8 Essential Solutions

8 Essential Problem-Solving Automation Solutions for Your Business

Today, with so many automation solutions available, it’s hard to know which one to choose.

Here’s a quick look at 8 different essential automation solutions that will help you streamline your business offering.

There’s nowhere better to start than…

Comprehensive automation packages catering to the needs of small businesses

Infusionsoft®

Infusionsoft® is a comprehensive small business platform that handles operations for over 125,000 subscribers. It offers 4 scalable annual plans, all of which include:

Full process CRM and Marketing automation
The capacity to send 5 emails a month each to 2,500 contacts (for the “Essentials” starter plan) and up to 20,000 contacts (for the “Team” plan)
An in-house support team available 24/7 to assist you with questions

Plans allow a minimum of 3 users to work on your network. With the highest level plan allowing up to 10 users.
If you choose the “Essentials” plan—or the “Deluxe” plan geared for Sales Automation—you’ll need to source a reliable add-on, e-commerce option. One like…

WorldInternetOffice

WorldInternetOffice is an inexpensive shopping cart service for small business owners new to e-commerce. Unlike Infusionsoft®, which allows a free 30-day trial period, WorldInternetOffice charges $3.95 for a 4-week test-drive.

But this test-drive is plug and play. Within 15 minutes, you can link your new shopping cart to your main automation platform and start processing orders. You can also:

Accept order payment in any currency, calculate tax by country and shipping and handling charges and set up custom “Thank-you” pages
Offer discounts, integrate various payment options, set up billing cycles, recurring and installment payments
Apply commissions to first orders, analyze sales performance and much more

Now that you’ve automated your daily operational functions and have a shopping cart in place, it’s time to learn how…

The “Eye” Has It When It Comes to Making Prospects Say, “I Want It!”

To attract prospects to your sales funnel—and keep them there, you must offer content they want. There’s no hotter lead magnet or nurturing device than FREE how-to…

Webinars

Webinars are an absolute must-have if your business is to catch the eye of busy prospects. Follow the three rules below to get prospects to opt-in to your list:

Make webinars short and easily consumable
Address a burning need your customer—new or recurring—has
Create webinars regularly

Keep webinars no more than 5 minutes in length, target subjects customers ask you about—and “specify the subject clearly in your webinar’s title”—and you’ll position yourself as a helpful authority prospects rely on.

A great webinar application is…

GoToWebinar

Nothing builds authority more than holding a live webinar that engages global participants in interactive content.

GoToWebinar is a popular choice because you can:

Rehearse beforehand, have multiple presenters and link to video uploads
Integrate webinar sign-ups with your CRM to manage lead generation
Create polls on-the-fly to boost participation and analyze real-time metrics

Another great webinar tool to try is…

EverWebinar™

Recorded popular webinars make excellent evergreen lead magnets. But, to be effective, recorded webinars must look like live webinars. An EverWebinar™:

Has the feel of a real-time event and even simulates live audience participation
Offers participants multiple time attendance options, including a just in time (JIT) option that creates urgency and ups attendance rates 80 – 90%
Helps you build email lists, pre-qualify them and A/B test at the same time

Now that you understand the lure of webinars, it’s time to discuss…

Daily interactive options that drive attendee engagement—on a schedule

Zoom Video Conferencing

In a global economy you need an affordable conferencing application that supports remote teams. Zoom offers straightforward video and web options that:

Are ideal for meetings, training events, technical collaborations and town halls
Provide access for 500 video participants and 10,000 viewers
Have voice, video and screen sharing options for content-rich experiences

To manage your Zoom meeting schedule, you’ll need…

AppointmentCore

AppointmentCore is a digital scheduling assistant that interfaces seamlessly with Infusionsoft® and Google. It will:

Show minute-to-minute availability and eliminate email tag
Send individual emails, email blasts or campaign invitations to coworkers and clients and book them automatically into your calendar
Schedule in a buffer zone so you have prep time before important meetings—and are never overbooked

Finally, with so many applications running, you need a process coordinator like…

Zapier

Zapier links all of your web applications, increasing productivity and eliminating inefficiencies with a single click. Use it to:

Zap information instantaneously between all your apps
Identify ways to streamline CRM workflows with trigger-to-action mapping
Complete tedious, routine processes—behind-the-scenes

In short, let Zapier handle time-consuming administrative tasks, while you grow your business.

If you want to learn more about essential problem-solving automation solutions, read “10 Top Automation Applications to Build Your Business.”

Don’t work in your business!

Automate the Right Processes and Work on Your Business, Not in It!

With the rise of e-commerce, what you automate makes or breaks your business.

With limited time and resources, it’s vital you focus on tasks that promote your company’s growth. And you need to automate all tasks that require manual labour.

But which tasks should you automate first?

Simple, the ones that slow your response time to customers.

Your BPA (Business Process Automation) Plan needs to help you maintain your competitive edge. It should help you be nimble and ultra-responsive to customer needs.

It should:

Allow potential customers to find you, and then buy from you, quickly, easily and repeatedly, and
Perform flawlessly, on a schedule, freeing up your time for continued business development and new customer acquisition.

This is a tall order. And one that makes business owners stall as they decide on which business processes to automate first

Luckily, there’s a systematic approach to BPA that helps you automate business processes in a way that’s tailored to the specific needs of your business.

To begin, Lauren Simonds of Time recommends automating “time-consuming tasks that require attention, but don’t necessarily qualify as income-producing activities.”

Which means the first processes you need to automate are the ones that allow you to…

Always work one-on-one with customers closer to the sale

When it comes to growing your business, nothing replaces a human touch. So, the processes you automate first are the ones which allow you to interact with customers. Especially, customers who’ve expressed an interest in your product and are positioned to buy.

To decide which processes contribute to better sales, map out the entire end-to-end sales and accounting CRM process of your business. Note where your business workflow grinds to a halt or slow down due to manual processes.

The following list has typical sales activities. It helps determine any high-time, low-value tasks you currently engage in during each of them.

Activities you need to examine closely are:

Re-engaging existing lists
Capturing leads and systemizing sales conversions
Automated delivery of products
Asking customers for referrals and feedback
Upselling activities
Streamlining the sales process
Long term nurture
Attracting new traffic

Your goal is to prioritize your business processes. That way as many tasks as possible can run automatically behind the scenes.

Identify “time-consuming processes that occur repeatedly and automate them,” business process analyst Pratik Dholakiya advises.

You should follow this is advice, given that the vast majority of hands-on tasks performed during the sales lifecycle disrupt workflow. When you automate these tasks, you’ll have more time to focus on building relationships with new and recurring customers.

To start…

Automate all manual time-wasters susceptible to human error

Your business is in a constant state of flux. As are your business processes. Locking down yourself, or your employees, on operationally greedy tasks prone to errors makes no sense.

If you’re to have the time to work one-on-one with customers closer to the sale, you must eliminate tasks like:

Cold-calling
Compiling customer dossiers
Manual invoicing
Database management
Sales results analysis
Meetings to identify process slowdowns and inefficiencies

Your business will only grow, if it’s efficient. Let the built-in analytics your BPA offers perform all complex operations behind the scenes. Print off data reports, as you need them, to decide where best to focus your efforts.

Draft sales letters, regular content, product bulletins and business correspondence as needed once and let your automated system send them to your list, on a schedule.

Do the same with email autoresponder series that you send to nurture and keep customers at all stages of the sales lifecycle in the loop.

Offer free downloadable lead magnets like short how-to guides, checklists and automated webinars online to attract new customers and as bonuses to your regular content to re-engage existing ones.

Automate the invoicing process and accounting series. Send new and old customers quick automated surveys with drop menus to select from so you learn more about them

In short, automate the repetitive parts of your business and allocate most of your time to what systems reviewer, Mary Shacklett, considers the most vital use of your time, “customer-facing processes.”

Do this and you’ll…

Free up your valuable time closest to cash and make more sales

The days of manually compiling huge Access databases of customer profiles are gone. For your business to remain agile in the face of change, you must maximize your sales piece. Do this by automating tasks that disrupt workflow and detract from the growth of your business. And free up time for personalized customer interactions.

Nothing replaces great person-to-person interactions. Nothing. So, automate busywork and spend time developing key relationships with customers. Differentiate yourself in the marketplace with your one-on-one skills, not your business inefficiencies.

To learn more about automation systems that handle each step of the end-to-end business process, read “8 Essential Problem-Solving Automation Solutions for Your Business.”

Let customers come to you

Why you need to Automate your Business
and let customers come to you!

Given today’s scaled-down business model, if your business hasn’t automated manual, labour-intensive processes, it’s poised for failure.

A 2015 study conducted by the Office of the Chief Economist supports this statement. A full 60% of Australian businesses are non-employing, one-man operations. Another 25% are micro-enterprises, which only employ between 1 and 4 employees.

Which means 85% of Australian businesses have few workers—if any—available to perform hundreds of daily tasks.

60%

Sole Traders

Non-employing, one-man operations

25%

Micro-Enterprises

Employing between 1 - 4 employees

85%

All businesses have few workers

Australian businesses have few workers to preform the daily tasks

If your business is one of the 85%, automating your internal processes is not only essential, it’s critical to your survival.

Luckily, deciding which processes to automate is as simple as...

Following the 80/20 rule to rack the shotgun

Sales and marketing guru, Perry Marshall, learned the hard way he needed to

focus 80% of his time on the 20% of tasks that

provided the most value

Following his 80/20 rule, the most valuable tasks for you to focus on involves human interaction, or relationship-building. Simply put, you need to spend

Simply put, you need to spend:

working directly with the right people: customers who’ve expressed an interest in your offer, and

focussed on strategic tasks like setting up, analysing and responding to the results your automated processes have yielded.

Marshall claims that customers who express interest in your business have racked their proverbial shotgun in your direction. Which is to say, they’ve signalled your business is in their sights by opting into your sales funnel.

Now it’s your job to keep them in your funnel. They identified themselves as your ideal customers when they expressed an interest in your services. Keep them by giving them the personal attention they deserve—and 80% of your time.

To do this, automate the processes that attract, and keep, ideal customers with you.

Which processes?

Lead generation
Downloadable product delivery
Front end email marketing (autoresponder series)
Re-engagement email series
Order device payment processes
Scheduled content delivery
Requests for feedback and testimonials
Upsell opportunities

As the above list shows, you should spend 20% of your time writing, or designing sequences of, repetitive processes and then automate them to run when needed. This frees up hours you can devote to existing customers. And attracting new ones.

Gone are the days when you had the personnel, or the time, to spend all day cold-calling prospects to achieve a 1-3% appointment setting rate for every 100 calls.

Now 80% of your efforts should be focussed on…

Triggering your audience to see who responds

Your automated lead magnets attract potential customers into your sales funnel. Once they’ve self-identified their interest in your product, it’s time for you to start building relationships with them.

And you do that by sending new prospects automated email series that welcome them to your business, thank them for their patronage and offer them more opportunities to engage with your offer.

You’ve begun a sales conversation and a relationship you will develop as your prospects progress deeper into your sales funnel. The closer your prospects get to the sale, the more personal attention you need to pay them. And the more automated the process needs to be for you to have the time to devote to customer interactions.

Let your automated processes handle the low-level grunt work. While you dedicate yourself to spending the time it takes to help make the sale.

Such as moments when you, or your employees, need to:

Follow up on incomplete online orders
Offer assistance to participants who attended free webinars, but didn’t buy
Respond to customer inquiries regarding products
Manage order cancellations
Contact existing customers whose credit cards are about to expire
Provide personal help to customers experiencing systems difficulties

Building relationships is where the real value is. Because relationship-building creates loyal customers who trust you, will refer you to others, and will buy again from you themselves.

As Brian Gladhu says, modern businesses must “automate processes, not relationships.” Automate low-level tasks to allow prospects to explore your business and buy from you, quickly and easily. And save your time and efforts to build personal relationships with potential and recurring customers.

In other words, to keep your sales pipeline full, you need to...

Become an authority your customers recognize and trust

So, there you have it.

To be successful in today’s business climate, stop calling on customers, hat in hand. Instead, position yourself as an authority and let customers come to you by automating your front-end lead generation and internal processes.

Automate tedious processes to have the time to give personal attention to the customers you’ve attracted. Learn what customers want today, and you can deliver it tomorrow.

To learn more about how to personalize and automate each stage of your sales funnel, read “How Personal Interaction + Automation = Business Success.”

Heading Test

Get 25% more sales

A simple technique to get you 25% more sales

In todays market, it doesn’t matter what industry you are in, its the same problem. Getting leads is hard. Getting sales is even harder.

So wouldn’t you want to make sure that you do absolutely everything that you can to convert the leads that you do get?

In todays short video I teach you 1 simple step you can take to potentially help you convert 25-35% more sales, almost automatically.

Wouldn’t it be worth it to implement it into your marketing today?

Using SMS – The EASY way

Are you using SMS in your communications?

Did you know that SMS's get a staggering 98% read rate, with over 90% of those read in the first 3 Seconds?

That's far greater than our traditional email marketing, with stats on average around 20-30%. Watch the video below to see how to add SMS broadcasting Automatically into your campaigns the cheap and EASY way

Hi, it's Jason Buckner here from Automation Made Easy. I've been helping small business and online businesses automate their processes for the last 11 years. And hopefully I can help you automate some of your processes today.

So today I want to talk to you about using SMS in your marketing and SMS in your communications.

In traditional email communications, which most of us are using now, our traditional open rates are around 20% to 30%. So when you send out 100 emails only about 20 to 30 of those get opened on average.

Sometimes it goes a little bit higher if you've got some good strategies in place. But most of the time it goes even lower than that.

Now with SMS… this is pretty cool…

With SMS there's a 98% read rate on SMSs, which is very cool. And the other more important fact is 90% of those are read within their first three seconds.

You know, we're becoming a very mobile orientated community.

And as soon as an SMS comes through, we read it and we action it most of the time, because once it's been read, it's a little bit harder to go back and action on it later.

So with SMS, wouldn't it make sense to use it in your marketing with those sorts of read rates - a 98% read rate, as opposed to 20%-30% for emails?

I'm not saying that this should this should replace your email marketing, but I think it should absolutely be used in conjunction with your email marketing.

However a lot of my customers come to me and say, “You know what, it's too complex. I don't know how to set this up. I don't know how to automate from my marketing efforts, from my Keap (previously Infusionsoft) account through to SMS. And I like to start cheap.”

We can start cheap and then grow from there. They are a very simple service and simple or cheap is where we start. It's SMSBroadcast.com.au.

Now these guys are just one that that I use here in Australia because I find them to be the cheapest and one of the easiest to integrate with. So it's as little as 2 cents per message to send an SMS. That's for one SMS, and of course every time you grow larger, they become bigger.

Let's dive in and take a look at how simple it is to send SMSs from SMSBroadcast.com.au.

We're in our campaign builder and we want to build our campaign to include SMS. So, whatever might start our campaign, whether it's a web form or anything that goes along in there, whatever the goal is, that's irrelevant.

What we want to look at is the functionality in here in the sequence. All of these would connect up and we can go through the details of this later, but in here, we're going to send an SMS.

Now you won't just have someone opt in or apply a tag and then send an SMS automatically. But what we are looking at is just the SMS functionality at this point in time. And then the rest of the campaign you can build out later.

So what we do is we go down here to send a HTT post and this is the way we send an SMS using SMS broadcast. I like to rename these things straight away, send SMS, and then we go into our HTTP post. Now there are a few things we need to send in here.

This is really cool. These HTT posts… it's very good. So for an SMS broadcast, we use this same code (see the link for this at the end of this post).

Every time we send an SMS and we put that code into here, and then we need to remove this in here. What we put in here is username. And then we don't want merge fields. Next we put in here password, and then we need to put into here who it's to or where we get the information from. And then we put in here from, and then here we have the message. Then we have max split.

Now I'll explain this max split to you a little bit later, but let's go through the details.

So first we put our username and our password in. This is the same username and password that you use to set up or to log into your SMSBroadcast.com.au account. So you'll put those in here - your username and your password. This is the cool stuff.

Now, though, in the two sections here, what we'll do is we'll click on the merge field and we will use Contact Fields (most common). And then mobile, I've got mine labeled as mobile phone one I've labeled as mobile. But in your case, you might have this called phone one. So you choose phone one in that case. And I try to always use phone one for mobile devices, so that so that we can always send SMSs.

Then from now, this is cool... you can put in here a ‘from’ name and then you won't get any replies. It'll just come out from ‘JasonB’ or ‘Automation Made Easy’ or something like that. But you can only use six characters in here for the, from name, so be cautious of that.

If you want people to be able to reply to you on your actual mobile phone, this can be done. Instead of having a name in here, put in your whole mobile phone number.

Now the cool thing about the phone numbers that are set up in your account in here is that if you put in 0405…, so forth and so on. Or if you put in 61 405…, or if you just have in, you know, sometimes when we do imports, it drops the zero and it just starts with 405… so forth and so on, SMSBroadcast.com.au will automatically recognise that as a mobile phone - whether it's got the +61, whether it's got the 0 at the start, whether it's got no 0 at the start - and it will automatically recognise and send to the number, which is pretty cool.

Next we type in our message - let's go there and then we'll put in say, “First name, great choice in coming onto the Automation Made Easy training, looking forward to seeing you in the session.”

Whatever it is that you want to put in there, you can use merge fields in there; you can put… say you've got an event reminder, for example, you can put your URL, your HTTP slash you know, all of that sort of URL into the post and get it out as well.

Now the next bit is the important bit. If this is more than 160 characters long, it will become two SMSs. So you need to put in here a ‘2’, but a really cool trick you can do in here is you can actually put this in as ‘5’. And then if your message is somewhere between one and five messages, it'll work out exactly how many messages it's meant to be, and then it will it will create it together and append all of those messages together.

If you don't put a number in here, and if you're more than 160 characters, it'll send the first 160 is one SMS. And then the second 160 is another SMS, and it gets a bit awkward. It looks a bit silly when it comes through as an SMS.

So just put a ‘5’ in here and that'll sort that out for you. Of course, don't send an SMS that's more than five times 160 characters because it will just be too much for the people to read and then they'll stop reading through it. So try and keep it short and sweet and straight to the point.

Now then we mark it from draft to ready and we publish the campaign as you normally would. Of course, you put in your username and your password. And then when someone comes through to this part of the campaign, it's automatically going to send that SMS for them. Pretty cool, right?

It's one way only in this setup. It's just about sending an SMS. If you put in your mobile number into the ‘From’ though, any replies will come back to you. But if you put anything else in there - if you put in your name, for example - the replies will go back into your SMSBroadcast.com.au account. So you can manage them from in there as well.

Here's the Link you need when setting up:

https://api.smsbroadcast.com.au/api-adv.php

Copywriting: Outsourcing for Maximum Results at a Minimum Cost

How much time do you spend trying to create highly effective copy for your website? You may know that every word matters on these websites and you know that there is incredible value in having the right combination of factors such as SEO, sales language, and calls to action. But, be honest with yourself.

If you are spending countless hours on the copywriting for your website you are losing time and losing money. What's more, unless you have a high level of experience, chances are good you are not going to produce the highest level of product.

Again, be honest with yourself. Is your copy what you want it to be? Again being even further honest with yourself, do you really know what it takes even to get the right copy onto your site that is actually going to make sales?

Outsourcing Works

A better step to take for many of today's website owners is to outsource. Outsourcing your copywriting does not have to be a difficult process, but it can offer some key advantages to your website:

You'll get to use an experienced professional how knows the market and knows how to convince people to take action. In other words, they are experts.

You'll be working on your product or service longer and spending less time fretting over the words on the blog or on your website. That means you have more time to do exactly what you need to grow your business.

By freeing up your time and giving yourself a better finished product, you increase sales. What's more, you shouldn't assume that outsourcing is over your budget. Chances are good, it's not!

When you consider all of these reasons, you know that your business can only grow rapidly if you take advantage of outsourcing. What's more, you'll find that it can give you the ability to provide better direction to the content and gives you the opportunity to convert more of your traffic.

Take the time to really consider what your options are when it comes to copywriting. You could spend a few hours a week learning how to write your own copy or you could give yourself a break and take advantage of the benefits outsourcing can offer.

« Previous 1 … 19 20 21 22 23 … 25 Next »