Today I'm gonna give you a little guidance on where I think you should start and what we do right away when a business has no automation.

Let's talk about where to start with automation. So this video assumes that you haven't automated anything in your business, and that means you don't have one auto responder or anything like that. Right? So everything is manual for the today's discussion here about this. If that's what the situation looks like. When people show up here to work with us, the first thing we start to automate is some sort of customer messaging, right? And so that's to the existing customers, right? We want to keep that existing customer pool, warm and engaged with the business, and that might be on products or services. It doesn't matter. Right? So if that customer base has been allowed to cool off, that's the first place to get into auto animating messaging to that group. And what that might look like specifically is at least 52 messages about a year's worth of weekly emails to that existing customer base. 

And it sounds like a lot when I say that, but it's really not that hard to come up with 52 short messages. And we do at the same way that we've talked about other videos on here by organizing our topics, our expertise, and then just working down and you can quickly come up with 52 topics and then just start filling in the blanks and getting those written. What's really great about most messaging email platforms is you can start an automated sequence like that and keep it adding to it as it's sending. So you don't need to set the whole thing up necessarily. You can get 10 done, then you're 10 weeks out and then do 10, do 10 do 10. And then it all is happening. That's the first place we love to start is just making sure that the existing customer list is reengaged. 

If it's been allowed to cool off. And if not, and there's been some sporadic emails at least get like some regularity, but get the workload off the staff, the owners and the managers, so that that's automated. And we know that that's happening. The next piece of the puzzle, once you have those existing customers engaged is to focus on new customers. And I think that the most important piece of automated messaging for new customers and this assumes that if they buy something, they get a confirmation. Okay. So that's, that's basic automation. So you definitely want to have that, right? When somebody gets a, they buy a product from your shopping cart, your shopping cart should have a confirmation email and a shipping email. Okay? So those are cool automations that are built into most e-commerce platforms. If you're a service provider, you need to think, how can I mimic that? 

When I onboard somebody, what sequence do they go into? We call that a client indoctrination series, and it's really important. And here's how it looks. If you get a new client, you really should have about two weeks of indoctrination messaging for that client to solidify that relationship, to reaffirm to the person that they made a good decision by choosing you as their service provider. And, and to introduce them to all the other things that you probably do or can do for them that they didn't even know about. And it's just a lot to cover on a phone call for instance, or in the middle of trying to solve one of their problems, right? So the indoctrination series looks like this. Typically it's going to be an email every two to three days for about 14 days. So that's seven to 10 emails, thereabout, and those are going to go from a nice little arc, if you will, like a sort of story arc, they start kind of at welcome all the way to, you know, here's all the ways that we can transform you and your, and your problems to solutions. 

Here's what things look like in the future, right? That whole stuff we've talked about on other videos and highlighting all of the things that you do, and also covering topics like how they can get the most from the relationship with you. Like what can they do, right. Setting some expectations with them and covering how both of you can do well and be profitable in the relationship. So those are my two areas that we immediately jump into. If you haven't automated anything in your business, then that's where I would dive into right now, the bonus points are adding in SMS messaging to the same sequences, right? So you can double tap, send an email and send an SMS and kind of have that going along, which is great. We've been doing more and more of that last year and this year. And we continue to push more SMS messaging for most of our clients, because it seems that people just love it. 

It's fast. And the opens in readership are near a hundred percent on text messaging, which is awesome, comparative to email, which is still good on a warm list, but they're really not even close to the numbers. You can get on a text message where they receive it. They're gonna look at it. The downside is the amount you can send is far less, right? So sometimes it might just be a message like - Hey, we've updated, something in your account. So go take a look, here's the link. Or we send you an email, check your inbox, or here's a video we made linked to a page. That's always a good one for text. Just, they've gotta be brief. Those are the areas to go for and there's tons more you can do of course, with automate, but those are definitely the basics to sort of lift up your relationship with your new clients, your existing clients, and get a lot of that manual communication load off your shoulders. Go ahead and like our video and subscribe because we do videos every week and we'd love to see you again.