Running an e-business requires you to be a jack of all trades, with your time and attention constantly divided between inventory, sales, innovation, delivery and a million other things.  Issues of scalability are bound to stir up because when purchase orders stack up, tearing yourself away to manage these ten different tasks doesn’t work out. Even for your team, the task of managing inventory, sales, innovation and delivery can become increasingly time consuming and inefficient. If time is money then automating your e-business is the winning lottery ticket.

End to end automation hacks to scale your business smoothly:

• Inventory- A critical asset in any e-business, inventory management can determine whether your inventory works as an asset or leads to your biggest liability. Inventory errors can greatly affect your business, having less supply can lead to you not being able to fulfil important orders, whereas surplus can lead to wasting warehouse space. Automating inventory can help in streamlining the process of warehousing to fulfilment.
  Get alerted when your stock is running low, integrate this with apps to directly subscribe to purchase refills to manage your inventory. Automation helps you store your inventory data in a secured and organised manner, this data can be helpful to analyse the performance of your products and determine their future demand.
• Lead generation- Automation when used accurately can greatly impact in generating new leads for the business. Use apps to collect a database of viewers on your website, set up personalised automated chatbots on your website to engage your customers, and use the database for automated email campaigns to reach out to your potential leads. Automation can help you identify and approach your leads seamlessly.
• Sales- Your sales team should be ideally on the field, chasing new leads and converting them into customers however sadly most of them end up exhausting a lot of their potential in repetitive sales tasks during work hours, hence hindering their true reach. Automating these tasks can help free up their time, and hike your sales. Use CRM apps to directly log potential customers, schedule calls and allocate sales agents to deal with this within a matter of clicks, help your sales people manage their follow ups as closing a deal could require multiple calls/interactions by automating reminders to the salespeople and directly setting up follow up calls by notifying prospective customers.
• Social media marketing: Use the best tools available digitally to ace digital marketing. Automate mundane tasks like posting on multiple social handles to save time by scheduling them in advance, using integration of your data from potential leads generate optimum results for your paid marketing campaigns by accurately targeting your potential customers and creating buyer-profiles more easily. Use automated emails to reach out to your audience. Basically automation can help you identify your insights and act on them more efficiently, this can help you save time and money, as well as improve your reach to the correct audience. Going digital is the best way to sustain successfully in digital.  
• Internal communication: Several apps like Slack,Trello, Asana can greatly help in managing internal communications more seamlessly. Assign tasks, create teams, interact with workers, set meetings and collaborate more swiftly with each other by automating the process.
• Customer service: The key benefits of automating your e-business is the value of real time. Being on the internet your shop is accessible to your customers 24/7, it’s only fair that they have their interactions with you valid 24/7 as well. Automation can help in this, chatbots on the website and through messengers guide customers through general queries, log their questions for your offline hours and for gathering feedback post purchase. You can also enhance customer interactions by providing personalised offers through automation. Record your customers' data and hence email them special codes on special occasions like their birthdays/anniversaries or during non shopping intervals to get their attention. Aside from all of this you can also use automation to analyse your customers buying behaviour and hence offer more personalised services and help.

Building an automation journey for your e-business

The competition in online shopping is cut throat and hence getting your workflow and order processes right is an integral part of your success as an e-business. The last thing any business wants is to lose out on their “big moment” because a deal seemed too big to handle. Automating your workflow can help you run your business at its optimum efficiency.

In order to run at your optimum efficiency and successfully automate their processes a business needs to reflect and identify tasks that need automation, ask yourself where your time is being wasted!! Another integral part is defining your goals to know what you’re setting out to achieve, and identifying the right measures of automation for the business accordingly. To make the best out of this journey of automation, businesses need to integrate their automated processes.

Streamline your way to success by creating a journey that’s unique to your e-business with the help of Quickwork.