Business automation tools help companies and their customers by automating repetitive, day-to-day tasks.
They free up employees to focus on more strategic projects and provide an auditable trail of data that teams can use to make more informed decisions and apply consistent controls.
Companies of all sizes can apply business automation to myriad tasks, projects and processes. The key benefits usually include time and cost savings, elimination of errors and setting up controls to ensure that policies are followed.
Types of Business Automation
By making certain business processes “automatic,” business automation eliminates repetitive tasks, reduces hours wasted on redundant tasks, and helps improve overall productivity.
For these and other reasons, a growing number of organizations are infusing more and more business automation into their operations. Here are the types of business automation, how they work and when they should be used.
1. Marketing Automation
Marketing is an important business activity that can be both laborious and costly, making it ripe for simplification through automation.
Through marketing automation tools (which usually take the form of software), companies can generate highly qualified leads that are ready for sales engagement.
These tools also provide a framework for teams to target, build, execute and measure the success of marketing campaigns—taking the complexity out of lead qualification and conversion.
Some marketing automation software can automate email marketing processes, allowing companies to better align these campaigns with the efforts of their sales teams.
Companies can also use marketing automation tools to track and measure a prospect’s activity, identify when a lead meets known buyer-readiness conditions and deliver leads to sales as soon as they meet predefined criteria.
Marketing automation is useful for companies of all sizes. For example, a smaller company may use the software to develop, generate and send out monthly emails to convey relevant content or offers to a client distribution list.
This process can significantly reduce the number of hours spent on customer “touches” over the course of a year.
A larger firm, meanwhile, may want to take advantage of extended marketing automation features, like the dynamic segmenting of an extensive customer database, the targeting of customers with automated messages via social media and text, or custom-built workflows that align with the company’s specific marketing processes.
By automating online marketing and lead generation campaigns, companies can reduce the cost of developing and running these campaigns. This, in turn, helps to create a higher measurable return on investment (ROI) for each of those campaigns.
2. Accounting and Bookkeeping Automation
By automating their accounting and bookkeeping functions, companies can save considerable time on accounts receivable (AR), accounts payable (AP), billing, collections, credit card applications, data backup and other financial processes that have to be managed on a daily or weekly basis.
They can also apply automation to core processes like closing the books, general ledger (GL) management and bank account management.
By removing manual elements from the accounting team’s work—and handling the number-crunching and transactional work—automation makes a complex process more manageable.
Take accounts payable management, for example. About 55% of companies still handle their AP processes manually.
Using an automated system for this specific area of business finance management saves money and time: Data capture is automated, invoices are automatically matched to documents, and approvals are electronically routed. It also reduces data errors and helps prevent fraud through a system of “touchless” controls that happen behind the scenes.
Combined, these functionalities translate into important benefits. AP automation software reduces manual tasks and frees up cash flow.
Teams can submit invoices, manage approvals and process payments through a single platform with swift approvals and better visibility and control over important financial processes and data.
For companies of all sizes, accounting is a time-consuming process that includes many manual steps. By automating some or all of those steps, companies can free up time for important tasks like analysis, strategy and collaboration among team members.
3. Process Automation
Business process automation (BPA) goes beyond basic automation and incorporates integration of applications to help companies improve value and efficiency.
A subset of BPA, robotic process automation (RPA) focuses on automating routine tasks, while BPA helps companies get more out of their automation investments. BPA does this by aggregating data across multiple sources to develop analysis that would be difficult to attain manually.
Companies are using BPA for functions like:
- Automated order entry
- Email automation
- Automated batch processing
- Automated file transfers
- Automated report generation and distribution
From hiring to email management to accounting, nearly every corner of a business’s operations would benefit from BPA, which not only replaces manual labor but also simplifies and improves the workflow steps that make up the process.
When a business process is automated, entire steps in the existing workflow—emails chains and document transfers, for example—are eliminated.
4. HR Automation
Hiring new employees is a multi-step process that starts with an online job ad or recruitment effort and ends when the employee is officially onboarded. Many steps in this process can be automated.
A human resources management system (HRMS) is a valuable tool in doing so. As part of a broader set of functionalities, these systems automate the candidate management process.
This relates specifically to automated employment offers sent directly to candidates, which helps share roles to fill to both the outside world and current employees who may wish to apply for internal jobs or make referrals.
An HRMS is valuable to companies for which the candidate experience is a primary concern—from applying to resume management to interview scheduling to making offers, all the way through onboarding.
Using this automation, HR teams can process job applications, handle payroll, manage current and past employee data, improve the user provisioning process and administer benefits.
Because HRMS automates all facets of human resources management, including onboarding and payroll, it provides complete analytics across these processes.
It also automates core HR processes like managing employee time off, benefits, and other fundamentals. Using analytics, these systems also provide critical insights into a company’s workforce productivity and efficiency.
Other HR tasks that software can manage include:
- Employee record retention and retrieval.
- Reviews of job applications submitted online.
- Distribution and signing of work contracts, confidentiality agreements, waivers and other new-employee documentation.
- Employee tax form management.
- Benefits enrollment eligibility.
- Training requirements (e.g., when an employee moves into a new position).
Charged with evaluating employees’ work, HR departments can use the system’s data to track all tasks of each employee and generate ready-to-use reports for managers and leaders.
If, for example, employee turnover in the warehouse has become a serious issue over the last 90 days, the company can use an HR tool to pinpoint the specific problem and make better hiring decisions.
5. Contact Relationship Management
Using a contact management system, or CRM for short, has many values for a small business. With that said, when talking with other small business owners, many do not incorporate the use of a CRM in their business.
A CRM can be instrumental for storing prospect or customer data, managing workflows, managing sales processes, and much more. The benefit of incorporating a CRM solution cannot be understated.
When you have a CRM solution in your business and you actually use it, you decrease the chance of human error (simple forgetful-ness for example) in regards to managing workflows and sales pipelines.
Just like the email marketing solutions mentioned above, CRMs typically have flexible API interfaces as well so you can integrate it other platforms, such as email marketing and shopping cart solutions.
When to Use Contact Relationship Management Tools
You should use a CRM as soon as possible. They allow you to keep track of your contacts, update them, create sales pipelines, and just store valuable information on a consistent basis with your contacts.
This is why they are so beneficial in a business. Every business needs a filing cabinet to keep track of contacts, this is your filing cabinet.
6. Shopping Cart
For the type of businesses that need to set up a store front on a website, accept payments for products or services, and do it all with the utmost encryption or security, then you need a shopping cart solution.
There are many shopping cart solutions out there so there can be a lot of confusion around which shopping cart solution is best for your business.
Just like the CRM and Email Marketing solutions mentioned, most shopping cart solutions have open API interfaces too so you can integrate them with other platforms.
If you have any type of business, there is value in having a shopping cart. Through a cart you can track purchases, frequency of purchases, average customer lifetime value, and give prospects the opportunity to purchase on their own through your funnels or website.
Who doesn’t like to make money automatically?
If you are a small, service-based business, that handles a few transactions per month, then the argument can be made that you can get away with not having a shopping cart. Instead you can lean on solutions like Quickbooks, Freshbooks, or Paypal.
Other than that, just about every other type or level of business, can find use for a shopping cart. Also, keep in mind, to automate the entire sales cycle in a business, a shopping cart is essential.
All-In-One Solutions
This is a rarity in platforms for small businesses. Many of the solutions mentioned above have some sort of cross-list of features but there are only a few, true all-in-one solutions.
All-in-one solutions allow you to automate much more than single-featured solutions mentioned above but they also have higher costs associated with them.
The value that offsets the higher cost is the fact that these all-in-one solutions, can handle multiple functions typically derived from multiple solutions which saves money from having to purchase multiple solutions and saves time by minimizing the time drain that can occur from having to bounce from system to system.
When you are managing a growing business, this is a massive challenge that impedes growth and also takes businesses away from opportunities.
The two main all-in-one solutions on the market today happen to be Infusionsoft and Ontraport. Ontraport doesn’t have a true full slate of eCommerce functionality so if you need a shopping cart, Ontraport does not have one.
Ontraport does have order forms so you can still automate the sales process. They both include full CRM functionality and rules-based, robust, marketing automation.
Essentially to duplicate the set of features that both platforms have, you would have to adopt Salesforce, Hubspot, and 3D Cart, which can easily cost you over $500 per month, to be able to match the same features that both Infusionsoft and Ontraport offer.
When to Use All-In-One Solutions
Infusionsoft and Ontraport both have a full CRM and Marketing Automation list of features. Where they differ is that Infusionsoft has a fully-featured E-Commerce set, a more intuitive campaign builder with an easy to use graphical interface.
For example, if you need to set up a shopping experience on your website for when prospects want to add products or services to a cart, Ontraport does not allow this to be built out.
Infusionsoft also has a much larger pool of plug-ins to add additional features and functionality. However, they are both powerful all-in-one solutions and fantastic.
Keep in mind that these processes can be built out with a combination of platforms above through API, “out of the box” with the Marketing Automation Solutions or the All-In-One Solutions.
- Track lead sources and produce ROI reports that show cost per visitors, lead, and customer.
- Webinar registration and follow up
- Interest or behavior-based offers
- Affiliate registration and follow up campaigns
- Sales process targeted follow-up and scheduled tasks
- Dynamic marketing based on actions, behaviors, purchases, and more.
- Full internal workflow processes
- Full billing and purchasing support; automated billing, emails when billing errors occur, assigned tasks
- Retention processes
- Responses when actions occur in membership-website based products
- Targeted up-sells, down-sells, or cross-sells
The possibilities are endless, especially when you are working with all-in-one or marketing automation solutions.
They are designed from the ground up to be very flexible, robust, and to work with outside platforms, plug-ins, and software solutions to create automated systems for your business. When you are working with the stricter-featured platforms that focus solely on.
- email marketing
- contact relationship management,
- shopping cart
You’ll often end up “gluing” a bunch of solutions together resulting in a business that looks like this. There’s significant value in using marketing automation or all-in-one platforms because they build systems that:
- create efficiencies
- scalability,
- and additional revenue streams
Automatically within your business with a singular solution instead of a hodgepodge of API-connected solutions.
