For marketers, “am I spending too much time on this?” isn’t an uncommon question, and before we question ourselves one more time, let’s looks at the facts and see exactly how we are spending our time. Can we reduce those hours spent on routine tasks like creating an email, building a list, organising analytics and creating reports, and if we can reduce those hours, should we or do we run the risk of cutting corners?

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Apparently, 2015 has been the year of automation as the majority of marketers or marketing firms have incorporated this type of technology into their business models.

Automation is a proven time saver and our platform allows you to easily set up an automated email welcome program to offer your recipients a seamless brand experience, from newsletter sign up all the way through to final purchase. If you want to find out more about behavioural marketing, data-based automatics and related resources, pop along to this page.

So how can we save you almost 250 hours per year?

Imagine what you could do with 250 additional hours. That’s almost 28 working days per year! Whether that’s a website redesign, a new AdWords strategy, hosting an event, or just getting some well-deserved R&R, a small reduction in time spent on a routine task can have a huge impact on your performance. Every marketer is different: the demands of the job, the technology available, and the size of the team all have a huge impact on how you can save time so if you focus on simplifying, delegating or even removing some routine tasks from your day-to-day, it’s very possible to work a little smarter. Here are our 3 tips to help marketers save more time on email marketing and collecting that all important data:

Tip #1: Identify the most important metrics.

Looking at unnecessary metrics takes time and energy that could be better spent focusing on more important indicators. If “average time on page” is an interesting statistic but has no effect on your weekly decisions, then remove it from your reporting.

Tip #2: Invest in reporting software.

Invest in software that makes reporting easy or take the time to master integrations that pass data between systems. The end goal of any data and analytics program is to achieve more accurate, closed-loop reporting so you can tie every single lead, customer and pound spent back to the marketing initiative that created them.

Tip #3: Get (slightly) less creative.

The next big offender is the workhorse of most marketers: email.
Know what works and clone successful email templates, reuse text from the landing page in the email and stick with subject lines that you know entice your audience. If you are forever debating between options just cut to the chase, use an A/B test and move on. Email is essential to get right but make changes slowly and thoughtfully.

Leverage your extra time

In the past few years, there has been an explosion of different marketing software that can help solve almost any problem you run into. That being said, finding out which ones are worth the investment can turn into a time-waster, too. Figure our how much time and money it would save you and decide if it is a successful solution or instead an extra layer of time encouraging you to procrastinate. We all struggle with time management so try not to make the mistake of just working on what’s urgent, not what’s important.

What really matters, the technology or how you use it? Find out in our new joint report with Technology for Marketing which covers both the future of marketing technology and a focus on data capture, management and attitudes in 2016.