I love saving time, and automation is a great way to do just that. Recently, I attended an Entrepreneur’s Conference and one of the speakers talked about how he bootstrapped his business with no outside investment. One of the key points he hammered on – automate as much of the work as you possibly can.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your email campaigns ran themselves? Saving time for you to focus on other aspects of your business, like getting new clients or securing a big donation to your non profit? Using email marketing automation effectively can get you close. Email automation is truly a significant trend for email marketing, it’s fast and easy and there are ways to make it work even more efficiently for you. With good planning and implementation email marketing automation can help save time by eliminating tedious and mundane tasks, cutting time and cost. It’s more important you spend your email marketing time on creating great content than the mechanics of sending the message.

Although automated systems can be expensive there are plenty of affordable options out there for companies of any size looking to generate leads or create entire automated campaigns. The best companies really learn how to utilize email automation to better interact with clients. With 74% of all online adults preferring email as their method of commercial communication, it makes sense to be persistent in communicating using this medium. Here are some great pointers I’ve picked up from the experts at Mailigen to automate your campaigns.

1. Organization is the key to success

Often, the best way to organize your campaigns is to start by creating a marketing calendar. Developing a calendar allows you to step back and really look at everything you have going on and examine the big picture. It allows you to identify which target audiences you are communicating to, and what kind of message you’re sending in totality rather than one at a time. You don’t want to send duplicative messages to the same audience at once. For any plan to be implemented effectively, a strong plan of action must be drawn out. Most email marketing platforms provide an email scheduling feature that allows for planning of future marketing campaigns.

2. Make Staying In Touch Easy

Using email autoresponders makes staying in touch easy. Autoresponders enable follow-ups to be sent in a timely way, that’s important when you are working in such a time sensitive medium. Autoresponder systems can automatically send information and follow up automatically for you on a regular basis. It’s easy to create autoresponder campaigns. After you create and schedule content, the campaign works itself out, allowing for you to focus on other things. A recent email study found that it sometimes takes 10, 15, or even 20 follow-up messages for prospects to become first-time customers, depending on your product and how much it sells for. All of which can be done by autoresponder. Consistently staying in contact is important and can be done effectively with broadcast email software. Broadcast email software allows you to target only a specific group of clients, perhaps by demographics or geographic location to convey a specific message.

3. Keep Track of Your Lists

Email marketing tools allows for you to monitor who is opening what, which emails “bounce”, and to track all email activity. It’s important to keep email lists updated as changes in client information are made. Which clients are opening emails? Which are responding? Buying? Take advantage of the ability to organize contacts for specific things to really focus on clients who are generating sales for your business.

4. Pre Write Your Content

Drip marketing tools allow you to send pre written messages to customers over time, “dripping” the content to them automatically. Drop campaigns are scheduled automatic mailings that follow a pre-determined course using auto-responders for leads and contacts. The lead completes a form, and then your autoresponder kicks in, sending appropriate messages. The messages are “dripped” based on specific subscriber behavior or status. Pre writing these messages and then scheduling the drip cycle means less day to day management on your part.

5. Segment Your Audience

Dividing your audience into unique segments allows for automated emails to be sent to a targeted group, developing personalization. Creating consistently updated dynamic lists organizes emails with just one click, rather than dividing them up manually. You can segment lists in many different ways, like demographic, age, gender or type of customer.

6. Email Personalization and Dynamic Content

Email automation can personalize content instantly by placing a contact name in the heading automatically, replacing a generic heading. Most email marketing software provides this feature. You can further personalize an email by adding specific information pertaining to that individual with information like the town or city they reside in, personality, their birthday or if they have bought a specific product from you in the past—this is where audience segmentation can come in and be a great help to this. Many email providers offer automation software that creates dynamic content automatically. The user simply creates one generic email, and the software will change the content based on rules set by the user like location, picture or income, creating highly personalized content in more than half the time.

7. Measure Your Results (And Make Changes)

Use standard reports, such as Campaign ROI, Contact Mailing List, Key Accounts, Accounts by Industry etc., for tracking performance of the marketing activities. Analyzing your data is the only way to know if your automation is working for you and where improvements can be made. Using Google Analytics integration and UTM tags can help track individual marketing campaigns by tagging different values to each campaign.

With the automation tools available today, email automation can make a large impact on your campaign without day to day campaign management from you.