As a small business owner, you are always looking for ways to increase your profit margins. You may think the best way to do this is to cut costs or find new revenue streams. While those are both important, there’s another way to increase the profit margins that you may not have considered — systemization and automation using Keap.
Keap is a software that helps small businesses automate their sales and marketing processes. By leveraging Keap, you can free up your time so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. Additionally, Keap can help you streamline your processes so that you can save money on things like labor costs. Let’s take a look at business automation and how tools like Keap can help you increase your profit margins.
What Is Business Automation?
Business automation allows companies to enhance their offerings and provide a better experience for their customers by using technology to its fullest potential. By automating business processes, your organization can avoid spending time and energy on mundane tasks.
Having your team’s time and energy freed up by automating routine processes like lead generation funnels, sales reports, conversion tracking, email marketing, order monitoring, and more will allow them to better apply their skills to more strategically significant initiatives.
The development of digital banking is a prime example of customer-centric business automation. Customers can avoid long wait times at the bank by handling their financial needs right from their mobile devices.
How To Scale Your Business Through Automation
Here are some guidelines for successfully automating and scaling your organization, no matter your industry or strategy.
Have a Clear Idea of What You Want
Without a doubt, growth and scalability are at the heart of why you should adopt Keap marketing automation in your company. However, before implementing an automated system, it’s crucial to have a firm grasp of your desired outcomes and accomplishments and the areas of your business that need the most attention. Understanding your objectives for automation will help you establish milestones and priorities. After that, you can create long-term plans of action.
Establish Reasonable Objectives
The key to success is setting reasonable objectives and expectations for the many areas you plan to automate. However, don’t establish unrealistic goals or compare your company’s procedures to those of others.
Make Use of Automated Processes Whenever Possible
To successfully expand your business and see the results you seek, you must focus on the tasks that significantly impact your bottom line, such as marketing and sales. Nevertheless, try to think out of the box. Every company can benefit from adding a bit more automation to several processes. It’s time to take stock of all the manual work you put in each day and make a list.
Create a Checklist To Measure Growth
Since tracking your progress is essential for making informed decisions and changes in direction, it’s crucial to establish a set of criteria in advance that can be used as milestones. If you make it a habit to review this list regularly, you’ll have no trouble keeping tabs on the many aspects of your business’ automated processes and determining which are performing as intended, those that require tweaking, and ones you can safely do away with.
Pick the Correct Platform or Tool for Automation
The automation tools and platforms you use should be tailored to the specific business process you’re looking to streamline. There are several specialized platforms available, each with its own set of pros and cons, that can be used for various business operations. When it comes to sales and marketing automation, Keap is one of the best tools out there.
Areas Where Automation Improves Process Efficiency
The process of automating work processes is not without its challenges. Nonetheless, companies can take baby steps in this direction. Here are several areas in which automating might help increase productivity within an organization and, by extension, its bottom line.
Sales and Marketing
Thanks to automation, businesses can better develop sales and marketing strategies that successfully attract and retain new customers. Companies can streamline their sales and marketing processes by automating tasks like lead management, email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and social media marketing.
Human Resources
Using automation, the HR department will be able to streamline the hiring process. Automating tasks like interview scheduling, candidate screening, and communicating recruitment status updates can relieve pressure on HR teams and improve prospective employees’ experiences.
Finance and Accounting
By implementing automated accounting systems, companies can eliminate the need for human intervention in a wide variety of financial processes, including computation, auditing, and payment processing. Automating routine tasks allows teams to get more things done because less time is spent on processing.
Project Management
Managing projects effectively is essential for organizations in various industries. When the project management process is automated, the team can spend less time on non-essential administrative tasks and more on strategic activities like development, testing, and new releases. Businesses can save time and effort by automating various processes, including report generation, and resource allocation.
Essential Marketing Processes You Can Automate
Using automation software, you can streamline several marketing tasks. Take a look at these four key marketing processes that need to be automated if you want to achieve your business goals:
Email Automation
You can use business automation solutions like Keap to set up an email drip campaign if you want to send multiple emails to the same group of subscribers or automate the delivery of personal emails like welcome messages or status updates. With this capability, your team will be able to devote less time to monotonous tasks and more to achieving strategic objectives.
An automated drip email campaign can be configured to send out messages based on specific criteria. Any time a lead meets one of these parameters or completes one of these steps, they will immediately enter the associated drip campaign. Combining triggers with email marketing helps get your content in front of customers right when they’re ready to engage with it. Additionally, the open rate for drip campaigns is 80% higher, meaning you have a greater chance of closing a deal.
Lead Nurturing
Some aspects of the buyer’s journey or customer journey can be automated as well. Various marketing and sales techniques can be used in the lead nurturing process to increase the likelihood that the lead will become a paying customer.
Your target audience’s preferences will likely shift over time. You need to adjust to the evolving tastes of your customer base when you want them to remember your brand favorably. One strategy is to learn what factors customers consider most important before making a purchase. With the help of a CRM system that also includes marketing automation, you can better understand your target demographic and re-engage with your existing customers.
Reporting and Analytics
Reports on marketing initiatives should not be overlooked, but they can take a lot of work. Keap marketing automation allows you to schedule the generation of reports based on criteria and run them at regular intervals.
One of the best benefits of automating reports is that errors and inconsistencies are less likely to occur. In addition, sales processes can be streamlined with the help of automation solutions, allowing you to better evaluate the contribution of different marketing efforts to the progress of your pipeline and the growth rate of your revenue.
The list continues with the potential to automatically perform website audits, referrals, social media promotions, and keyword analysis. The automation tools you choose will be determined by the objectives of your company.
What Is the Return on Investment of Marketing Automation?
Once you pursue marketing automation, budget and ROI are the first things that spring to mind. The marketing automation software you choose could have a significant impact on your company.
Research shows that marketing automation can boost sales productivity by up to 14.5% while cutting marketing costs by 12.2%. In addition, 80% of those who used marketing automation experienced an increase in the number of leads, and 77% saw a rise in their conversion rate. For these reasons and more, 91% of businesses that utilize marketing automation tools rate it as “very important” to the effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts.
Introducing Keap: How It Works
Keap works by consolidating all your customer data into one centralized platform. This includes contact information, purchase history, preferences, and more. With this information stored in one place, you can create customized marketing and sales campaigns targeting specific customer segments. For example, if you have a group of customers who have made recent purchases, you can create a targeted campaign to upsell them on additional products or services they may be interested in.
How Can Keap Help Me Increase My Profit Margins?
As a small business owner, your time is precious. There are only so many hours in the day, and there’s only so much you can do yourself. This is where Keap comes in. By automating the tedious and time-consuming tasks that eat up your day, Keap gives you more time to focus on revenue-generating activities that will help you increase your profit margins. In addition, Keap’s tools can help you streamline your operations, which will also save you money and boost your bottom line.
Optimize Your Customer Relationship Management
Keap’s CRM features will help you keep track of your customers’ contact information, purchase history, and communication preferences. This will allow you to provide them with a better overall experience since you’ll be able to quickly resolve any issues they’re having and address their specific needs. Additionally, by segmenting your customers into groups, you can create targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to convert into sales.
Streamline Your Appointment Processes
If you run a service-based business, chances are that a large portion of your time is spent scheduling appointments. This time could be better spent working on other aspects of your business or developing client relationships.
With Keap’s appointment scheduling feature, you can automate the process of setting up appointments. This includes sending automatic reminders to both yourself and your clients before the appointment date.
Not only will this save you time but it will also reduce the likelihood of missed appointments. And because happy customers are more likely to do repeat business (and recommend your company to others), streamlining your appointment scheduling process with Keap is a great way to increase your profits.
Reduce Labor Costs
You can also reduce your labor costs by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining processes. This is because you will no longer need to pay someone to do things like input data into a spreadsheet or send out manual reminders. The money you save on labor costs can be used to invest in other areas of your business or increase your profit margins.
Improve Collaboration
Collaborative projects involving multiple people can quickly spiral out of control due to the sheer number of moving parts. Fortunately, even the most intricate projects can be monitored and carried out without a hitch, thanks to automation.
Assigning and following up with targeted prospects are two examples of time-consuming, manual processes that can be automated with Keap marketing automation. Businesses often struggle to unify these departments effectively. Thanks to marketing and sales automation, cooperation between the two areas is more productive than ever. Once everyone is on the same page, managers and team leaders can track everyone’s progress and ensure everyone is doing their part.
Smarter Decision-Making Using Data
Recently, “Big Data” has become a popular term in the field of information technology. Sadly, not all companies are effective at gathering and leveraging this information in their marketing and sales activities. With the help of Keap marketing automation, it’s much easier to make sense of Big Data, and once you have that insight, everything else becomes simple.
One of the best ways to evaluate marketing activities and anticipate customer reactions is with the help of a sales and marketing automation solution like Keap. It has the capability to generate a comprehensive profile of your leads.
Personalize the Customer Journey
Converting a one-time buyer into a lifelong supporter is one of the most challenging tasks businesses regularly face. Using automation to create content tailored for social media and blog posts is one way to accomplish this goal. Research also shows that companies that use sales automation early on also enjoy greater levels of customer satisfaction.
Statistics on video marketing indicate that more than 70% of consumers are on the lookout for content that is extraordinary, unique, and relevant to their interests. Keap marketing automation tools optimize the process of delivering the necessary content through email to the right customers at the right moment.
Another perk of marketing automation is the information it gathers, which is helpful for validating marketing leads before sending them on to sales. Using a grading and scoring system based on data about visitors, marketing automation can route qualified leads to the most suitable salesperson, further tailoring the experience for each prospect and increasing the likelihood of a sale.
Finetune the Marketing Process
Keap marketing automation software provides a means of mapping the customer journey. Your marketing plan will also help you create processes based on your customers’ needs and preferences. Implementing procedures designed around the customer journey streamlines the processing of targets and the nurturing of leads.
Knowing that 44% of customers will go elsewhere if they don’t get a response within a reasonable amount of time may cause you to reevaluate your follow-up procedure and the benefits of implementing marketing automation to boost customer satisfaction.
Boost Employee Morale
Most employees actively seek to avoid routine work. Doing the same thing over and over again can be tedious and unrewarding. If these repetitive chores can be automated, employees will have more time to focus on higher-value tasks, such as those that require them to use their intellect. If we put our brains to work, we can accomplish amazing feats. If you spend too long on dull or repetitive work, you may find that you have less energy and drive for more interesting or rewarding endeavors.
The positive domino effect that automation has on morale can do wonders for a company. The workplace culture rarely benefits from the contributions of weary and frustrated workers. When employees are happy in their jobs, they are more inclined to put in extra effort, learn more, and strive for excellence.
Capturing Leads
Keap has several features that make it ideal for lead capture. First, it offers a customizable lead capture form that can be embedded on your website or blog. This form allows leads to input their information so that you can follow up with them later.
In addition, Keap allows you to set up webhooks, which are essentially automated messages sent to leads when they take specific actions on your website (like submitting a form or signing up for a newsletter). These webhooks help you quickly respond to leads so that you can nurture them through the sales funnel.
Finally, Keap integrates with other popular marketing and sales tools (like Zapier, and Google Sheets) so that you can quickly transfer data between platforms and capture leads from multiple sources.
Creating Marketing Campaigns
Finally, Keap’s campaign feature allows you to automate your marketing efforts by sending targeted messages to groups of contacts based on their interests. For example, if you sell women’s clothing, you could create a campaign specifically for women who have expressed interest in dresses and send them periodic updates about new dress styles and special offers. Or, if you sell home goods, you could create a campaign for people who have bought from you in the past and send them updates about new products and exclusive discounts. By automating your campaigns, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are always on point and that your contacts receive the information they’re interested in.
As a small business owner, automation tools like Keap can be a lifesaver. By automating critical tasks like lead capture, sales pipeline management, and invoicing/payment processing, you can free up your time to focus on other areas of your business.
Keap offers an innovative solution that helps businesses streamline operations and increase efficiency.
The Bottomline
Businesses can save money on labor costs and redirect those savings to critical strategic efforts by adopting marketing automation solutions. But that’s only the beginning. Having the right marketing automation tools at your disposal can help you foster better teamwork, improve employee morale, and ultimately boost customer satisfaction.
If you’re not using automation tools for your business yet, now is the time to start.
Contact the Automation Agency today to learn more about how Keap can help your business grow! Request a FREE 14-Day Trial of Keap.
