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Business automation for small businesses
By Zapier • Published March 1, 2021
Automation helps you get more done without working more and helps lighten the load when staffing is tight. You can use automation to handle crucial business functions, like scheduling and manual data entry, or to make it easier for you to do your job with notifications and reminders.
Why use business automation
In this guide to adding automation to your business we highlight popular ways to automate apps that are crucial to your business. You rely on forms, surveys, CRMs (Customer Relationship Management), email marketing, and social media to stay in touch with your clients and customers. And spreadsheets, databases, and project and task management programs keep you aligned internally.
With automation, you can keep your focus on the most important work while ensuring everything you need done in the background keeps happening.
How automation works
Automation is a way of telling the apps, software, and tech tools you use to do work for you. The basics of any automated workflow is when this happens do this. You use Zapier to create these custom workflows to handle tasks in the background, so you and your team can focus on the more important work you're doing—and not moving information from one place to another.
You can use automation for single tasks, like adding contacts to your CRM when someone fills out a form, or to create complex workflows that take that form submission and go on to assign leads to team members, create deals, update spreadsheets, and send customized emails back to the lead.
Get started with business automation
How do you know it's the right time to automate a task? Look for the elements of your work that you have to do on a schedule or for responsibilities that pop up repeatedly at random. If you're regularly moving information between apps, try automating that data entry first.
Ultimately, the most important motivator for automating any aspect of your work is your "why." If you do the challenging work of running a small business, you should also be able to reap the reward by choosing the freedom and flexibility to run a company the way you want to, too.
Learn how to add automation to six of the programs you use to run your business. Start small or think big—you can always add more workflows to automate even more tasks.
After you've seen how to use automation in your business, get a walkthrough on how to set up a Zap in our quick-start guide.
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