Investing time doesn’t mean working all day long and getting stressed. Instead, use technologies to reduce the time taken for the same work and invest that precious time in improving the thinking process to increase profitability.

The new technology methods have proved to be speeding up the tasks that one day work of long hours. Leveraging automation into most business processes not only offers speedy output but also tends to provide accuracy.

Though choosing what area to automate your business is tough to identify, we present seven domains that generate outstanding results if automated for small and big enterprises. 

What are the domains that can be automated to improve business automation productivity?

Technological automation now has its roots in every area of business. To be more precise, here is the list of eminent domains for which automation is a boon. It is also helpful for SMEs and startups.

1. Human Resource:

Considered to be an indispensable part of any organization, the Human Resource Department carries out some of the prime functions that include talent management, talent acquisition, payroll, workforce engagement, etc. So, one can understand the burden on their shoulders, and automation in their functions plays a colossal part to direct the organization’s growth.

Their significant functions from hiring to retirement and employee retention practices can be automated using factoHR‘s solution. The primary features that an HR can automate here are recruiting the best talents, performance calculation, benefits administration, compliance security, time management, robust analytics to think out differently, and the list is endless. 

Manual methods of performing the above tasks can eat up a lot of time and gather a bunch of mistakes in a hurry to complete the tasks. Moreover, modern people require more solutions. As you hire freshers in a time of technological advancement, automation helps maintain diversity and encouragement among the workforce, thus improving their attention and performance towards the work.

2. Marketing

Whether a product or a service, if you don’t have proper working marketing techniques to connect to the customers, it is difficult to survive in the market. Marketing needs to be accurate to attract and retain essential customers and achieve more excellent customer success value. 

Having a working marketing strategy will help the salespeople close a higher number of deals. The marketing strategy you apply should include methods that are applicable according to the company’s niche. 

But what if you can be free from the struggle for management of marketing by spending fewer hours on it? Surprising! But the online market provides solutions to your marketing needs. Platforms like Hubspot, etc., offer an easy way to manage your social media and telemarketing management while all you need to do is set up inputs on the platforms.

3. Don’t lose phone conversation

Are you losing your clients every now and then?

As a startup, increasing your client network is a must. If there are clients, there is business success. It looks simple, but it is not.

Imagine you tried to contact a lead, and it results in an unreceived call. The prospects might be busy with an important meeting. As soon as they are free, they will call you, but now you are busy with some tasks. Relatable! And again, when you get him, the line is busy or unreachable. It goes on. And then the prospect has already lost interest.

The one technique you can employ is to go for automated software with which you can auto-share messages to the prospects that you are unable to talk with them and will take tomorrow. Isn’t it helpful? You don’t lose any of the clients in the situation of busy or unreachable calls.

4. Immediate email response

No one likes to wait in the fast-changing world. Even a 30 minutes delay can trigger customers to change their minds toward another product. And why make them stay when you can make fair use of technology to revert them with a positive reply immediately?

You need to add a ‘contact us section on your website from where the interested person can reach you. As soon as the person fills out the form, the software you are using will automatically reply to them, and you may never lose contact.

The reply will generally go like this: “Hello. Thank you for contacting us. Our representative person will shortly contact you.”

5. Customer engagement, is a must

The customer must be treated as a god. That’s why people know the worth of finding and retaining customers.

Your service provider must be such that customers feel free to contact you for their queries. We saw what happens when customers have to wait longer to resolve their issues. Also, they must not feel hesitation in asking anything regarding your product/service provided.

Automation does this work for you efficiently. For instance, you can easily bifurcate based on category-wise queries, prioritizing customers, or service agreements type. Furthermore, based on the representatives’ time schedule, customers will be assigned persons who will take and resolve their doubts

6. Interviewing candidates

Automation has now spread in the interviewing and hiring process also. Imagine how simple the business automation process will be by devising excellent software. HR’s work will directly be reduced, and they can invest their time in more strategic processes that make the working place relatable to growth.

HR can use software that eases their tasks of finding candidates, reviewing their resumes, calling them, scheduling interviews, and selecting the worthy ones. Investing in accurate recruiting software, HR can file down their candidate listings, appoint interviewers according to their schedules, assign rankings and reviews for particular candidates, and much more.

Stats have shown that every job position attracts 250 resumes, but only 4-6 candidates get shortlisted for the interview, and in the end, only one will take the position. You can imagine the trauma the recruiting person is going through. (source)

Imagine the ease of working on software rather than listing down the whole recruitment process on paper. Moreover, chatbots have made their way into conversing with candidates for their queries. Candidates can talk with the chatbots and get AI-based replies that will highlight the company culture and attract more candidates.

7. Centralized document storage

Personal documents are susceptible to the outer world. And while joining the company, employees want a secure environment where their personal and family information remains intact. They trust the employer with their documents, and thus the employer must abide by the same because if they fail to do so, the company’s reputation is at target.

But employers can save the image and their time. They just have to go for software that uses storage servers where every detail of employees can be stored without occupying piles of files in your office. 

It provides centralized access to a server where you can access the employee information for your office’s location.

Talking about document storage, the software can even be used to store client details. Losing such details can cause a great disaster, but now you know how to tackle the same.

Your takeaways:

Automation is everywhere you go. You have to identify where and how to use it to reduce your burden and work on actual business development tactics. And to move on with the world, it is a must to bring such changes into your business automation. You may think that it will consider more time to move and get used to the software. But believe me, once you learn to use it for your own good, you’ll love to work with the platforms to achieve the targets.

The post 7 Domains Every Business Should Automate appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Email automation is the sending of newsletters through an automation platform. An automated email newsletter is just like traditional catalogs. In the early days when there was no internet, companies would send catalogs to their customers now and then. An email newsletter can include any news – a promotion/sale you are having at the store, tips relevant to your products, an event that is organized at your company, etc.

What is Email Automation?

Sending the newsletter to the emails of your customers one by one can be tiring. For this reason, you need to use an email automation system to deliver newsletters to your customers. Email automation allows you to send a newsletter to subscribers who meet certain requirements. For example, you want to send a welcome message email to every person who fills in your newsletter signup form. The email contains information on welcome messages about what kinds of newsletter they can expect to receive shortly. In your email automation system, you can set up the email to be automatically sent every time someone signs up for a new account. You don’t have to click any button to send the email.

How does Email Automation work?

Automated email campaigns can be sent with either email automation or a marketing automation platform. In the email automation system, you need to first set the conditions and add the email address before your subscribers can start receiving messages. You are done once you have set up the conditions and hit publish. Many automation platforms will offer ready-made marketing automation templates that can be used to design the newsletter. You can also use your template on the platform.

Convert New Visitors

An automated email campaign can encourage prospective customers who have visited your online store but not yet ready to buy. They come to your online store so they must have shown interest in the products you are buying. You will need to communicate with them and persuade them to get them to buy from you. One way to reach out to them is to persuade them to be your subscribers. New customers are more interested to subscribe and learn more about your product before making a purchase decision.

In your subscription email, you can tell them about a subscriber-only offer. It is important to make your email visually appealing with a CTA and discount for first-time purchases. The email automation platform will also be able to generate a discount code for a promotional offer in the email. In the analytic, you can check how many times the discount codes have been used. This allows you to track the effectiveness of your promotion.

Inform about the Expiration of a Subscription

Email automation allows you to inform your customers about the expiration of a subscription, or sale. You should be sending email campaigns at least 2 months from the expiration. If there is no response, you can send a discount code with a call to action to encourage them to renew the subscription. You simply enter the expiration date of the subscription and set a timeframe for the automated emails to go out.

Send Discount Code on Special Occasion

You can use email automation to send well wishes on special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries. You need to know the date of the special occasion of the subscribers to set up this type of email. After the campaign is set up, the email will be sent to the recipient on the date every year. When you send a special occasion email, you can include a voucher or discount code for them to use in your store. Including a voucher can be useful if you sell things that can be used to celebrate a special occasion

Reminder for the Next Appointment

Email campaigns allow you to send reminders of an appointment to your client. For example, if you are a clinic, you can send a reminder to your patients on the next appointment with the doctor. It reminds the patient to come for the appointment punctually. You can set up this kind of email campaign by entering the last appointment date and that it should be set to start sending email after 3 months or when the next schedule takes place. Customers can get busy and become reluctant to attend the appointment. Sending email reminders will push your customers to come back for the next appointment.

Monitor Unsubscription Rate

From your analytics, you can also monitor your unsubscribe rate. You should investigate if there is an increase in the unsubscription rate. A high unsubscription rate could be caused by newsletters that are not interesting. In your email newsletters, make sure to include an unsubscription link to give your recipients the freedom to unsubscribe. If people can’t find the link, they will set your email to go spam which leads to your email address getting blacklisted.

Promote New Blog Post

An email campaign can be a powerful channel to promote your blog. Every time you publish a new post, you can send your subscribers an email and invite them to read it. An email campaign can drive tons of traffic to your blog posts if it is done right. Email subscribers are more likely to share your content on social media. This is why you should send an email whenever you publish a new blog post.

Promote a Business Event

You can use an email campaign to promote an event that your business is organizing. Not everyone who registers for the event will arrive. You need to keep on sending reminders to get most of the people who register to attend the event. Email campaign allows you to send a reminder on the upcoming date of the webinar. You should start sending email reminders as soon as a person registers for the webinar. After the webinar ended, you can send important details that have been discussed in the form of slides or a link where they can watch the webinar video.

Track the Performance of Your Email Campaign

Email automation allows you to monitor and track the progress of the performance of an email campaign. In your email marketing analytic, you can check the open rate and click rate of each of the emails you send. You should have the goal of achieving at least a 20%-30% open rate and a 10% click rate for each email. Your analytic will also show the bounce rate. A high bounce rate could be caused by sending emails to email addresses that no longer exist. A soft bounce is an indication that the persons you send the emails are receiving them slowly as their inbox is frequently full. It is normal for an email campaign to have a 2% – 3% of bounce rate.

Mobile Friendly

Email automation is mobile users friendly as it is designed to be ready for opening on mobile devices. You should test several templates to see how they work on various mobile devices. There must be spaces around the calls to actions (CTAs) so that it is easy for readers to tap on them on the touch screen. A properly designed mobile-friendly email will offer two versions including plain and HTML versions.

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The post What is Email Automation and Why It Matters? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

The volume of data that an enterprise has to work with is increasing every year; with that in mind, automation is a must-have as it makes work more straightforward and effective. Automation is used for manual tasks, which take a lot of time. The work that is done is usually spreadsheet-based and tends to be tedious repetitive, and time-consuming.

The financial role has been modified continuously with time. Earlier it was very much dependent on labour arbitrage and shared services models, decreasing the work efficiency; with modernization coming in, it was visible that standardization was needed in the field of financial services for effectiveness and rapid growth of organizations.

Chief Financial Officers Analysis

The present time has seen a fundamental change in roles; the Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are investing in Robotic Process Automation and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning as they are the next big thing that will revolutionize the financial markets.

CFOs believe that automation is present for the future in the enhancement of transformation in industrial enterprise. According to the CFOs, earlier proficiency in Excel was considered useful because of the essential skill. With the boost in automation and seeing how fast work can be performed, the skill set of Excel has decreased considerably.

As per reports, the usage of Robotic Process Automation in the banking sector will see a growth of $ 2.9 billion by 2022.

Automation- A key ingredient

1. With automation coming into play, it is expected that many employees are going to lose their jobs and may struggle; however, they may shift to higher detailed work than data entry and report-writing. Data analytics can be a new sector.
2. It is needless to say that automation of finance processes is an absolute requirement. It is because of the manual and operational activities that the financial organizations are engulfed with that they do not find the time or resources to indulge in invaluable and enhanced tasks. Organizations are so preoccupied with these tasks that they cannot focus and delve into analytics, in-depth strategy, or insights.

It is expected that the introduction of bots for manual processes can reduce processing costs by 30% to 70%.

Automation- An Enabler

• Automation Anywhere will act as a facilitator. It will not only liberate organizations of mundane tasks but will also create a buffer and time for resources to enhance the system and the business.
• It will only take the sector to unseen heights and achievable success. Recent reports tell us that organizations that are leading to effectiveness and efficiency re-allocate the resources and add importance to the projects, making the finance organization sit at its peak.
• Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing have been an essential element in automation with the creation of this software that was compatible with computers and other software to work and provide outcomes that were reliable, accurate, and faster than humans.
• Like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) helps people at a level that could have never been anticipated, a faster customer response will simultaneously result in a high customer satisfaction level. There is no communication gap between the field force and the administrative office.
• SAP Leonardo Machine Learning consists of:
  1. Available
  2. Core Capabilities.

It is suggested that more than half of the organizations are beginning to implement Robotic Process Automation.

Conclusion

Despite creating unemployment in the services, the expanse of opportunities that automation will make in any use in general and financial services, in particular, is immense. 

 This article addressed some of the currently known changes in the field, with more advancement will come to better systems. Automation in the current times is a boon; it increases time allocation to essential tasks and reduces the burden of processing time and costs.

Who knows how far the creative human mind will wander and how much of the automation industry’s potential will be untapped? But for now, automation is here, and more is coming; what is yet to be seen are the remarkable changes it will create and how it will spiral across the systems globally.

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The post How is Automation Changing Financial Services? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the process of automating all manual marketing practices into automated digital activities. For that purpose, there are platforms and tools one can use to create a wholly automated, streamlined process of the marketing prospects. Some of the biggest and most popular choices are Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle, and many others with a lesser scope of service they provide.

There are a lot of activities that can be automated. These include email campaigns, social media posts, marketing workflow automation, lead generation and management, customer behavior tracking, sales automation and reporting, and analytics. Of course, to integrate this automated process into your business system, you must have a skilled professional with a certificate or learn how to do it on your own (more on this in para How to Learn Marketing Automation).

Benefits of Marketing Automation

When it comes to the benefits of marketing automation, the list is long. Let’s begin with the biggest ones.

1. More Time & Energy

First and foremost, you start with marketing automation to free time. To automate the marketing activities, you need one or two days (depending on the campaigns you are planning) to set up a plan and put it into motion. For the rest of the workweek, you have plenty of time to think outside the box, put your creative hat on, and work towards further growth and development of your business.

If you are a marketer, you know that you need to be completely focused on creating engaging content and work out the strategies that will bring you the results you need. If you stray from that creative process by doing the manual technical job of sending emails by hand, setting up posts on your own, or manage the data (which is likely that you will fail in doing so), then all of your time will be consumed by these repetitive tasks that take out the energy from you not leaving you those creative vibes you need.

2. Effective Distribution of Budget Money

When you choose marketing automation, you save time, and since time is of the essence when it comes to money, you will save money. What will happen is your budget will be freed from unnecessary labor costs, and you will be able to use this money for better purposes like bringing your company to the next level.

You need one person to lead the marketing campaigns, as they need to follow the automated processes and thus, have a plentiful of people free to do any other activities. Not only will you be able to distribute the money budget to segments effectively, it is more needed, but you will also effectively distribute the labor force to various tasks. In the end, the result will be a positive ROI, given that marketing automation was successfully implemented.

3. Closer to the Target Audience

Marketing automation tools have features that allow you to get closer to your target audience. You can refine the marketing processes and visualize the customer journey while making the ideal clients aware of your existence on the market. Moreover, you will be able to nurture your leads and help them transfer quickly on the journey of conversion.

The target audience needs to be engaged in order to react to your services or products. Since you can’t personally tend to their needs (in fact, you can, but only for the first couple of dozens – what about all of them?), marketing automation allows you to meet their needs all at once across multiple channels.

How to Learn Marketing Automation?

As stated before, you will probably need a certified expert to make the transition to marketing automation since it is not an easy task to do, especially if you don’t have experience in the field. If you still need to be in charge and lead the whole integration process, there are many ways to acquire the necessary knowledge. Let’s go over some of the most successful ones.

1. Take up a Course

There are many courses online you can register to take that will introduce and lead you to and through the world of marketing automation. First of all, you need to choose the marketing automation platform or tool you will be using and look for courses specified for that platform.

For example, look for Marketo courses if your choice is Marketo. Usually, these courses offer you the Marketo basics, which include learning about the fundamentals of how Marketo automation works and how Marketo handles all the processes. Then, it covers helps in the development of your best practice Marketo structure that mostly suits your business. Next, it can show how to master the lead database and how to keep optimal hygiene of the data on your servers. All in all, the basics of everything you need to know about running successful marketing automation in Marketo will be covered.

On the other hand, if you prefer the features of, say, HubSpot, you can look for a HubSpot course that will teach you the basics of this CRM platform. You will learn how to use the tools that HubSpot puts at your disposal and how to utilize the whole software to optimize the funnels for your marketing efforts.

2. Read Articles Online

It is always better to register for a course and have an expert explain to you quickly and simply. Of course, for that kind of service, you will need to pay. Without a doubt, that is an investment completely worthy of your time and money. However, if you don’t have the luxury to invest in a course at this point, you can do a lot of the learning on your own by reading relevant articles and tutorials online. You can find hundreds of free materials, but you must be selective and intuitive and focus only on the sources that will bring the most significant benefit to you. All you need is a strong will, motivation, and ambition to succeed on your own.

3. Bring in an In-house Team Member

Finally, if you feel too much pressure getting it all done by yourself, it is better to leave it to the pros. Bring in an expert in your team and have them take care of what they know to do best. Their experience and skills will be enough to tackle the challenges at the beginning of marketing automation, and later, when everything is under control, they can tutor you or someone else you want to be responsible for the marketing activities.

To sum up

Marketing automation brought considerable changes in the way businesses use digital channels to get popular, make more leads, and more money. With the constant development of technology and new trends coming up every couple of weeks, you must hop on board as soon as possible. It won’t become easier; it will become more complex and, without a doubt, it is better to learn the basics now than to struggle to keep up with it in the future.

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The post Why You Desperately Need Marketing Automation ASAP? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

A surprising number of marketing processes can be more efficiently handled by an algorithm than a human. Yet, many companies are failing to tap into this avenue of cutting cost and streamlining workflows. It’s not that difficult though as long as your marketing automation plan is well-thought-out. Here are some tips on how to do that.

1. Start with Automation Strategy

Going about any business activity without developing a carefully planned strategy is leaving your success to chance. So before you dive headlong into automating your marketing processes, take a step back and ask some fundamental questions.

For example, what is it you seek to achieve? What segment of the market do you want to reach? What metrics will you use to determine whether your marketing automation is successful? The more detailed and planned your automation strategy is, the more likely you are to succeed.

2. Marketing (and Not Technology) Should Own and Drive Marketing Automation

Automation means converting manual processes into technology-based algorithm-run ones. As seasoned technology professionals would attest, IT teams end up bearing the bulk of the burden whenever there’s a business project that is heavily dependent on technology. Some marketing managers may see this as a convenient way to let someone else worry about getting things to work but this can be a catastrophic mistake.

While IT professionals can provide the technical know-how needed to make automation work, the marketing team are the process experts and are in the best position to know whether the automation is an improvement over the existing manual process. Marketing should therefore own, drive and coordinate the entire process.

3. Good Relevant Data

Automation is all about generating certain outputs after receiving a set of data inputs. A core principle of computing is GIGO — Garbage In Garbage Out. Ultimately, no technology system can provide a quality output if the input data is of low quality.

Ergo, making sure you have the right data is vital for the success of marketing automation. The data you’ll need will depend on what specific aspects of the marketing process you intend to automate.

4. Get a Realistic Estimate of the Costs

No organization has infinite resources so even your marketing automation has to be done within a predefined budget. For the cost of automation to get the buy-in and approval of senior management, it should be much lower than the expected savings and the anticipated rise in sales revenue.

You’ll have to work closely with the IT department and where applicable, the third-party vendor and/or software developer. Most times, the vendor or developer will provide a quote for the software contract so that cost will be fairly straightforward.

However, you should perform a more comprehensive assessment of total expenditure including the cost of any new hardware and software required (e.g. remote support tools), training of marketing employees on how to use the new system, and the need to hire new employees in case the company doesn’t have the required skills internally to run the system.

5. Get C-Suite Buy-in

You’ll need an accurate realistic budget when you are making the marketing automation pitch to the company’s leadership. No department works in isolation and the marketing unit is no exception. Your quest for automation is unlikely to pay off unless you have all key stakeholders on board. For that to happen, the drive toward marketing automation should have (and be seen to have) the support of top executives starting from the CEO.

That will ensure your project runs into minimal resistance since few employees would want to appear to antagonize something that the top leadership is determined to see through. That being said, C-suite buy-in is not automatic. Your pitch should be persuasive and clearly demonstrate tangible value over the medium to long-term.

6. Focus on the Smaller, Simpler Processes First

Marketing is a complex process with numerous moving parts that have to work in sync. The sheer scale of the entire marketing workflow can be overwhelming and may make it difficult to know exactly where you should start. Instead of trying to ‘boil the ocean’, start by addressing the quick and easy wins. Look at the small but significant challenges to the customer’s current experience and seek to automate as much as possible to fix the issue.

It could be as simple as having a welcoming video for first-time visitors on your website. When you start with and conquer the simple problems, you get the confidence and experience needed to tackle the more complex ones. Note that you might not be able to automate the entire marketing cycle; some aspects may have to remain manual for practical or cost reasons.

7. Train Employees

Your marketing team is already used to doing things a certain way. It’s not going to be easy to get them to adopt a new method. As with any change in an organization, expect some degree of resistance, reluctance, and skepticism.

You can minimize the time and effort it takes to get marketing staff to adapt to the new process if your automation project is accompanied by a robust training program. Don’t make the mistake of assuming workers will figure things out as they go along. Make sure all marketing employees know what they are expected to do before the new system goes live.

8. Monitor Performance from the Start

The whole point of marketing automation is to improve the marketing process. From the get-go, you have to look at marketing performance metrics powered by the automated process then compare with similar metrics when you were using the manual method. Senior executives will certainly want to see this data so they can be certain that the automation was worth it.

Proving value early is also vital in catching flaws quickly and taking appropriate measures to close any gaps. For turnkey or proprietary software provided by a third party, the installation will usually come with a months-long grace period where the vendor provides support services at no extra cost. It’s therefore in your best interest to escalate to external support any serious problems encountered within this window.

9. Fail Quickly

The rationale for moving from manual to automated processes is reasonable and logical. That doesn’t, however, mean that all automation will work or prove value for money. Whereas hardly any project will demonstrate a healthy ROI from day one, you must give yourself a realistic timeline within which you can make a judgment on whether the automation is really moving the business’ marketing efforts forward or backward.

If after several weeks or months of use the project isn’t showing the improvements you expected, don’t throw good money after bad. Cut your losses before they spiral out of control. Start looking at a more viable automation alternative.

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Some marketing managers will make the mistake of sticking with an ineffective solution because they are too embarrassed to admit to the company’s leadership that things did not turn out as they had thought they would. It is certainly a difficult conversation to have especially because the business has spent a good chunk of cash to get the new system rolling.

However, you are more likely to retain senior management’s confidence if you demonstrate a propensity to take corrective measures quickly even if it’s at the risk of temporarily damaging your reputation. After all, your management aptitude is best tested and proven during the most during difficult of times.

When you embark on a marketing automation project, success is never guaranteed. But following these tips can significantly increase your chances of making it work.

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