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Automation has many benefits. It can help you reduce costs, save time, maximize your efficiency and even improve the user experience on your website. The major downside is that it can be tricky to implement automation effectively, because automated solutions typically have tradeoffs. There are many automated solutions that could compromise the quality of your website – particularly if they are not executed cautiously. When implementing automated systems on a website, it’s important to pay attention to the nuances of how each automated process could potentially affect the user experience.
The following 4 tasks could all be automated without negatively affecting the quality of your website:
It’s crucial for businesses to manage customer interactions efficiently. In particular, it’s important to collect, respond to and act on customer feedback in a prompt and courteous manner – but it can be challenging to prioritize this critical task. Automating some of your email marketing and customer interaction processes will ensure that this actually gets done.
How can you accomplish this? Here are some ideas:
Automated Product Review Requests – After one of your customers has completed a purchase, you can set up automated emails that will enable your website to automatically collect reviews. These could be reviews of individual products or reviews of their entire experience with your website. To maximize the effectiveness of this technique, you would have to calculate the correct time frame for the customer to receive and use their goods; for example, if you normally send your products via two-day shipping, you could configure the emails to be sent about a week following order placement.
Sentiment Analysis - If you get massive quantities of customer feedback, you can use automated sentiment analysis software as a means for sorting through customer comments and classifying them to understand whether they are positive or negative. This can give you quick, helpful insights into whether your customers are generally satisfied or dissatisfied. This type of software is especially useful for business owners who receive overwhelming amounts of customer feedback.
Abandoned Shopping Cart Reminders - If your typical customer shops for your products on a mobile phone, you’re most likely looking at a high percentage of abandoned shopping carts – perhaps even a rate as high as 85.6 percent, according to Forbes. If your typical customer is a desktop user, your abandoned shopping cart percentage might be a bit lower, but the typical rate is still high at 73.1 percent.
What can you do to close more of those sales? One possibility is to send automated push notifications or emails to customers reminding them about the items they were interested in purchasing. You could possibly include a discount or special offer in your push or email.
Efficient Lead Management - You’re working harder than you have to if you haven’t already set up automated systems for capturing website-generated leads, classifying them and placing them at the appropriate spot in your sales funnel.
Perhaps someone on your team is collecting leads out of your emails or website forms and then manually deciding how to handle each lead. This process could be streamlined using automation; you can set up automated lead capture systems and configure them with preset parameters for sorting and contacting new leads. For example, leads can automatically be sent to specific salespeople based on predetermined criteria; perhaps they could be sorted and assigned by address if your salespeople are each allocated a specific geographic territory to cover.
Blogging is most effective if it’s done systematically rather than helter-skelter. If you post on a consistent schedule, you’re far likelier to have readers actually show up to read your content at the anticipated time. It’s easiest to accomplish this if you write your blog posts in batches and then schedule them to post on a regular basis. There are many blogging platforms that support blog post scheduling; a few of your options that include this feature are Wordpress, Ghost and Typepad.
If you’re using cloud-based solutions for hosting your website, you can schedule automated website backups. If your site changes daily, it’s wise to schedule daily backups. If your site changes infrequently, daily backups aren’t a necessity, but you’ll want to be proactive about creating a backup schedule that makes sense given the usual frequency of your updates.
It’s all too easy to let social media consume more of your time than it’s worth. If you want to maximize the return you’re getting, it’s worth automating your social media tasks to the greatest extent possible. There are many tools available for scheduling social media posts and automating social media management.
There are countless other things that can be automated on your website – but you have to be careful about overdoing it. It is possible to make the mistake of enabling too much automation, which could potentially compromise the user experience on your site. The above-mentioned automation techniques are all reasonably easy to implement without sacrificing quality or degrading the user experience on your site. When executed carefully, all these automations have the potential to improve the user experience and also to make your website operations more efficient overall.
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