How to Balance Your Online Business and Family Life
Discussions about automation are often restricted to menial jobs or careers, with around 1.5 million job roles thought to be at high risk of automation in the future.
According to an analysis from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which reviewed the jobs of 20 million people in England back in 2017, discovering that 7.4% are at an increased risk of losing their livelihood to automation.
However, automation can actually be a far more subtle and further reaching business tool, and one that actually boosts your work-life balance over time. In fact, it’s now possible to automate almost every element of your business, allowing you far greater autonomy over your venture.
#1. Email Marketing Automation With MailChimp
We’re going to touch on the automation of online marketing a little later in the piece, but email marketing is also worthy of special consideration. After all, some 99% of email users check their inbox every single day, while 91% of marketers recognise email as the single most important digital channel.
Because of this, email marketing is the ideal medium for keeping customers aware of your business activities, although the need to send regular, daily updates can become a little challenging and time-consuming over time.
The good news is that you can use tools such as Mail Chimp to automate your email marketing efforts, by scheduling an extended sequence of planned emails that are timed and sent out automatically.
So, with a little forward planning and a viable marketing strategy, you can automate the practical elements of your email campaigns and divert your own attention elsewhere.
#2. Online Marketing and Loyalty Programs
When we delve deeper into online marketing, two of your main areas of focus should be social media and customer retention.
When it comes to the former, blogging and social media remain excellent mediums through which to target and engage potentially large audiences, but regularly conceiving, creating and sharing content can be hard going.
However, tools such as JetPack allow you to link your various social accounts, while Hootsuite allows for automated tweet scheduling and publication.
As for customer retention, which is between six and 25-times cheaper than acquiring new consumers (depending on the nature of your business), you should create a simple but effective loyalty program that automatically rewards shoppers when they spend their hard-earned cash.
#3. Office and Admin Work
Office administration may be one of the most time-consuming non-strategic business tasks, so this should be one of your first ports of call when implementing automation tools into your model.
For example, you can use comprehensive tools such as Evernote to collate and organise your business notes, task management, accounts and contact logs, before connecting associated apps and tools into a single program such as Herolocity.
When it comes to file saving, sharing and syncing, DropBox also offers a convenient and intuitive option. This can also reduce consumption and admin costs over time, so it represents a genuine win-win for business-owners.
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