Small & Easy Ways To Automate Your Business

Your time is valuable. Make the most of it with automation!

Running a business is time-consuming. You are human resources, client relation management, creative director, sales and assistant all at once. When you eventually grow to be even more successful, hiring a team won’t be a problem and delegating becomes a breeze, freeing up your time to focus on the next big business milestone. 

Until then, you should make space each day for planning, administrative tasks and meetings without the stress of trying to get other things done. Luckily, many of these stressful tasks can be automated! Don’t worry, automation isn’t as scary as it usually sounds. 

Here are Content Creative’s simple and easy ways to automate your business:

Emails

Outgoing Auto Reply

The first thing to get left behind after a long day is inbox management. To be productive, we should check our email 2-3 times a day so it doesn’t get in the way of actual work getting done. This makes sense. What if you have a ton of emails though? All from potential clients, actual clients or other potential opportunities. 

They all need to be answered, but they don’t need to be answered at that exact moment when they come in. Most people understand that you need some time to get back to emails, but for those who don’t, we recommend creating an automated outgoing message. Gmail makes this process very easy! All you have to say in your message is that you received their message, you will get back to them in X amount of hours or days and wish them a great day! 

Those who need you in case of emergency, have your number or can reach-out in another way reserved for those instances. By setting this up, you’re respectfully setting up boundaries for your workday so you don’t become overwhelmed with the need to check and answer. 

Welcome Email Automation

Your website is all set-up, you have a newsletter pop-up and people are subscribing! The plan is to send a monthly or weekly newsletter, but what about in the meantime? Before they receive their first newsletter, send them a welcome email so they can get to know you, your business and what to expect by subscribing. 

That sounds overwhelming, right? You don’t have the time to send personalized messages to everyone in your audience! We recommend creating a template in your email software, then setting up a trigger from your website to automate the email to send when a person subscribes on the website. Most website platforms connect to popular email software programs, so it’ll be a cinch to set-up with how-tos and customer support for when you need it! Try it out and let us know how many opens you get with your subscriber welcome.

Project Management Software

Do you have project management software? Popular platforms include Asana, Trello, and Monday. If you use one of those or a similar equivalent to keep you on track, ask yourself, am I using this platform to its fullest capabilities? More than likely, you are not and that’s ok! It takes time to get to know your project management platform of choice and all its hacks and tricks. 

Our favorite hack featured in a project management platform? Butler for Trello. Now available on all plan types, Butler is just as it sounds- an automation butler. It can create cards for you each month for repetitive tasks, clean-up your boards with a push of a button and move cards to different lists and boards depending on how many items you checked off a to-do list. Butler has so many automation types you can create that the endless amount of possibilities can actually overwhelm you. Start with a few, then become a pro! Learn more about how Butler can simplify your work life with automation here.  

Do you find yourself taking time to add emails, notes and other tidbits from various websites to your project management platform? Consider making Zapier your friend! It helps apps talk and work together to make your life easier, especially when you’re busy being on-the-go.

Invoicing

This is possibly the simplest automation out there! You may have it already in place. For those that are unfamiliar, all bookkeeping applications and software have a way where you can automate sending invoices. Surprisingly easy, invoicing is simple. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend more time on it than necessary, especially if the software can automate for you. Here’s how to do so in Quickbooks, Wave, Honeybook, and Dubsado!

Already thinking of all the things you can do when these automations are in place? So are we! Want more suggestions or an expert how-to? Reach out to the team at Content Creative to see how we can cook up more smart ways to automate your business.