Put Your Online Business On Automatic Pilot

Your web site is everything you dreamed of – successful, profitable, and a targeted market. The only problem is you thought by having a retail web site you’d be spending less time working instead of more. Well you can just by putting your online business on automatic pilot.

Marketing is one of the areas that take up considerable time and most web site owners would rather spend that time interacting with clients or taking some time out for themselves. The best way to handle your marketing is with an automated system. When your marketing system is effective it will run itself on auto pilot.

A good automated marketing system means you set it up and then forget about it. So your investment in both money and time is a one time commitment meaning over time you save both money and time. But remember for your automated system to work you need to have put some serious work into the set up elements.

Your automated system should take your customer through the entire process from first visit to completed purchase to an invitation to return again. Your marketing campaign must also set you apart from other competitive sites. After all if you don’t stand out what’s going to make the potential customer follow through? In that message you’ll also have to have a persuasive message that hooks your potential customer.

Don’t forget about customer you already have. Be sure that your automated system sends them regular reminders often referred to as ticklers. These ticklers will have some incentive for the customer to return. Perhaps a discount, free shipping, or what ever is appropriate for your site. The goal is to get the customer to react to the message.

Another aspect of online business that can be time consuming is the processing of payments and then the delivery of the goods. A good checkout system is essential. It makes the process easy for your customers and it allows you to seamlessly process orders.

If you sell retail products of course there will need to be human interaction at the final stages of the order. If you sell downloadable materials you can automate the entire process so that you never need to personally interact with the transaction.

There are many credit card gateways that you can choose from as well as Paypal which offers full merchant services to online merchants. Automating your payment process via the internet might cost you a little more but it’s a much smoother process then if you have to wait for payment to arrive, process it, and then make manual deposits to your bank account.

Your templates should also be automated but they also need to be practical and easy for the consumer to use. If your templates are pre-designed then you can save plenty of time when you decide your site needs a change. Simply load up one of your alternative templates.

You can eliminate double entry bookkeeping by integrating your credit card processing with your accounting or POS software. This means you won’t be wasting time entering information manually that is already available in one of your systems. Simply import the data into your accounting package. For this to happen you must ensure you choose an accounting package that is compatible with your payment processor.

Inventory can also consume a lot of your time so it’s important to integrate your inventory control from your website with your accounting package as well. There are many packages designed for seamless integration so shop around until you find the one that’s right for you.

The portion of any online business that eats away the most time are the menial repetitive tasks. Most of these tasks can be easily handled by your computer providing you invest in the proper software and services. So why not put your online business on automatic pilot and start to enjoy some free time?

Deon Melchior is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may reprint the articles that are included in our site, as long as the article is unedited and the author box is included with it's live hyperlinks.