If You’re a Marketer, Automate These Tasks Now!

“The future has already arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” said William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer.

And he was right, decades ago. Across all spheres and especially in Marketing, automation is increasingly freeing up resources and time that are now spent in taking up ambitious and creative projects. So, if you are still using excel sheets that are simply hampering productivity, then it’s time you rethink the way you approach everyday tasks.

Marketing automation is neither rocket science nor magic that’ll run your business. But what it can do for you is: Save you a lot of time by automating repetitive manual tasks that would otherwise eat away at your work hours. You can also say that technology will help you optimize conversions, reduce cost of lead generation, and increasingly re-engage customers.

There are a variety of tools and software that automate different things. It would be your call (or your company’s call) to decide what to automate based on costs, time and other parameters. But, there are certain things, basic but time consuming, that you should automate to increase workplace productivity. We give you the top four things you should automate, if you haven’t already.

Welcome Messages

Sending an automated yet personalized “Welcome on board” message is a great way to immediately engage a visitor who has just converted to a customer or subscriber. The welcome message could ask them about their interests in order to give them relevant updates, talk about what you as a business have on offer, or even simply welcome them and get them started.

A welcome message is one way to ensure that the person who signed up with you remains engaged and returns to your platform. For instance, you have a limited time free trial for those who have just signed up. And, there might be a chunk of people who haven’t used the trial or engaged with your platform after signing up. There would be many reasons for this. But, by sending them a welcome or follow up message, after a certain number of days (depending on your business and strategy), you’re bringing their attention back to your platform.

The message can be, “Hey, welcome aboard. Here are 2 simple things to get you started. Here’s why you should give this a try. Click on this message to watch a video on how to place your orders with us.”

Special Occasions

Customers, like any other human, like celebrating special occasions. And this is a sweet spot for marketers to impress customers. By using birthdays, anniversaries or especially local festivals, marketers can celebrate with the customer by offering special discounts, a free trial of a new feature, or an invite to an event.

You’ll not only see customers engaged, but also find more time to do other productive things by automating this process. One great way to do this is by scheduling a notification for later. On the date set beforehand, your message will be delivered to your customer. You’ll see stronger customer retention and also stand out in the crowded market place.

New Post on Your Blog

You might have a large subscriber base for your blog. But how do you get them to read new posts, old posts, or even attract new subscribers? There are multiple ways you can handle these challenges. The most brilliant way is to automate new post updates to subscribers. You can implement this in two ways. Let’s examine them quickly.

RSS-to-Push : RSS-to-Push sends a Push Notification to your blog subscribers the moment it detects a new post. The blog title is taken as the heading of the notification and the first 48 characters of the body become the notification message. You can, of course, edit the details and schedule the notification for later. This method is effective as the push message appears on your users’ device screens as clickable messages, tempting them to click on it. This way, you’ll find more engaged readers.

Automate Emails : You can automate sending blog post updates via emails to your readers, similar to RSS-to-Push. But the results will vary here as emails are not as agile as Push Messages. They could lay unopened for a long duration or land in spam folders in subscribers’ inboxes. Whereas pushes appear instantly on device screens.

Reminder Messages

If your business attends, organizes, hosts or even informs users about events, it would be beneficial to automate reminder messages instead of doing it manually. Be it an invite, pre-event or post event message, these reminders engage users. You could plan in advance how you’d want to go about these messages.

For instance, you can schedule an invitation, giving brief details about the event, followed by a reminder message and then a confirmation request. Based on those who did finally attend the event, you can then schedule a post event message like a “Thank you”, a survey or even arrange a call with your sales team.

Marketing Automation Technology facilitates many opportunities to better utilize your resources to other tasks, while giving commendable results. Big corporations use this on a massive scale to make their processes efficient and engage their customers effectively. And following suit, smaller businesses are implementing it to have an edge over their competition.

It’s not always complicated to set up or use these technologies. You’ll be able to reap good results by automating small tasks with the right structure and strategy.

P.S. You can also automate your social media posts. Just remember to write personalized messages for the updates you post about a piece of content you publish. Buffer is a great tool to manage your social media platforms under one umbrella.

Originally published on The Marketer’s Last Mile — the PushCrew Blog.

(You can signup and start using PushCrew Web Push Notifications for free here.)