Today’s business environment is fast-paced, with a constant overlap of tasks to complete. It can be hard to find time for anything else, including vacations. When you finally get to spend time out of the office, like for the holiday season, your marketing campaign is the last thing you want to worry about.

Fortunately, you can set up automated campaigns to keep your business running while you’re away. So while you’re out for the holidays, you can leverage digital tools to automate your campaigns and keep them running.

Tips and Best Practices for Out-of-Office Automated Campaigns

1. Choose the Right Strategy

Your email marketing strategy dictates how the campaigns perform. It provides the goals and direction for regular emails and promotional emails. Plus, it provides time frames for achieving your goals.

So, it’s vital to establish your customer journey in each of your emails as well as throughout your automated campaign. Talk through your strategy and messaging with your team to resolve any questions or hiccups that might hinder conversions.

Also, consider A/B testing options your team can implement on the fly if a campaign isn’t working as you had hoped. Marketing can be somewhat of a guessing game, but creating the right strategy based on solid data and your specific goals can help set you up for success.

2. Test 

Actors don’t earn their roles without first acing an audition. Likewise, marketers shouldn’t blast their automated campaigns without taking them for a test drive.

Before heading out of the office, test your campaigns. Ensure they work across different browsers, devices, and accessibilities, and ensure that your internet connection can handle the traffic. 

It’s always easier and less stressful to give yourself time to tweak glitches and optimize for results instead of doing damage control when you’re trying to enjoy time away with family. 

3. Go Simple with Your Tactics

Automated campaigns run the gamut—from interactive bells and whistles to straightforward text and images.

While you may be tempted to incorporate various different segmenting tactics to bump up conversions, go simple with your approach. Come up with a strong and sensible marketing message that appeals to your entire audience and launch with that.

When you get back from your trip, you can work on segmenting your email list more thoroughly and incorporating more complex campaigns since you’ll have more time and attention to devote to them.

4. Use Marketing Tools

The right tool for the job will also help you enjoy a worry-free vacation. Enter Automation Pro.

With Automation Pro, you can ensure each new subscriber gets a welcome email immediately after they sign up for your newsletters, whether you’re in the office or not. You can even automatically follow up based on each subscriber’s interactions with your email campaigns or website.

You’re set up for success with several strategy templates that put everything in place for you. All you have to do is plug in your email campaigns and lists. With the right automation tool, you can run entire marketing campaigns all with your “out of office” on. 

5. Check In

Depending on your work/play boundaries, you should check in on your campaign occasionally to keep an eye on your results, and the tools listed above can make that task easier.

Even though you’re not sitting in front of your computer all day, it’s important to check in on your campaign results from time to time. This way, you can make any necessary adjustments and ensure that your leads still receive valuable content.

If anything seems off, you can fix it on the fly or pause the campaign and address the issue when you get back to work. Or, if everything is running perfectly, you can truly relax.

6. Avoid Checking Your Email Excessively

Checking your email too frequently can be a major drain on your productivity, especially if you’re constantly checking for new messages when you should be focusing on enjoying your time out of the office.

Set specific times for checking your email, and stick to those times as much as possible. Checking your email first thing in the morning can help you get a jump start, but checking it multiple times throughout the day can disrupt your flow. Checking it right before bed can also make it difficult to fall asleep.

Also, you can limit the number of times you check your email daily. If you only check it once or twice a day, you’ll be less distracted by new messages and more likely to focus on why you’re out of the office.

7. Plan Your Campaigns in Advance

When you’re out of the office, your email campaigns are the last thing you want to worry about. By planning your campaigns in advance, you can set up automated processes to keep your campaigns running smoothly while you’re away.

Decide on the days and times each campaign will run and what offers or messages to include. You can also set up automatic notifications to keep track of how your campaigns perform while you’re away. This way, if anything goes wrong, you’ll be the first to know.

Automated Campaigns to Put In Place When Out of Office

Autoresponders

By using autoresponders, you can continue to communicate with your customers and even make sales without lifting a finger. You can use email autoresponders to automatically send follow-up messages after someone subscribes to your list or purchases from you. This is a great way to stay in touch and build relationships with your customers while away.

Trigger-Based Campaigns

By setting up triggers, you can automatically send emails or run ads when someone takes a certain action, such as visiting your website or downloading a white paper. There are endless possibilities for what kinds of triggered emails you can send; the key is ensuring they’re relevant and targeted to the individual recipient.

A little segmentation goes a long way here–for instance, don’t send the same discount code to everyone who abandons their cart. Instead, target specific products or categories, or come up with different offers for different types of customers.

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Being out of the office is no reason not to keep leads warm and engaged until they’re ready to purchase. By sending targeted content and offers at specific intervals, you can keep your business top of mind and increase the likelihood of converting leads into customers.

Put together an automated email drip campaign to send a series of pre-written emails to newly generated leads to gradually nurture them towards conversion. The drip campaign keeps running and warming up new leads while you make the most of your time away from the office.

Customer-Retention Emails

While focusing on new leads is great, engaging existing customers and subscribers is also important, more so when you are out on vacation. Automate customer retention emails like thank you emails after customers perform specific actions, birthday emails, and special occasion emails, amongst others.

You can send thank you emails after customers make purchases or after you render a service, while birthday emails are a great way to show customers they are remembered and valued on their special day. These are great ways to keep your customers feeling appreciated and can go a long way in boosting customer retention rates.

When crafting your customer retention emails, be sure to personalize the messages as much as possible, and include a call-to-action, such as a discount or a coupon, to encourage customers to continue doing business with you.

Email Reminders

If special sales, promotions, and events are in the works for your business, you can set up reminder emails in advance, so your customers never miss a beat.

To start, create a list of all the special offers, promotions, and events you want to remind your customers about. Then, create an email template for each and include all the relevant details, such as dates, times, and links. Choose how often you want the emails to go out when you want them to start and end, and schedule.

A good rule of thumb is to send the reminder a few days before the event or promotion starts. This will give your customers enough time to plan and take advantage of the offer.

Automated campaigns take a lot of the work out of your marketing duties. When you use our tips, you’ll be able to set up, deploy easily, and profit from your automated campaigns—especially when you’re out of the office.