Automation is useful to all businesses in some way. When you understand the purpose of automation, you’ll see that there are incredible opportunities to save time and effort in most areas of your business.
Here are some examples of where you could use automation in different types of business.
Plumber (and other trades like carpentry, electrician, carpet fitters)
- After booking in a prospective client, use an email and/or SMS tool to send an appointment confirmation message – as this solves the problem prospective customers experience with unreliability with trades, by creating some reassuring that an appointment is booked in
- Use an estimate generation tool (e.g. with FreeAgent or Xero) – which can be emailed directly to a client. They can then accept the work, giving you a simple audit trail. It also makes it very easy for you to send out quotes with the least amount of paperwork.
- Send out invoices with the ability for a customer to pay via BACS, Paypal and Stripe (credit/debit card) – this makes it easy for you to get paid quickly, and reduces the amount of time you spend chasing invoices.
- Once a job has completed, have an automation email out a request for a Google or Facebook review (with instructions), to build up your credibility.
Online Shops / Ecommerce Stores
- Use software tools that sync your orders to your accounting package to reduce how much work you need to do to reconcile orders and your revenue. This can save hours of work when done correctly.
- Use stock-control tools that help you to manage when you need to order in new stock and raw materials.
- Use automated emails to request product or shop reviews. e.g. for Trustpilot, Google or Facebook
- Use automated emails to offer a special gift (or discount) if they refer one of their friends to the shop.
HR Professionals (and other professional service-based businesses)
- Have a bespoke tool that makes it easier and faster for you to do audits for your clients, especially where there are elements of reports that are common between clients who you are auditing. Audits are often income-generating, and therefore worthwhile to create.
- Use a tool to remind clients what information you need from them so that you can complete a piece of work. Ideal if it’s a complex bit of work where you need lots of information from them.
- Use an automation to pass leads from your website into your CRM system, so that your prospects can be sent emails immediately when they enquire, to show that you’ve got their message. (How many times have you made an enquiry to a website to wonder if they got the message?).
- Once a project has been completed, set up an automation to contact your clients to give you a LinkedIn recommendation or a Google review. Ensure that the automation checks to see if the client has given you a review already, and only email that client if they haven’t done so already.
- You could use an AI tool based on content generation (e.g. ChatGPT, NeuronWriter) to help you to create new content for your website, to help with your SEO efforts.
In these examples, you can see that you can pick an automation from each of these business types to apply to your own business. This shows you that there’s always something that you can use to make your life easier.