5 Tips For More Effective, Unique Sales Emails Posted on September 13, 2017October 18, 2023 by Jeanna Barrett Email marketing can be a handy sales tool for a business looking to grow revenue, but the average consumer receives up to hundreds of emails a day which makes the likelihood of your business emails standing out that much less. Your business’ sales email is only as effective as the strategy you use to develop these emails. There is an art to creating an email that your customers will want to open, read and engage with. If your email strategy is lacking, your recipients will disengage, and sales opportunities can dwindle. These four tips below will help you get a head start at converting customers faster through email. 1. Consider HTML vs. Text Emails There can be a number of different reasons why companies might have greater success with an HTML email versus a text email or visa versa. However, when selling via email marketing, your ultimate end goal is to get prospects to open your email and click-through to your website. Studies show that you may want to skip the fancy header images or photos within an email and just keep it simple with plain text email formats. According to a blog from Square2 Marketing, on average: Adding images (GIFs) to emails reduce open rates by 37% Using an HTML template in your emails reduces open rates by 25% Increasing the amount of HTML in your emails reduces open rates by 23% And, click-through rates in an HTML format are also lower, especially in a heavy-HTML format Most email clients such as Outlook block images automatically. Instead of embedding images in your sales emails, consider using strong copy and headlines to help influence the recipient to take action. If you feel like shirking the statistics and prefer to use an HTML format, that’s okay. It’s your business, your rules. I just recommend trying a simple HTML template, and making sure you use alt text for all of your images. Alt text allows the email reader to understand what the image is supposed to be in case images come through to their inbox blocked or missing. 2. Be Clear and Straight to the Point Email copy is key. Cleverness and humor are not always well-received and may not be the right approach when you’re trying to sell. Your email content should be clear and succinct. Your content should be well thought out, relevant and interesting. And, it should provide value to the recipient. Why do they want your product or service? What can it do for them? What are you hoping the customer will do after they open and read your email? Consider linking out to further research or a really great piece of content on your website. Close your email with an actionable request. 3. Vary the Content of Your Emails If your email marketing strategy is to touch prospective customers more than once, switch up the approach of your emails. Otherwise, it just gets boring to receive the same type of email, and if the recipient deleted it once, they’d delete it again. There are three parts to every sales email that you can change up — the opening, the benefit, and the closing (CTA). Get creative! A few ideas: Switch up subject lines. Keep it short, but enticing. Get personalized including the recipient’s name. Or, another example, “Question about (a goal the end-user would have if they needed this product).” Remember to avoid spammy words as much as possible (sale, free, special offer, etc.). A/B test your subject lines to see what works best. SubjectLine.com is a great tool to test the effectiveness of your email subjects. Test out adding a “P.S.” message. A P.S. message is sometimes the first (and maybe only) part of the email your audience will read. A couple of ideas could be to share good news about the company, acknowledge a personal connection, or if you’ve met, something you remember about your prospective customer. As stated in the above point, keeping it short is a must, but make it easier to read using different formats such as bulleted lists or bolded, catchy headlines. No matter what style of email you send, remember that over 60 percent of recipients read emails on their mobile device. Make sure your email is optimized for smaller screens, so it’s an easy read for the recipient when opening it on their phone. This will give them more incentive to click-through and take action. 4. Spice up Your Email Signature View your email sign off as a blank canvas. Considering adding some media to your signature such a photo or a video. Or use an image of your actual signature and a picture of yourself. This approach will give the email more of a personal touch and make it feel like the email is coming directly from you, instead of a wide email blast. Include links to your LinkedIn or Twitter account. While a robust email signature is a nice touch, I do caution not to add too much to your signature. Only value-add information (maybe leave your favorite quote off this one!). Below is a great example of a clean and personal signature, and WiseStamp is a great tool to use. 5. Test Your Emails I shouldn’t have to mention this, but I know I’ve received a few emails here and there that have spelling or grammar errors, broken links or just simply do not make sense, and I hit the delete button immediately. Send your emails to yourself and to colleagues, friends, family — anyone that will give you feedback and double check your content. This is especially important when you need to send mass emails after extracting contacts via a LinkedIn email finder or other email extraction tools. Have them open it, and scan it (you do the same). Is the main objective clear? Does the CTA make sense? In almost every instance you’ll have something to change when you proofread your materials. Writing effective sales emails can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. And to stand out amongst the masses can be even more challenging. Implementing the four above techniques will help hone in on your email sales strategy and get responses faster. Author Bio Jeanna is the Founder & Chief Strategist of First Page, an award-winning online marketer and an expat entrepreneur. Through content, social media and SEO, Jeanna uses the power of words and data to drive growth in brand awareness, organic traffic, leads, revenue and customer loyalty. She has a combined 12 years of inbound marketing experience at venture-backed startups, digital agencies and Fortune 500 companies, with an expertise focus on small business and technology. She’s been named ‘Top 40 Under 40’ of brand marketers and ‘Best in the West’ for financial technology marketing. In 2016, Jeanna left the U.S. to lay roots and build her business in Belize.
Should Your Small Business Invest in AI? Posted on September 12, 2017December 15, 2022 by Jonathan Herrick There is hardly a buzzword that gets more attention nowadays than AI. Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence by machines or computers. It is designed to use large amounts of data to analyze and react with the most optimal solution possible. While larger businesses have been leveraging AI in their products such as Apple and Amazon, small businesses stand to benefit as well. AI can help your company in any number of ways: virtual assistants, machine learning, market strategizing, accounting, customer support, chatbots, speech recognition, marketing, and sales. But before you just dive in head first and invest in AI, you need to know exactly what it is you’re looking to achieve and how much it’s going to cost. How Can AI Help My Small Business? There are lots of ways to incorporate artificial intelligence, but broadly speaking, here are a few of the most prominent ways small business owners have found it useful. Chatbots It’s becoming more and more common to see companies use natural-language generation to analyze swaths of text-based communication data and create automated responses for customers to read and interact with. This is particularly ideal for customer service, and can drastically cut your support costs, improve response times and enable you to deliver support 24/7. Image Source: Drift Facebook chatbots are particularly handy and easy to use while setting up one for your website is also possible—but be careful of having tech disproportionately outweigh your human support. At the end of the day, when customers have a serious problem, it will only frustrate them even more to get an automated response when they are looking for a live person to vent to. Speech Recognition Similar to chatbots, this is an audio-based computer recognition software. You’ve very likely encountered this sort of tech on the phone with banks or large companies, where you’re asked to provide detailed answers to questions like your phone number or address, and can choose from a list of subjects to hear more about. This technology may seem rudimentary, but it’s quickly improving and can save your company time and energy if incoming phone calls are a big part of your business. Network Assistants If you’re running your own company and always felt like you could get by without an assistant, you’ve probably also gotten overwhelmed and occasionally forgotten projects or deadlines. Virtual assistants can manage your affairs, schedule and remind you of meetings, interact with customers (using an integration of the above AI tools, chatbots or speech recognition) and help support your company in a myriad other ways. Tools such as X.ai automate personal communication via an online assistant—”Amy” that will respond to your emails and book meetings on your calendar. Image Source: X.ai Market Research If you want to one-up your competitors in responsive marketing, AI can help you do it. There are tools that can track certain types of information, articles, keyword mentions or subjects, keeping your marketing and PR teams in the know down to the minute. This is more than just a search engine—this is like keeping a relevant industry newshound in your office at all times, making sure you’re literally keeping ahead of the competition. Sure, AI Sounds Good—But How Much Will it Cost? There’s no single answer to this. If you’re running a lean company, you probably don’t have the desire or funds to hire a data scientist who can create proprietary algorithms for your small business. Their salary alone can rule out innovative AI projects from your plans. The good news is that there are other ways to incorporate AI into your company. Depending on which problem you’re looking for AI to solve, the solution could be as easy as a few dollars a month for a subscription to a software. Virtual assistants can be fairly affordable nowadays, while AI-run accounting and market-research softwares can also be used and paid for on a per-project basis. Be Prepared Before You Invest Adopting AI as part of your business strategy takes more than just adding a few tools to your arsenal. It takes having the right systems in place such as a CRM and solid processes for capturing and streaming your data. It’s also entirely likely that by bringing artificial intelligence into your business, it may replace some of the human jobs. The fact is that this is the future: it happened in the 1920s with the Industrial Revolution, and it’s happening again with AI, machine learning and bots. But that doesn’t mean the human element will disappear entirely from your business-it’s a matter of reallocating your workforce and resources to more productive within other areas of your business. If you’re unsure as to whether AI is right for you, you can sit back and watch other companies adopt it and learn from their successes and failures. But the fact is that small businesses are benefiting from AI. Don’t disregard it entirely, or you’ll go the way of the 1920s factory worker.
5 Questions To Determine If You Should Be Marketing to Local, Domestic or International Prospects Posted on September 11, 2017 by Allie Wolff Finding your target audience is one of the most challenging—and fundamental—parts of marketing. Part of that includes researching basic demographic information, including how old your ideal clients are and, yes, where they live. While parsing that data can lead to new insights that ultimately inspire a domestic or international expansion, you always have to be careful—any wrong move can quickly sink a growing business. So how can you figure figuring out if your small business should be marketing to international prospects? There are a few questions you can ask yourself to figure it out. 1. Who’s buying your product? You’ll need to dig into your company analytics to learn this one. Obviously, if you’re starting small, your audience will be local, but your specific demographics can be more revealing—and hint at places you could market. If you’re running an online store, dig into that demographic information to see where people are visiting from. If you’re selling to a broader or more international range of customers than you realize, that’s the easiest (and most obvious!) indication. But subtler cues can be revealing, too. Finding demographic information, as well as how those customers are using your product, can reveal other sources of inspiration. If you know that your brand is popular among liberal-minded males in the metropolitan U.S. East Coast, you can find similar areas that might respond equally well, like Toronto, Berlin or Austin. This can be a bit hit and miss, but you’re likely to make solid inroads into new markets, particularly domestically. 2. Can you handle marketing in multiple languages? This should go without saying, but marketing internationally—and sometimes domestically, depending on which market you’re targeting—will require language skills. Communication is language. If you’re marketing to a Spanish-speaking audience, it’s about more than just writing good ad copy in Spanish. You should have a Spanish language customer support network, a Spanish website and Spanish onboarding resources for your product or service. You may need to start Spanish accounts on Facebook and Twitter, too. Marketing is making a promise. If you’re making a promise, you have to be prepared to follow through. 3. Are you legally able to sell abroad? Advertising laws vary from country to country. Pharmaceuticals, for example, are strictly controlled by the government in several countries around the world—the rules in Canada differ greatly from the United States, even though the markets are generally regarded as similar. Various other marketing techniques, from contest rules to website regulations, will also vary from country to country, and even within provinces or states. The European Union’s infamous “cookie law” is one example of a website requirement you’ll have to take into account. And all this precludes the product development itself, which may be subject to packaging and material transparency in various ways across the world. 4. Are you in a position to work with locals who know the market? If the answer is “no,” you’re straightaway in a bad spot. Nobody would expand into a Chinese market without Chinese expertise on their side. One great example of this is search engine marketing. While Google is the leader in North America, Yahoo, Bing and specific niche engines rule across the world. (Naver in South Korea, Baidu in China, etc.) We sometimes forget that domestic industry leaders are not universal. SEM will be tricky because you can’t simply translate your pre-existing keywords into another language. You’ll need to work with local marketing experts to localize your marketing concepts and the direction of your brand and work with their software. A good start to all this is to ask yourself how comfortable you’ll be working in the country and with locals. If you have any native language skills or a keen and genuine interest in the demographic, that’s the best way to start the conversation. 5. Do you have the time to invest in researching all of this? This, ultimately, is the biggest question to ask yourself: Do you have the time to spare? Marketing internationally can require far more research than simply evaluating shipping costs. A good rule of thumb in all of this is to start small. When targeting a new market, don’t invest big dollars and expect big results. It’s best to start small and grow once you have enough evidence that your plan will actually succeed. Without enough proper planning, this whole operation could go belly-up. Assuming something will work abroad simply because it works domestically—or even that it will work domestically simply because it works locally—is always a mistake. These decisions require research and months, if not years to accomplish. Weighing the pros against the potential cons is a decision only you can make.
5 Ways to Create Super-Effective Emails with Buyer Personas Posted on September 8, 2017June 14, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Jonathan’s article was originally published on the Wordstream Blog. If you’ve done the essential exercise of developing buyer personas for your customers, don’t make the mistake of shoving them in your desk drawer and expecting them to magically work for you. Personas are essential to creating personalized email campaigns that convert – in fact, one study by MarketingSherpa showed a 7% conversion rate for a persona-based campaign. Now is not the time to rest on your laurels, insert the “first name” field and consider it personalized. You have to actively apply your personas to create more personal, engaging emails. So how do you exercise what you learned from your personas in email marketing? Let’s dive into five actionable ways you can apply personas to your email marketing and score more engagement in the inbox. #1: Nail Your Email Marketing Strategy Your personas can help you nail your email marketing strategy by uncovering useful information about the customer journey. Every email campaign you build should be targeted to an overall goal, like: Building Trust and Brand Awareness: Focus on content-centric campaigns that add value to your audience. Increasing Conversions: Attentive email nurturing that reinforces your unique value prop and keeps your brand top-of-mind until your recipients are ready to buy. Raising Customer Lifetime Value: Add value to customers and reinforce your brand with relevant cross-sell, upsell and add-on offers. Growing Referral Business: Actively incentivize promoters to send new business your way. With your goal defined, you can easily determine what type of content to send in your marketing emails. Then, take those juicy insights you learned about your target buyers and use them to help define and build out your email marketing strategy. Zillow is a great example of how you can apply personas to your email marketing strategy. Zillow’s main targets are real estate professionals who will post listings and advertise on their site, as well as home buyers and renters doing their research. However, their strategy with their “Zillow Digs” email campaign aligns to a specific persona – someone, likely a female, who has an eye for design, is thinking about changing their space, and likely hits a target income bracket. By sharing the latest home trends every week, Zillow can capture the interest of this persona at the top-of-the-funnel, in the awareness stage, before they’re even considering buying or selling a home. With this awareness strategy, Zillow can stay top of mind, and even nudge their persona to their website to look at homes for sale as they dream of improvements. #2: Slice and Dice Your Email List Did you know segmented emails have a 15% higher open rate? (More key email marketing statistics here.) Buyer personas give you the opportunity to address everyone on your email list in a personal manner – but it won’t work if you aren’t segmenting your list. The further you can segment your list, the more detailed and relevant you can be in your emails, giving you the attention and engagement you deserve in the inbox. Even if you only address a single persona, you can still drill down to send the right message at the right time, based on: Stage: Lead, Prospect, Customer, Former Customer Temperature: Cold, Cool, Warm, Hot Interest: Webpages visited, Webpages NOT visited, resources downloaded, emails engaged with Persona Layer your data to target the perfect segment of your list, and then use merge fields like First Name, Title, Company, Industry, etc to pull personal details into your email. List data paired with details about your persona can help you align your messaging, copy, and offer in a relevant, personal manner. For instance, Start A Fire, a social media tool, layers personal data to send a weekly report to users, enticing them to jump back into the app. Not only do they share stats, but they share useful content that aligns to their customer persona – a mid-level marketer looking to grow reach and show results for social media campaigns. #3: Write Better Copy. Get More Opens and Clicks. You know what your features are – and so does your audience. But unless you know your audience well, it’s tough to nail down the intangible benefits that will really catch their attention. This goes double if your solution is complex and has a learning curve. You need a hook to get your audience to want to learn more. Describing features in detail is a snooze fest – save it for the release notes. Instead, captivate your persona with the single most important benefit to them. It’s essential to rely on your buyer personas if you want to write compelling copy. What challenges are most pressing? Use your email copy to uncover the annoying itch – and then give them a tool to scratch it with. Adobe does a great job aligning copy with their persona, the creative designer, with their Creative Suite newsletter. Instead of being application-centric, they are very user-centric in their copy. For instance, the main heading, “Make something now. We’ll show you how.” appeals directly to the designer who just wants to create and doesn’t want to be bogged down with tutorials and features. The first article, “Put your best face forward on Facebook,” is all about making the user look good with ease. Rather than putting up barriers with wordiness or technical language, Adobe’s copy puts the persona front and center, enticing them to get back into the Creative Suite app (making it even stickier and more indispensable to the user). #4: Entice Them with an Irresistible Offer and Clickable Call to Action Knowing your buyer persona can help you present the perfect offer with a call-to-action they can’t resist. What do your personas value? Do they need to slash budgets? Save time? Do they go crazy for freebies? Analyze psychographic data around your buyer to put together an irresistible offer, like: 1st Month Free Save 20% Free Consultation Instant Access Free Trial Complimentary Upgrade Source: Wordstream Think about how they like to communicate. A tech-savvy millennial might prefer to communicate through email or text messages. On the other hand, if your persona is a veteran C-suite executive, they might be most comfortable speaking over the phone. A/B test CTAs like: Call Now Download Subscribe Schedule a Time Book a Live Chat Free Online Demo Hone in your call-to-action to suite the preferred communication method of your personas and watch your click-through rates rise. Credit Karma boosts engagement with “See My New Scores.” The clean email, simple copy and clear call to action are all designed to drive their busy, millennial, mobile persona back to their site. The same approach wouldn’t work as well for a Baby Boomer persona who would feel uncomfortable getting their credit score online.
10 Quick Tips For Starting Your Own Business Posted on September 7, 2017June 14, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick The world is full of good ideas and bad advice. It takes a bit of serendipity to find one and avoid the other. If you think you’re ready to start your own business, here’s a quick checklist to run through. This list of tips is by no means exhaustive, but it should help you get started down this road of entrepreneurship. Have a worthwhile idea. Sound easy enough? It isn’t. A good rule of thumb is to ask a variety of people—not just people you trust, but various people from different backgrounds. Your friends and family may lie to you to avoid hurting your feelings. You can pitch your basic idea to them, sure, but also bounce it off strangers and acquaintances to see if they agree. Establish a budget. How much do you think starting your own business will cost? Double that number. Odds are your cost structure is going to be higher than you realize—particularly once you take into account overhead costs such as insurance, legal fees, office space (if applicable), website costs, marketing, and on and on… Start by analyzing the costs associated with your specific industry. If you’re dealing with investors, they’ll want to know the costs, so this is a worthwhile exercise regardless. Think about the legality of your small business. You’ll have to register with the government somehow, but the exact way will depend on your goals. This will affect your taxes, legal status and growth possibilities. You’ll have to understand whether you’re paying taxes as a self-employed worker, and/or paying income and salary taxes. Look up your options for establishing a small business in your own country and state or province, as they’ll vary from area to area. Spend time finding the right name. Again, whether you choose a descriptive name such as Pizza Hut or a synthetic one like Uber, ask around for feedback from your target audience. You want a brand and a name that taps into the emotions of your buyer and reaches a broad consensus. Once you’ve found a winner, check to make sure it’s not already trademarked and research online to make sure there are no obstacles getting ranked in search engines such as Google. If you run into a roadblock start the whole process over again. Welcome to small-business marketing! Make sure your website works. If you’re not hiring a developer—which we’d understand, as so many do-it-yourself CMS platforms exist these days with beautiful premade themes—then you still have to spend some serious time designing and troubleshooting your site. It will likely be responsive, which means you should test it on various platforms, operating systems and devices. Find a good a copywriter. A lot of people assume writing is easy, but nothing screams “amateur business” like boring copy and poor grammar. If you need, hire a copywriter to help create your website and some evergreen promotional materials and emails. The investment will go a long way. If you need photos, even just a few good product shots or headshots, consider finding a professional as well—these details can distinguish you from your competition. Get the word out there. This means doing whatever it takes—networking at events, going door-to-door to find business partnerships, getting involved in the community or even just simple marketing. Be shameless. Offer referrals, free samples, trials, anything to get your message out there. The important thing is exposure. Set up the right social media accounts. Contrary to what we just said about spreading the word everywhere, you want to make sure you’re marketing in the right places. Choose your social presence wisely. Facebook will be almost inevitable; Instagram is a good bet but not for everyone; LinkedIn might seem like a good idea until you realize how low the engagement rates are; don’t bother with Pinterest unless you have the time to dedicate and a subject matter worth showing off in vertical photos. Get to market quickly. The beginning stages are not the time to become a perfectionist. You should get your product out there quickly and gauge your customers’ reaction. Solicit feedback early on from as many people as possible and as an ongoing plan for improvement. Don’t forget to leverage tools such a CRM or survey tools such as Survey Monkey to streamline the feedback process. If you spend too much time honing your product before releasing it, not only will you possibly have wasted more time and money on a flawed idea, but you’ll have a harder time making changes. Accept failure. Don’t throw good money after bad, as they say—sometimes you have to know when an idea doesn’t work. Sometimes there are small tweaks you can make that will steer things in the right direction; other times the problem is more significant. In any event, you should always be flexible, and never let your arrogance get in the way of a compromise that could work out well for you. Be ready to pivot, change ideas and listen to feedback to adjust your business strategy.
22 Unforgettable Email Sign-Offs Posted on September 6, 2017June 14, 2018 by Allie Wolff We have to preface this article by pointing out the great irony of its existence: the best email sign-offs are unique. Not just unique for a person (“Wishing you many rainbows for the upcoming week!”), but unique between you and the person to whom you’re writing. The most memorable email sign-offs deal directly with a subject or history that’s familiar and distinct to your relationship. Just be a human being. For example, if you’re writing to someone about a tech conference, you might write, predictably, “Looking forward to seeing you at the tech conference” as your sign-off. That in itself, while simple, is better than “Best” or “Cheers.” But, okay. It’s not always that easy. Sometimes you need a little inspiration. That’s why we’re here. Behold, a list of flawless email signatures, sign-offs and farewells that we absolutely guarantee will resonate with anyone who has a sense of humor or humanity. These won’t all apply to you, and you might find some of them silly (well, they are), but we guarantee they will, at least, be memorable. Looking forward to chatting more about this. In the business world, no conversation ever truly ends. Signing off like this keeps the option for further communication open and shows a bit of enthusiasm. Let me know how things go. The ball’s in their court now! Make them get back to you by showing how interested you are in whatever they’re up to. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions. If you’re pitching something, you want to be as open as possible to their response. This one’s a good option for that. Have a good evening / weekend, and I hope you don’t spend too much time staring at screens. Anyone who works at an office will understand this. Congratulations again on the [recent achievement worth congratulating]! Did they recently do something impressive? Acknowledge them for it. Thanks for reading this whole email. Here’s a picture of a puppy. I mean, it doesn’t have to be a puppy. But it’s always nice to be rewarded for finishing a novella-sized email. Always great to chat with you. Hopefully you’re not lying about this one. Regardless, it’ll make the recipient feel good and enjoy the correspondence. Cordially. Who says this anymore? You do, that’s who! Waiting for your reply. This is a handy way to put a bit of pressure on anyone to get back to you ASAP—maybe a busy manager or a lead you’re nudging along. Hope things go well for you. If you’re not directly involved in a project or assignment, but you want to express some solidarity, supportive sign-offs like these are a good bet. I’ll be in touch. Keep the onus on you to make next contact, while keeping the lines of communication open. This is nice because it’s basically saying, “You don’t have to email me anymore; I’ll email you.” See you soon. But, you know, only if you actually will. Don’t want to sound creepy now. Glad to see you back in action. A great way to welcome back someone who’s spent some time away. Let me know if you want to chat about this over coffee. Always a pleasant idea to elevate email communication into casual real-life meetings. Some people still value that, you know. Wishing this were Slack. Want to upgrade your business communication? Make a not-so-subtle nod to one of our favorite small business mobile apps. Enjoy your vacation—you’ve earned it. But only if you actually think they earned it. If they haven’t, find another salutation. We don’t recommend writing: “Enjoy your vacation, even though you’ve done nothing to deserve the privilege of being paid to sit on a beach.” Maybe we can reconnect on this down the line. Is a lead not engaging with your sales pitch? End on an optimistic note—never shut the door on possibility. All the best from everyone here. This one elevates the standard “Best” to include your company, family or friends, adding a nice collectivity to otherwise individual communication. I’m sure you’ll do great. A good idea if you’re writing to someone who’s nervous about an upcoming presentation or pitch. Everyone loves encouragement. Virtually yours. Get it? Because it’s virtual mail. I’m just going to end the email here because I don’t do clever email sign-offs. Go meta or go home. Always a pleasure. This one’s so sincere it’ll make anyone say “Aw, shucks.” It’s easy to get lost in the inbox, but it’s easier to be remembered with one of these signatures.
9 Leadership Exercises To Help Your Confidence Posted on September 1, 2017September 1, 2017 by Jonathan Herrick We have a secret to share with you. Not everyone is born with the confidence to get up in front of a room full of people and inspire. Not everyone is born to lead. In fact, most of the skills required to be an effective leader need to be taught or developed over time through practice and perseverance. And often it means learning from mistakes, picking yourself up, dusting yourself off and getting right back on the horse. If confidence doesn’t come naturally to you, there are some exercises which can help you thrive despite your fears or personal concerns. Do these on a regular basis, and soon you too will have people believing that your confidence comes naturally. Until then, we’ll keep your secret, and you can fake it until you make it. Create a blueprint It’s so easy to focus on the negative when things are not going your way. But instead of going into a negative spiral, put together a plan ahead of time, mapping out how you want to respond in turbulent situations. Think about these questions. When you are confident, how will you act? What will change between now and then? What will you do differently? What kind of words will you use? How will you come across to others? Once you have your blueprint mapped out, you can start to put your plan into practice. After all, life isn’t about what happens to you but how you respond to it. Practice Speaking Remember that old ‘practice makes perfect’ adage that your mom or dad may have mentioned at least 100 times during your childhood? Well, it turns out it is true. The trick to coming across as confident is to practice any discussion beforehand. Whether you are speaking to a handful of people in your boardroom or talking at a significant external event, practice what you are going to say beforehand. Don’t be dismayed if it doesn’t sound perfect, that will come with time. Start with the small tasks first Overcoming small challenges can do great things for your overall confidence. So create a list of small tasks to stretch you out of your confidence zone. Arrange to have lunch with someone. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Join your local meetups to widen your circle and improve your leadership skills. Take up a new hobby. It doesn’t have to be much; but, whatever you jot down, make sure you do it! If necessary, give the list to a trusted friend or colleague to keep you accountable. Record your voice A big part of coming across as a natural leader is having an ability to project your voice with confidence. Want to see if your voice is on target? Try recording it. I know what you’re thinking: I sound terrible when I listen to my own voice. No to worry. It doesn’t matter how you think you sound when you record your voice, studies show you process the sound differently than someone listening to you speak. However it’s still helpful for you to hear if you are using lots of “ums” or speaking way too fast. Ask yourself, are you pausing enough? Is your speech clear? If you are too slow, you risk putting people to sleep and losing engagement with your audience. Smile often It may sound a little strange, but when we’re nervous we stop smiling. Smiling conveys confidence and also makes you appear approachable – both great traits in a leader. The truth is you’ll improve in the areas that you work on. And yes, that even means your smile. Practice smiling in front of the mirror, so your smile appears natural. Too forced and you may come across as a little overwhelming. When you smile as you communicate, people will be drawn to you and more willing to listen to what you have to say. Record your body language Utilizing body language in your communication is a big part of coming across as confident on the leadership stage. Any speech or presentation can be improved by appropriate body language and hand movements. Recording your body language will help you pinpoint those gestures which signify nervousness such as touching your hair or clothing, swaying back and forth, and highlight the ones that work to boost your verbal language. Adopt good posture When people slouch or slump they look unprofessional and nervous. Good posture, on the other hand, will make you appear confident and improve the tone of your voice. Keep yourself in check by holding your head high and rolling your shoulders back. Regular stretching or yoga exercises can be very beneficial in ridding you of poor posture habits and improve the way you carry yourself. Use positive affirmations As Stuart Smally once said: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it people like me.” Telling yourself you are confident and successful can work wonders for your mindset. Use positive affirmations on a daily basis to boost your inner confidence so you can radiate that confidence from the inside out. While affirmations alone won’t make you a great leader, they can inspire you to try your best each day. Positive thinking can go a long way toward building up your self-confidence and encouraging others. Mentor others Mentoring an individual is a great exercise to build up your confidence. It puts you in the position of teacher where you can share your knowledge and wisdom with others. Also, when you help others succeed it not only feels good but will boost your communication skills. In the end being respected and valued is a huge confidence booster—helping others to see you as a natural, self-assured leader.
The 6 Most Valuable Mobile Apps Your Small Business Needs Posted on August 31, 2017August 31, 2017 by Erin Posey What do you need to succeed in business? Strategy, sure. Core values, of course. But what about digital infrastructure? Specifically—what about apps? There comes a point in every small business owner’s life when they realize their company has gotten too big for them to handle in certain ways. Maybe it’s keeping track of expenses; maybe it’s too many emails piling up, maybe it’s a flurry of social media questions you lose track of. But the result is always the same: an epiphany that tells them they need to invest in organization. That’s where apps can be a valuable lifesaver. Invest in the right ones, and you’ll be able to tangibly see the ROI in terms of saved time alone. Here are just a few apps to get you started. There are hundreds of worthwhile apps you should look at, of course, but these are some of the most critical and well-reviewed ones that thousands of companies around the world are trusting. Concur Concur has become one of the most definitive expense-account apps for modern companies of all sizes, including major multinationals, federal government bodies and healthcare providers. Employees can snap photos of their receipts through the mobile app, then easy itemize and track their expenses. Managers can then quickly review each expense and approve them from their own mobile device in a matter of seconds. It’s an ideal solution for companies with remote employees or employees who frequently travel—journalists, on-site engineers and sales teams are just a few examples. The app also allows for analytics reporting, credit card integration and electronic receipts for all purchases. Evernote Evernote is a note-taking app designed as a more flexible notepad that works across multiple devices. You can snap photos and attach notes to them, jot out longer memos or create checklists to keep things top of mind. In short, it can replace Microsoft Word and then some. The app creators offer a few ways small businesses can use it. You can create an ongoing database for snapping photos of equipment with serial numbers and purchase info. You can create and organize a digital company binder with general notes, dates and instructions to share with your employees, or a private one for managers only. Slack Sick of searching your email inbox for one detail? Slack makes communication easy. It’s a direct communication line for the 21st century, allowing company members to chat with each other privately or in groups. Searching for words and topics is easy, and eschews the problem of having to dig through old emails to find relevant information. You can create multiple group chats for anything you need: “Social Media Ideas,” “Development Projects,” “Kitchen Happenings.” It creates a less formal, faster medium for communicating with your team—and it’s intuitive and easy to download and use. Best of all, Slack starts off free, and small business can keep it that way unless you want to pay for a bigger plan. Zoom This broader alternative to Skype allows for video conferencing in groups, and has historically aimed its product specifically at small businesses. Their interface has been recently updated, and the tool’s designed to be easy for companies without on-staff IT specialists—ideal for small business owners who work with remote workers and various clients around the world. The software comes with some very handy features, including the ability to switch between devices while in a meeting—so you can switch from your phone in the car to your desktop at work and stay connected—as well as a solid free version and a few other perks. Hootsuite Hootsuite is more than just an app, but the app can help organize your small business’s social media presence to help elevate it to the next level. Hootsuite creates a main dashboard where you can view all your company’s social media feeds—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, YouTube and others—including when people mention or message you. You can schedule posts, upload future posts in bulk and moderate comments. All this is free, but if you can afford to pay for one of their plans, you can also find social analytics and the ability to run social-media contests and sweepstakes to help generate new followers and boost engagement among your current base. Hatchbuck Shameless plug here, but no small business should be running without a CRM. Having access to your prospects’ and customers’ contact information on-the-go is wildly helpful in staying top of mind with your audience. Hatchbuck Mobile includes many of the desktop version’s most impactful CRM features to keep you connected to your customers in and out of the office. You can quickly create, lookup, and update customer contact records and see a full contact detail view. Hatchbuck Mobile allows you to stay in touch with contacts constantly — whether it’s a phone call, text message or a one-off email, you get to stay top of mind and your customers don’t feel neglected. Running a small business comes with plenty of twists and turns so making sure that you have tools like these apps at your disposal will keep you organized and on top of your growing to-do list.
7 Elements of Exceptional Mobile-Friendly Website Design Posted on August 30, 2017August 30, 2017 by Jessica Lunk There’s an old saying that my family has passed down from generation to generation: “You can always tell a website’s age by the look of its mobile site.” It’s a trite old-world European saying, but it’s true. If you can scroll an awkward 20 pixels to the right, the site probably hasn’t been made within the last three years. (Or it has, but by someone who learned how to code in the mid-2000s.) There are a few ways you can design a mobile site, and your method of choice should boil down to your online goals. With mobile accounting for anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of all web traffic, and most Google searches done there as well, it’s not a decision you should make lightly. You can either make a responsive website—one that works on either desktop, mobile or tablet screens perfectly—or create a different site that registers when your visitors find you on their mobile devices. Responsive sites are more in vogue these days because they’re more affordable, easier to manage and capitalize on your content in a more contained way. Mobile-specific sites tend to be better for companies with an audience who expect something, who simply wants a stripped-down version of the main site. If usability and speed are your top concerns, it’s something to consider. Regardless of which approach you take, there are a few key design elements to take into consideration. These are irrespective of how your site is built and what its function is—these are universal design elements to ensure you have the most mobile-friendly website design in 2017. Focus on Clear CTAs The biggest problems with mobile design tend to stem from clutter. There’s a reason most mobile sites tend to simply be black text on a white background—it’s clean, easy to read and immediately understandable. If your website is dependent on calls to action (CTAs), make them clear, legible and visible. Use an attractive, on-brand color for buttons, and use a font size that people could read while riding the bus—which is probably where they’ll be when they find your website. Keep in mind finger sizes, too. Nothing is more obnoxious in mobile design than trying to click a link that’s too small to actually click. Think About How We Hold Our Phones By and large, people are right handed. (Sorry, lefties.) And mostly, we hold our phones in one hand. That means anything in the top-left hand corner is almost certainly going to be out of reach for people, unless they use both hands or are diehard fans of the tiny iPhone 4. Most navigation menus are in the top left corner, largely because they’re only needed occasionally when the user needs to navigate away to another section. Search buttons are more commonly used, which is why they (generally) appear in the top right corner. If you have picture links on the same line as text, those pictures should appear on the right hand side, closest to the thumb. Keep these ideas in mind when deciding where to place certain objects, particularly CTAs and other elements you want to see enjoy a high click rate. Navigation is Key There are a few different types of mobile navigational bars. The three stacked bars—the hamburger, as it’s called—is the most popular, even making its way onto desktop sites to ensure a clean responsive design that’s brand-consistent across all platforms. You might have a header menu that disappears into a hamburger at a certain screen size, or some combination of toggles (a hamburger, or a three-dot icon) that pull up different menus. The trouble with overloading this is that users may not know how to find the content they’re looking for. On widescreen desktops and laptops, sidebars were once an easy fix to this, but with the verticalization of screens, sidebars are often disregarded entirely, streamlining the design even more. A good rule of thumb is to use sidebars as ancillary benefits if you use them at all. Don’t depend on them for conveying important information. Typography Matters Take careful time when deciding on a font that looks good when small. Generally, font sizes will be between 16 and 20 pixels, with ample room to breathe between lines and margins that don’t make the font feel cramped. Serifs are uncommon for body text in the digital sphere because of how much harder they are to read; this is particularly true in mobile design. Make Brand Continuity a Priority Above all, don’t just design something you think looks cool—design something that looks like your brand. Logos, colors and fonts are all elements that shouldn’t change too drastically just because you’re on a different screen. Responsive design makes this easy since it’s literally the same website appearing on a different screen. The big takeaway should be to be wary of drastically changing your mobile design just to fit in with conventional mobile design—think of it as simply another element of your overall brand strategy.