OREANDA-NEWS. January 21, 2016. As digital marketing continues to gain increased share of budgets, marketers are more responsible than ever for driving the business and delivering real ROI.

Meanwhile, customers are on a continuous journey with your brand. They expect you to be there for them every step of the way—day or night—on the channel of their choosing. Delivering personalized, relevant experiences with every interaction is no longer a nicety. It is the mandate.

In response, it comes as no surprise that marketers are devoting more of their time to digital marketing activities (60% on average). But ask yourself: When was the last time you measured the success of a campaign by the effort required to bring it to life?

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Regardless of the size of your team or the industry you serve, automation is the key to maximizing digital marketing returns without sacrificing customer experience. It enables you to systematically coordinate your data and campaigns at scale—eliminating many of the manual tasks that 1-to-1 personalization has historically required.

While automating campaigns does require a bit more effort on the front end, the efficiency payoff is dramatic down the road. For example, let’s check out a few low-effort ways you can achieve quick wins with email automation from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Inventory Your Email Campaigns

As a first step, take an inventory of all of your current email messages to identify those that are scheduled or routine. This often includes welcome series, weekly offers, birthday coupons, customer or employee onboarding campaigns, etc.

With Marketing Cloud, you can quickly automate any repetitive communication. Need help getting started? Playbooks will guide you through step-by-step.  Simply create the emails, schedule your list, and then let Marketing Cloud do the work.  In no time you’ll be engaging with subscribers with just the right message, at just the right time.

Personalize Your Content

Next, let’s go from mass automation to mass personalization. Suppose you want to automate the sending of your monthly newsletter—and include dynamic content for 1-to-1 personalization, and predictive content for delivering content the recipient is most likely to be interested in receiving. With Marketing Cloud automation, you are able to create highly personalized, relevant emails based on a single template. Each newsletter will be unique based on the data you’ve automatically gathered for each recipient.

Automate Your Journey

Regardless of what type of campaign you’re running, mapping the customer journey enables you to increase performance and drive customer satisfaction with always-on, event driven lifecycle marketing. You can tailor every interaction based on specific customer actions to automatically reach customers at just the right moment.

Moving forward each month, you simply need to update the dynamic content—the predictive content updates itself.  In addition, you can schedule all of your reporting so your performance data is always ready to review and share.

Drive Efficiency and Results

More and more companies are adopting marketing automation to increase efficiency, drive revenue, and gain insights into performance. And more than any other channel, email offers instant opportunities for quick wins and positive ROI.

Are you ready to work smarter, not harder? Sign up for Any Journey is Possible, a 7-day simulated experience that sends you examples of scheduled, personalized messages that customers would see. Check it out!