How Automating Processes Helps Build Good Business Practices

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Automating routine tasks is one of the fastest ways to free up time, reduce errors and optimise your business for growth - especially for startups where time is at a premium. By taking advantage of standard automation and AI tooling, and combining with custom code, you can start building powerful automations almost immediately.

Why Follow-Up Matters—and Why Automation Helps

One of the most important processes in business is consistent and throughtful follow-up. By combining automation tools with the services you already use in your business, you can build simple, but powerful, automated follow-up pipeline to follow up with customers and contacts.

I recently started using this type of setup. After 15 years building and maintaining tailored software projects for clients, we’ve built up great relationships with many clients and contacts. However, as projects finish and people move on, it’s important to stay in touch.

To help with this, I built a lightweight automation to keep in touch with customers. The process starts by selecting 3 random contacts from our CRM system, using custom code to determine context, and finally drafts an email. The email is written to take into account our most recent work and services.

Every weekday, my inbox now contains three ready-to-review email drafts. From there, I can add any extra details and helpful information, or simply a personal note, prior to sending.

Business Habits

Whilst it seems this automation is simply creating the emails, and saving time, I’ve actually found it’s doing something more important. The daily notification is helping me to build a good business habit.

In fact, I often end up rewriting the email content, but simply having the draft delivered each day - instead of the dreaded “blank page” - is a great help. This is easily the type of work that can easily fall through the gaps.

It’s especially easy to push down the to-do list when you’re focussed on writing code and the operations side of the business.

This simple daily notification, and the drafts waiting in my email account, helps to keep me accountable to a process, and in turn develop a good business and marketing practice.

Getting Started with Your Own Follow-Up Automation

If you’d like to explore how our custom software, data and automation services can help to optimise and grow your business - and build great business habits - book your free consultation call today.