By Kayla Walters
Your website should be your business’s best employee. It can work24/7,and it’s always available to customers, even when your physical store or office is closed. An up-to-date website can also be a consistent source of your most accurate information, cutting down on the endless questions most business owners tend to receive.
What a lot of business owners don’t know is that your website can be given the tools it needs to automate a lot of the mundane tasks you would otherwise have to do manually and give you back time to focus on your business.
If you’re ready to start using your website to its fullest potential, here are six website tools you can use to start automating your business and decrease your stress.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms allows you to create and manage forms on your website.
By automating data collection, you will not only help alleviate the paperwork that you have to do, you’ll also make the process of submitting information quick and easy for your customers, which will in turn increase the number of responses you get! Win, win!
With Gravity Forms, some of the automation opportunities at your fingertips include the following:
Create fillable PDF forms that can automatically send confirmation emails.
Collect signatures for waivers.
Charge an application fee.
Set cut-off dates and a maximum number of submissions per application.
Create order forms with inventory, one-time or subscription-based payments, taxes, coupons, and discounts.
Woocommerce
Another method of automating your business is selling online with the popular WordPress plugin Woocommerce. This is the most robust e-commerce tool on the market and canhelpyousellanytypeofproductorservice.Pairthiswithadd-onsthatcanautomatethe entire purchasing process, and you could be selling online in no time and only have to fill orders.
With Woocommerce, you can do the following online:
Sell products, services, memberships, courses, and gift cards.
Offer coupons and discount codes.
Sell event tickets.
Accept one-time payments, recurring subscriptions, or instalment payments.
Automatically create receipts, packing slips, shipping labels, and confirmation emails.
Booking software
If your business relies on appointment scheduling, you can start automating the booking process with software like Calendly or WordPress plugins like Amelia. These tools can be directly embedded in your website, and you’ll never again have to waste time with back-and-forth emails about availability!
With a booking platform like Calendly or Amelia, you can do the following:
Integrate with popular calendars like Google Calendar or Office 360.
Provide meeting or appointment times based on your availability.
Accept free or fee-based appointments.
Collect additional information.
Send confirmation, reminder, and follow-up emails or text messages.
Include employees in the booking schedule and charge different rates based on their service, schedule, or location.
Offer coupons or other add-on incentives.
Embed your CRM
Client Relationship Management (CRM) or Business Management Software (BMS) systems allow you to create contact forms as the first step in your sales process.
Most robust CRMs will provide you with the code you’ll need, and it’s as easy as copying and pasting it into your website. You’ll now have an additional pathway for communication with your customers, an increased number of leads, and fewer unnecessary emails between prospective clients, as they’ll be able to start the sales process at any time.
Zapier
If you really want to hit peak automation for your business, Zapier is a game changer. This software will allow you to connect your website and other third-party applications that wouldn’t otherwise integrate, making the options to automate your repetitive tasks virtually endless—without the need to know how to code.
You can program workflows that perform automated tasks that say, “When this happens, then do this.”
Here are a few examples of “zaps” you can create include with Zapier:
Create invoices and receipts once a purchase has been made on your website.
Post new blogs to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, or other social media sites.
Record and break down invoice payments based on credit card fees, taxes charged, and date received.
Save form entries in a Google Sheet.
An FAQ page
This one isn’t a fancy tool but could be one of the most powerful assets on your website. Studies have shown that small businesses can cut down on 60 percent of their inquiries by providing the most common answers to customers’ questions on their website.1
FAQ pages are also a powerful SEO tool to help you increase your ranking in search engines because content written in question-and-answer format is easy for search engines to read and serve up in search results!
SEO TIP: An added bonus of using tools like these to automate your business is that they increase the number of visitors to your site, keep them on your website longer, and help increase your SEO ranking!
While the initial set-up on your website does require an investment of time—and sometimes money—the results will speak for themselves.
You will not only alleviate the often endless amount of time you spend on administration, you’ll also improve customer satisfaction when the experience of working or buying from you is quick, easy, and frictionless.
So, what will you do to better your business with all this free time you’re created for yourself?
Want to learn more about the tools mentioned in this article? Head over to GoodCheerDesign.com/resources for links to each tool and for more information about how I can help you set them up on your WordPress website.
Kayla is the owner of Good Cheer Web Design, and she’s on a mission to help women business owners create beautiful, game changing WordPress websites and help them use tech to run killer businesses. She’s been designing and maintaining websites. She’s been designing and maintaining websites for over fifteen years and loves working with women who are ready to target their ideal clients, make more money and decrease stress behinds the scenes. When she isn’t glued to her laptop, she loves exploring the city with her dog, Gus.