Sometimes it’s more stressful to go on vacation than stay in the office.

With marketing automation, you can change how you feel about this scenario.

If you’re planning on heading out for maternity leave, a long-awaited trip, or personal days, remember the following eight tips so your campaign will practically run itself. That way, you can focus on fun in the sun, family, and personal time instead of work.

1. Choose the Right Strategy

What you market, how you market it, and when you send your automated email campaigns will dictate how the campaigns perform.

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 well as you’d hoped. Marketing can be somewhat of a guessing game, but creating the right strategy based on solid data and your business’s specific needs before you leave the office can help set you up for success

2. Test Your Campaign

Actors don’t go on stage and wing an audition or performance. Likewise, marketers shouldn’t blast their automated campaigns without taking them for a test drive.

Before you go on vacation or head out of the office, test your campaigns. Ensure they work across different browsers, devices, and accessibilities and 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 a cocktail on the beach.

3. Go Simple with Your Tactics

Automated campaigns run the gamut—from interactive bells and whistles to cut-and-dried text and image.

While you may be tempted to incorporate tactics such as segmenting dynamic content to bump up click-through rates, 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 incorporating more complex campaigns since you’ll have more time and attention to devote to them.

4. Prepare Your Team for Your Absence

Drip campaigns are a type of automated marketing campaign that needs follow-up engagement. And if you’re doing your automated marketing correctly, most of your campaigns will need nurturing as they run.

While you can schedule your emails to go out at a certain time, you’ll need to have your team ready to respond to leads, comments on social, and other kinds of customer interaction. Have a meeting before you leave to tell your team how to respond to queries and give them a time frame for when and how they should manage these messages.

5. Use Marketing Tools

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

With the right automation, you can run entire marketing campaigns while you’re soaking in rays at the beach. Each new subscriber can get the same Welcome Email you’d send when you’re in the office and you can even automatically follow-up when you run a promotion based on each individual subscriber’s interactions with your email campaigns or website.

You’re even set up for success with several strategy templates that puts everything in place for you. All you have to do is plug in your email campaigns and lists.

6. Set Expectations

Your team should be able to take the reins on your automated campaign while you’re away.

To help them own this responsibility, set benchmarks and expectations. Write down daily target goals they can aim for and optimize if the campaign isn’t performing as you expect. It’s always smart to hand off a detailed checklist and foolproof directions for your stand-in manager to abide by while you’re out.

7. Check In

Depending on your work/play boundaries, you might want to check in on your campaign occasionally, and the tools listed above can make that task easier.

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.

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