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This method works best when all participants can see what’s being created by using a flip chart or white board. Make sure you have the right people in the room who know what’s involved in accomplishing the process. I discuss this and more in the free  Process Improvement Playbook: Overcoming the Hurdles of Manual Processes in the Workplace . Step 1 – Process Name. To get started, write the name of the process along with a description on the flip chart. Step 2 – Process Boundaries. Identify the start and end points of the process. What triggers the process to start? How do you know when it’s done? Step 3 – Process Outputs. Identify what’s produced by the process. Step 4 – Process Inputs. Identify what’s needed to perform the process and where it comes from (e.g. paper, web, fax, etc.) Step 5 – Process Activities. Brainstorm the activities (what) that need to be done to get the process from start to finish. State these in a verb / object format (e.g., approve req...

It’s a fact. A hard one to swallow but one you have to learn to live with as a marketer. I’m talking about subscribers who stop engaging with your emails. Loss of email engagement can be bad for business in more ways than one. The first is that disengaged subscribers can result in a loss of revenue. The other reason is that emails that go unopened reduce your sender reputation, resulting in higher chances of your emails being sent to the SPAM folder. There are many reasons—some you may never know—why subscribers disengage. Image Source:  Emma Knowing those reasons will help you design a robust email marketing strategy that will have higher engagement rates. Let’s quickly run through some of the most common reasons subscribers disengage. 4 main reasons subscribers disengage from your emails Before we look at how you can craft the perfect re-engagement campaign, it’s important to understand the reasons behind subscriber disengagement. 1. Change ...

You put your heart and soul into email campaigns for your clients. You spend hours selecting just the right graphics, writing relevant copy, and segmenting your audience so your content goes to just the right inboxes. That’s why it hurts to see an email bounce. Although this might frustrate the perfectionist inside you, bounces are completely normal in email marketing. You can’t avoid them entirely, but you can maintain a healthy email bounce rate. Certain factors you can control, but others you’ll have to leave up to the email powers that be and adjust your tactics accordingly. This blog will go over what makes emails bounce and how to keep your bounce rate low. What does an email bounce mean? Email bounces are like the “return to sender” of the email marketing world. They mean that your email service provider could not deliver the email you sent for any number of reasons. According to  Better Bounces , 31 billion emails bounce every day, which means it happens to...

AMP Update: The Latest On Accelerated Mobile Pages Erik Newton Websites that aren’t optimizing for site speed are setting themselves up for poor rankings, high bounce rate, and bad user experience. An estimated  40% of people  will click off a site that doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less. For a business as large as Amazon, a single extra second in load time can therefore translate to loses as high as $1.6 billion per year. A few years ago, long page loading times on mobile led Google to begin work on a collaborative effort to create AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages.  These pages are designed to load lightning fast , improving the user experience across the web. In the years since their first development, they have caused debate but also spread across the digital ecosystem. The value of AMP lies in its ability to help brands create fast, effective sites. Since this development has been around for a few years now, we thought we would take a look at the evo...

You use email marketing to engage customers and boost sales, but how do you know your campaigns are effective? Is email helping you achieve your goals? Are you reaching your readers? Are your emails getting opened? The only way to know for sure is to measure your key performance indicators (KPIs). What are KPIs? Don’t be intimidated! You mastered your ABCs. You mind your Ps and Qs. And you’re about to learn the basics of email marketing KPIs: specific marketing metrics you can monitor in order to measure progress toward your email marketing goals. Finding and following the right KPIs can show you how your email marketing campaigns are doing, so you can adjust accordingly and get to where you want to go. Which marketing metrics matter to you? Though every metric can be measured, not every metric matters to you. And that’s good news because it would take an awfully long time to track the hundreds of metrics out there. A better approach is to focus on metrics that are relev...

When it comes to your email sign-ups, success is based on three vital elements: design, copy, and the information gathered. We’ll start with the foundation of your sign-up form: the design. There are so many things to consider when it comes to your sign-up design, and it’s vital not to slack on any of them. Placement The placement of your email sign-up form is vital to its success. While you may not think this would fall under design, we believe it does. After all of the hard work you put into creating your sign-up form, it would be a shame for it not to be seen. In order for your sign-up form to bring in more subscribers, you have to make your form present in the right place at the right time. When you’re finding a location for your sign-up form, you need to take your audience into consideration. Would they be more likely to sign up if it was at the top of your website, or if it was available on your Facebook page? There are a number of places where you can place your sig...

BrightEdge In this third and final segment of our guide to basic SEO concepts, we’ll touch on the more advanced SEO definitions and concepts of website “crawlability,” including basic search engine directives, common client and server errors, best practices and web developer resources. You can access  Part 1  of our series, covering  on-page SEO  concepts, and  Part 2 , explaining essential linking terms and related search engine directives. Crawlability In simple terms, “crawlability” refers to the ease with which search engine robots (or “bots” like Googlebot) can “crawl” a website in doing their work of indexing pages to build the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are several tools and best practices webmasters and developers can employ to optimize a website for search engine bots – in other words, maximize its crawlability – as well as minimize the usual crawling errors. The ultimate goal behind site crawlability is to expedit...