Online Business Automation: Tips and Tools!

Automation has become vital to the growth of businesses as it has added efficiency to all the aspects which form the lifeline of a business. The year 2019 will be defined by how well and how fast are you able to engage your audience, keeping them glued to your business. Online automation tools help you save time and energy, especially in mundane and repetitive processes that take a heavy toll of both. Technology offers many options which will help you automate and make your workday more productive. Business automation tools have thus become synonymous to survival in this age where everything works at the speed of thought. The flooding of the web has pushed businesses to think fast and run lean both of which are a distant dream without automation.

Best Business Automation Tools

Online automation tools help to ease your workflow as they can be used for a range of activities from marketing to daily operations. Nearly 60 percent of the top businesses of the world have shifted to automation and the number is continually growing. Here is a list of tools divided by category to handle online business automation processes for your concern:

• Management: This software helps you automate the routine management tasks and makes the flow of work more organized.

1. Asana: It finds use in multiple business processes. It helps in the creation of tasks with deadlines in addition to the automation of all the repetitive processes. Asana also helps ensure compliance by sending emails to users as deadlines approach. Furthermore, all the tasks as they are able to be completed in time can be synced with Google Calendar, Outlook, etc. It enjoys the advantage of being able to integrate with other apps.
2. Trello: Trello has a much cleaner interface and makes use of boards or lists for organizing your business tasks. Its strengths lie in robust apps and integrations. E.g. the Butler powerup which helps users to give shape to their own range of automation which ranges from moving cards to even sorting different lists via commands in natural language.

• Marketing: It becomes overwhelming for businesses to keep pace with the growing number of customers and maintain strong relationships with each one of them. These online automation tools help to categorize the data of customers and thus ease the job of agents who can focus tailor their strategies as per the buyer’s journey.

1. Salesforce: It has emerged as the best CRM tool in the world. It is loaded with a huge opportunity for automation and customizations for integrating with other business automation tools.
2. Freshsales: It has a point-and-click interface that can be customized to suit the needs of customers and businesses. It is helpful in sending emails, trigger notifications and even keeps the records up-to-date.

• Social Media: The online automation tools used for social media help businesses to increase their reach and enhance their engagement with the audience. They greatly help in streamlining the process.

1. Quuu: It is specifically directed at bringing together business owners in different industries and content creators who are in search for the right audience. You have to just put your preferences about interests of your audience, select the number of posts and thus post the content which you want either manually or automatically.
2. Hootsuite: The best feature of this is that it clubs all the social media accounts across multiple channels under one dashboard. This definitely brings efficiency in posting and makes your social media strategy more effective.
3. 99 Dollar Special: As the name suggests, this works at $99 per month but then takes care of your entire social media efforts and helps in sharing the right content to your audience once in a day.
4. Buffer: It typically helps in automating the content curation. It lets you take content from the web and put it in your scheduled posts thus eliminating the need for sharing the posts individually a few times in a day.

• Communication: Effective internal communications always form the lifeline of any business. Many business automation tools have come up to make this more streamlined.

1.  Slack: It is helpful in organizing internal communications, managing emails, holding periodic discussions with your team, etc. All the conversations are continuously archived and appear like threads in a chat window. It is thus possible to refer to a topic in history. It has much more to offer than what meets the eye and one has to explore it backwards-forwards for getting the maximum benefit out of its features.
2. MailChimp: It has been in the market for quite some time and has established itself as an effective communication tool for both internal and external communications. The whole team is kept abreast with daily operations. It has now also expanded in the domain of social media automation as well.

• Analytics: The whole business efforts fail if you are not able to track your analytics or web performance periodically.

1. Google Analytics: This is the most reliable and sought-after tool for analytics. It has unparalleled insights for your web performance and helps to track and analyze your web traffic. It allows for the creation of customized dashboards for reviewing either on a monthly or weekly basis with the metrics which matter most.
2. Kissmetrics: It works on the same lines as Google Analytics but also helps you keep a track of your users by ID as the user’s device gets cookied. This lets you track the user behaviour every time they visit your online website. This information works a great deal in helping you design your online strategy accordingly.

Thus, the internet has changed the ways businesses are run and it is essential to keep pace with the changing landscape to survive. The list of such business automation tools is growing every day so you have to be selective in your approach to pick the ones which are best suited to your business needs.

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