What Are the Benefits of Workflow Automation for Small Businesses?

Video Version

If you run a small business, you know that there are a million and one things to do in a day. There’s never enough time to get everything done, and often things fall through the cracks. This is where workflow automation can help.

Workflow automation can also help you improve your customer service. By automating tasks like customer communication and lead nurturing, you can make sure that your customers always feel heard and valued.

As a business owner and founder of AJ Tatum Digital, I’m always looking for ways to make tasks, routines, and other boring or mundane tasks easier to do. Even when I enjoy doing something, if I think there’s room for improvement, I look for it. Workflow automation helps me do this by automating tasks and cutting down on the number of manual tasks I have to do.

In this post, I’ll tell you about some of the things I’ve learned that can help you get started and give you some ideas for how to automate your small business’s workflow.

I’ll go over what workflow automation is, the advantages it can bring to your small business, some things you want to look for when choosing a workflow automation platform or service, and introduce you to several workflow automation services that I use and that are also affordable for small business owners. 

What’s Workflow Automation?

Workflow automation is the process of automating the tasks and processes that make up your workday. This can include things like email marketing, social media, customer communication, lead nurturing, and so much more.

A subcategory of workflow automation is marketing automation, and you can read more about marketing automation in my post “Why Your Marketing Automation Matters” to learn more.

What Are The Benefits of Workflow Automation for Small Businesses?

There are a ton of benefits of workflow automation for small businesses. Perhaps the most obvious benefit is that it can save you a ton of time. Automating your tasks and processes can free up hours in your day to focus on other things, like growing your business.

Besides saving your time, workflow automation can also improve your communication and organization. When everything is automated, it’s easier to keep track of what needs to be done and when. This can help you avoid missed deadlines and dropped balls. Workflow automation can also help to improve accuracy and consistency and reduce the risk of human error.

Workflow automation can also help you improve your customer service. By automating tasks like customer communication and lead nurturing, you can make sure that your customers always feel heard and valued.

Overall, workflow automation can save you time, improve your communication and organization, and help you provide better customer service. If you’re not already using workflow automation in your business, now is the time to start!

Workflow Automation Use Cases

• Data entry
• Order processing
• Invoicing
• Sending out emails
• Scheduling meetings
• Responding to customers faster with personalization
• Lead scoring
• Social media marketing & planning
• Integrating services you use

3 Workflow Automation Examples That Will Make Your Life Easier

Automate Your Customer Support (with Personalization)!

Most small business owners are either the customer support “team” or they typically have a small team. However, it’s critical to respond to customers as soon as possible, even if it’s just to acknowledge that you’ve received their question, etc.

Doing this manually would be pretty hard to do.

However, with the proper automation, you can close communication gaps and keep customers happy. The key is balancing automation with personalization.

For example, let’s say that you have a contact form on your website. Instead of just you receiving an email or them receiving a generic confirmation, you can automate and personalize the customer’s confirmation email in an automated way.

To give you an example, if you use WordPress, you could use Gravity Forms or Fluent Forms (I’ve used both) and use their own tool to personalize the customer’s email confirmation by including their first name, etc. 

In addition, if you wanted to automate email responses outside of WordPress and also log them into your CRM, then you could leverage Make.com’s integration with ActiveCampaign, Postmark, or HubSpot and mailparser.io or Parseur.

Consolidate & Manage Your Leads

You have some leads on your phone as contacts, some leads in your CRM, and some in your newsletter. But imagine a world where you could go to one place and see the entire lifecycle of your leads, subscribers, and customers. Sounds pretty amazing, right?

Well, if you use a CRM like ActiveCampaign or HubSpot, you’re in luck as they have integrations with services you’re probably already using, such as Google Contacts, Gmail, and more out of the box!

However, if your CRM doesn’t have the direct integration you’re looking for, you can typically build your own integration easily with workflow automation tools such as Make.com, n8n.io, IFTTT, Pabbly Connect, and more.

Take Charge of Your To Do List

I don’t know about you, but I’m horrible with to-do list apps on my phone. I put something on the list and I get a reminder, which I dismiss, and then totally forget about it. However, thanks to TickTick, I’ve finally found an app that’s just annoying enough to help you stay on task.

The only gripe I had was that it lacked the automations and integrations that you find in a lot of similar apps. However, thanks to IFTTT (If This, Then That) it’s possible to do almost anything. For example, I use Raindrop.io for my bookmark manager, and whenever I find something that I want to read later, I add it to Raindrop.io with the tag “ToRead.” When IFTTT notices that there’s a new bookmark with that tag, it automatically creates a task in TickTick for me to read the article at night. If you’re curious, you can checkout the workflow/applet that I published on IFTTT.

IFTTT Raindrop.io to TickTick Workflow

Social Media Marketing Workflow Automation Examples

How to Share Any Content on Android With an App, Make.com & Hopscotch.social

So, let’s say you’re browsing the web and you find a blurb from an article and want to share it with your community. You could go into an app like Buffer and share it from there, but what if you wanted it a bit more automated?

While my automation took some time to set up, I haven’t had to touch it in months thanks to an Android app called “HTTP Request Shortcuts“, Make.com, and HopScotch.social.

To keep thing easy, I suggest the first version of our automation be receiving a Webhook and then posting directly to a social media platform. Once you have that going, then look into HopScotch.social, which will schedule your posts for you!

Now, for configuring the HTTP Requests Shortcuts app, check out the short video below:

How to Share Any Website With Make.com, Raindrop.io, and Hopscotch.social

As mentioned, I use Raindrop.io for my bookmarks. With the Raindrop.io extension and mobile app, you can get to your bookmarks from any browser or device. What’s more, you can categorize your bookmarks with folders (called “Collections”) and tags and it integrates with Make.com!

Want to know how you can share any bookmark in a specific Collection to your social media followers? If so, I’ve come up with a step-by-step example with screenshots below:

Step #1: Create New Scenario in Make.com

Step #2: Search for Raindrop.io Module

Step #3: Create Raindrop.io Connection

Step #4: Select “Watch Bookmarks” in Raindrop.io

Step #5: Pick a Collection from Raindrop.io

Step #6: Optionally Select a Tag from Raindrop.io

Step #7a: Create a Second Raindrop.io Module

Step #7b: Create a Second Raindrop.io Module

Step #8: Select “Update a Bookmark” in Raindrop.io

Step #9: Select the first ID field for the Bookmark ID in the Raindrop.io Module to map it back to Make.com

Step #10a: Change collection of bookmark to another folder in Raindrop.io so that the bookmark is moved and won’t be processed twice.

Step #10b: Change collection of bookmark to another folder in Raindrop.io so that the bookmark is moved and won’t be processed twice.

Step #11a: Add Hopscotch.social Module

Step #11b: Add Hopscotch.social Module

Step #11c: Add Hopscotch.social Module

Step #12: Choose how you want to send your post to Hopscotch.social

Step #13: Add your Hopscotch.social account

Step #14: Select a social media profile linked in Hopscotch.social

Step #15: If you selected “Smart Queue a Post” select the queue you wish to use in Hopscotch.social

Step #16: Select Title or Description from Raindrop.io that you want to use as your social media post.

Step #17: Select the URL from Raindrop.io to include in the post. Be sure there is a space between the two fields.

Step #18: Click “Ok” to finish module

Step #19: Turn on Make.com Scenario

(Advanced Alternative) Step #1a: After Adding the first two Raindrop.io Modules, instead of posting to one account, let’s use a Router Module to post to multiple accounts.

(Advanced Alternative) Step #1b: Select the Router Module

(Advanced Alternative) Step #2: Add Hopscotch.social Module to first route

(Advanced Alternative) Step #3: Choose how you want to post to Hopscotch.social.

(Advanced Alternative) Step #4: Select Twitter for the social media account as we need to make sure the tweet isn’t too long

(Advanced Alternative) Step #5: Select the Smart Queue you wish to use for Twitter

(Advanced Alternative) Step #6: While in the “Text” field, on the left side select the gear icon at the top to go to some functions.

(Advanced Alternative) Step #7a: For this function, first select “if” and drag it to the text box. The function will check if the length of the text is longer than 270 characters, and, if so, truncate the text.

(Advanced Alternative) Step #7b: Click the “A” icon

(Advanced Alternative) Step #7c: Click the “length” function and drag it so that it’s before the first semicolon.

(Advanced Alternative) Step #7d: Using the same process, eventually the textbox will look like this using the “substring” function.

(Advanced Alternative) Step #8: Continue creating as many new routes as you’d like to Hopscotch.social or anywhere else.

Four Recommended Workflow Automation Platforms

While there are plenty of workflow automation platforms out there, I’m going to highlight four of them here that can help get started with automating your business. If you’re curious about learning more, check out my blog post, “60+ No-Code Automation Tools To Spark Your Curiosity.”

IFTTT

IFTTT is a service that allows you to create simple “if this, then that” rules to automate various tasks. Originally, I used IFTTT for personal workflow automation and home automation, but it’s recently expanded into my business as well.

For example, you can set up a rule so that every time you get a new email from a specific sender, IFTTT will send you a text message alerting you about the new email. IFTTT has over 700 integrations and offers a free tier. However, starting at $2.50 a month, you can get multi-step workflows.

Make.com

Make.com is an affordable solution that offers over 1,000 integrations. They have a drag-and-drop workflow builder that is easy to use and yet quite powerful.

One of the biggest ways I use Make.com is for social media marketing automation with their integration with HopScotch.social. Whenever I tag a post in Inoreader or like an article in Feedly, Make.com takes it and sends it to HopScotch to be shared with the world.

Make.com offers a free plan with 1,000 operations a month, but you can only have two active workflows. Starting at $9/month, you’ll get unlimited workflows and 10,000 operations per month. An operation is however many “steps” there are in a workflow. So, if one workflow has five steps (or actions), then that will be five operations.

n8n.io

n8n.io is my go-to platform, primarily because it’s open source and I self-host it. They currently have over 220 integrations.

With it being self-hosted, I don’t have any limitations on the number of workflows I have running, etc. However, their cloud version is also very affordable.

I love their self-hosted version, as you can practically do anything in it, such as running your own scripts, etc.

If you’re feeling adventurous, it’s very easy to get started with self-hosting your own n8n with many cloud providers, but here are instructions for Digital Ocean, though I personally prefer hosting with Vultr. Another option if you don’t want to manage servers, is to use elestio.

As far as their cloud pricing goes, n8n starts off at $20 and allows for 20 active workflows and 5,000 workflow executions. n8n differs from Make.com, in that they don’t count individual steps in a workflow; instead, they count however many times an entire workflow has been executed.

Pabbly Connect

Pabbly Connect falls somewhere in between Make.com and n8n.io as they offer over 850 integrations and their pricing is very generous. They currently have a life-time deal ranging from $149-$447 depending on the number of workflows you want and if you want multi-step workflows. They also have a free tier so you can try out their platform and see if it’s a good fit for you.

Additional Workflow Automation Platforms

Azure Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps is a cloud-based service that enables you to automate tasks and workflows that you would otherwise have to perform manually. With Azure Logic Apps, you can easily connect to popular cloud services, such as Azure Storage, Office 365, Twitter, Dropbox, and Twitter, and perform tasks such as creating documents, sending emails, and processing data. If you’re already using Azure, I highly recommend checking out Azure Logic Apps.

Huginn

Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn’s Agents create and consume events, propagating them along a directed graph. Huginn is a free, open source alternative like n8n, but has a slightly steeper learning curve.

Pipedream

Pipedream is an integration platform for developers to build and run workflows that integrate apps, data, and APIs — no servers or infrastructure to manage!

Additional Workflow Automation No Code & Low Code Tools

Read my blog post, “60+ No-Code Automation Tools To Spark Your Curiosity” to learn about more tools that can help you with workflow automation in almost every way possible.

Is Zapier A Good Workflow Automation Platform?

This is strictly my opinion after using Zapier as my first automation service. While Zapier has the nicest user interface and they provide integrations with practically everything, you end up paying significantly more for what you receive when compared to the alternatives. Additionally, they charge per step or “zap” and can lead to surprising bills. In conclusion, I don’t think Zapier is worth the premium price tag.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this post and how workflow automations can help you scale your small business and free up your time. I only scratched the surface of what workflow automation can do, and that’s because every business is different. To get started, write down all the services you currently use and then find an automation service that can integrate with as many as possible.

I’m always excited to help others grow their business, especially when it comes to automation! So, If you have any other questions about workflow automation, please comment below, contact us, join our Discord server, or schedule a free one-hour consultation.

Thanks for reading,
AJ

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