Author: Franz Malten Buemann

In 2019, DoorDash was losing money on the average order and reported an operating loss of $616 million on $885 million in revenue. By the end of 2020, their revenue jumped to $2.89 billion — a 226% gain.
Why the sudden success?

For one, the global pandemic spiked the demand for food delivery. But DoorDash also responded to customers’ needs right from the start. They delivered COVID test kits and launched the #OpenforDelivery campaign to support restaurants by the end of March, made it easier to filter customer ratings in April, and released a Gifting feature to send loved ones food over the holidays.
Simply put, they figured out what customers desired and rapidly delivered.
Now more than ever, customers expect brands to understand and respond to their needs. In a survey of global consumers, 58% of people remembered a brand that quickly pivoted and 82% ended up doing more business with that company as a result.

But a lightning-fast response only happens if your team can handle abrupt change.
Agile marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on quickly executing projects by working in short sprints. It makes room for marketers to shift their focus, adapt to customer needs, and change priorities alongside expectations.
With Agile, what once took months to deliver can take weeks.
Adopting this approach takes work, but this post shares how to get started with Agile marketing by explaining the process, sharing examples, and showing you how to automate your efforts.
What is Agile Marketing?
Agile marketing is a strategic marketing approach that prioritizes creating high-value deliverables, working in short, intense bursts to achieve goals, and rapidly iterating.
By the end of each burst — often called a ‘sprint’ or an ‘iteration’ — teams complete their outlined deliverables and begin testing so they know how to improve during the next iteration. Data collection and analytics allow teams to incrementally refine and improve the results over time.
Agile marketing embraces failure. It also requires teams to learn from their mistakes and make adjustments to continuously get better. This mindset isn’t always easy for teams to instantly adopt. That’s why it’s important to understand the core values outlined in the Agile Marketing Manifesto before switching to this approach.

Validated learning over opinions and conventions.
Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy.
Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns.
The process of customer discovery over static prediction.
Responding to change over following a plan.
Many small experiments over a few large bets.

When these values play out in real-world projects, the impact can be massive.
Research by McKinsey found that digital marketing organizations using Agile have seen a 20-40% increase in revenue. Agile has also cut down the time it takes for companies to turn an idea into an offer — from multiple months or weeks to less than two weeks.
You may think this acceleration leads to sloppy deliverables and disappointment. It’s the opposite. Agile marketing can improve performance and quality by creating space for clear goals, frequent feedback, continual testing and iteration, on-time deliverables, and inevitable impact.
To get those results, you have to dive into the nitty-gritty details.
Agile Marketing Process
No marketing team follows the exact same Agile approach. Some stick to the traditional frameworks while others pick and choose which parts work for them to create a hybrid method.
The method you choose can depend on the goals you want to accomplish. While its roots are in web and software development, 77% of companies using Agile rely on it for creative services, content creation, and operations.
The main methodologies for Agile marketing teams are Scrum and Kanban.
Scrum
The Scrum framework revolves around sprints. Each sprint lasts for two to six weeks and is organized by the team doing the work. Depending on the size of your project, you may need to break it up into multiple smaller sprints to tackle it bit by bit.
The goal of each sprint is to rapidly deliver small projects that can be combined into a larger project over time. Once a sprint is set, the team shouldn’t change its goals or reprioritize until the sprint is complete.
To make sure your sprints stay on track, you need to establish a few key roles and meetings.
Roles
1. Scrum MasterThis person is responsible for keeping the team on task. They know the Scrum framework and use it to facilitate meetings, remove roadblocks, help team members use the framework, and make sure everyone on the Scrum team is collaborating and communicating.
2. Product OwnerThis person understands the reason for the work and makes sure the process is being done at the right time. They understand the customers better than anyone else, and they collaborate with the stakeholders and team to ensure the deliverables provide value to the business and to customers.
3. DeveloperEveryone else on the team falls under the Developer role. Ideally, the people in this role are cross-functional and contribute a unique set of skills needed to accomplish the sprint. You want to choose at least one person from each department that your project touches.
Meeting
1. Planning
A planning meeting kicks off every sprint to decide what the team can achieve. Everyone looks at the priorities the Product Owner has put together and agrees on which to include in the sprint.
The project(s) are divided into tasks, given deadlines, and assigned to individual team members so people know exactly what to work on when they leave the meeting. These meetings take time, so dedicate at least one hour per week of the total sprint time (i.e., a three-hour meeting for a three-week sprint).
At your first planning meeting, emphasize that Agile is a new way of working and the typical rules don’t apply. Reiterate the need to focus on the customer above all else and highlight the need for speed, collaboration, data, and accountability.
2. Stand-up
The daily stand-up gets your team together for a brief (15 minutes or less) check-in. The aim is to make it very clear where everyone is on progress, roadblocks, and tasks. Everyone on the team answers:

What they accomplished yesterday
What they plan to do today
Any blocks in their way

3. Review
The review is the time to show off what your team has achieved during the sprint. It’s open to anyone interested in the results and is a good time to show off campaign materials, demo content, or share early testing data.
Make note of feedback and add or adjust your priority list as needed, but don’t get wrapped up in additional approvals or new ideas. The point is to share insight into what your team is working on and highlight the impact.
4. Retrospective
Headed by the Scrum Master, this meeting is a chance for the Scrum team to reflect on work from the latest sprint. Everyone shares what went well, what didn’t, what can be improved, and lessons learned. Make sure people don’t point fingers in the meetings, and assign action items as a way to continually improve before the next retrospective.
Kanban
If your marketing team is full of visual learners or does work that won’t fit well into a predetermined sprint timeline, Kanban may be the Agile framework for you.
Kanban is made up of three main components: visualizing workflow, setting WIP limits, and meeting cadences.
1. Visualizing workflow
Unlike Scrum, Kanban uses visual cues to track progress. A Kanban board is how people track the progress of user stories (i.e., tasks) to be accomplished. The board is divided into columns, each their own stage in a workflow.
The simplest boards have To-Do, Doing, and Done columns, but the more complex your workflow, the more columns you may need. (One of my favorite tools for building boards and tracking progress is Miro).
Source
Each card on the board represents a task to be completed. For example, if you’re planning a social calendar for the upcoming quarter, you would list each task that needs to be accomplished on its own card (i.e., choose topics, assign copy, write copy, schedule posts, and so on).
As the task is being completed, you move the card into the corresponding column. A quick glance at the board and everyone on your team knows how the project is progressing and what still needs to be done.
2. Setting WIP limits
When people have too much on their plates, nothing gets accomplished. This is why Kanban uses WIP limits — boundaries that outline how people will work on the tasks within each column on the Kanban board.
Placing limits on how many tasks can be in one column or how much time people have to accomplish a task. Let’s say you want your social coordinator to schedule the posts for each month before they begin reviewing posts for the following month. That rule means they can’t move the “Review posts” task into the “Doing” column before the “Schedule posts” are in the “Done” column.
Setting ground rules helps people focus on finishing a specific goal or task before starting another one. In a world of context switching and mental burnout, limitations are a way to achieve your goals without juggling too many tasks at once.
3. Meeting cadences
Similar to Scrum, Kanban is designed to help teams work better and accomplish their goals. It incorporates planning meetings, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives to make sure a project is on task and continually refined.
The one meeting that’s different from Scrum is the delivery meeting, a time to plan when to release the content or project. Since Kanban works on longer timelines than Scrum, the delivery meeting is the place to bring in other groups that may need to help get the work out.
While a small team may own a project, a successful Agile marketing strategy relies on everyone. It’s helpful to bring in outside team members to collaborate on timelines, share feedback, and assist in launching the work your team accomplishes.
Agile Marketing Examples
Most Agile marketing efforts break down into a few simple steps.

The team makes a list of priority projects to work on.
The steps to tackle a project are planned out in a sprint.
The team checks in every day in a stand-up meeting.
Everyone accomplishes their specific tasks and testing begins.
Data from the testing is collected and used to improve the project.

Let’s look at how this process can play out in real-world Agile marketing examples.
1. Scrum Example
The United Kingdom-based Santander bank struggled to produce efficient marketing campaigns due to long production lead times and expensive creative costs. In an effort to increase efficiency, they adopted an Agile marketing method for their “Unlock you London” campaign. The bank’s goal was to convince customers to download and use their mobile app.
They “put everyone together around shared objectives, shared KPIs, and a budget in the middle of the table” and agreed to tweak the campaign on a weekly basis. Instead of dedicating a massive spend working with a creative agency that would take months to develop everything needed for the campaign, they began spending a few thousand pounds at a time. This swap allowed them to make changes quickly and test an idea on customers.
If something resonated, they’d keep it. If not, they’d make a small change and test again.
The new Agile approach produced incredible results. By the end of the campaign, the bank saw a 12% increase in loyalty, a 10% increase in account satisfaction, the highest Net Promoter Score in 17 years, and the highest positive sentiment (90%) among customers.
2. Kanban Method Example
A technology startup recently revamped its brand and wants to update essential marketing materials. The creative team puts together a small Agile team to revamp the website and create new marketing materials.
They include a designer, copywriter, sales rep, creative director, product lead, content coordinator, and a member of the legal team. The team chooses tasks to be completed, decides on a six-week timeline, and lays out the work in a Kanban board.
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The team lays out the individual tasks associated with each task in a project management tool and tracks the progress of each project in a Kanban board.
Six weeks later, the Agile team has designed five new web pages, six one-pagers, and two decks. While more complex projects like the website will need another sprint or two in order to build out simpler materials — like the one-pagers — for the sales team to use. What once took an entire quarter to complete has been condensed into several weeks.
Agile Marketing Automation
Having the right type of technology for Agile marketing automation is crucial for collecting data and conducting analytics.
A well-designed CRM platform can help you collect, organize, test, and manage data about your customers and sprint iterations. It can automate campaign delivery and send messages to customers, feeding tracking and performance metrics back to you.
Above all, automation improves your ability to react to customer requests. In a survey of C-suite executives, 41% said they hoped to implement more digital technology in order to respond quickly to customer needs. So if you need to convince your boss that automation technology is worth the investment, explain how it’s essential to collect data that allows you to share the most relevant messages and offers.
Let’s say you decide to turn an idea for an email campaign into reality using your newly established Agile marketing team. You gather a copywriter, designer, analyst, developer, operations lead, and email lead. Before starting the sprint, you’ll want to make sure you have the following tools to automate your efforts.

A collaboration tool
A tool to review copy, design, and development
A way to collect feedback
An email marketing tool
A way to gather data and analyze it

Look into the following Agile marketing automation tools to see which one works for your team. Evaluate the features, user interface, customer support, integrations, resources, reviews, and pricing.

HubSpot
Marketo
Agile CRM
NetSuite
Pardot

Once you have the technology you need to automate your Agile efforts, you can focus on the tasks at hand and make sure every sprint or board stays on track.
Switching from a traditional project management approach to Agile marketing may seem intimidating. But the switch will be simple if you keep a few rules in mind. Start with what you want to accomplish (your goals), get buy-in from the senior marketing leaders who can advocate for you with the rest of the team, bring together a small group of people, and explain this new way of working to them. Finally, set up the technology you need to collaborate, collect feedback, and analyze data.
Soon, you’ll be finished with your first project — and gaining momentum that lets your Agile marketing efforts stay focused, grow faster, and get better results than ever before.

In more ways than one, branding is a pillar of success.
It helps you develop a set of features unique to your business, like a logo and brand name, which allows customers to come to know your brand and associate it with what you have to offer.
Branding is impactful in and of itself, but co-branding brings additional opportunities and benefits to businesses that engage in it. In this post, discover the advantages that come from generating brand individuality for your business, and the added benefits that come from co-branding with a partner.

1. Branding is often the deciding factor for consumers making purchasing decisions.
Branding is often the deciding factor for consumers when making a purchase decision. In fact, consumers report being more likely to buy from brands that they know or know and already have a positive experience with.
This is especially true for social media, as 89% of consumers say they’ll buy from a brand they already follow and recognize over a competitor. Given this, having a recognizable and unique brand gives you a leg up with customers, as they would feel safer buying from a business they already know.
2. Branding gives your business an identity.
Branding gives your business an identity beyond just the products and services you sell. You become more than just a name, especially if you develop a brand mission separate from your products.
For example, if your brand is committed to social responsibility, you’ll become associated with those interests in addition to your products. Your business develops a personality outside of your sales, which consumers appreciate.
3. Branding sets you apart from competitors in a saturated market.
There’s no way to quantify how many brands there are globally, but there are certainly a lot. Given this, branding helps you stand out from the crowd and gain an edge in an increasingly competitive market.
Your brand identity differentiates you from your competitors, especially in industries where it’s not easy to stand out because you offer similar products. If you have a unique identity, you can still offer those similar products, but your unique brand personality and reputation are what seals the deal.
4. Branding makes your business memorable.
Strong branding makes your business memorable and recognizable to consumers.
They’ll be able to quickly discern that content you create belongs to you, especially if they see it on channels you don’t own, because it looks like and is in line with the content and content style they know you create.
Being memorable is also helpful when it comes to ad spend. A memorable brand can devote more resources to product promotion and less to brand awareness because consumers already know who you are. For example, Coca-Cola doesn’t need to get the word out that they exist because their brand already has universal awareness. Instead, they can focus marketing efforts on advertising a new drink.
5. Branding supports your marketing efforts and promotes consistency.
When you have consistent branding, future business efforts always have a clear path to follow. You’ll spend less time coming up with ways to present yourself and more time ensuring that you’re consistently delivering high-quality content, products, and experiences that customers desire.
Here are some stats that support the benefits of branding consistency:

Uniformly presented brands are 3.5x more visible to customers.
Consistent brand presentation has been seen to increase revenue by 33%.
Inconsistent branding damages a company’s reputation and credibility.

Consistency also helps build trust with your audience, which we’ll discuss further below.
6. Branding builds credibility and trust.
Inconsistency confuses, but strong branding does the opposite.
Customers don’t have to guess how or why your content and products relate to your business because it’s clear. This helps build credibility because you show consumers that you stick to your word and don’t engage in practices that seem misaligned with what you stand for.
When you build credibility, you also increase trust in your business, which influences consumers making purchasing decisions. As mentioned above, a customer is more likely to do business with a company they recognize and trust because they already know who you are and what you stand for.
7. Branding inspires customer loyalty and retention.
Branding increases trust, and trust is a pillar of customer loyalty.
Your identity attracts customers because they can tell what you stand for, which helps them feel connected to you. When customers feel connected to a business, they’re more likely to be loyal. Loyal customers, in turn, drive revenue, as they’re more likely to make repeat purchases and draw in new clients to your business.
8. Branding encourages word-of-mouth marketing.
Having consistent branding makes customers loyal, which makes them more likely to practice word-of-mouth marketing.
Word-of-mouth marketing is when consumers promote you to their friends, family, and even strangers online. This is highly beneficial for all businesses, as people trust other consumers more than marketers because they believe they have an agenda. Consider these statistics:

39% of consumers build trust in a brand from peer-to-peer conversations compared to 23% from a brand’s paid ads.
Consumers report that a person like themselves (another consumer) is 14% more credible than a brand employee.

When you build a following of loyal customers, they provide your business with free marketing to draw in new clients and increase revenue.
9. Branding helps you share your values.
Customers are more interested than ever before in buying from companies that share their same values, so having a consistent message to share is critical. In fact, if customers believe you’re making a positive impact on the world, they would pay 31 to 50% more for products and services.
Branding helps you appeal to this new consumer interest, as it goes beyond just a recognizable logo — it enables you to communicate your brand mission and values.
10. Branding builds internal employee morale and pride.
Branding is beneficial for outward conceptions, but it also impacts internal employee retention, morale, and hiring processes. Consider these statistics from LinkedIn Business on the impacts of strong employer branding on hiring and retention:

Well-regarded brands can bring down training expenses by as much as 50%.
72% of recruiting leaders worldwide say that the employer brand has a significant impact on hiring.
50% of employers report more qualified applicants.
Strong branding is associated with a 28% reduction in organizational turnover.
Inconsistent branding has been found to embarrass employees and lower morale.

The statistics show us that branding helps you position yourself as a reputable source, making employees feel like they’re working for something big and authentic. They’re proud of representing your brand and business, ensuring that everyone is continually working to satisfy your customers.
11. Branding helps you easily introduce new products.
Branding helps you easily introduce new products to market and drive sales for those products.
Firstly, you already have consistent branding, so it doesn’t take much legwork to market a product, so it aligns with your existing products and brand message. You don’t have to sit at a table and figure out how everything will fit in or rebrand your business; there is already a path for you to follow.
When you launch these new products, customers already loyal, familiar with, and appreciative of your quality of service will be eager to try what you have to offer, generating sales and driving revenue.
12. Branding brings a high return on investment and increased profits.
Being profitable is the ultimate goal as it allows you to keep your business running, continuously innovate, and provide the delightful experiences that customers expect and desire.
As branding is a significant factor in achieving high ROI, it makes sense to invest in the practice.
The benefits discussed above are relevant to all businesses, regardless of size or maturity. Co-branding can bring about additional advantages, which we’ll discuss further below.
Benefits of Co-Branding
Co-branding is a partnership between two businesses where one company’s success contributes to the success of the other. Co-branding partnerships are most impactful when they involve two similar companies working together, as audience members obtain unique value from their relationship. An example of co-branding that you may already be familiar with is a sports company partnering with an athlete.
1. Co-branding is exciting for consumers.
When two businesses work together, the partnership is exciting for consumers. They may have never expected your collaboration, so they’re eager to see what’s to come.
Co-branding attracts interest and increased attention, as it is not a common practice. You may have customers refreshing your social media feeds or checking your websites on launch days because they’re incredibly excited about what’s to come.
2. Co-branding brings exposure to new audiences
Although you may operate in the same industry, you and your partner likely target different audience segments. When you work together on a co-branding campaign, you gain exposure to their audience, they gain exposure to yours, helping both of you increase brand awareness, draw in new clients, and grow your overall reach.
3. Co-branding helps you generate trust with new audiences.
When you’re advertising alone and emerging into new markets, it is your responsibility to build trust with your audience. However, a benefit to co-branding is that your partners vouch for your credibility.
Your new audiences may not trust you 100% off the bat, but the trust that they have in your partner tells them that they wouldn’t expose them to a brand that they disagree with or don’t find credible. Essentially, your partners are telling their audience that they can trust you because they trust you.
4. Co-branding is cost-effective
When you work with another brand, you’re both committing to sharing resources and putting money into your advertising efforts. This means that you can save money and spend more than you may have had access to with your individual budget.
For example, if you and your partners agree to share ad costs, you can use double the money to access resources to create your campaigns. If you’re a small brand, this can be highly beneficial, as you have the opportunity to branch out in ways you couldn’t do alone.
At the end of the day, your business’ branding, regardless of whether you’re working with a partner, is the first thing consumers will see about your business. If you take the time to prioritize strong branding for your individual business, you’ll find sales growth, and retain new audiences when your co-branding campaigns go live.

When it comes to the important elements of an email, lots of brands and professionals underestimate the power of their signature. Your email signature tells your recipients who sent the message, of course, but it also lends legitimacy to your content and/or your request. And if you really take the time to do it right,…
The post 10 Ways to Take Your Email Signature to the Next Level appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Hello all – I am looking to connect with US based Marketing Automation experts (Eloqua and Marketo). My current need is to fill a long term contract for a fortune 500 company. Should be US based, open to remote contract work. 40 hours a week for 6-12 months.
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In just about every type of business, you can find countless small, repetitive tasks. As a business owner, you do them yourself, at first. Later, as your business grows, you start delegating them to employees. You get to focus on more important things, while your workers handle the more mundane, repetitive tasks. This was the old way. Today, with the advance in Artificial Intelligence, we have moved into the age where machine algorithms can go beyond our own capabilities in a broad range of tasks. Some repetitive tasks you can automate include:
Repetitive physical labor Customer service Payroll and purchase orders Collecting and processing data
Nowadays, AI is able to perform these tasks faster, better, and at a more affordable price than humans. Machines can manipulate tools, extract data from files, send purchase requisitions for approval, automate your payroll management process, and allow business owners to have more of the most limited resource of all — their personal time. The more repetitive tasks you automate, the more time you’ll have for the important stuff, such as growing your business, handling key clients, planning, and strategizing for the future. What Does the Research Say? According to PwC and McKinsey’s research, we are able to automate around 20% of all business activities just with today’s tech. PwC predicts that the automation trend will continue to rise during the 2020s and it will even encompass 30% of all current positions by the mid-2030s. Based on McKinsey research, we are likely to automate around 18% of all tasks. This is based on an estimate that we can automate 30% of activities in around 60% of all jobs. Additionally, McKinsey projects that we will be able to automate around 5% of all jobs with today’s AI tech. These include:
Graders, sewing machine operators, and sorters of agricultural products (they can be 100% automated). Travel agents, watch repairers, and stock clerks (they can be 60-80% automated). Web developers, chemical technicians, and nursing assistants (they can be 30-60% automated).
Three Main Phases of Automation PwC predicts that we will have automated 20% of all occupations by the 2020s and 30% by the mid-2030s. They’ve divided this transformation of automation into three distinct phases:
The algorithm wave which will last until the early 2020s. The augmentation wave which will last until the late 2020s. The autonomy wave which will continue until the mid-2030s.
Automating simple computational tasks and analyzing structured data is part of the algorithm wave we’re currently experiencing. In the second phase — the augmentation wave — we will automate lots of repetitive tasks and dynamic interactions. Moreover, semi-automated tasks like robots moving products in a warehouse are part of this wave. Ultimately, we will experience the complete automation of physical labor — the autonomy wave. The main focus here will be on automating dynamic, real-world cases that need responsive actions., such as transportation and manufacturing. Although PwC predicts that automation tech will reach its full maturity on a nationwide scale during the 2030s, 30% of all occupations in every sector will have been automated by then. Currently, automation enables us to increase productivity growth by 0.8-1.4% yearly. This is because the existing AI-powered automation tools reduce mistakes, as well as increase speed and quality. They even achieve outcomes that go above human abilities in some situations. All of this means that if you’re looking to improve your productivity, automating tasks is the way. Start Small with Automation Before you decide to automate anything, you’ll first need to identify repetitive tasks in your business. To begin with, look for routine manual activities that use up a considerable amount of resources and time. The more repetitive the task, the more you will benefit if you automate it. Next, you should start small. Large and complex tasks come with more challenges when you try to program them. This is why you should first begin with small, predictable tasks before you try to completely automate all activities that are necessary for your company. You should also completely understand every part of the task you’re trying to automate. This allows you to easily break down the activity into smaller steps that are easier to program, implement, and optimize later on. Ultimately, you should save your time for the tasks you do best. This means that it’s better to automate tasks that aren’t directly tied up with the core competencies of your business. This way, you can allocate much of the workforce to profitable tasks. Moreover, this will enable you to focus more on how to make your business grow and plan to thrive in the market. Don’t Automate Everything This is where the majority of companies get off on the wrong foot with automation. It’s not the point to automate everything. Rather, you have to comprehend how automation works and what it can actually do. Even though you can automate most of your tasks, you’d better not. There are numerous tools for automating web design, translation and copywriting, but the majority of them can’t accomplish these tasks efficiently. For instance, translation tech can’t replicate the complex mental processes of human translators making it mostly useless for your business purposes. What you want to automate are the tasks that take time, that are repetitive, and easy for AI to handle with precision without your input: These include:
Manual labor Sending invoices Collecting data Processing data Automating email responses for different lead scores Chatting with customers
What you shouldn’t automate are the tasks that require lots of human input and creativity — copywriting, design, or problem-solving. For example, instead of importing spreadsheets between Google Sheets and Excel several times a day, you could automate this process. Once you get a hand of what automation can’t and can do, you can begin coming up with various ambitious strategies that not only save you cash and time but change your company entirely. Set Your Automation Goals You shouldn’t spend money on automation and invest in developing new workflows if they don’t increase the profitability of your company which means that before you develop any new workflow, you should ensure you have particular targets that you’ll utilize to measure success and optimize your processes. In some situations, your objective could be to simply match the performance of your department and then utilize that time elsewhere. For instance, you can automate your social post scheduling so that your blog posts are automatically published on Twitter a couple of times a day weekly. If your employees are already doing this, automating it won’t improve results, but simply free up more time. It’s also crucial that you know what you are going to do with all this free time. Since the objective of automation is to enable you to do something else, define this. Identify your objectives and ensure they’re measurable so you can observe the effects of even small automation and how they all add up. This will happen naturally for some of your workflows. For instance, when you’re developing an automated lead generation process, you’ll select a target number of leads and various KPIs while your sales automation will place targets for closing more leads and retaining more clients. Be accurate, select targets for every quarter, and utilize these as milestones to measure success. What Tasks Should You Automate? Some tasks are better to be automated than others. For example, lots of small companies have inefficient procurement and purchase order processes. These businesses waste valuable time on repetitive tasks they could easily automate, regularly producing accidental task repetition. Why not streamline your procurement and purchase order tasks so you save time, increase productivity and avoid errors? On the other hand, we all know how much time is wasted on managing the payroll of full-time employees. You have to consider a lot — state and federal laws, compliance, etc. This is where automating the payroll process can develop more effective systems. Automation can also let you provide improved customer service. Small companies have a limited consumer base, which means that ineffective customer support can negatively impact their whole business. That’s why it’s key that you have the best level of customer support. How? Keep track of customer complaints and address them in a timely manner. This is where automation comes into play. It lets you set up ticketing systems for managing customer queries more effectively. Not to mention it helps you make pre-formatted replies for often asked questions, leading to faster responses. For instance, AI-enabled customer assistants can give your buyers information about their orders or where they can find the product they’re searching for based on keywords. Predictable manual labor is also perfect for automation. This includes occupations like machine operators and assemblers. Machines perform predictable activities better than us since they don’t get tired or bored. However, unpredictable tasks that require the human level of agility in adapting tasks aren’t suited for automation. Note: this article is longer than I can fit here, however I will leave you the link here in case you wish to keep reading 🙂 ⬇️ https://www.etrellium.com/automation/how-to-automate-repetitive-tasks-as-a-small-business-owner/
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