There are hundreds of enterprise business automation software and they have gained traction for a good reason. They enable employees to save time, get reminded of important tasks and organize their workflow better. Whether its customer support, finance, HR or the IT department, there are tasks to be automated. Abstracting away repetitive tasks allows staff to concentrate on higher level tasks that can directly affect the bottom-line. In fact, the quantified gains of automation of routine tasks far outweighs the costs. Here are some of the best available business automation tools available today.
1. Zapier
According to their website, Zapier allows automation across more than 5000 apps. Depending on the desired level of automation and sophistication, small and large businesses can automate thousands of daily tasks. For instance, employees who receive task via their Gmail can have such tasks added to their to-do list whenever they mark the email as ‘important’. Zapier also allows sharing of social media contact across multiple platforms with one click. It is also possible to have tasks automatically created from note-taking apps and documents created for new meetings.
2. Integromat
Integromat is especially great for business running e-commerce stores and want to serve their customers quicker. It allows such business owners to get a report from Google Analytics on their website sent as a report to a productivity platform such as Slack. Integromat can also be used to connect e-commerce stores to bulk-email solutions to automatically send out emails about new products whenever the product catalog gets updated. Integromat can also help automate the matching of credits to your bank account to invoices sent out to clients. This can help businesses spend less on manual labor.
3. Buffer
Buffer is a SaaS social media automation platform. It’s mainly used by businesses to schedule posts on various media. You can also cue content to be reposted a specific number of times to avoid doing it manually. For a business that is heavy on content, Buffer can send automated reminders when you are about to run out of content. You’ll then have enough time to create new material.
Buffer provides a dashboard to track how your different social media pages are performing. You can also create dashboards for specific campaigns.
4. Active Campaign
Active Campaign allows businesses to combine email marketing, marketing automation, and customer relationship management in one platform. The platform has an easy inbuilt drag-and-drop email builder to allow users to customize the look of emails. Businesses can also use one of the available templates.
Users can also create subscription forms for the various campaigns they are running. What’s more interesting though is the ability to create a sequence of follow-up events when a person submits a filled form. You can set up follow-up emails based on the information submitted. You can also segment your customers within the platform to allow you to send dynamic content to them. There are multiple ways to segment them, for instance by location, age, last purchase and so forth.
ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation abilities include site tracking to see pages clients interact with as well as event tracking to see links clicked or emails opened. This helps to give more clarity on what the best leads to follow up thus optimizing the marketing effort.
5. Xero
Xero is an online accounting software that provides added visibility into your business’s cash flows, expenses, and revenues. The platform connects to your banking apps thus automating the reconciliation between events in the bank account and the accounting being done at the office. It provides a dashboard to keep track of bills and expenses, and you can create triggers and alerts based on custom metrics. You can also automate payments to avoid falling back on bills.
Businesses can also create, keep track and organize documents using Xero. For instance, when payments come in through the bank, Xero generates a new document and stores it in a specific repository. You therefore retrieve documents related to a specific period or department as necessary.
6. Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is a CRM and marketing automation software specifically customized to suit the needs of a small businesses. The software automatically segments customers based on behavior but also you can create a custom categorization method. Further, Infusion soft allows users to develop their own lead scoring algorithms by providing markers of what constitutes a good lead.
Infusion’s CRM tool gives you visibility into every customer’s contact information, orders, where they rank on the lead scoring systems, their payment history, website activity, interactions with your brand on various platforms, and email interactions. Their market automation has great capabilities including triggering campaign messages based on user behaviour and website activity.
Infusionsoft also has a landing page builder allowing you to quickly customize a page to increase the impact of your campaigns.
7. Shopify
Shopify does more than just helping businesses have an online store. It automates a lot of the work that would otherwise require hiring people to carry out. For instance, it’s possible to run a drop shipping business and automate the entire process of placing inventory orders and shipping based on incoming orders. Such automation can help when a business is scaling first and the owner needs to keep track of their revenue, traffic sources, best performing products, and marketing analytics.
Advantages of Business Automation
The first major benefit of business automation is always freeing up of time to work on other areas of the business that requires strategy. However, CRM and marketing automation tools increase the conversion rates of leads significantly. By keeping track of past conversation and sending offers to clients based on user actions and behaviors, a business sees a massive upside on marketing ROI.
Automation of tasks also minimizes errors that are common with humans especially when such things as fatigue kick in. Standardization of tasks means that customers receive the same experience from the company each time they access an automated service. A good example would be customers making deposits or withdrawals from an investment account. Automation means that the process follows the same steps and takes the same amount of time each time. Such consistency is very important in building the brand equity.
Transcendent Software
Sometimes a large-scale enterprise solution may not meet your business automation needs. That might require you to build a custom automation solution. Contact Transcendent Software for all your automation application as well as integration needs.