Everyone wants to do more with less. In today’s guest post, Wendy Dessler of OutreachMamma shares some of her favorite automation tools for small business.

When you own a small business, it’s often challenging to coordinate all of the various responsibilities on your plate. You’re responsible for customer service, finding the right employees to get the job done, and so much more. It’s never difficult to stay busy once you own your own community-focused small business.

As a business owner, you have to do more than just stay busy. You need to be as productive as humanly possible in order to stay on course. You do not want to waste your precious time on repetitive, time draining tasks that could be better handled if you were to employ the latest automation tools and technology. 

Remember, wasting precious time performing specific activities manually is only going to hurt your company and your overall productivity. Paying members of your team to work on manual tasks that can also be automated is a waste of your money, their time, and it’s ultimately going to hurt your business.

There’s good news though. The age of the internet will come to the rescue because many brilliant people have come up with apps and programs that make it easier than ever to automate mindless, menial tasks that typically take up a great deal of your time. To help you get your small business moving in the right direction, we’ll share our favorite effective tools to help you use automation to your advantage so you can grow your small business and have members of your team working diligently on the most important projects when it matters the most.

MailChimp

Automating your customer email list is one of the most important things you could ever do to improve the efficiency of your company. You obviously want to keep in contact with your fans and customers, and having an email program that allows you to quickly send emails to your entire mailing list is definitely a good thing. There aren’t too many effective marketing tactics right now, but email automation is definitely one of them.

At the end of the day, there are many effective email automation programs to try. Mailchimp is one of the cheaper options when first starting out. In fact, it’s completely free until you reach a certain amount of subscribers (currently 2000 subscribers). With the same free plan, they’ll also let you send up to 12,000 emails per month. So if you have 2000 subscribers, you can send everyone six messages throughout the month without paying anything for their service.

Online Time Tracking

Online time tracking is incredibly effective for small business owners, business owners managing virtual employees, and every type of company in between. Giving your employees and remote workers the ability to clock in and clock out online is very efficient, effective, and certainly a step in the right direction toward successfully managing productivity.

The cool thing about online time tracking is you can generate reports and sheets that will show you how many hours your employees work on the whole, how many hours they work per project, and other vital pieces of information to help you successfully run your business.

In fact, you can set up your online time clock however you desire to help track productivity within your company as best as possible. So take advantage of this low-cost, excellent option and once you’ve gathered enough data, you’ll be able to make certain tweaks within your business to help your productivity soar.

Not only that, you can also connect online time tracking software with your payroll company or even cut payroll checks directly through the program, depending on which one you use. So it certainly has its uses and it’s honestly a creative invention that will cut down on your accounting needs, help you save a tremendous amount of time, and automate productivity and payroll processes all at the same time.

Asana

As far as workflow tracking and employee delegation are concerned, you’ll have a tough time beating Asana because it’s one of the best tools available to track employee workflow. Again, you can use this for in-house employees, remote employees, or employees that work in every single capacity.

So many small business owners are taking advantage of this software because it’s simple to create and assign tasks. You can use the program to assign and prioritize particular projects. You can set up templates for projects that you’ll typically work on fairly regularly, and more than anything else, you’ll feel organized, stress-free, and so happy that you decided to use this program to manage your company workflow.

Not only that, but you can also communicate with your employees through this program, leave comments, have conversations, set up a calendar, leave updates, and effectively manage your team. After using Asana, you’ll wonder how your small biz ever survived without it.

Conclusion

Automating your small business is one of the best things you could ever do for your sanity. Please look into our favorite automation tools mentioned above and figure out how you can begin using them in your small business.

About Wendy Dessler

Wendy is a super-connector who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. She frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses her efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans depending on the industry and competition.