In line with recent research efforts made to conceive energy saving protocols and algorithms and power sensitive network architectures, in this paper we propose a transmission strategy to minimize the energy consumption in a sensor network when using a localization technique based on the measurement of the strength (RSS) or the time of arrival (TOA) of the received signal. In particular, we find the transmission power and the packet transmission rate that jointly minimize the total consumed energy, while ensuring at the same time a desired accuracy in the RSS or TOA measurements. We also propose some corrections to these theoretical results to take into account the effects of shadowing and packet loss in the propagation channel. The proposed strategy is shown to be effective in realistic scenarios providing energy savings with respect to other transmission strategies, and also guaranteeing a given accuracy in the distance estimations, which will serve to guarantee a desired accuracy in the localization result.