Automating business workflows has various long-term benefits, from reduced errors and cost savings to increased efficiency and scalability. For example, when you automate business workflows, you’d need less labor. This, in turn, means less operations costs.
And it’s not only about that. Automation reduces the risks of human error that could lead to costly rework or delays. Business process automation also allows for more efficient use of resources. This means reduced overhead and lower costs.
Automating business workflows involves streamlining processes using technology to perform repetitive tasks without any manual intervention. This is typically done using various software tools and APIs.
For example, APILayer offers a comprehensive range of APIs that are quite helpful for small and medium-sized enterprises in terms of automating different types of workflows and processes.
APILayer is basically a trustworthy and leading API marketplace offering reliable APIs in various categories. From geolocation and weather APIs to finance, scraping, and sports, you’ll find all sorts of APIs on APILayer. These APIs are super easy to integrate into systems/apps and are designed to automate various workflows.
In this article, will explore in detail how small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can leverage various APILayer APIs to automate their workflows. We’ll focus on the key benefits of automation and how you can utilize APILayer’s diverse business automation APIs to achieve these goals.
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Why SMBs Should Automate Business Workflows
SMBs operate in a very competitive environment often, with limited resources and budgets. Thus, it’s crucial for them to seize any opportunity that can help them reduce costs, increase efficiency, and gain a competitive edge. Workflow automation is one such opportunity.
Here’s how automating business workflows can help SMBs:
Cost Savings and Resource Optimization
Cost savings is one of the main goals of SMBs and automation plays a critical role in it. When you’re doing things manually, you need significant human labor, which means higher operational costs.
However, by automating repetitive tasks, SMBs can reduce the need for manual labor. This frees up resources that you can allocate somewhere else.
Automation also helps companies utilize resources efficiently. With automation, tasks are completed faster and with fewer errors. This means more efficient use of time and resources.
Increased Operational Efficiency and Productivity
Automation makes processes quicker and more efficient. Manual tasks that require hours can be completed in minutes. This way, your team can focus on more strategic tasks.
Increased efficiency also means that your business can handle more work with the same or even fewer resources. This boosts overall productivity.
Scalability to Support Business Growth
As the business grows, operational needs also increase. With manual processes, scaling can be challenging. It would require more labor and resources.
However, when you automate your processes using APIs, it provides the scalability needed to handle increased demand without a significant increase in costs or resources. This allows your business to grow and respond quickly to new opportunities.
Examples of API-Driven Automation
- Businesses can use an IP geolocation API to automatically customize website content, language, currency display, or product offerings based on the user’s location. For example, an e-commerce site can display products popular in the user’s region. Similarly, they can adjust shipping options and costs according to the user’s location.
- Using an IP geolocation API, businesses can automatically flag or block transactions from high-risk locations. Similarly, they can block transactions from regions with unusual user activity.
- An IP geolocation API is also helpful in automating the promotion of events or offers to users in a specific city or region.
- Businesses can use a currency conversion API to automatically update product prices on their website based on the latest exchange rates. This way, they can show prices to customers in their local currency.
- A currency conversion API is also helpful in automatically converting and tracking expenses in various currencies. This simplifies financial reporting for international operations.
- A phone number verification API can help businesses automatically verify the phone numbers provided by users during registration. This way, they can ensure that they have valid and active numbers and reduce the risk of fake accounts.
- Businesses can also use a phone verification API to automatically filter out invalid/inactive numbers from SMS marketing campaigns. This improves delivery rates and reduces costs.
Key APILayer APIs for Business Automation
APILayer has a diverse range of APIs. Here, we’ll discuss some of the most useful APILayer APIs to automate business workflows.
Note: All APILayer APIs offer a free plan and have detailed documentation.
Ipstack IP Geolocation API
Ipstack is a leading IP geolocation API that provides accurate geolocation data of an electronic device based on its IP address. Businesses can use the API to identify the location of their website visitors. They can then automate various processes (as discussed in the previous section) based on this data.
Ipstack is particularly known for its high data accuracy, ease of integration, and efficiency. The API provides detailed geolocation data, which includes:
- Country
- City
- Continent
- Region
- Zip code
- Latitude and longitude coordinates.
It also offers additional valuable features, such as:
Some APIs also offer additional features, such as:
- Security Features: Detects Whether an IP address is using a proxy, crawler, or Tor. It also shows the threat level associated with an IP address.
- Currency: Provides currency information associated with the location detected against a given IP address.
- Timezone: Provides timezone information associated with the location returned against a given IP address.
- Hosting information: Provides ASN and the hostname of the ISP a website visitor is using.
Mailboxlayer Email Verification API
Mailboxlayer is a simple and easy-to-use email verification and validation API. It helps businesses ensure that the email addresses they collect are valid and genuine. This way, businesses can ensure that they only send emails to real customers and high-value contacts.
The API is super useful in applications where accurate email data is critical. These can include user registration processes, email marketing, and customer communication. For example, businesses can automatically verify the validity of email addresses during the user registration or sign-up process.
The API supports:
- Syntax and typo check and also provides a useful alternative
- Real-time SMTP. The API verifies if the email address is deliverable and tests each email for catch-all configuration
- MX-Records check. Mailboxlayer validates the email address by checking the MX (Mail Exchange) records of the domain. If the domain’s MX records are valid and correctly set up, the email is highly likely to be deliverable.
- Disposable email detection. The API can identify email addresses that belong to temporary or disposable email services.
Fixer API
Fixer is a powerful foreign exchange rate and currency conversion JSON API. The API is widely trusted for its high accuracy, real-time data, advanced features, performance, speed, and ease of integration.
Here are the key features of the API:
- Can update real-time exchange rate data every 60 seconds, 10 minutes, or 1 hour, depending on your preference and subscription plan.
- Supports historical exchange rates all the way back to 1999.
- Supports 170 world currencies.
- Has a separate endpoint to convert any amount from one currency to another.
- Offers a ‘timeseries’ endpoint to retrieve daily historical rates between any two dates.
Fixer can be used to automate various processes, such as automatically updating product prices on a website based on the latest exchange rates.
Numverify API
Numverify is a highly accurate phone number validation and lookup REST API. It helps businesses ensure that phone numbers collected from or provided by customers are valid, active, and up-to-date.
Key features of the API include:
- Supports 232 countries
- Supports various types of phone numbers, such as mobile, business and landline numbers.
- The API can verify both the local and international phone number formats.
- Supports carrier detection and line-type detection
- Detailed API documentation with coding examples
Businesses can use numverify to automatically verify users’ phone numbers during registration, filter out invalid/inactive numbers from SMS marketing campaigns, etc.
Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing Automation with APILayer APIs
First, you need to identify business processes that can be automated. For example, if you regularly collect customer phone numbers and emails and use them for marketing, sending promotions, etc., you can use phone verification and email verification APIs to automate these processes.
Similarly, if you want to localize content on your website or show product offers based on the user’s location, you can use the ipstack IP Geolocation API.
Once you’ve selected the appropriate APILayer APIs, you can start integrating them into your app/system.
Here we’ll show you basic steps and a coding example for integrating the ipstack API. If you want to integrate any other APILayer API, you can refer to the particular API’s documentation.
Integrating ipstack API
- Go to ipstack’s official homepage page.
- Click ‘Get Free API Key’ in the top right corner.
- Choose your desired subscription plan and provide the required information
- Get your unique API key from your ipstack dashboard.
Coding examples
JavaScript (fetch) example (single IPv4 or IPv6 address):
[crayon-66eb6d9593f68959540451/]Python
[crayon-66eb6d9593f76431484257/]Overcoming Common Challenges in API Integration
- Provide your team with training on API integration
- Use standardized protocols and data formats, such as REST, JSON, or XML, to simplify integration.
- Refer to the API documentation during the integration process
- Use OAuth2 and API keys to ensure that only authorized users and systems can access your APIs
- Ensure that all data transmitted via APIs is encrypted (HTTPS)
- Monitor API usage continuously
Conclusion
In conclusion, automating workflows is crucial for SMBs to gain a competitive edge and reduce costs. It helps them enhance operational efficiency, minimize errors, and save on operation costs. Typically, this automation is achieved through different software tools and APIs. APIs are, in fact, cost-effective automation tools that help build scalable business solutions.
APILayer is a reliable API marketplace that has tons of high-performance APIs in various categories. Businesses operating in different industries are utilizing these APIs to automate different processes and save costs.
In this article, we’ve discussed in detail how SMBs can leverage different APILayer APIs to automate business workflows.
Sign up for APILayer today and leverage its reliable APIs to automate your workflows!