If you provide a service to customers, coordinating appointments, consultations & all the other personal connections required for your business can quickly become as overwhelming as running the business itself.
You’re juggling work responsibilities, blending them with your personal life to the point of burnout. Your calendar is jam packed.
Worst of all, you can only take on a limited number of clients because you’re just spending too much time managing the ones you’ve already got.
If this describes your life as a business owner, we only have one question…
You haven’t automated your scheduling because…why?
Marketing automation tools are easy to set up & are as efficient as simply pressing a button. There’s no need to make 100s of phone calls to generate leads, no booking appointments, no emails back & forth to stay in touch & make sure they actually show up for their service.
It saves you a ton of time…& because these tools help you contact more people at once, you ultimately make more sales as well.
There are many ways to automate your business processes so you can get more customers & sales…but how exactly does it work?
Read on to find out how automation software can transform your business & sales.
Ways To Automate Your Business Processes
Email marketing is a crucial line of communication that runs the length of the entire Customer Value Journey.
You can send welcome emails to start building a relationship with new leads & customers. You can send out announcements about new products, coupons & special promotions.
Without a way to stay in touch with your contacts, they will forget you exist.
But if you take advantage of every opportunity to let them know there’s something exciting going on at your business, you’ll stay at the forefront of their minds & keep them interested.
If you run a business that provides a service, you can also use email to follow up about appointment information. This involves sending a series of reminders that builds anticipation about the service while also ensuring they show up.
Calendar Management
Unless you want to hire someone to exclusively manage your calendar, knowing how to automate your business processes in regard to scheduling is the best way to go.
Automation softwares like Infusionsoft & Active Campaign, the same programs Cirius Marketing uses for our own clients, have the ability to integrate with calendar applications to allow customers to schedule consultations & appointments.
In addition, these applications can be automated to capture your leads or customers’ contact information so you can send appointment confirmation emails & other special announcements by email.
Event Management
If you’re hosting a webinar, open house, concert, fundraiser or other event, knowing how to automate your business processes can help you reduce the effort involved in promoting the event so it doesn’t overtake your regular operations.
By integrating with event hosting sites like Eventbrite, you can create an easy way for patrons to register after viewing a landing page for the event, not to mention keep track of how many people are attending.
You can also link your event management applications with your email software to send out special materials to get attendees excited & ready to attend, reminders of the event & instructions for parking & schedules for the day.
Putting It Together: A Case Study Of How It All Works
The event planning explosion from EXOS, a human performance company, illustrates how much a strategy to automate your business processes can pay off in time & profits.
EXOS’s mission is to help customers reach their health & fitness goals, offering customized plans, training programs, nutrition regimens & more.
One of their most important promotional efforts is a series of events for healthcare providers & fitness experts to share their services & mission. With at least 50 of these large-scale events held yearly, planning & recruiting attendees was time consuming.
What made the process more challenging was that their event planning strategy was outdated & inefficient. While some automation was involved, the major of interactions with registrants involved manual email follow-ups & did not easily gather contact information & data.
As a result, planning & coordinating the events was significantly less scalable than it should have been.
At least until they started integrating Eventbrite with their customer management & marketing platform.
On its own, Eventbrite is an event planning powerhouse. Not only can you create event pages, but the program also allows you to sell tickets, manage sales, keep track of attendees & investigate data so you can optimize your approach.
Combined with their normal contact management software, though, they were able to move contacts generated from the event into their system to keep them connected with EXOS services & developments.
In the end, not only did this automation strategy drastically reduce the time required to manage their event planning, but it also made it possible for EXOS to increase their number of events from 50 to 200.
Knowing how to automate your business processes literally can save you 100s of hours. But more importantly, it makes it easier to generate more leads with your event & advance them further into their Value Journey so they can become customers & eventual repeat buyers.
How To Automate Your Business Processes & Change The Game
Whether you’re putting on large scale events to generate leads like EXOS or just wanting to connect with customers for consultations, automating your scheduling & event planning processes can have big payoffs.
Being able to connect directly with leads & customers can also go a long way to building greater interest in your brand & establishing the trust you need to build a relationship with them.
So how do you get started? Creating a strategy to automate your business processes starts with understanding the journey your customers take from strangers to your brand to total evangelists for it.
But exactly what does that journey look like…& how well are your customers traveling the one you have in place now?
We made a quiz to help you to figure it out.
Calculate your Customer Adventure Score & find out what your customer’s experience with your brand is really like & get some exciting tools to help you improve your results.
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