When it comes to running a small business, productivity is the name of the game. After all, the average small business owner has to wear a ton of hats. According to a recent Forbes study over eight out of 10 small businesses don’t have other employees to balance the workload. And for those that do have the bandwidth to hire additional employees, this 16% of small businesses only have between one and 19 employees!

In a world where there’s so much work to do, and so little time to do it as a smaller organization, some vital tools are blessedly bridging the gap.

Test the method: Delegate, elevate, automate — or eliminate?

As a small business, there’s only so much you can do with limited resources. We’ve all been there: some days it’s just a matter of deciding what you can actually do and what’s going to have to wait for another day. But there’s only so many times you can do this before something has to give.

Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek put it perfectly when he explained, “Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash. How’s that for incentive to be effective and efficient?”

A simple test to see if something is worth your time and effort as a leader is by asking yourself, “Can I delegate, automate, or eliminate this?” Only when the answer comes back as a resounding “NO” can you justify continuing to keep said task on your plate.

While delegating tasks requires hiring extra hands and eliminating something means removing it from your small biz strategy, workflow automation is one of the strongest tools you can leverage in today’s world.

Here’s the secret sauce… are you ready?

Invest in small business automation tools. Yes, it really can be that simple.

Small business automation is vital to unlocking a scalable business model and enabling your team to handle the important, “needle-moving” stuff while reducing human error and the hefty time investment many repetitive, manual tasks require.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to determine what process or system would be a great fit for task automation:

• Is it a task that needs to be completed frequently (AKA repetitively) or on a set schedule?
• Is this something that requires little to no brain power or higher thinking to accomplish?
• Does it involve moving information between multiple applications?
• Do you find yourself being frustrated by the prospect of spending time on something that doesn’t seem exceptionally fruitful — but is necessary to your business’s continued success?
• Does it take you away from more important business functions?

If you answered yes to any (or more than one!) of the above, workflow automation is the right solution for your small business.

One specific thing that tends to take a lot of time away from more important tasks is anything to do with your calendar organization. We’re talking about keeping all of your event or appointment dates and details straight, communicating them with your customers, and reminding them of the event or appointment as the day gets closer. It can truly be a full-time job!

But, with the help of calendar automation, you can cross this off of your to-do list permanently!

Here’s exactly how you can automate your small business’s calendar

First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about the term “calendar automation”. We’re talking about using a calendar automation software app that is designed to simplify and streamline the process of organizing and managing events.

Enter AddEvents, the perfect automated calendar scheduling solution for your small business! Picture this: all of your upcoming events neatly organized in one place, across as many calendars as you need. Each event has its own landing page (customizable, to boot!) that you can easily share with your customers and they can click “RSVP” to indicate they’re coming.

Plus, you get a ton of other shareable options:

• Add to calendar buttons for your website
• Add to calendar links for your emails
• Embeddable calendars and event widgets for your website
• RSVP buttons, links, and embeddable forms

AddEvent even offers subscription calendars, so you can share multiple events with your customers and, once they’ve successfully subscribed, will add any new events to their calendars automatically!

But that’s not all — there are more ways you can automate your calendar and event marketing. When you add dynamic add to calendar functionality to your website or email newsletters, you make it quite literally as easy as possible for your customers to save your upcoming events into their own calendars.

If you’re looking for a way to provide an automated add to calendar button or link that’s dynamically personalized according to a unique event, then AddEvent has the solution for you.

Now, there are two ways to do this:

Add the dynamic button to your website

First, easily install the automated add to calendar button into your website without requiring a ton of development work or coding experience. Just copy the add to calendar button code we’ve supplied and paste it into your website or landing page’s backend.

AddEvent’s calendar automation features work great with custom websites like WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc. And, you can update your button’s look so it matches your website design flawlessly.

Whenever you update the event, you just need to change the parameters in the code. You can connect these parameters to your database and this will automatically update the event details based on each user!

Add the automated links to your emails

Much like the directions above, you can build automated add to calendar functionality into your email campaigns by simply copying and pasting the add to calendar link code into your email template.

These features are compatible with a ton of mail APIs like Mailchimp, SendGrid, Mailgun, and other similar platforms.

Generate a calendar file (.ics file) to attach to your emails or link to a customizable event landing page so your customers can add it to their individual calendars. And, you can connect your event parameters to your database so it will automatically update the event details for each user.

Wait! There are even more ways to automate your small business processes.

Depending on the other marketing tools, scheduling software, and operations platforms your business is using, there are a ton of other automations you can set up thanks to Zapier.

Here are just a few examples to get your wheels rolling:

• Tired of manually transferring your RSVP info into your CRM? There’s a Zap for connecting AddEvent with CRM and marketing automation tools like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Salesforce, and more.
• Want to send a personalized email to attendees when they sign up for an event? Create a Zap that connects your AddEvent account with Mailchimp or AWeber to kick off an automated email warm-up campaign.

Let us help you automate a few things in your small business and see what that frees you up to do to scale your organization — all for free! Sign up for a Hobby account to see for yourself.