Renu Sharma — November 7, 2019 Repetitive tasks cost the global service industry more than $ 5 trillion a year with employees spending a total of 69 days in administrative tasks, says a study by DJS Research.
Building a successful business takes a lot of resources, time, and effort. But, with technological advancements, many repetitive tasks can be automated.
Automation technologies use Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science to automate repetitive tasks. While manual work has been the conventional go-to solution for businesses, automation offers a better, more efficient and effective alternative.
Automating manual routine tasks that are repetitive and mundane will help you to accelerate your business growth.
Here are the major benefits of automation:
- Increases manual productivity
- Amplifies efficiency and effectiveness
- Increases lead generation and conversions
- Increases customer satisfaction
- Decreases the possibility of errors
- Identifies vulnerabilities or weaknesses in your system faster
- Saves time and effort
- Cost-effective solution
Let’s explore seven ways you can use automation to grow your business:
1. Enhance Customer Experience with Automated Interactions
According to a report by Microsoft, about 96% of consumers around the world say that customer experience is a major determining factor for brand loyalty.
Automated customer service can enhance your customers’ experiences, from being a website visitor to becoming an end-user. It can help you create customer-centric processes. Automation also aims to reduce or eliminate the need for human intervention to provide customer support.
Automated customer service tools primarily include chatbots and voice bots. They provide quick responses leading to better customer satisfaction. They also help reduce manual work, and the time and cost involved.
Today, chatbots have become a common feature on scores of company websites. That’s because platforms such as LivePerson have made highly interactive and intelligent chatbots to solve customer queries.
These chatbots use features such as contextualization, intense identification, semantic assistance, and empathetic responses. This helps to provide customers with easy, simple, and quick responses.
Image via LivePerson
These chatbots can also be designed with enhanced features to offer precise guidance to customers.
2. Use AI to Predict Campaign Performance
To run a successful business, you need active and meaningful engagement with your existing as well as potential customers. Using predictive analysis, you can design your marketing campaigns to align with your target audience and brand’s vision.
Whether it is for choosing the right image for your ad campaign or selecting the target demographic for your sponsored posts, automated AI technologies can help you go a long way.
For instance, Cortex is an AI-driven platform that can help you create a strong predictive analysis for your targeted audience. It can also predict how a specific campaign or brand image will perform.
Image via Cortex
It provides industry-specific AI tools that offer visual vocabulary, deeper insights, end-to-end market analysis, and content audit.
3. Increase Sales with Data-Driven Email Marketing
Personalized marketing is the most effective way to engage with your target customers. Emails with a personalized list of services and offers based on each customer’s preferences will perform better than bulk emails sent to all customers.
Sending a highly personalized email to all customers manually will take a huge amount of time and resources. AI-based data-driven email marketing does a better job at a fraction of the cost and time to send customized emails to your recipients.
Data-driven email marketing also helps to optimize the content and boost email open rates, click-through rates, and delivery rates. Omnisend is a data-driven email marketing platform that analyzes a customer’s browsing pattern and collects behavioral insights.
Image via Omnisend
Using this information, you can create personalized emails that align with your customer’s expectations and intents.
4. Integrate Social Media Channels for Effective Brand Awareness
About 3.48 billion people are active social media users. It’s a significant increase of 9% from 2018. No wonder why most brands are using social media platforms to increase brand outreach and generate leads.
Sheryl Sandberg mentioned that around 2 million advertisers use Stories across Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook. However, maintaining a social media presence on all platforms can become strenuous and mundane.
But fortunately, there are tools that can help you automate social media management such as Hootsuite.
Image via Hootsuite
Hootsuite provides an integrated platform to manage all social media channels in one place, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can use it to easily manage all of your insights, schedule content, monitor posts, and analyze ad campaigns.
5. Automate Customer Support Workflow
Customer support workflow often entails multiple elements that you need to take care of while providing assistance. However, many of them are repetitive elements that you can automate, enabling executives to focus on providing better client support.
Agile CRM is an excellent tool to automate customer support workflow, align it with brand expectations, and deliver high customer satisfaction. It enables executives to automate routine processes such as setting priorities, tasks, and statuses, and routing incoming tickets.
Image via Agile CRM
It also helps executives identify pending open cases and notify them about the due date of the ticket’s service legal agreement (SLA). Agile CRM tools help to accelerate case closure and deliver better customer service by actively tracking the SLAs.
6. Retarget Visitors Via Programmatic Ad Campaigns
Ad campaigns that use personalized offers to meet customers’ buying intent stand a better chance to convert. Every website visitor that clicks on an ad may not buy the first time. But they give a clue that they are interested in the product.
Retargeting ads increase brand familiarity by following these prospects. And a retargeted ad’s click-through rate (CTR) is 10 times higher than a standard display ad’s click-through rate.
With Adroll, you can engage with your website visitors via customized emails, texts, videos, and display ads to offer them valuable recommendations from your website.
Adroll enables brands to go beyond customer acquisition and build strong customer relationships to retain their loyalty. You can create personalized shopping experiences by showing products that are most relevant to your customers or those that align with their purchase intent.
7. Automate Marketing Campaigns for Personalized User Experience
Today, buyers are more informed about their needs and options available. To succeed in this market, brands will have to offer personalized user experiences to potential customers.
Oracle Eloqua helps create personalized campaigns across different platforms including email, web, display, search, image, video, and mobile.
Image via Oracle Eloqua
Their marketing automation software is custom-built for the needs of your business and it can easily align with your customers’ interests. Oracle Eloqua also allows you to create cross-channel ad campaigns within minutes. It significantly cuts down the manual effort and time spent on tracking, maintaining, and analyzing ad campaigns.
Takeaways
Automation is a powerful technology that can help you scale your business easier. Instead of worrying about routine daily tasks, you can automate them to free up some time to grow your business.
To automate your business processes, start with the smallest activity that can be easily done via an automated tool or platform.
Once you’ve automated one business activity, observe and analyze its impact on the following parameters:
- Employees’ response and adaptability
- Overall productivity level
- Cost and time invested in running the tool
It might take some time to adopt automation as the main entity in your organization. However, it has helped many businesses all around the world scale.
If you have any questions regarding automation for your business, feel free to leave a comment below.
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