Are you and your employees spending too much time working on non-productive tasks? It’s a common problem in many organizations and the time you waste doing these activities could be put to better use working on more productive things. Thankfully, you can automate most of the tedious and mundane duties you need to do in a modern business. Below are some areas of a business you should consider automating.
Bookings
Manually taking bookings in a business can waste a lot of time. In many instances, the person taking down the details of a booking may be responsible for doing other tasks. As a result, these employees often have to stop what they are doing and focus their efforts on taking bookings. A range of different online booking systems are available that do this work automatically for you.
Scheduling Your Work
Scheduling your work is another time-consuming chore. However, scheduling software programs do all the hard work for you and you even have a range of online systems and apps available that allow people to schedule work from any location. For instance, if you have a salon, there are salon software systems available that have a scheduling feature that takes care of this aspect of the business.
Online Sales
More shoppers than ever are turning to the web to find a bargain. This means retailers need to move with the times and set up an online version of their store on the internet. The latest ecommerce solutions allow you to advertise and list products online.
Shoppers and customers can then use a shopping cart facility and a checkout facility. Once a transaction is complete, these systems are designed to send an invoice or receipt through email. The whole sales process takes place online and the retailer never meets their customers.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with previous customers and potential customers. Over time, you may need to send large numbers of emails to many different people. Managing email campaigns can quickly get of control and this is where an autoresponder comes to the rescue. An autoresponder stores the contact details of people who give you their contact details such as their name and email address. You can load a number of pre-written emails into your autoresponder and the system will send these emails to your subscribers at certain scheduled times.
Backup Systems
advanced robotic hand image source Daily mailHave you ever lost important changes you made to a file or had your website hacked? If so, you probably wish you had a backup. However, manually backing up everything you do is not a practical solution and most people forget to do this anyway. This is why you should use services that schedule and automatically back up your work.
Customer Relationship Management
A wide range of sophisticated software systems are available that make it much easier to handle all of the data produced by the interactions that take place between a business and its customers. Customer Relationship Management systems take basic customer data and allow you to analyze it and use it for a wide range of purposes. This is a much faster and effective way to process this information, which would be extremely difficult to do manually.
Scheduled Blog Posts
You need to be extremely disciplined to publish blog posts on a regular basis and a lack of discipline or time often prevents blog owners from posting content as often as they should. However, there is a solution. The leading blogging platforms like WordPress have a scheduling feature that lets you load multiple blog posts into your blog and schedule these blog posts for publishing at a future time. This means you don’t have to be logged into your blog when your content goes live on the internet.
Social Media
Posting on social media websites takes up a lot of time too. Thankfully, there are systems like Hootsuite that allow you to view all of your social media accounts in one place. Your future messages can then be added and scheduled to be posted at a future time.
Mobile Apps
There is a mobile app for almost every type of business activity. Many of these apps are designed to take away the hassle associated with invoicing, managing business transactions, marketing campaigns and much more. All of these tasks are done in the background and you can simply view your phone to see how things are progressing.
Time is the most precious resource a business has. The more time you can save working on repetitive, unproductive tasks, the more efficient your business becomes. So, consider automating each of the areas listed above.
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