If you’re concerned about the impact that automation is having on your customer relationships, then you’re in the right place!
First of all, you need to understand automation isn’t the future of all evil – just think of it as your own personal assistant, taking the simple things off your hands giving you more time for bigger and better tasks.
We have come to rely on automation to not only make our lives more efficient but a hell of a lot easier. Seriously, ask yourself where you would be without social media alerts, voice-activated search and messaging and your perfectly generated Spotify playlist which can match any mood. You would be lost, don’t lie!
Some may argue that automation makes us lazy, but I’d suggest it actually makes us far better workers. When you stop wasting time on the small tedious tasks you have more time for the important things such as expanding your client base, planning ahead and time to look after yourself and your wellbeing.
Small business owners are often strapped for time, so embrace automation and spend your precious energy elsewhere!
We are already incredibly busy people and sometimes balancing your work, health and family can be damn near impossible. On an average day you’re expected to update your blog, reply to customer emails, deal with the finances, post something new to all your top social media channels and build Rome!
If you’re thinking there must be a better way to get more done in a day, automation might just be the solution you’re looking for. Especially if your goals consist of increased site traffic, better time management, more engaged customers and a bigger social or financial impact.
Despite all this, there is a common concern that by automating your business processes, you’ll lose touch with the heart of your fans, dilute your impact and systemise yourself beyond the reason you first started. However, automating your tasks is quite the contrary.
Isn’t automation totally impersonal?
If you got just 10 emails or comments a day: are you going to wait till you have time to talk/respond to all them?
It’s like having an entree before dinner, if you have to wait 2 hours for your main you’re definitely going to appreciate and delicious entree to pass the time. The same goes for an email or comment response, you may not give them everything they asked for with an automated response, but you will wet the taste buds and keep them interested.
So how can automation help you build better relationships, increase traffic and find more time?
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: they commented or subscribed because they like you. Why not strike when the iron is hot to strengthen that new relationship? It’s near impossible to do this without automation.
Talking about striking whilst the iron is hot – if we’re just looking at emails, automated replies have a 119% higher click through over standard emails. With just 10 emails a day, automation you can help you deepen your relationship with 3,650 readers a year.
Simple automation such as thanking them for their comment or subscription instantly with a nice ‘personal’ message and some more information can make a massive difference to your relationships, referrals, impact and loyalty.
Email can be a serious time-killer! Here’re my three favourite strategies for automating traffic through social and email marketing, allowing you to easily nurture the engagement and loyalty of your list.
Traffic
Social Oomph
There are plenty of social media scheduling tools, but Social Oomph goes above and beyond!
Auto-following, DM replies and this neat tool called “Queue Reservoir” that will easily keep your “evergreen” posts (you know the ones that never get old) sent out over a period of time (days/minutes or hours) with different titles.
Sign-ups
SumoMe
SumoMe will pop-up (hehe) a few times in my favourite tools.
Plenty of sites have a single point of opt-in, or one generic pop-up. SumoMe’s free service allows you to simply create a pop-up email capture form and with one simple click can automatically send your new signups straight to MailChimp. This helps to make the sign-up process as relevant as possible to the readers point in time.
Subscribers
The biggest mistake businesses make is not keeping in touch with their subscribers from the minute they join your list, except for the standard “confirm your subscription”.
When someone says ‘Hey, I trust you enough to let you into my inbox’, jump right on it!
The first step in automating your email marketing is running a series of nurture “Welcome” emails over 30 days after subscription. The open rates are often 200% higher than standard mailings. So don’t skip past this one!
It’ll make your life easier, it’ll even improve the open rates of your standard mailing because they’ll already be used to receiving your emails.
You can use these emails to gather more information and learn more about your subscribers, giving you a better chance of sending more relevant information by segmenting your emails. This you can also do automatically!
I’ll talk more about my top 7 email marketing lifecycle automation strategies to increase blog traffic in my next post. So stay tuned!
To get you started, I usually start off with 4 to 5 emails over a series of 30 days.