home business. online marketing Archives - Page 11 of 21

March 14, 2021

10 Ways Small Business Benefits from Smart Automation

All businesses benefit from smart automation. Automation today is not expensive. You can implement much different productivity-improving automation free and inexpensively that will not just save time but will save money and increase your revenue exponentially.

Increased Scalability – When you automate, even if you’re just one person, if you choose what to automate wisely, you’ll be able to scale your business in ways you may not have thought possible.

Reduced Errors – There is no way around it, but machines, once set up properly, make fewer errors than humans. If you can set up an automaton that works, you’re going to reduce the errors you’re used to making and letting by. It’s not about perfection, though. It’s just about being able to do something simple without having to worry about the errors once it’s set up.

Better Customer Satisfaction – When customers get service fast like they want, and it’s accurate and timely, they are always happier with you—today’s customers like using self-service automation and don’t mind using chatbots at all.

Reduced Labor Costs – When you can automate instead of outsourcing, this is always a good thing because technology is cheaper than a human being. Your time is also worth way more than your chatbot’s time.

Better Work-Life Balance – Automating things even that take you five minutes a day can add up and save you so much time that you start experiencing that elusive work-life balance people love to talk about.

Use Resources More Efficiently – When you set up automation, it is always more efficient than human resources. Not only does it work more accurately, but it also costs less to start with than hiring a person.

Decreased Operating Costs – When you use technology to increase productivity, you can keep your operating costs lower because you’re not using extra human resources or your time, which is always more expensive than tech.

Improved Decision Making – If you have an accurate picture of the research involved, which using automation can help you with, you’re going to make better business decisions. Imagine if you set up a Zap to send reports generated in Google Analytics to a Dropbox for you to view every Friday – so much more straightforward than having to get the reports yourself.

Boost Productivity – When you have to do fewer steps to get to the deliverable, you will become super productive. Remember that there is a lot more to being productive than movement or being busy. Finishing projects and tasks makes you productive.

Increased Competitiveness – When you can get more done in less time and done accurately, you’re going to please customers more, and that’s going to make you more competitive.

When you decide to implement automation in your small business, choose from the things you do right now, already, that are repetitive in nature, and you can’t go wrong—no need to invent new things to do until you automate what you already do every single day.

March 14, 2021March 14, 2021

Don’t Forget That You Can Automate and Outsource Your Home Management Too

While we are so busy talking about business automation, remember that you can boost your efficiency by also automating and outsourcing your home management too. The time saved will allow you to get more done that you really want to do for yourself, your family, and your business.

Lights – With a smart house set up, you can fix your lighting so that it stays at a specific level of natural light. For example, if you close the shade and the light has reduced, the lighting in the room automatically compensates. You can also turn on lights via a motion sensor at night when people are using the toilet and so forth.

Door Locks –Using automated door locking is a great feature and helps you get in your home with packages. You can also lock your front and back doors or garage using your smartphone instead of checking physically.

Security Cameras – Setting up security in your home with cameras can also be automated once it’s set up. You can film the parts of the house you want based on motion, lighting, sound, and other criteria.

Blinds – Close your blinds based on how dark or light it is outside. Even if you’re not home, the blinds will close, which can make your home less likely to be broken into but also reduces the time you must take to raise and lower the blinds on your own.

Heating and Cooling –Setting up your heating and cooling to be based on the ideal temperature for you based on the room and time of year will not just save time but money too.

Filling Your Tub – Newer smart homes come featured with a smart bathtub that can be programmed to fill up at the right time without you ever going in there using your smartphone or the control dial. Set up a hot bath when you’re outside sledding with the kids to save time and get warm faster.

Starting Your Coffee – If you like to drink coffee in the morning or at any time, set up your coffee maker to automatically brew your coffee for you. When you get out of bed, you will eliminate a few steps from your day.

Paying Your Bills – Just like you can set up your business bills to be paid automatically, you can do the same with your household bills. Setting up automation for saving, bill paying, and so forth not only saves time but will help you stick to your budget better.

Sending Birthday or Holiday Cards – Do you like to send your friends, family, and perhaps business partners cards in the mail? You can use a service like Send Out Cards or Postable.com to automate this process by setting up an account and the criteria.

Yard and Housekeeping – It’s not hard to hire people to help you keep your home clean and organized, from landscaping to basic lawn care to keeping your home clean and shiny without lifting a finger. You can find what you need through sites like Thumbtack.com and Care.com.

yard and housekeeping

Childcare – Even a work at home mom needs time away from the kids. You can find a mommy’s helper, or you can hire a childcare worker or teenager to help you with your kids using Care.com or other online sites.

Grocery Shopping – Using a service like Instacart.com to get your groceries delivered can save hours of your time and help you avoid last-minute purchases, thus actually saving money over shopping yourself.

If you have a voice assistant like Google or Alexa, you may already have the ability to automate some of your home life. Take a look at what’s available with your particular assistant and the tools you have. When you eliminate personal steps in a process and turn it over to a bot, you save time and generate an opportunity to do more with that time.

March 11, 2021

How to Use Automation for Boosting Efficiency

One of the main reasons people like to use automation in their business is because it boosts efficiency. If you can automate any task that is repeatable such as invoicing, creating files, saving files, and so forth, you can save many hours of time in your workday and work year. Those are hours you can use to create even more awesome products and solutions for your ideal audience.

Sort and Respond to Emails – Your email software has many features that you may not be implementing fully. Apps like Boomerang for Gmail or Sales Handy for Outlook will help you sort and respond to emails using automation features.

Manage Projects – This is especially important if you are working with a team. Set up a project management software that allows you to know when each part of your team is done because they check it off, make a note, or otherwise use the system to ensure smoother collaboration and avoid bottlenecks.

Improve Your Sales Funnel – Using software to automate your sales funnels is a no-brainer today. There are numerous options for you to implement, such as Leadpages.net and Instapage.com, but also many email marketing solutions come with sales funnel automation options.

Enhance Your Workflows – Software like Monday.com, Kissflow.com, and others can help you automate your workflows whether you work alone or with a team. Improving and enhancing your workflows will ensure that when you do automate something, it’s done most efficiently.

Optimize Your Online Presence – Use an all-in-one platform that enables you to use all your social media in one spot, such as Hootsuite.com or sproutsocial.com. When you use one of these social tools to automate sharing, engagement, and relationship building, you’ll really realize the power of social media marketing.

Drop the Dead Weight – You don’t need to keep doing tasks that are not working. For that reason, you want to always check your metrics to ensure that when you act, the result is what you’re looking for. If it’s not, stop doing it and move on to something else.

Automate Every Possible Task – Make a list of any tasks you do each day that are repeated. For example, perhaps each morning, you walk into your office, turn on your computer, and check email. What can you automate? You can automate turning on the light in your office as well as turning on the computer. You can even automate organizing emails using tags and other features so that it’s faster to get to the emails you need to respond to.

The best way to determine what you want to automate is to track what you do each day, week, month, and year. Anything that repeats, do a little research about how other people automate that task. You may be shocked to learn how simple automating your business really is. Automation is not nearly as expensive or complicated as you may think before actually finding the right solutions.

March 11, 2021

Tools and Tips for Automating Your Sales and Inventory Process

Whether you sell physical products or hours and services, automating as much as you can of your entire sales process and inventory, if needed, will save you tons of time. When you save time, you’re saving your most valuable and irreplaceable resource, but more than likely, automation will also save money.

Understand Your Buyer’s Journey – Every business type who has a buyer can learn what they do to make a business decision. Most buyers go through a process from awareness to delight, and it’s your job to know what the buyer’s intent is so that you can deliver just the right information at the right time to advance sales.

Stop Doing Repetitive Work Manually – If it can be automated, stop doing it yourself. There are too many ways you can automate things today that fit any budget for you to keep doing everything like file creation, backups, and inventory tracking. If you continually need to transfer customer information to another system, find a way to automate using Zapier.com or another option.

Provide the Right Information to Your Stakeholders – Ensure that anyone who is interested receives information that they need to make decisions in a self-serve manner. This can be via internal documentation that you provide access to based on their place, such as Trello.com or Basecamp.com. You can assign access based on who they are. For example, the customer of product A gets access to information, groups, and help about product A.

Empower Customer Care – If you hire customer service personnel or use a chatbot, empower your customer care to make sales when it seems like the right thing to do, depending on the conversation. You can even set up your chatbots to do it.

Empower Your Customers – Let your customers care for themselves with self-serve information and AI chatbots so that you don’t have to answer repetitive questions, and they can help themselves.

Create the Right Email Messages – Every product that you create needs certain email messages set up right away. You’ll need a series for all stages of the buying journey, from awareness to delight.

Get the Right Software – It depends on the types of products you sell, but many shopping carts have inventory management included in the system. The most crucial factor is to get the right software for your needs and not try to make bad software work for you.

Automating your sales process may only involve setting up a landing page, a freebie, and moving them to your email list so that you can teach them information, make offers, and move them through their buying journey faster. But if you sell physical products, you probably want to keep track of how many you have available to buy—the same thing with the hours you sell for your VA business. If you’re a service provider, keeping track of what you’ve sold will ensure you don’t oversell but also ensure that you meet your goals.

March 3, 2021

Automate Your Community Management

Building community builds brand awareness, provides amazing feedback so you can get more product ideas, and builds stronger relationships. When you can find the people talking about you online and respond, it turns social media and community into a powerful tool for you to build relationships and a better business.

Building community for your business will increase brand awareness, teach you more about your customers, and provide amazing value to your customers now and in the future due to all the incredible insight you will derive from the community.

Invite Your Buyers to A VIP Support Group – Creating a group for your buyers to come to ask questions and get answers, and other support is a fabulous way to encourage the community to help each other.

Ask List Members to Come to Your Private Facebook Group – Make it a habit to invite anyone who joins your email list to your private free Facebook Group. You can get to know them and they you and move them from interested to delighted faster due to the fact actual customers will back you up.

Invite Interested Parties to a Product Development Group – Some of your customers may be interested in conversing with you on a deeper level helping you essentially create more products for their needs.

Using the tools of the trade help make community-building easier and more effective. These tools will make your job easier, and there are plenty to choose from depending on your needs and budget.

NapoleonCat.com

Manage your social media through this platform. You’ll be able to see all feeds in one view so that you can deliver the best customer care to them on any platform from one spot. Plus, you’ll get top-notch analytics. After all, you can’t know if what you’re doing is working if you’re not studying the metrics.

Some features include the ability to answer repetitive questions automatically with templates, hide spam messages automatically, and even delete offensive material based on your list of insulting words without having to view them yourself.

Heyo.com

This software is a platform that allows you to run contests. Community and social marketing are all about engagement, and nothing creates more engagement than the ability to have a good old friendly competition. You can use this software on any social media platform, across multiple platforms, and even in SMS via mobile devices.

Grow your email list, get more accurate leads, and make your customers happy with this software. Whether you want to run a sweepstake, a photo contest, or send out a quiz to your audience, this platform will do what you need.

Taggbox.com

User-generated content is the most important type of content you will deal with when building a community. It’s also some of the most powerfully compelling content for any new person to see when buying your products or using your services.

Whether you want to build a hashtag campaign, boost virtual events, or even help build a social wall for your in-person events, Taggbox.com can help you get it done and automate most of it.

Building and managing the community you create due to your brand allows you to get better user feedback, provide amazing support, increase brand awareness, and build exceptional relationships. If you really want to boost customer interactions and create raving fans that not only want what you have but want to tell others about it, invest in building community through all your social accounts with your like-minded ideal customer base.

March 3, 2021March 3, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Email Marketing

There aren’t many business owners today who aren’t aware of automated email marketing technology that uses autoresponders. If you’re not sure, autoresponder software like Aweber.com will send out messages to your list members based on either your schedule or a behavioral trigger that you set up and define.

Two ways to automate your email marketing:

Trigger Based Email Messages
Drip-Fed Scheduled Messages

A trigger-based email message is set up to be sent to the subscriber based on something they do. For example, if your customer downloads a free report, or clicks through to read a specific blog post, or even if they simply open a particular email, you can set up your autoresponder to automatically deliver specific messages to them based on what they did.

A drip-fed email message is simply set up to deliver based on the schedule you choose in a specific order. Usually, the messages are a sequence and often referred to as your “autoresponder sequence.” For example, if you offer a free report about a specific problem that you solve, the customer downloads the report, which puts them on that list, which triggers the system to start the drip schedule.

Besides these two ways you can automate, you can also use the automation features inside your software to segment based on new information you obtain from your customer such as demographics data, and product purchased, product not purchased, how they learned about your solutions, and more. Frankly, if you can think it up, you can create a segmentation trigger.

When you automate your email marketing in this way, you can create more targeted and personalized messaging, create customized landing pages, and even use split testing for your emails to create better results from your email marketing. You can also use the native software to examine delivery rates, view rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more to make it all work better together – mostly automatically.

The trick for getting this right is to choose the right software for your needs. Some small business owners using a combination of Aweber.com and a WordPress site will work fine, but for some others, they may need a more robust platform to work with, such as Ontraport.com or Clickfunnels.com.

Write down the functions you’d like to have now and in the future. Choose your software based on longevity, functionality, and growth – but of course, also consider your budget. Fortunately, most email marketing software choices have options that can grow with you based on your usage. You can find solutions for as little as $20 to start and on up to thousands of dollars, depending on how you’re using it. The main thing is to do your due diligence checking out the software you want to use to ensure that it works for your needs. For example, some autoresponder software expressly forbids affiliate marketing – if you want to build an affiliate marketing business, you don’t want to start with that choice.

February 28, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate HR Management

From time tracking to expense management, automating your human resource management will save time and money. Anything that happens on a recurring basis is ripe for automation. Tasks like data collecting, file creation, document sharing, form filling, and more can all be done using the software in a way that eliminates the need for an HR person to do these tasks and frees you up to do more.

Contractor and Employee Onboarding – When you bring on a team member, they need to have access to information about your company, including branding information, document templates, and more. If it’s important that your people comply with a particular thing, it needs to be in the onboarding process.

Offboarding – When someone leaves your company and moves on with another, it’s a good idea to survey them about why so that you can improve. Use your HR system to send an automated exist interview via email that they can do on their own before they leave. Plus, once they fill out the exit survey, they can also be automatically sent other information such as COBRA info.

Vacation Requests – If you have employees, they may want to leave, even contractors, if you rely on them to do regular tasks on a long-term contract, offering a way for them to let you know they’re going away is always going to make everyone’s life easier.

Expense Claims – If you reimburse your people for expenses related to the work you do, letting them automatically enter a request for expenses is a lot simpler when done via computer technology and reduces the paperwork and time needed to process such requests.

Payroll – Allowing your employees to enter their own time in a system that creates the paychecks is a great way to cut down on your need to do data entry. All you have to do is approve the time, and the check or direct deposit for their pay happens automatically.

Training – Whether employees or contractors offering company training is helpful to them and can improve their work. You can offer branding information and train them on using all your systems without having to do it individually for each person you bring on board.

Time Management – Let your contractors and employees keep track of their own time using the software.

Benefits Management – Let your contractors or employees take advantage of their benefits on their own. Self-serve, saving lots of time.

Tax Forms and Filing – Most bookkeeping software and systems automatically offer tax forms and filing options depending on your needs.

Even if you don’t have a bunch of employees and only work with contractors having everything together in a centralized place organized according to the laws and regulations where you live is going to free up your time and help avoid issues in the future.

February 28, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Your Finances

Automating your business helps free up your valuable time to do more money-making activities. It’s a wonderful time for business finance automation because the tools that exist today are so easy to use, inexpensive, and they work great. Plus, new tools are coming online every single day.

Bookkeeping Data Entry – Most bookkeeping software today can be integrated with your bank and credit cards. When you make purchases using those cards or that bank, the expense is automatically booked into your accounting software in the right category the moment it happens.

Invoicing – Most invoices in small businesses don’t change that much from month to month. Because of this, you can set up invoices in most bookkeeping software to send automatically based on entries during the previous week, month, or another time period you choose. What’s more, when your client clicks the invoice to pay, the payment is automatically recorded in the software, and then once the money is received, it’s booked in your bookkeeping software.

Accounts Receivable – You can set up your bookkeeping software to remind your customers to send you the money, and it will automatically book it properly when received too.

Accounts Payable – Likewise, if you have bills to pay, you can use the same bookkeeping software to record your payment as you make it. You can also set up your bill-paying system to pay all your bills automatically on their due date. Most banks have this feature built-in for free.

Tax Compliance and Reporting – Once your accounting software is set up with the right categories, most of it will work automatically. If you have to deal with more than one state due to your business structure, try a platform like Taxify.co to help automate and understand more of this process.

Expense Management – Managing expenses, especially when you’re away from your office, is easy today with the various software that helps you collect receipts, appropriately book the expense, and so forth. Automating this is more important if you have several people to keep track of. Software that can help include Zoho Expense, com, and even your existing bookkeeping software may have an option.

Payroll – Depending on how many contractors you have or if you have employees or not, you may need to have an automated way to ensure your people get paid on time. Letting them self-manage their pay helps save time. Look at your bookkeeping software to determine if there are add-ons to help automate this or try using SurePayRoll.com.

Investing and Saving – The truth is, if you don’t invest and save on a regular basis, you won’t do it. Using your bank to send money to your investments automatically, savings accounts are the best way to make it happen, whether personal or business finances.

Automating your finances helps you avoid making the same steps over and over again. There is no reason to repeat tasks today when you have the ability to let the software do it for you. You can save hours each day by implementing these financial automation tips and tools.

February 28, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Engagement

Customer engagement is crucial to building the all-important “know-like-trust” quotient that is so important for a business owner’s success today. After all, the main reason you even exist is to solve your customers’ problems in a way that makes them feel satisfied and delighted. The best way to engage with customers today is to automate as much as you can while remembering to focus on the customer of one.

Set Up a Customer-Driven FAQ – Most customers today like going to a website to find information by searching for answers to questions that they have before they contact anyone in person. You can assist this process by setting up an automated FAQ for the customer and potential customer to use for themselves.

Be Easy To Reach – Don’t hide your contact information from your customers. You want them to be able to contact you in a number of ways so that they can use their favorite method. If they want to contact you via email, SMS, or more directly, making that happen will help you both.

Let Your Customers Self Schedule Appointments – If you do take sales calls or do discovery calls, it’s essential for you to let your customers schedule these for themselves. Use software like acuityscheduling.com to automate the process. If you provide the phone number to them to call, you can even let them call you at the arranged time, so you have less to remember.

Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns – Definitely use an email marketing software that uses triggers like tags to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person on your list. Software like Drip.com, Aweber.com, and if you’re not an affiliate marketer, mailchimp.com all work great.

Automate Your SMS Marketing Campaigns – Using automation software for your SMS campaigns is also important. You’re just not going to get good traction trying to do everything manually. Using a service also helps you with legal compliance.

Consider Adding a Conversational Chatbot – With the advent of inexpensive conversational chatbots, you can engage with your customers 24/7 in a way that feels very good to them and boosts sales exponentially.

Recommend Products or Services Based on Customer Behavior – Using internal triggers in the software you choose, such as your autoresponder software or your landing page software. You can efficiently deliver product recommendations to them based on what they do.

Make More Sales by Targeting Cart Abandonments – This is a fun way to automate your sales. Set up a system that automatically starts a remarketing ad campaign to target cart abandoners or to send them a message via email if you have their email when they leave their cart.

Boost Customer Retention by Following Up Post Sale – When you do make a sale, your job is not over. You need to send follow up information to them via your autoresponder and have the info via SMS. Even if all you do is send a series of messages to them after the sale, that will help.

Find Ways to Reward Your Best Customers – Remember that customers get tired of seeing all the sales directed toward new customers. Treat your customers like VIPs so that they want to stick with you.

Practice Social Listening Strategically – A really great way to automate engagement is to set up your social listening to send you information each time your product or name is mentioned. Then you can go respond directly to any mentions of your name or a like product so you can help people. Set up Google Alerts to send you the information that you need as often as you want it.

Use Automated Invoicing Tools – Why spend time with time-consuming invoicing tasks when you can automate the process as much as possible. Look at using systems like Go Daddy Bookkeeping or Freshbooks.com with their time tracker to automate your invoicing tasks as much as possible.

For your business to grow and flourish, you need to pay close attention to how you communicate with your customers. It needs to include two-way conversation in order to really take your engagement to the next level. When you are easy to find and are responsive to your audience, you’ll end up building a more successful business. Because when people feel like they like you, they also trust you more.

February 28, 2021

Sales Automation Tools and Tips

When it comes to automating sales, you’re in a great time to be involved in selling anything. Selling online is fun and exciting because you have access to so much data from your efforts. You can perfect your sales process to the point that it produces tremendous results for you if you’re paying attention to the metrics.

Capturing Leads – You can automate your entire lead capturing process by using the right software. For example, you’ll need autoresponder software and a landing page to deliver a freebie. Just set up the autoresponder to deliver the link to the download page after they sign up. You can make this work even better if you use software for your landing pages, such as leadpages.net or Instapage.com, to set up a dynamic lead capturing system.

List Building – Building your list is an important thing to do if you want to be successful in marketing online. When you build a list of hungry buyers, you can give yourself a raise anytime you want by making them an offer. Using systems like Aweber.com, Drip.com, or any autoresponder system that enables you to set up automated messaging, tagging, and segmenting is essential.

Communicating – To automate your communication process, use templates to get the work done faster. Once you set up a template, you can use it for all your communication needs, only changing what needs to be changed each time.

Qualifying Leads – You can use automated systems to help qualify your leads. Once you capture a lead and they sign up for your list, you can send more information automatically to them via your autoresponder system. Then, based on their behavior, you can tag them all automatically, depending on their behavior.

Nurturing Leads – For most people, the easiest thing to understand about automation is the autoresponder, which sends out messages that you loaded in the system in the order you determined was best based on the exact customer’s needs.

Following Up – Most transactional and follow up emails can be designed in advance and then delivered right away as soon as the customer needs them. For example, if your customer buys widget A, you’ll send information about widget A and how to use it right away. Only later will you follow up with a recommendation that they buy widget B.

Scheduling Meetings and Calls – The other important thing you can automate when it comes to sales is calls and meetings. Let your potential customer fill out a questionnaire and sign up for the exact time they prefer to go to the meeting or participate in the call. When the customer feels in control, they’re more likely to show up, and you can close the sale.

Webinars – Webinars are often used in the sales process. You can do one of them live, then automate the remaining ones and run them “as live” to build your list and get more followers. You can run these automatically and pop on at the very end if you want to make that part live and more interactive. An excellent tool to check out if you’re interested in running live and recorded “as live” webinars are Demio.com.

When it comes to automating sales, you can’t go wrong with investing in a good autoresponder service, a webinar service, and/or a funnel-based system like Clickfunnels.com to build your business by capturing leads, building your list, and nurturing your list members with appropriate content every single day.