Marketing and Sales Automations to Make Your Holidays More Jolly

Between Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and the holidays, November and December are busy times for businesses. Your busiest days may be yet to come, but if you want to get ahead, you need to start preparing as soon as possible. This post offers tips for automating and streamlining your processes to make sure that this holiday season, your business runs smoother than Santa’s workshop.

 

The foundation of any B2B or B2C business is its CRM system. You need to know who your customers are, what they’re buying from you and how you can encourage them to buy from you again. CRMs help you create sales pipelines to help you identify the best way to get leads and convert them into sales. Combining your CRM with automation can power up your business and free up your time to do the important things. 

 

There are many CRM apps, and which is right for your business will depend on your needs.

If you don’t have a CRM, Zapier has a self-paced short course on creating a lightweight CRM (Automate getting new leads into your CRM). No matter your budget, there’s no excuse for not keeping track of your customers.

 

 

For this, we’re heading back to Zapier Learn’s courses with Build an Automated Client Onboarding system. The course starts by explaining how to build a CRM in Google Sheets. It then explains how you can use that to automate sending information to new clients and scheduling onboarding calls.

 

If you’re getting ready to drop your prices and offer deals, you need to have your sales and invoicing platforms ready to go as soon as possible.

 

If you don’t use a payment or sales platform that automatically handles invoicing, automating the creation of invoices is a game changer. A simple example of this is the following Zap:

This type of sales automation keeps your accounts in order without manually processing each payment.

 

Offering unique deals to customers is a great way to make them feel special and more inclined to buy from you.

 

 

If you’re using Kajabi to manage subscriptions to your courses, you can use the Zapier Kajabi integration to add users to a deal. For example, if they fill in a form on your website or buy a specific course from you, you can add them to a deal that you’ve created in Kajabi and send them an email to let them know about your great offer!

 

 

If you have an e-commerce site, you may want to generate unique discount codes. This Zapier Community article offers different ways of creating unique strings using Zapier. If you’re using Shopify, you can use Zapier’s API call or App extension actions to add the discount codes to Shopify before giving them to your customers.

 

The last thing you want when your business is at its busiest is to be worrying about posting on social media. But you need to keep your customers updated on your services and products to make sure that you stay front of mind. Planning social media posts ahead of time will allow you to ‘set it and forget it’ while you focus on sales.

 

 

The simplest way to do this is using a social media management app, like Hootsuite, Buffer or MeetEdgar. Of course, good social media management apps don’t come cheap, but you can create and automate a social media plan without one. How? I’m glad you asked.

 

 

First, you need somewhere to plan and store your posts. For this, you could use Google Sheets, SmartSuite, Zapier Tables. Anything that lets you store the social media content (including images) and the date you want to post it. From there, use Schedule by Zapier to trigger your Zap daily. If the day matches a date in your social media plan, take the information and post it to social media.

Everyone loves a personal touch, thinking someone took time and effort to do something especially for you. It makes customers feel valued and more likely to shop or work with you again.

 

Of course, in today’s world, it’s even possible to automate a personal touch. Apps like Handwrytten and Handwrite allow you to send ‘handwritten’ cards and letters without ever picking up a pen. Both of these apps integrate with Zapier. You can use them to send a personalised thank you card after a purchase or to automate sending holiday cards to your most valued clients.

 

Whatever your business, planning now is the best way to ensure a successful holiday season. If you’d like to speak with our Zapier expert to learn more about CRM, marketing and sales automations, book a call using the button below.