One of the biggest advantages to being an ecommerce company is that you can focus on the core essentials without worrying about all of the superfluous details that other businesses often get caught up in. But unless you learn how to automate these processes, you don’t stand a chance of being successful.
The 3 Processes You Should be Automating
As marketer Neil Miller explains, “Automation is moving the needle of business efficiency and simplifying human lives in general.” He goes on to point out that, “Organizations that embrace business process automation have cut costs, saved time, and asked their manual workforce to solve more intelligent problems. They let machines do the rote tasks, while eliminating the chances of human errors.”
If you’re still trying to tackle everything on your own, you’re missing out. Not only are you being inefficient, but you’re ultimately going to wear yourself down to a point where you aren’t able to operate at your maximum capacity.
You need to leverage the power of automation and, as Miller says, move the needle of business efficiency. Thanks to advanced cloud-based software, this is more possible than ever before. Here are a few specific processes to consider automating.
1. Digital Marketing
You may think you’re doing a good job at taking on digital marketing, but are you really? How’s your lead nurturing? Is your conversion rate strong? There’s a lot to think about in this area.
“One of the biggest challenges businesses face is connecting with leads and turning them into customers,” says Veronica Taylor, a small business marketing expert. “In many cases, lots of people visit your website but few actually interact with your content and even fewer purchase anything. Marketing automation helps reduce that gap.”
Recommendation: Give Pardot a try. As a Salesforce product, you can rest assured that you’re not only getting a quality platform, but also exceptional service. It can be a little on the pricey side, but it’s worth every penny.
2. Supply Chain Logistics
Trying to manage a supply chain isn’t easy. This is especially true when it comes to fulfilling orders that come from multiple sales channels. Between consolidating the orders, printing shipping labels, picking and packing, and tracking returns, this can be a full-time job. Thankfully, the right cloud software can make all the different in the world.
Recommendation: Sellbrite is widely considered to be the most efficient multi-channel shipping software on the market. It works especially well with Amazon’s FBA program, so definitely consider Sellbrite if this is one of your big sales channels.
3. Disaster Recovery
It’s nearly impossible to run a business these days without some sort of disaster recovery plan in place. Some are better than others, but you need something. Thankfully, the processes associated with disaster recovery can be automated with the right cloud solutions. And while the hope is that you’ll never need to utilize it, it’s nice knowing that you have a backup plan in place should something go wrong (which it eventually will).
Recommendation: Again, you have a lot of choices here, but Automic is one of the best. It offers total visibility into disaster recovery processes at any time and automated execution of the plan you’ve established with very minimal human intervention. This is extremely important, since you typically don’t know a disaster is coming ahead of time.
Maximize Your Time and Energy
Your time and energy are valuable finite resources. In order to stand any chance of being successful in your business operations, you have to find a way to automate the mundane and time-consuming responsibilities. From digital marketing and supply chain logistics to disaster recovery and internal communication, cloud software can get you where you need to be.
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Author: Larry Alton
Larry Alton is a professional blogger, writer and researcher who contributes to a number of reputable online media outlets and news sources, including Entrepreneur.com, HuffingtonPost.com, and Business.com, among others. In addition to journalism, technical writing and in-depth research, he’s also active in his community and spends weekends volunteering with a local non-profit literacy organization and rock climbing. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
