Let’s face it, we’re all busy. We’re answering emails, taking calls, trying to solve issues, putting out fires, learning new things, and sometimes we just don’t have enough time in the day. If you’re a business owner, you especially understand. We should be focused on growing and providing the best product or service that we can and sometimes it can be difficult to do this. Focusing on company growth means being on the lookout for new strategies, tips, and tricks and one key strategy we’ve learned is automating repetitive tasks.

The use of automation tools to streamline your company's business operations is crucial. The right software can be used in conjunction with internet-based technologies such as social media and email while saving you time, money, or other important resources that may otherwise have been wasted on manual efforts. While the costs of new systems may seem like a lot, the time saved will be priceless. In the long run, you’ll be saving hundreds of dollars a month. There’s a lot of automation software out there but here are our favorites, tried and tested by our own agency.

1. Autopilot Email Marketing with MailerLite

Automating your emails can be a real game-changer. We rely on MailerLite, an email marketing platform that allows you to send newsletters, e-blasts, create landing pages, forms, and of course, email drip campaigns. We’ve even been playing around with their A/B testing function and have seen huge spikes in stats.

One way to easily implement this marketing automation in your business is through drip campaigns. Drip campaigns can help increase your company's brand awareness and sales revenue, as they rely on automated systems to create consistent communication with potential customers throughout the campaign period (which can be anywhere from a day to years). Because this type of email marketing is created far in advance there is no need to create a new campaign each time; this makes the workflow much easier!

For example, you sign up for a newsletter on an e-commerce site because you get a 10% discount code sent directly to your inbox. The next email will likely be reminding you to use your discount code. From there on, the emails can promote new site items or sales, all completely automated.

On the back end, you can choose how frequently emails are sent and you even have the ability to have them automatically turn it off if someone signs up or makes a purchase. Drip campaigns are great for those who work in the service industry as well. Real estate agents, salon owners, and even agency owners like myself can benefit from the constant check-in.

Some examples of drip campaigns include:

Before client purchase: incentives for turning into sales, brand education
Current clients/active shoppers: invoices, new items, company news, birthdays, and anniversaries
Past clients / inactive shoppers: casually checking-in, company news

If you’re interested in MailerLite, the price varies by the number of subscribers you have. A basic account with MailerLite is free with 1,000 subscribers or less and a maximum of 12k emails per month. This account features a drag-and-drop editor, landing page management, subscriber management, advanced segmentation, A/B testing, analytics, and email campaign reports. The higher number of subscribers you have, the price increases incrementally along with a few added features such as live chat support, custom HTML editor,

2. Invoicing and Billing with Stripe

Imagine a world where you never have to worry about forgetting an important detail. With Stripe's invoice feature, your clients can automatically receive professional invoices with all of their needs taken care of! You decide which payment method they can pay with and make sure everything goes smoothly by automating billing procedures - no more waiting around for payments or chasing down clients who haven't paid yet. As an agency, I particularly love that they autosave your service types and pay so what used to take me an hour to create on Canva turned into a 5-minute task.

It even links to a lot of other payment software like Eciwd, a company that we use for customers to buy our digital products directly on our site. An added bonus is that Stripe allows for personalized branding so every email and invoice coming from you includes your logo and company colors.

The most basic Stripe account offers a pay-as-you-go model with a 2.9% +$0.30 per successful card charge, and this includes everything you need to manage payments. There’s also a customized package for larger payment volumes that offers special volume discounts, interchange pricing, and country-specific rates.

3. Creating Contracts with Zoho

While Zoho also can help with invoice and billing I find the backend to be a little more outdated- which is we rely on Zoho for contract automation instead. Zoho helps you quickly generate contracts whether it's between you and clients, contractors, or employees.

While we know contracts certainly aren’t the most glamorous part of business, it's important to have all your contracts in order and Zoho is perfect for this. Through this platform, you can access templates for commonly used contracts or create your own custom templates. Zoho helps keep the back-and-forth to a minimum across parties and helps ensure your contract terms are clear by allowing you to input everything from the due date, payment plan, specific details of services provided, or any other service-related information. There’s even a built-in document editor so those annoying typos don’t go unnoticed!

With a maximum of 20 subscriptions and 1 user, you can access a Zoho free account and this offers multi-currency support, integration with Stripe, offline payments, and more. For $49 per month, you can have up to 500 customers and 3 users as well as multiple payment gateways and automatic payment reminders.

4. Scheduling Social Media Posts on Later

Show your social media strategist you care by getting them a scheduling platform that will save them a ton of time. Instead of having to be online 24/7, we use Later to automatically post about 80% of our client's social media content. The best part of Later is that it can be used with a variety of social media platforms. There’s still about 25% of the planning process that can’t be automated, such as posting a reel or publishing a story. The good thing is that Later will send you a notification and have the content automatically downloaded into your camera roll, making posting at the scheduled time a breeze.

Other features we love from Later that will transform your social media marketing activities:

Analytics & Key Metrics
Feed Preview
Hashtag Suggestions
Location & User Tagging
Support through Live Chat

The price for Later starts at $25 for 1 set of profiles, and depending on what extras you’d like to include, such as analytics or hashtag suggestions, the price varies. It’s a small price to pay for agencies as scheduling each social media post used to take hours of our time. Now it's down to the click of a button and has been one of the best purchases and social media tools we've used!

5. Managing Tasks with ClickUp

ClickUp is probably one of our most important tools here at the agency. Gone are our physical to-do lists and numerous follow-up emails about project statuses because ClickUp has helped automize it all. Our entire team is connected by “spaces” which are how you wish to organize all of your company’s tasks. These spaces can be specific projects, campaigns, or in our case, clients. In each space, you’re able to create folders and within those, specific tasks that include the team members involved, due dates, key files or documents, and our favorite - subtasks!

Its intuitive interface and organization helps businesses and employees maintain their to-do lists, timesheets, and more. It’s especially helpful when you want to see your tasks organized by priority or if you have recurring tasks.

The most basic account is free and includes unlimited tasks, unlimited members, a live chat feature, email within the platform, time tracking, and 100MB of storage. You can access unlimited storage at the next account level which is $5 per member per month.

No more chasing down teammates for status updates or trying to prioritize your day, let ClickUp create these automated workflows and improve your productivity.

6. Connecting It All with Zapier

Put simply, Zapier allows you to automate tasks between different platforms. These workflows or “Zaps” can be set so that specific actions occur whenever an event takes place on one of the linked websites. What’s more impressive is the expansive list of more than 3,000 platforms that can be linked together through Zapier. Google Sheets, MailerLite, WordPress, monday.com…whatever applications you use, Zapier is sure to work with it.

Zapier can handle the most simple of tasks, such as automatically saving attachments from Gmail to Google Drive, to more complex ones such as allowing a MailerLite subscriber list to be updated whenever a new row is added to a Google Sheet.

The pricing for Zapier speaks for its abilities as one of the most powerful software tools since it can help cross-platform and streamline multiple mundane and complex tasks. Pricing is dependent on the number of tasks you want to automate; keep in mind tasks can easily add up - tasks are counted whenever a Zap successfully takes an action. So for example, if your Zap is creating new Google Contacts, then each time a contact is created it is using one task. At the free level, you can get 100 tasks a month with a total of 5 zaps and a 15 minute update time, which is how often Zapier checks for new data. The next levels are $20 and $49 per month with 750 tasks and 2,000 tasks respectively. The update time also varies between these two, from 15 minutes to 2 minutes, which could significantly impact your day-to-day.

It’s important to take a step back and truly evaluate the cost of making your teams and business run more efficiently. Using a tool to automate your business will save you and the people on staff time, mental headspace, important resources, and most importantly money $$$. This will allow you to spend more of your time and energy focusing on what really matters within your company: creating great products or services, growing as an entrepreneur—or taking that much-needed time off.

But, we get it, sometimes it’s not always possible to spend what you want to make work easier. If budget is a concern, check out some of Google’s free tools that can help get you started on your path to being partially automated and take your business to the next level. Learning to automate your business will be life-changing. Once you start automating, you’ll never look back at the days of manual task handling.

6 Business Automation Tools to Grow Your Business in 2023