Crushing Cones Blog
It’s Time To Take Automation Seriously
- March 14, 2023
Being a b2b agency, we come across businesses from all sorts of industries who are looking to build or maintain some sort of online presence. This also exposes us to a number of business processes such as marketing strategies, sales funnels and more.
One commonality that stood out to us was a lack of automation. Even for simple tasks like appointment reminders, welcome emails and followups. Comparable to sending a fax in the world of email, we saw a lot of time and resources being wasted on repetitive tasks conducted manually.
Our article today will highlight a few important reasons for embracing automation for day to day tasks. We’ll primarily focus on marketing automation as we think businesses have the most to gain with a low barrier of entry. However, automation can be just as effective toward sales funnels and other business processes.
Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency!
It’s all about streamlining and automating repetitive tasks. Would you rather have a team member spend their day sending out follow-up emails and phone calls or instead focus on higher-level strategy and customer engagement?
We previously talked about no-code tools like Webflow taking the web design industry by storm, but another benefit to these tools are that they also make automation easy for non-technical users.
Zapier and Make are just two popular examples that integrate with most applications used by businesses on a daily basis such as emails, storage drives, CRMs, social media and more. This brings endless opportunities for automating day to day tasks and opens up the door to creative marketing strategies as well.
Lead Management
With the repetitive tasks automated, you and your team can now allocate that time toward better managing your leads. Being engaged with them throughout the sales process will mean higher chances of conversion.
But leads can still fall through the cracks, especially if your marketing efforts bring in a high number through the funnel.
This is where the same tools mentioned above can shine. For example, Airtable, a minimalist CRM & database platform allows your team to keep track of leads at different stages, while also being able to automatically trigger workflows and API calls.
Now your team is further freed from unnecessary followups and repetitive tasks, instead focusing on handling unique cases or assisting with other on-boarding requirements. Essentially, going from an active to a more supervisory role.
Personalization
When people think of automation, they tend to imagine robots and software that lack emotion and a personal touch.
And let’s face it. You and I would rather receive communication from a real person rather than a scripted email from a no-reply mailbox.
Unfortunately, these reasons have convinced numerous businesses to avoid implementing automation beyond customary welcome emails or in some cases, not adopting it at all.
But with increasingly sophisticated tools being developed, we now have the ability to personalize emails, SMS and even phone calls to that specific end user in a manner that appears to be human-like.
For example, in our case study on automation for an insurance agency, we wrote about how we connected Airtable with communication tools such as ActiveCampaign and Twilio to bring increased personalization throughout the entire onboarding process. Taking it a step further, we integrated Google’s natural sounding conversational AI called Dialogflow to facilitate phone calls.
These are just a few ways that automation can be used to personalize communication with leads and even your existing user base. With AI technology such as ChatGPT becoming more accessible to developers, we expect to see a rise in features that will attract additional businesses to take advantage of automation tools, ultimately helping free up valuable time and resources.
Data Insights
Marketing strategies are constantly evolving as businesses grow and adapt to the times. One of the most important factors that are used to determine changes in strategy are user analytics. And in present times, we depend more on data analytics to make informed decisions.
Lucky for us, automation tools also serve as crucial data-gathering tools, providing valuable insights on customer behaviour and preferences that would otherwise be quite difficult to obtain. And with everything interconnected, data can be collected from various sources such as websites, social media and CRM systems.
All of this can be done at real-time, providing a unique opportunity for businesses to monitor and address customer preferences and issues faster, improving customer satisfaction. With increasing issues being addressed proactively, it can help reduce the strain on support staff.
This also opens the door to predictive analytics and deeper personalization. With automation tools being connected with user data, businesses can now tailor their messaging and customer interactions based on their behaviour and preferences.
Finally, combining data insights with machine learning gives you the unique opportunity to predict future behaviour. These insights can help your product teams identify customer needs and allow you to proactively offer new products and services.
Conclusion
I hope this article helps convey the importance of automating your marketing and daily operations.
Automating day-to-day tasks and streamlining marketing processes can provide a much higher return on investment. In many cases, also improving customer experience by delivering highly relevant and personalized communications. At the same time, teams can now allocate more time toward developing effective strategies instead of spending it on repetitive tasks.
A well integrated system can also enable marketing, operations and other teams to collaborate more effectively and deliver a consistent customer experience.
We hope you take automation more seriously and consider incorporating tools that help your business become more efficient and evolve with the times.
Written by
Narius Khambatta
