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In business, we all love to have insightful reporting dashboards at our fingertips. When done well, they show us where the business is thriving, which areas are struggling, and if we’re on track to reach our goals.
That said, creating reporting dashboards can be incredibly time-consuming. It takes time and effort to compile up-to-date, accurate, and meaningful data, not to mention the learning curve required to understand what data to collect and how to do so.
This is why reporting is one of the most effective areas of your business to automate.
What’s more, it doesn’t have to be complicated to implement automated reporting workflows.
Here’s how to automate your business’s reporting workflow for dashboards that are continuously updated, without you needing to lift a finger beyond set-up.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Reporting Workflows
So you know that you want to have good data reporting in your business. But what does this actually look like?
Take a look at the characteristics below and identify how your business’s data workflows are currently performing.
The Good
You can identify the most effective reporting workflows by looking for:

Clear tracking of the most important KPIs, without clutter and vanity metrics
An automated dashboard that your team can view on any device
Frequently updated data that doesn’t require manual, time-consuming, and error-prone imports and exports

The Bad
By contrast, reporting workflows in need of optimization and automation look like this:

Reports that depends on you (or anyone else) to trigger updates
A lack of certainty if the data in your business reports is accurate
Siloed reports that only certain people can easily access

The Ugly
And, here’s what to really avoid if you want to save time, improve data accuracy, and fix efficiency leaks:

Manually importing and exporting data between apps, or copying and pasting data between sheets and presentation slides
Out-of-date or overly complex dashboards that don’t provide any real value, or lacking any clear data
Knowing that the data on your dashboards is inaccurate

Our Pick of the Best Options for Automated Reports
How can you achieve more of the good and less of the ugly in your reporting? Here are some of the best ways to automate your reporting and create insightful dashboards with the most relevant and up-to-date KPIs, ordered from basic to highly customizable:

Built-in reporting for your CRM and key apps
Google Analytics
Google Sheets
Google Data Studio
Supermetrics

1. Built-in reporting for your CRM and key business apps
Many comprehensive CRM options on the market have excellent reporting capabilities. Some also have native integrations to pull data from other key apps.
For instance, HubSpot connects to Google Analytics to enrich the data you already have inside the CRM. This makes it simple to display website engagement analytics alongside lead and customer data.

As a simple solution for automated reporting, check your CRM’s scope for creating up-to-date dashboards that share your business’s key data.
Tip: For the most accurate and enriched data insights in your CRM, sync it two ways with your other business apps that collect data.
2. Google Analytics – for an up-to-date view of your website data
If you want to automate reporting on website engagement and conversion goals, Google Analytics provides a simple, yet robust, framework.
To begin, optimize the data you’re collecting. Make sure the tracking code is properly added to your website, and look into setting up Events to track the conversions that matter to your business, such as ecommerce transactions or a visitor landing on your sign-up confirmation page.
You can then add these key metrics to your dashboard as custom widgets and choose how they are visualized. With custom dashboards, you can customize your reporting for the best overview, taking into account the most important KPIs for your team.
It’s also worth creating a simple process to share or export your dashboard, such as with a link that anyone in your team can use without logging into Google Analytics. Or, you could take your automation even further by automating Slack notifications that share the GA dashboard every week.

3. Google Sheets – for a simple spreadsheet powered by Google Analytics
Google Sheets is a very simple but effective solution for automating your data reporting.
The main scope for automated reporting with Google Sheets is by enabling the Google Analytics add-on and automatically pulling data in.
Here’s an example of a report that’s straightforward to create in Google Sheets using Google Analytics data:

You can enable your reports to update automatically (and avoid having to click “refresh” to bring in the new data from Google Analytics) by selecting Add-ons > Google Analytics > Schedule Reports from the menu bar.
Another great option for automated reports in Google Sheets is the Supermetrics integration with Google Sheets that also enables you to connect data from your non-Google business apps.
Tip: If you use Google Slides to present business meetings and reports, you can automatically sync charts and data views in Google Sheets with Slides (and Docs) to avoid manual copy and pasting before every meeting.
4. Google Data Studio – for highly customizable visualizations using data from multiple apps
Google Data Studio enables you to connect, visualize and share your business data on one platform. It’s fairly straightforward to set up, but there’s huge scope for customization and complexity if that’s what you’re looking for. With the tool, you can:

Connect data from the apps you use every day via built-in and partner connectors. The 500+ data sets include built-in connections with Google products like Google Analytics, Sheets, and Ads, plus partner connections with apps such as Copper, Mailchimp, or Facebook Ads.
Visualize your data in compelling ways with interactive reports, charts, and dashboards.
Share your reports and dashboards and collaborate with individuals, teams, or the world with public visibility. You can also embed your Data Studio reports on any web page.

To get started with Google Data Studio, first choose which data sources you want to connect:

Next, decide how you want to visualize and share your reports.

5. Supermetrics – for a scalable solution that takes Google Sheets, Excel, or Google Data Studio further
Supermetrics is a scalable solution designed to bring all of your marketing metrics together in one place, including PPC, SEO, social, and web analytics.
You can use Supermetrics alongside these tools to bring all of your marketing data insights directly onto each platform:

Google Data Studio
Google Sheets
Excel

Here’s an example of a report using Supermetrics data in Google Sheets:

Best Practices for Automated Reporting
Regardless of the tools and processes you choose to automate your business reporting workflows, there are a few best practices to keep in mind to achieve the best results.
When creating your reporting automation, focus on these three goals:

Simplicity: The most effective reporting workflows and dashboards are often the simplest. What’s the most valuable data for your business to track? Keep the focus on a few KPIs and make sure the data is automatically updated, accurate, and accessible.
Accessibility: Avoid keeping your reporting in silos. Ensure your team members can easily access the data they need to track performance and do their best work, such as with a public dashboard that is pinned in a Slack channel.
Data accuracy: Even the best automated reporting workflow will fail if the data in your source apps is inaccurate. Take the time to clean up your databases and use an iPaaS to instantly sync data between your apps using conditional rules.

As a marketer, you’re busy. And, even though you probably already know that automating tasks and workflows can free up a lot of time, it takes a lot of focus to set up, right?
Well, not necessarily.
With all of the marketing automation tools at your fingertips, it’s simpler and speedier than ever to streamline your workflows.
To maximize your automation strategy, we’ve compiled some of the best marketing tasks that you should automate in your workflow.

35 Marketing Tasks to Automate
Email Tasks
1. Delivering Content Downloads
One of the most effective areas of your marketing strategy to automate is email. As one example, you can set up automated emails to deliver content opt-ins such as reports, ebooks, and free templates.
This can be instead of (or as well as) triggering the download in the person’s browser. It also has the added benefit of enabling you to add a ‘next step’ CTA in the email body.

2. Email Newsletters
There’s a wide spectrum of what you can do to speed up the time you spend on email newsletters.
You can start by streamlining simple things such as creating email templates or easily duplicated header designs to speed up your production process.
But your automation options don’t end there. There’s plenty of options of complex automation you can implement to suit your specific needs.

3. Drip Campaigns
Email drip campaigns are a pivotal part of any digital marketing strategy. By automatically enrolling contacts in a campaign based on defined criteria (such as opting into your mailing list or purchasing a specific product or service), you can automatically send tailored content at set intervals.
Most drip campaigns work effectively when there’s a ‘goal’ for the lead to reach — such as subscribing to one of your paid plans. When they reach this, you can automatically unenroll them from this drip campaign and even enroll them in another one instead.
Here’s a simple example of a drip campaign made with GetResponse:

4. Smart Personalization in Emails
All top email marketing platforms offer personalization tokens to customize your content for every recipient.
Take a closer look at your automated emails and regular newsletters to identify where and how you can put them to the best use.
5. Cart Abandonment Emails
Savvy marketers know to keep an eye on leads that are nearly converting but need a nudge to cross the line.
If you have an ecommerce store, this can be enabled with an automated cart abandonment email, just like what Shopify offers:

6. Customized Email Campaigns
Rather than having email drip campaigns for only one stage of your funnel, take time to create customized email campaigns for the entire customer lifecycle journey. You can create campaigns that share:

Top-of-funnel content for new leads unfamiliar with your product or service
Middle-of-funnel content that mentions your product and shows ways it can help them to solve their pain points and reach their goals
Bottom-of-funnel content with a deeper product focus

When these three types of campaigns are used together, you can seamlessly guide new leads to become paying customers — at the right pace and without more manual work on your plate.
7. Email Follow-Up
Fed up of manually chasing people who haven’t got back to you? Many CRMs enable you to automatically follow up after a set interval (such as one week) so you don’t have to spend hours on tedious follow-up.
Lead Generation Tasks
8. Minimalist Lead Generation
If you prefer a subtle approach to automated lead gen, there are countless tactics and brands to inspire your strategy.
On their simply-designed website, podcasters and writers The Minimalists show that lead gen doesn’t have to be sleazy. It can be, well, minimal:

9. Website Banner Promotions
Got a webinar coming up or an offer expiring soon? Pin a minimally intrusive banner to the top of your website to feature an offer to visitors who land on your website.
10. Landing Page CTA’s
Ask yourself: how can you encourage your website visitors and blog readers to stick around and explore other pages?
This “New here? Click me” button on the bottom right of Marie Forleo’s blog headers is a good example of finding creative solutions to boost time-on-site:

11. Recurring Webinars
The online business platform Kajabi offers daily educational and Q&A webinars to provide trial users with more value.
This can be a really effective way to convert more people into customers — especially if you can introduce automation to boost ROI.
Many of Kajabi’s sessions are automated, including weekly sessions for ‘Create and Sell a Product’ and ‘Marketing Pipelines.’

12. Dynamic CTAs
One of the most powerful features in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is Smart CTAs. By adding a Smart CTA to your website — such as in a blog post or sidebar — you can display the most relevant call-to-action to every visitor.
You could promote a product-focused webinar to sales-qualified leads while showing new visitors a more top-of-funnel content upgrade.

14. Slide-in CTA’s
If you have created downloadables such as ebooks, worksheets, templates, or other resources, you can use these as a powerful tool for automated lead gen on your blog posts. One way to capture new leads and get more downloads is with a slide-in CTA connected to a form.
Social Media Tasks
14. Facebook Bots
An impactful and highly personalized way to automate lead generation is with a Facebook bot that guides new leads through a conversion process.
This example shows a simple use case that automatically delivers a content upgrade via Facebook Messenger:

15. Social Media Scheduling
A super helpful way to save time scheduling your social media posts in advance is with a social media management app like Buffer.
In your Buffer Analytics, there’s also a handy ‘Share Again’ button that you can use to reschedule the same posts that worked well the first time.

Content Tasks
16. Dynamic Content
With dynamic content on your website, you can boost conversion rates by automatically showing the most relevant content to each individual lead.
As one example, with HubSpot you can add smart content to your emails, website pages, landing pages, and templates.

After adding a smart content area, you can then automatically show different content based on:

Country
Device type
Referral source
Preferred language
Contact list membership
Contact lifecycle stage

17. Content Production Queue
Trello is one of the most popular and straightforward ways to manage your team’s content queue. But did you know it also provides a ton of options to automate project management, including keeping your content pipeline on track?
With Butler, Trello’s automation feature, you can create hundreds of rule-based and if-this-then-that automation to keep your content team on schedule.

SEO Tasks
18. SEO Site Audit
Not every marketing team has the resources to hire an in-house SEO specialist. Even if you do, there are many tools to help you streamline your SEO and stay on top of website problems and opportunities.
Although it’s not the cheapest on the market, Ahrefs is one of the most popular and feature-rich SEO tools to optimize your search presence.
As one stand-out feature, it delivers a Site Audit to crawl every area of your website, list all issues, and categorize these by type and priority level. You can then resolve these one by one and re-run the Site Audit when you’re ready to check for improvements.

19. Keyword Research
Another area where Ahrefs shines is keyword research. It’s super simple to track the keywords you’re currently ranking for, look for opportunities related to your relevant topics, and even identify what your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t.

Marketing-Sales Tasks
20. Upselling Customers
Marketing isn’t just about leads, it’s also about your existing customers. Automation is a powerful ally when it comes to upselling customers at the ideal time with products and services similar to those they have already gained value from.
21. Live Chat
Live chat has moved from being a nice-to-have to a must-have for many businesses. Your customers and potential customers want to easily and quickly get in touch with you.
With live chat apps such as what Drift offers, you can create automated chatbots that are configured to bring in marketing leads, not just sales-ready prospects.

22. Lead Qualification
GetResponse is another handy tool for strengthening your marketing team’s bridge to sales and helping them identify quality leads.
With a marketing automation platform, you can make sure your leads are sales-qualified before proceeding through a pipeline.

23. Lead Scoring
With lead scoring tools, you can effectively track engagement and know which leads to follow up with or enroll in a workflow that’s further down the funnel.
ActiveCampaign makes it easy to reward points and deduct them based on specific behavior and engagement, such as when a lead downloads content or visits your pricing page.

24. Good-Fit Leads
ActiveCampaign also notifies you when leads are becoming more engaged. It automatically triggers email notifications and assigns tasks based on lead score changes.

25. Automated Product Demo Video
As an example of automated sales-qualified lead gen, Marketo gates its demo video behind a form to collect data from qualified leads.

26. Lead Assignment
With sales automation you can automatically distribute your new leads and deals based on:

An evenly distributed round-robin
Based on value (to ensure all sales reps get about the same amount of value over time)

27. Trial Extension Offers
If someone signs up for a trial of your product but doesn’t convert, consider sending them a trial extension offer.
This effective example from Kajabi is generous and highly personalized to encourage conversions.

Management & Organization Tasks
28. Contact Management
Your losing a lot of time in your workday if your business doesn’t have an automated way to organize contacts from all channels
Your answer to this is a cloud-based CRM system with built-in pipeline management and automation capacities, such as what Copper, HubSpot, and Pipedrive offer.
29. Inbox Filtering
You don’t have to reach inbox zero, but you can clear up a lot of the chaos in your inbox using automated inbox filtering. Here’s a quick WikiHow tutorial on how to use Gmail’s priority inbox feature.

30. Sync New CRM Leads
Two of the most important tools in your marketing stack are your CRM and email marketing app.
Your CRM works best when it’s at the center of your stack with contacts from other apps instantly synced. It’s also important to ensure that the right leads are in your newsletter list. You can achieve both of these goals by keeping your CRM and email platform in sync.
As well as syncing relevant new CRM contacts with your newsletter list, you can also instantly remove leads from your mailing lists if they opt-out in another app.
31. Marketing Reports
It’s easy to spend a lot of your workweek on reporting: finding the right data, creating visualizations, and sharing these with your team.
With tools like Google Data Studio and Supermetrics, you can connect all of your marketing data for reporting in one platform.
Here’s a free Google Data Studio reporting template that shows how you could automatically connect your data.

32. Updating Meeting Slides
Instead of manually updating Google Slides with the right data ahead of meetings, you can automatically sync charts and data views in Google Sheets with Slides (and Docs) to free up time and reduce scope for error.

33. Slack Reminders
If you’re a regular Slack user, you have lots of automation options to streamline your workflows. You can take advantage of this by setting up a weekly Slack reminder to prep for upcoming team meetings.
34. Team Progress Updates
Another example of how to take advantage of Slack automation is by asking for updates on important projects at the start of every week. Similar to Slack reminders, you can message your team on a recurring basis so you’re always in the loop.
35. Project Management
Like Slack, Trello is another app that you can quickly level up with automation.
For instance, if your editorial team has a content planning board, whenever a blog post is moved to the ‘Editing’ column on Trello, the due date is automatically updated and the right team member is assigned to make sure each piece is edited on time:

Data Tasks
36. Contact Data Enrichment
Do you find yourself having to manually find out information about a new lead? Use Clearbit to automatically enrich the data you have for every new lead that enters your CRM and marketing apps.
37. Automated Data Syncing
Manually exporting and importing data between apps will never be the highlight of any marketer’s day.
To free up time for what really drives your KPIs while improving data quality in all of your marketing apps, set up a two-way data sync between your apps. This will keep the customer data in sync not only across your marketing apps, but throughout your entire tech stack, too.

Look at any business and you will likely see customer care professionals on the frontline. Whether they are in customer service or account management, these people set customers up for success, keep them happy in the long term, and make vital contributions to the business’s sustainability.
However, despite its value, customer success is one of the most challenging roles at any company.
According to Pega’s ‘The good, the bad, the ugly: 2019 global customer service insights’ study, 79% of 70,000 customer service employees reported that they experience multiple pain points when doing their job. Customer service also has one of the highest turnover rates of all departments.
Why is customer service so challenging? 
Let’s review some of the common pain points for customer service teams below.
Common Pain Points for Customer Care Teams
Many common pain points cited in Pega’s study come down to a combination of poor tools and processes that harm the customer experience. These include:

Having to pass customers between teams and departments (a pain point for 43%)
Having to manually enter the same information in multiple locations (a pain point for 32%)
Having to prompt customers for information they’ve already supplied on another channel (a pain point for 24%)

These are problems for a lot of businesses, but the good news is that they are easily avoidable and fixable with iPaas.
How iPaaS Improves Employee Satisfaction
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) connects and integrates your business apps so you can keep data updated across multiple tools. It also provides an easy way to centralize data in one place, like your CRM.
iPaaS tools are great for improving customer experience, but they also boost employee satisfaction and reduce turnover – especially in customer-facing roles – by resolving the pain points that affect nearly 80% of these employees.
If you want to reduce the turnover of your customer service employees, read on for five common problems to easily avoid and fix with iPaaS.
Problem #1: Passing Customers Between Teams and Departments
As a customer, there are few things worse than being redirected to what feels like hundreds of different people in a business. In fact, 69% of customers expect a connected experience when they engage with a company, but few of them get it.
When you’re working in a business with disconnected customer service, it’s also demotivating for the employees. You want to provide a seamless customer experience, but the infrastructure isn’t there for you to do so.
The Solution:
Use an iPaaS tool to sync all customer data to a centralized CRM tool, so any team member can find timely customer data and take immediate steps to help the customer.
Problem #2: Manually Entering the Same Information in Multiple Locations
Repeating the same manual work again and again sucks. For many customer-facing teams, it can seem like part of the job to spend hours of your day inputting the same data into a CRM, project management tool, invoicing system, and Slack to share data with colleagues. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Solution:
Set up a two-way sync so your contact data can instantly flow to all of the right places. Set up rules to automatically attach the right segments, labels, and notes — and you’ve instantly saved your team a lot of time and hassle.
Problem #3: Prompting Customers for Information They’ve Already Supplied on Another Channel
One sure-fire way for a business to annoy its customers is to ask the same questions multiple times. 78% of customers expect consistent interactions across a company’s departments. This requires your employees to know what’s already been asked before — and what the answer is.
The Solution:
Store customer data properly the first time and sync it across all tools so anyone on the team can access it at the right time, no matter what system they’re looking at.
Problem #4: Using Outdated Tools That Hold Back Your Team
Despite all of the excellent cloud-based systems on the market, not all teams benefit from these products. It’s all too easy for customer care departments to remain stuck with a tool that no longer serves them because change seems like a lot of hassle.
The Solution:
Take time to pause and look at all of your business’s core systems from a bird’s eye perspective. Ask yourself: What tools are you currently using? And, how do they fit together?
Problem #5: Burnout From Lack of Automation
If your customer service and success teams aren’t using automation tools, they’re most likely overworked. Quite simply, automation provides a solution to the tasks that no one likes to do.
Think manually sending the same emails several times a day, judging when to follow-up with customers, and searching for the right customer data to pass to a coworker.
The Solution:
Add automation to your customer service processes. To get you started, here are some of the best tools for customer service teams.