company Grow
1. Cost Efficiency
Automation tools let you create email and content templates. A simple copy-paste allows you to make an excellent newsletter or ready-to-publish blog post. In fact, marketing automation can handle content distribution, file hosting, and more.
Cincom is one example of a business who has turned to marketing automation and reaped the benefits of it. They used marketing automation to track their newsletter subscribers’ behavior to help identify qualified leads. This resulted in a 1,941% increase in their click-to-open (email) rates and generated 18 new sales leads weekly. Like Cincom, your business can also take advantage of marketing automation tools. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software make it easy to create and manage sales pipelines.
A study by Pace Productivity showed that the average time a salesperson typically spends on administrative tasks is 23% while the actual time spent selling is 22%. CRM tools can manage the administrative tasks such as sending out automated email follow-ups to sales leads, freeing up their time to do actual selling.
Besides managing sales pipelines effectively, CRM systems store valuable customer data, collect activity information from your business’ social network accounts and can even automate responses to customer feedback.
CRM systems sound simplistic, but the way they can free up more time and reduce expenses is undeniable. According to a Forrester study, about 50% of their respondents reported their marketing and sales teams improved their productivity by 5%. In fact, they saved at least $75,000 from their marketing budgets by using CRM and automation systems.
2. Consolidate Different Business Aspects
Marketing automation tools should not work as standalone. They can work together to connect the dots between the different aspects of your business – from marketing to sales to customer service.
A case study showed how marketing automation helped a tuition agency improve their productivity by 85%. Math Plus Academy Tuition Agency used Infusionsoft, a CRM system, to handle customer subscriptions, educate its customers on new products and even handle their e-commerce. The different business aspects were consolidated into one space enabling them to run their business more efficiently.
With the processes automated and the data stored in one place, changing of hands between old and new staff becomes smoother. This ensures continuity and no fragmentation in the business.
3. Recycle evergreen content
Manually marketing the same content over and over again to new, potential or current leads can be a chore. Marketing automation tools can take care of such mundane tasks allowing you to share and “recycle” evergreen content that you produce.
For example, Infusionsoft can be used with a Content Marketing System (CMS) such as WordPress to push out content to your customers. So if a new lead subscribes to your newsletter, Infusionsoft automatically sends them a welcome email and pushes out evergreen content. Any content you produce isn’t just left in your archives to rot away. It continues providing value to your business with every new lead.
4. Virtually Eliminate Human Error
As mentioned earlier, multi-tasking makes individuals prone to error. An overburdened employee who handles multiple tasks while keeping track of an SME’s product stocks without automation tools is likely to deliver an erroneous report. This can lead to troubled product analytics, which can render marketing campaigns based on this data fruitless.
Case in point: Zerion Software states that 80% of manufacturing and engineering errors stem from human errors. You can say the same for departments where error can result in huge profit losses such as marketing and sales.
Automation systems let you streamline an employee or business sub-routine to produce the needed outcome in fewer steps. This makes each procedure less tedious and prone to error.
5. Unlock Your Lead Generation Potential
Marketing automation unlocks your brand’s potential to improve lead generation and ultimately increases profit.
One example is stationery and greeting card company PaperStyle.com’s marketing automation campaign in partnership with WhereoWare. Depending on the trigger action, leads were sent tailored emails with relevant content. This led to a 244% higher open rate than average and a 330% increase in revenue for each email. Click rates reached 161% compared to their previous performance.
Wrapping Up
Your business hires employees because you need a competent individual to handle specific responsibilities. Automation tools and systems can take your business to the next level by adding savings to you business’ most precious resource: time. Even better, unlike your employees, marketing automation tools can run 24/7, making them valuable investments in the long-run.
Don’t think twice about investing in automation systems and software. Simplify your business’ procedures, reduce human errors, automate needless efforts, and accelerate the growth of your company.
Interested in automation? Check out 2Stallion’s Marketing Automation services details.
