1. Artwork Commoditisation

This is perhaps the first step to implement within your marketing department if you want to save time. What do we mean by commoditise? That you no longer need to think about what you’re doing, instead you follow a simple path by using a straightforward artwork template component you’ve already created.

A great way to understand this more is to look back at your recent high-performing email campaigns. Try to identify a winning trend or formula – what made them different to others you’ve previously rolled out? How did they stand out and why did they engage the audience?

To stress at this point, we’re not talking about content, but the layout itself. You should be able to identify a handful of components within an email that you can use again, complete with copy tweaks to reflect your relevant audience and what action you want them to take. These elements should work to liberate your marketing – whether one minute you’re talking about a new guide or another, asking people to register for your latest webinar.

Each template is important and should help you to building emails in no more than five minutes (we mean without graphics or taking the time to construct messaging here). By reducing this time, you can then reinvest it back into smart content.

2. Automate Everything

It’s your responsibility as a marketer to be operating in the most efficient way possible. Every moment you save by not doing the mundane elements, you can focus on becoming more strategic, create great content, and drive better relationships and conversations with prospects.

Now is the time to think about your role and the components of your day that are perhaps unnecessary. Simply say to yourself, ‘If I didn’t do this, what would happen?’

Typically, we see marketing as a case of building and sending emails, loading spreadsheets into email platforms, sending text messages or direct mail. This all sounds normal for a professional, but the question is, when do you do that?

Marketing automation is there to enable marketers to do their jobs effectively. Its core proposition is to manage the day-to-day tasks, so you don’t have to – from handling millions of data and updating your customer base accordingly, to delivering digital campaigns specifically to segments at a time when you know they’re most interactive.

Modern marketers understand that it takes, on average, six touchpoints via email to truly engage recipients. If you’re sending out this amount of content each time manually, that’s a huge chunk of your day wasted – and an even bigger reliance on you being at work.

3. It’s All About Personalisation

Every day you’re typically communicating with friends and family, and you’ve learnt to be relevant and timely with what you have to say to these groups. So, why do marketers find it hard when speaking to customers with the same kind of attitude?

Communicating with your audience via hyper-relevant content can only be achieved through personalisation. This term is often perceived to be something different from person to person, but it comprises of three elements:

• What to say
• When to say it
• Who to say it to

For example, if you say the right thing at the wrong time, it’s ultimately the wrong thing! To personalise your digital comms, you must be delivering the right thing at the right time, and to the right person.

And by this we don’t mean all you should be doing is simply addressing your emails with: [Hi FirstName]. It’s about understanding exactly what your recipient wants to hear about in that moment, and which reflects their of-the-moment interests.

When you personalise your messages, you’re not only saving time but your budget too because you’re focusing on a granular group of people and moving away from a ‘batch and blast’ style email delivery that ends up being received loosely by all – and takes you hours to comprise for little result.

Plug in marketing automation and you’ll soon begin to understand your database on a more in-depth level and be able to prioritise those who are most engaged in your brand’s content.

There are many more ways to save time and money for savvy marketers. The important thing is to keep coming back to the earlier question we posed, ‘If I didn’t do this, what would happen?’ Once you have the answer to that, you can begin to structure your day by removing the ‘boring’ stuff and focusing on the bits that you really love about marketing.