A few weeks ago, we posed the question, could a robot do a PR pro’s job? Don’t worry – for now and the foreseeable future, the answer is no, PR will remain a human-powered industry. Robots won’t automate PR pros out of a job, but they can help us automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time to focus on the fun parts of PR – creativity and strategy.

Here are ten boring PR tasks we’re more than happy to hand over to the robots, and the tools you’ll need to automate them.

1. Tracking who responds to your emails

If you send a lot of pitch emails, tracking them manually gets tricky in a hurry. It’s easy, though time-consuming, to keep a spreadsheet of everyone who writes you back, but for those who don’t respond, how do you know whether they’re reading your emails or ignoring them?

Take a leaf out of the sales playbook and install Yesware^[1]. A Gmail add-on that was originally designed for sales professionals, Yesware has a lot to offer PR pros, too. Use it to monitor opens, clicks, and responses for every email you send to influencers. You can also create templates to automate your outreach and track which messages resonate best.

2. Publishing and distributing multimedia press releases

Building a multimedia press release is hard enough. Making it responsive and email-ready is even harder – you need to get your contacts from Excel to your email provider, upload high-resolution assets to your press room, add image previews to your emails, make sure your assets look good on multiple devices… the list goes on!

Prezly^[2] solves this problem by combining multimedia email distribution with custom online newsrooms. Create a multimedia press release in your own custom-branded newsroom, and Prezly automatically generates a multimedia email version that you can pitch to journalists. Both the newsroom and the email are responsively designed to look great on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, and every email includes analytics to help you track response rates.