There’s no doubt that automation is now big business. Over the last couple of years, the global automation industry has registered remarkable growth, signaling a ballooning trend of just how organizations across all industries are increasingly adopting automation.
This year alone, the global automation industry was predicted to generate approximately $214 billion with key segments such as 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and drones expected to nearly double in annual revenue.
The industrial automation software category is also expected to be worth a staggering $43 billion by the close of 2021.
Image Source: Statista
That’s not all.
The home automation market size and share is also expected to hit the $89.6 billion mark by 2026 up from $48.7 billion in 2020. According to a Facts and Factors market research report, this unprecedented growth is primarily driven by the growing popularity of the internet of things as more and more consumers constantly demand state-of-the-art, elegant, and luxurious home appliances.
On the business front, the trend is also pretty similar.
Having witnessed how automation can positively boost operations and their workforce, most businesses today are increasingly warming up to the idea of automating some of their processes.
According to a report by McKinsey, 31 percent of companies from a wide cross-section of industries have fully automated at least one function while 66 percent were in the process of piloting a solution to automate one process.
Image Source: McKinsey and Company
Year-on-year growth across industry usage has also been phenomenal with the rate at which companies have been automating at least one function growing from 29 percent in 2018 to 31 percent in 2020.
Driven by the need to modernize business processes, the global workflow management system market has also experienced monumental growth and is expected to reach $55 billion by 2028, registering a compound annual growth rate of about 30 percent from 2020 to 2028.
These statistics clearly show how automation is being used by businesses across industries to transform them into productive and competitive entities, especially at a time when consumer preferences and market dynamics are evolving by the day.
But while a good number of businesses have adopted various automation solutions and are now enjoying the benefits of automating some of their day-to-day tasks and processes, others are still not fully sold on this transformative business strategy.
The whole point of automation is to effectively and efficiently manage the day-to-day processes and tasks that are downright slowing your business down. If your business is constantly playing catch up with the competition then guess what, it’s time to automate. If you find this hard to believe, here are more compelling reasons why you need to automate your business today.
This pretty much goes without saying. The one notorious thing that slows the growth of most businesses is maintaining manual and repetitive processes throughout your operations.
These processes take up so much valuable time – time that would have been spent doing other important tasks. When you automate tasks such as sales emails and integrate autoresponders, for instance, you can boost your team’s productivity by up to 14.5 percent while your overall marketing costs reduce by up to 12.2 percent.
Image Source: Invesp
While lead generation and nurturing are among the most important stages in the marketing funnel, most leads are unfortunately not worth spending time following up. However, some marketers have no way of identifying or differentiating quality leads and those that will eventually lead them on a wild goose chase.
But with automation, the quality of leads can improve by up to 60 percent, which ensures that your team is always following up on prospects that have a higher chance of buying from you.
Once you have locked in the quality of your leads, the next most important thing is to convert as many of them as possible. This is the part that makes marketers shine.
At the end of the day, your marketing campaign’s success is largely measured by how many conversions you were able to make. In other words, how many deals you were able to close and how much they are worth. With automation, your conversion rate can increase by up to 77 percent. This alone makes investing in automation more than justifiable as the results will speak for themselves.
Cyberattacks and data breaches are increasingly becoming a common trend across all industries currently ranking as one of the top crimes in the U.S. with global attacks expected to cost organizations over $6 trillion by the end of this year.
Automation can also be used to help businesses protect themselves from phishing attacks and data breaches by being able to identify and respond to threats, enhance their cybersecurity strategy as well as improve their security. This way you reduce the risks to your business.
Accounting for all the tasks and processes in your business can be daunting, to say the least. This gets even more complicated if you have a large team working on different projects at the same time.
To manually account for everything is outright impossible. Take, for instance, a lucrative project that needed to be completed within a specified timeline but unfortunately, your team was not able to get it done on time. Trying to figure out what went wrong and who is accountable could waste more of your time and money.
However, with automated processes, every little detail that affects your project is tracked and the data is stored in a central, secure, and easy to access location. Any change that is affected by a team member is also updated so that everyone else is up to speed with what’s going on. If any process stalls, it is super easy to flag it and get it back on track. This way, your projects will always be delivered on time.
For a business process or task to function as required, it requires a set of steps or human input from several people so that it can work as intended. Manually listed down steps are prone to a myriad of risks and ultimately mistakes can be made, slowing down the entire operation or at the very least, causing unwanted and costly delays.
But with automation, all the necessary steps are fully automated and executed as and when they are required – like clockwork. Automation strictly follows a set of rules, alerts, and most importantly, follow-ups so that every process and task can be closely monitored and reviewed. This enhances consistency significantly.
Automation might seem like a massive undertaking, especially for startups or SMEs but on the contrary, the process doesn’t necessarily require a huge budget to adopt. Automation is a process and it can be initiated at any time no matter your financial strength.
It’s understandable if you think automation is specifically designed for deep-pocketed organizations with huge budgets. To be fair, this is what automation used to be. But today nothing could be farther from the truth. Even a one-man-show start-up can comfortably automate and still reap its many benefits.
The trick here is to start small with tasks such as automating your social media posts and work your way up as your business grows. If you are a small business, what you need to do is to identify processes that can be automated easily and cost-effectively. Email marketing, for instance, is an important process that affects the growth of your business and one that can easily be automated for maximum return on investment.
Here’s the thing: you look at the stats above and think that you must automate everything as quickly as possible. We sell automation solutions and we’re the first ones to tell you that this is a mistake.
Hear me out.
While we’d love to sell you on our largest automation and integration package, we know that this is not the right way to go, especially if you haven’t used automation and integration before. Yes, you can dozens of man-hours every month, cut costs, and increase your profits with the SyncApps integration solutions.
But only if you implement them right.
In our experience, the companies (big or small, size really doesn’t matter here) that had the most success with automation and integration were the ones that took their time implementing it. I’m not talking about years. But do take a couple of months to test the waters and see how your team and your customers respond to the new changes.
By starting small, you get more accustomed to the automation process. This way, you also have adequate time to evaluate your automation solution, and as your business grows you can always scale up your automation.
If you go all-in from day one, you could feel overwhelmed. You’ll make mistakes — possibly even send a dozen campaigns at the same time to the same audiences. In our subscribers’ experience, it takes at least a couple of weeks to get the hang of automation’s real power and to make sense of the features you can leverage to the fullest.
This is why at SyncApps you can stay on a free plan forever or test advanced features in a free trial. It’s always your choice, we’re just here to offer you all the options you need.
A good example of an automation solution that works wonders for small businesses and that can be tackled gradually is the Mailchimp for Salesforce integration. As soon as you sign up for it, you can start by syncing deleted and removed contacts. This will save you and your team time and effort that would have been wasted if the process was to be done manually. It’s also a good introduction to automation and integration.
As soon as you’re ready, you can continue by adding bidirectional data flows from Group reports as well as bring back only records with opens or clicks activity to allow lead nurturing in CRM. This feature will make your sales and marketing processes far more efficient, as it allows you to focus solely on the leads that are ready to convert.
Next on the agenda: go more in-depth with your targeting. For instance, the reports section will let you see what your customers clicked on in your drip marketing campaigns – information that you can then use to target them specifically with customized campaigns.
This is just an example of how automation and integration can be implemented gradually. The same principles apply to all our integrations. And don’t worry — if you ever stumble upon anything, our support team is here for you 24/7, irrespective of the plan you’re on (yes, we have non-stop support even for free plans!).
