12 Ways to Automate to Scale Your Online Business

Why Automation Leads to Growth

As an online business owner, your time is your most precious resource. You have ambitious goals for scaling your business, but unless you automate many of your business processes, you and your team can become swamped. This can lead to a decline in customer satisfaction and stall out your growth. The more clients you gain, the easier it becomes to get mired in the care and feeding of your clients.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a gloom and doom post! There are so many tools and practices that can make your business run more efficiently and create positive client experiences. You can maximize your time as you nurture new leads and support current clients. Your team (even if your team is just you and a virtual assistant) can work like a well-oiled machine.

Here are my top 12 of the many ways that you can use automation to scale your online business:

1. Automate Emails

Creating email automations that are triggered by specific actions saves you tons of time while providing excellent customer service to your clients. For example, when someone signs up for your email newsletter list, this can automatically trigger a welcome email sequence. When someone signs up for one of your offers, they can immediately receive an orientation email telling them how to get the most from their purchase. When someone completes a program with you, an automatic email can be sent to them offering them ways to keep on working with you. You can send a gentle nudge email to anyone who has an abandoned cart, addressing common objections. There are so many ways that emails can be supporting your prospects and clients without you lifting a finger!

2. SOPs Make Your Team Work Well

Every business should have a set of standard operating procedures, or SOPs. These should be documented in writing or in video form (I love using Searchie for mine, so I can both show and tell). This set of specific instructions and procedures, when implemented by you and your team, will eliminate a lot of time-sucking back and forth communication—you know, the where-did-you-put-that-document-I-thought-Lisa-was-responsible-for-that type of thing. When there’s a place for everything, everything can be in its place, and when everyone clearly understands their role, the team can work like a well-oiled machine.

3. A CRM System is a Business Game Changer

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and if you’re thinking, “Oh, I have a great relationship with my customers,” you don’t understand all that these systems entail. A CRM system takes your relationships to a deeper and more powerful level while creating efficiencies.

CRM systems allow you to put all of your client data to work for you and keep in better touch with your clients. For example, you can automate emails on client birthdays, or you can automate emails to clients who haven’t purchased from you for a certain period of time. You can use the CRM to segment your clients any way that you choose, from the offers they’ve purchased to their geographical location.

CRM systems allow you to track all of your communication with not only customers but also leads. Let’s say you have a sales call and the prospect tells you that this quarter is not a good time for them to work with you—you can have your CRM system remind you to circle back with them next quarter. You’ll be able to have more high-value contact with your clients and prospects because your CRM will remind you of all that you know about that client, so you can start your next contact with them asking about how the new office space is treating them or how their trip to Alaska went—showing that you’re listening to them and care about them.

4. Not All Leads Are Equal

Salespeople spend way too much time sifting through leads, deciding which ones to pursue first. Not only is this a time waster, but it may allow hot leads to get away, since they need services in the near term. Create a lead scoring and ranking system that you can apply to each lead that indicates key data about the lead’s business and how hot the lead seems to be. By assigning each lead a score number, you can then create automated actions based on the ranking. For example, perhaps all of the “1” (hot) leads get a phone call, mailed packet, and email sequence. And for your lowest rank leads, you automate an email series that is designed to nurture that lead or take them off your list.

5. Social Media Scheduling

A lot of small businesses don’t have a dedicated social media staff member. And posting on social media can feel like a real burden. If you inject some automation into this process, it turns this task from a hand-wringing chore to simply another step in the content creation flow.

For example, each of my blog posts are accompanied by an email newsletter about the same topic, and then I create both video and static image posts for social media and YouTube. This is not a burden because the same content can be used (using a distilled form, which AI can help with) as video scripts, captions, and more. My team and I use the same formats for our posts and we try to batch tasks as often as possible, so I will record multiple videos at once.

6. Automation Can Improve Customer Service

When customers have a problem or question, they should receive prompt assistance, right? The problem is, clients have a way of asking the same questions or having similar struggles again and again. Fielding these client questions is important but takes a lot of time, and it pulls you away from other tasks.

Tools such as chatbots and knowledge bases that utilize AI can handle all of the common questions and issues that your clients face, and if the client truly needs to communicate with you, they are still able to do so. These automations save time for both you and your clients!

7. Automation Moves the Sales Process Along

There are a lot of steps to gaining a new client and getting them up and running. I use an auto-scheduler (Calendly) to make it easy for prospective new clients to set up their own discovery calls with me. As they schedule, I can capture the key data I need so that when our call begins I already have a handle on who they are and the help they need from me.

Once you have a new client, save time by automating their onboarding. This can be an automated email or email sequence that takes them through the onboarding process with welcoming and helpful videos. Helping new clients settle in and feel confident about their investment with you sets the stage for a positive experience.

8. Automate Repetitive Tasks

There are certain tasks that we do again and again and again—but there’s no need to. Ever heard of a free tool called Zapier? Zapier enables you to create “Zaps” (workflows) for these common tasks. You identify a triggering event and then an action that is taken. Zapier works with all of the tools you use, allowing a trigger that takes place in one platform to create a resulting action in another.

For example, you can set a Zap so that every time you finish conducting a Facebook Live session, it is uploaded into your Searchie account and appears in the exact spot that it belongs. When I open the doors to my membership to accept new members, I turn on the Zap between Searchie and ConvertKit that adds new audience members to my email list. This allows me to send a rockin’ welcome email sequence to everyone outlining the great things they’ll find in my membership. You can set a Zap so that each time you receive an email in Gmail with an attachment, the attachment is saved to your Dropbox account. One of my favorites is the Zap that sends my Searchie videos straight to YouTube.

9. Outsource Tasks Where You Can

We outsource a lot of tasks that don’t need to be done by us personally, right? Things like cleaning services, lawn services, and grocery delivery enable us to focus on our priorities. Think about what can be outsourced in your business life: where can a virtual assistant, a part-time worker, or an expert save you valuable time and keep you in your zone of genius? My most popular offering has been a VIP experience where business owners have me set up their Searchie offerings, such as online courses or memberships. It’s not that they can’t accomplish this task on their own, they simply don’t have the spare time or mental bandwidth. It’s a good business decision for them to focus on what they do best while I create their Searchie Hub.

10. A Task Management System Keeps You on Task

In my business, we use ClickUp to manage all of the tasks we need to do, from creating content to serving clients. Task management systems like Asana, Trello, ClickUp, and others can create efficiencies by allowing the entire team to see the current projects, deadlines, open issues, and more. Most of our communication is done through the tasks management system, which also provides us with a documented history for each task.

11. Automate Your Finances

Using Quickbooks or another accounting system can help automate tasks such as tracking revenue, documenting expenses, and monitoring profit. I recommend that you connect (via integration) your financial package to your CRM system so that financial data can be automatically captured.

12. Use AI

I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about AI in recent months, but have you tried using it for your business? Business owners need to create so much content… why not lean on AI for help with editing, summarizing, brainstorming, and more. Your content still begins with you; AI just helps you create it faster and better.

Let’s say you’re feeling tapped out on blog post ideas. Coming up with these ideas feels like running on a treadmill that you can’t get off. Ask an AI program to come up with ten blog post ideas for your industry or type of business. Not all of the suggestions will land, but some will surely get your gears turning.

You Can’t Scale Until You Streamline

In manufacturing, automations, workflows, and efficiencies have been the name of the game for 100 years. Online businesses are still relatively new, and I feel like we’re going through a revolutionary period where we can harness the power of tools like CRM systems, AI, task management systems, and other tools and procedures to powerfully scale our small businesses. What kinds of automations can you employ in your online business?

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