3 Ways You Can Use Automation To Increase Your Profitability
Josh Bardsley
CEO @ Avalanche & The Conversation Store | Author of ‘Raise Your Hand Marketing’ | Developing B2B podcasts with LeadCAST.
As the owner or employee of a small business, chances are you are very busy. Busyness has taken over our workplaces after social media and the internet has forced the feeling of guilt when we aren’t running around doing something. A large number of the “productive tasks” we force ourselves to do in order to flatter our guilty conscience really are not that productive and are either detrimental to our businesses or wasting valuable time that should be spent working ON our businesses.
Avalanche specialises in using automation systems and call to actions to both make and save you money, today we are going to talk about the latter. In this blog I will give you three workflows that have saved me a lot of time and money as well as actually making our business better.
There are some tasks in your business that right now you aren’t doing as well as you should be doing them and
- On-boarding
Automating key elements of your on boarding process can save you huge amounts of time and provides your new customers with a fantastic, unified, experience that you know will be delivered right, every single time.
Using ActiveCampaign (Avalanche can do this for you) we can build forms on your site that you/your sales people need to fill in when a new client is sold. Once their information is entered in the form an email would be sent to the client welcoming them to the brand over your signing period, maybe an email a day for 3-4 days. On the back end, the fields in the system are populated automatically based on the form fields that trigger notification emails and create tasks for the people in charge of finance/on-boarding. We can even automate the creation of a contact in your accounting software. All the client sees is 4 valuable emails from you and a digital contract that lands in their lap, automatically reminding them every 24 hours until they sign.
Time saved for us - 60 minutes PER client and decreased contract signed time from 4 days average to less than 48 hours.
2. Customer Service
Using a ticketing style automation that is a customer service form on your site or auto-responder on social media can make sure that nothing is ever missed. By using ActiveCampaign as a CRM that is automatically updated whenever the ticketing form is filled in, each activity update is registered against that contact, creating easy analysis of the time taken to solve.
By building a system that gets rid of the running around and reactive approach we often take to customer service, we are able to save huge amounts of time.
Time saved for us - Roughly 6-7 hours per month
3. Off-boarding
The recurring revenue method is a fantastic business model. Still, however, a large amount of time is wasted during the notice period and off-boarding process of this model and often each customer receives a slightly different experience, making it very difficult for any true testing & measuring to happen.
By creating automation procedures that notify the correct people and communicate with the client when they leave or enter their notice period, creates a consistent approach to this key, brand defining, process we all have to deal with.
Increasing communication with clients using automation and creating an automated notification system that makes sure everyone completes their set human tasks for the off-boarding process has led to an increase of cancelled notice periods by 40%, meaning our client retention has increased heavily.
How did we increase profitability?
- Huge amounts of time saved creating more time to be spent on marketing, sales etc
- Clients retention rate increased
- Money saved by automating low skill but very important tasks
We haven’t discussed the many many many ways we can use it to proactively make more money. If you are interested, send me a message! (One of our clients just posted a 10X annual return and we have only been working together for 4 months!)
www.avalanche-automation.com & www.avalanche-web.com
Our partners:
ActiveCampaign - www.activecamapign.com
Leadformly - www.leadformly.com
Zapier - www.zapier.com
Contact me for some serious discounts - [email protected]