5 Ways Marketing Automation Can Save Your Business 10 Hours a Week
5 ways marketing automation can save your business 10 hours a week
If you’ve ever spent a Friday afternoon manually sending the same follow-up email to twenty different people and wanting to tear your hair out, you already know how much time gets swallowed up by repetitive marketing tasks. The good news is that a lot of this can be handed over to software, freeing up hours every single week for the parts of your business that actually need your attention. Here’s how marketing automation can genuinely save your business time, explained without any of the jargon.
1. Sending follow-ups automatically
Chasing every enquiry, brochure request or neglected form by hand adds up incredibly fast, especially once your business is generating more than a handful of leads a week. Our marketing automation work often starts here, since these follow-ups can be sent the moment someone takes an action on your website, whether that’s downloading something or leaving items in a basket, without anyone needing to remember to do it. It also means nobody slips through the cracks just because your team was busy with something else that particular day.
2. Sorting the good leads from the time wasters
Not every enquiry is worth the same amount of attention by your team. Automation can help flag which leads are genuinely engaged, based on things like which pages they’ve visited or how they’ve responded to previous emails, so your team spends time on the people most likely to actually buy, rather than chasing everyone on an equal basis. Over a busy month, that alone can save hours that would otherwise go on calls and emails that were never likely to lead anywhere.
3. Keeping things moving outside office hours
Your website doesn’t stop working at 5pm, even if your team does. Automated chat, personalised recommendations and simple email sequences carry on quietly in the background overnight and at weekends, so visitors get a response even when nobody’s at their desk to send one. That’s time your team isn’t spending checking through messages outside the working day, and business you’re not missing simply because it falls after hours.
4. Pulling your reporting into one place
If checking how your marketing is doing means logging into three or four different platforms and copying numbers into a spreadsheet, that’s hours gone every month before you’ve even acted on what you’ve found. Automation tools can bring your reporting together in one place through our business insights service, so you can see what’s working at a glance instead of hunting for it across separate logins and exports.
5. Cutting down on repetitive admin
A surprising amount of marketing time goes on tasks that don’t need a human doing them at all, for example, emailing out the same brochure, updating a spreadsheet after every enquiry, or manually adding new contacts to a mailing list. Automating these small, repetitive jobs is often where the time savings add up the fastest, simply because they were happening so often in the first place.
Does it really add up to 10 hours?
It depends entirely on what you’re currently doing by hand. Research suggests businesses that automate their social media posting alone save more than six hours a week, and that’s before you factor in email follow-ups, admin and reporting. For a lot of the businesses we work with, once you add automation across even two or three of these areas, ten hours a week back is a genuinely realistic outcome, not just a sales pitch.
Getting started without the overwhelm
We know marketing automation can sound more complicated and overwhelming than it needs to be, which is exactly why we keep things simple. There’s no off-the-shelf package here, just an honest conversation about what’s actually eating up your time, followed up with a solution built around how your business actually works on a day-to-day basis.
If you’d like to talk through where automation could save your business the most time, get in touch for a free, no pressure consultation. No jargon, no hard sell, just a straightforward chat about what would actually help.
