What Is Workflow Automation?

Workflow automation is the process of simplifying your business processes and making them easier to manage. It can help you streamline your repetitive tasks while allowing you to focus on the essential things. In other words, you can do actual work instead of toiling away on administrative chores.

In this article, we’ll cover the benefits of workflow automation, how different departments can use it to their advantage, how you can start the process of automating your process, and some helpful tips along the way.

Workflow automation helps you manage your time better.

Workflow automation can positively affect every department in your company. Let us break this down and show you which segments of your business should be automated and which you should avoid giving up at any cost.

Marketing

While most people associate marketing with creativity, a lot of busy work comes with it. We suggest you keep the creative side of the job entirely to yourself without relying on AI-generated content. You’ll end up having generic content that doesn’t differentiate you from your competitors — so this is one thing you should not automate. But you could improve the efficiency of managing and production of creatives with workflow automation for a shorter campaign execution time.

Email Automation

With studies showing that marketing automation leads to a 14,5% increase in sales productivity, it’s imperative to figure out a way to speed up your email marketing process. Your first step is creating a sales funnel to ensure people in different stages of the sales process receive relevant and timely information.

Your customers who already bought something from you might want to receive email updates about sales or complementary products. It’s essential to have a goal for every group of email recipients.

Once you have your groups and goals, create content for them and determine when you want it to send out. If you offer a limited free trial, you’ll want to engage with your clients more in that period to secure more sales.

All of this can be automated. You can set up automated emails when a user takes a specific action within your product. If you want to maximize your sales and reduce the time spent on writing emails, you can and should automate this process.

Later on, you can engage less frequently. However, monitoring your open and click-through rates is essential to see if you need to implement any changes. Also, consider implementing DKIM lookup to improve email deliverability. Remember, it’s all about automating while retaining that personalized, human touch.

Social Media

Social media requires a lot of day-to-day work, but luckily you can automate the boring parts and use your time wisely. Not only can you schedule your social media plans on different social platforms and create visually appealing grids, but you can also automate your responses on social media platforms and your marketing campaigns.

Moreover, by automating the collection and distribution of content from various social media platforms, you can save time and effort while ensuring a consistent brand message across all channels. This results in the efficient management of social media accounts using a social media aggregator.

This includes leveraging tools like an AI caption generator, which can craft engaging and relevant captions, thus streamlining the content creation process.

Look into automating your customer support as well, especially if you receive many of the same messages and have a place to refer your clients to, like a webshop or a landing page with all the relevant information.

The one thing you should refrain from doing, no matter the platform, is using bots to increase your following, as this should be done with consistent posting and paid campaigns. Automating your marketing campaigns will help you target your audience better and generate better leads.

Sales

One of the most important aspects of sales is devoting time to your prospects and returning clients. With sales automation, this can be done for all of them simultaneously and with reduced staffing.

Lead Nurturing

Use lead nurturing workflows to identify the way and even the exact path your audience takes before they become prospects and customers. Once you know precisely how to convert your audience into customers, you can automate the process.

This process will help you ensure that no one slips through the cracks, and once they get towards the end of the sales funnel, you can quickly shift your approach just enough to secure sales, be it through a call center, contact center, or email.

Sales Analysis

Analyzing your sales process is the most insightful strategy for bettering it. With tools that can help you export data and check its accuracy, as well as generate reports that compare your best-performing month with the current one, the benefits of automating your sales analysis are clear. For example, you can automate your sales reports in your CRM to get a clearer idea of the sources of your best sales and to find out who your top sales reps are.

Finance

There are a lot of options available for automating your financial reporting. However, other parts of the financial side of your business can be quickly done and shared by automating your workflow, like managing employee expenses.

Budget Approvals

Approving a budget is easy for companies that have few employees. However, as soon as you start growing, that process becomes longer and longer. The best way to streamline this process is to create a template form with all necessary items and define the responsible parties.

Auto Payments

Suppose you have recurring billing that are always made out to the same amount, for example. If you work on retainers, you can set up automatic payments and alleviate the worry of chasing down outstanding payments.

Human resources

Human Resources is focused on people’s individual needs within your organization. However, a lot of administrative work comes with employing and onboarding new people that can be automated to make it a less resource-intensive process.

Data Entering

HR automation software can help you gather and enter employees’ information like addresses, insurance, expenses, and additional expenses, such as pet insurance or other corporate benefits. That way, you can drastically reduce paperwork and provide a quicker onboarding experience, as well as employee promotions and bonuses, as well as reduce high employee turnover.

Verify Potential Employees

Hiring new people can be costly; however, hiring the wrong person will be even more expensive. Verifying your candidates is a long and daunting process, but there is a way to streamline it.

Employment verification checks can greatly reduce the risk of hiring the wrong person. You can outsource it to hiring agencies or rely on HR software that collects data on potential employees and checks the given information for accuracy. This is especially important if you hire people from around the world.

How to automate your processes?

Before you start with your automating process, make sure to identify the problem and define your goals. Once you have those in order, you can look for the best tools and software to help your team.

The choice should be up to the people that will use it the most, so make sure to listen to your team’s input. Once you find the perfect tool, you must educate your team members and coach them through the transition.

You can expect some pushback initially, so be transparent with them and express your reasoning and end goal transparently.

Guest Post:

Petra Odak is a Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals, a simple yet potent proposal software tool that helps you send high-converting, web-based business proposals in minutes. She’s a solution-oriented marketing enthusiast with more than five years of experience in various marketing and project management fields.