Key takeaways
- Use dormant consumer data to personalize and optimize emails. A small upfront time cost saves hours later.
- Actively look for weaknesses in content creation and deployment so small issues don’t become major time drains.
- Organize your email workflow to avoid lost ideas, plan uncertainty and missed team meetings. Upkeep is easier than the initial clean-up.
- Automate routine steps like sign-up confirmations, opt-ins, welcome messages and date/product reminders, but don’t automate everything.
- Repurpose high-performing content across newsletters and social channels to reduce development time. Maintain a balance between recycling and new creation.
Introduction
Running a campaign that connects with your audience in the inbox is one of the most powerful ways to take advantage of the constantly growing digital world. Unfortunately, if you don’t approach this process from the right angles and with the right mindset, it can also end up requiring a substantial investment of your most valuable resource: Time. If you’d rather not deal with inefficient and unnecessary practices, take a few moments to look over these five time-saving email marketing tips.
You Have Consumer Data, Use It!
To start the discussion off in high gear, Wired magazine’s Emily Konouchi suggests dusting off that consumer data that’s been sitting around and putting this asset to good use. All too often, information regarding the people that make up your audience lies dormant due to the perceived idea that this content takes time and effort to properly utilize.
While this notion definitely holds plenty of truth, it’s also important to point out that consumer data enhances and optimizes your content, thus lowering the amount of time and effort put into the process down the line. Essentially, working in this knowledge now takes a little bit of time, but it can save you countless hours later on.
Look for Areas of Improvement
Additionally, Konouchi explains that keeping an eye out for optimization throughout the process continues this tradeoff of a small time commitment now for greater efficiency and resource allocation later. Instead of living by the “getting by is good enough” email marketing mindset, make it a point to take note of weaknesses and deficiencies in both your content development and deployment methods. This way, you can manage and eradicate these small problems before they turn into major issues that bog down your forward momentum in the inbox.
Stay Organized
For those of you who embrace clutter and hectic desk layouts, it’s time to bite the bullet and get organized. Just like in most other facets of your professional and personal lives, letting disarray take center stage with your email marketing operations is akin to asking for avoidable problems.
Lost content ideas, uncertainty regarding plans, and missed meetings with your email marketing team of experts are just a few of the calamities that come with a disorganized take on reaching out in the inbox. Thankfully, one you get things in order and stop wasting time via a cluttered or jumbled approach, you’ll find that maintenance is far easier to handle than the initial clean up.
Automate Opt-ins and Other Steps in the Process
When it comes to running the day to day operations, Business 2 Community’s Monica Montesa notes that automation is a massive boon to those who are looking to cut down on their time expenditure. Naturally, you won’t want to put everything on autopilot, but there are a few key steps that definitely benefit from an automated response approach.
At the top of this list are sign-up confirmations and other opt-in messages. By having welcome content and data entries ready to fire up when a user accepts your invitation to join your brand’s contact list, you’ll not only be saving a few minutes getting things up and running, but also offer a professional and quick response to this action.
In terms of other points worthy of automation, important date and product reminders deserve a spot in the conversation. By utilizing the consumer data we talked about earlier to hone in on these events and generate relevant automated content, you can efficiently maximize your interaction and impact with these customers, all while working on other projects or duties. When it comes to saving a few minutes here and there, it’s hard to pass up this kind of opportunity.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Within Reason)
Finally, don’t be afraid to recycle and reuse your content across every facet of your business and marketing approach. From “best of” email newsletters to snippets on social media that breathe new life into influencer quotes and other offerings, repurposing what once lit the inbox up is a great way to reduce your development time and get these selections out in front of new viewership.
The only catch here is that you won’t want to rely solely on this process going forward; you’ll need to find the right balance between recycling and creation to keep your inbox users excited and engaged. However, if you can find this sweet spot and pair it with the rest of what you’ve learned here, it won’t be long before your email marketing operations take on a sleek, streamlined, and efficient new look.
FAQ
Dust off dormant consumer data and use it to enhance and optimize your content. Spending a little time up front to apply that data reduces time and effort later by making future content more relevant and efficient to produce.
Look for weaknesses and deficiencies in content development and deployment. If you notice recurring small problems, lost momentum or a “getting by” mindset, address them early to prevent larger time drains down the line.
Get organized to prevent lost content ideas, uncertainty about plans and missed meetings. Treat the initial clean-up as an investment. Once organized, ongoing maintenance will take far less time.
Start with sign-up confirmations and other opt-in messages, plus welcome content and automated data entries. Also automate important date and product reminders using your consumer data. Avoid automating everything, keep selective automation.
Yes. Reuse ‘best of’ newsletters and social snippets to reduce development time and expose content to new audiences. However, don’t rely solely on recycling. Find the right balance between reused and newly created content to keep inbox users engaged.
Over-automating can remove necessary human oversight; over-reusing content can bore subscribers. Avoid putting everything on autopilot and balance automation and reuse with fresh content to maintain engagement.
