A couple of weeks ago a good friend of mine asked me if I wouldn’t mind giving some advice to their partner who’s expanding their photography business. Specifically around website and branding. Since I am always happy to give my totally biased opinion to small business owners, I was happy to share my thoughts. Here’s 4 recommendations I made that may be helpful in your own business!

1. Setup a Google My Business Page. This gets you into the Google algorithm which is the only one that counts. Fully fill out your profile – you can hide your address so it doesn’t show up in search results. (Since you live in the PNW I’d also setup Bing Places. Both are easy and FREE!)
2. When launching a business the first thing I suggest clients do is send out an announcement email to their network. I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re up to! It doesn’t have to be a huge email – but a couple of specific images and a little about what you’re up to these days would be awesome. I suggest MailChimp if you think you’d do occasional announcement emails – that way people can subscribe AND opt out of communication from you. If you need help setting up an email and building your list – here’s a checklist I created to help.
3. I also created a monthly marketing calendar that will help prompt you with some ideas of what to do each week.
4. Finally – start to get testimonials and reviews. Here’s a recent blog post I wrote about it – everyone struggles with this – but once you’re setup on Google you want people to start reviewing you so those stars show up!

There are SO many things that go into starting a new business – but if you have the basic website setup and you’re starting to get clients, these are a few tasks that I recommend to help you grow and start out on the right foot!

A few weeks back I had a post about missing your Follow up Window and a friend of mine commented and asked if I use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) and what my process is. Today I wanted to share 4 ways that I use my CRM to help with my follow up window.

1. Get Contacts in ASAP – Any potential client or colleague gets added into my CRM immediately. I save notes from calls, and with mine (Zoho) you can send emails directly through the platform so it stores the conversations which is handy.
2. Schedule The Follow Up Tasks – Once I send an email I immediately add in my follow up task. Usually it’s simple like “response?” just to remind me in a few days to check in with them if I haven’t heard anything. If there was a referral involved I’ll make a note to send a thank you note to that person once the process is complete. (Often they’ve made the introduction so I don’t need to let them know I heard from the referral).
3. It’s on my task list – Every week I have a notebook with all the tasks I need to accomplish for the week. The first thing says BLOG (see, it works!) and the second thing is Zoho (my CRM). I check my CRM a few times throughout the week, if not daily. Sometimes I adjust my tasks that are due for the week, and sometimes I can get them all done in one day. I will add long term client tasks here too which is handy so I don’t forget (which I started doing after I forgot something a few years ago).
4. It Integrates with MailChimp – This is one of my favorite parts of my CRM, each month before I send out my newsletter I transfer new contacts from my CRM. It’s a quick and seamless process that ensures my prospects get this additional touch point from me. That way if they stop responding or say “not right now,” they’ll continue to hear from me so when it’s the right time, they know where to find me.

Your CRM is a powerful tool to help with your follow up. These are 4 ways that I’ve found they help me to ensure that prospects and clients don’t fall through the cracks. There are a TON of other features in my CRM I’m not talking about here – and a ton of other features I don’t use (and probably should) but this is how it helps with my follow up.

Don’t have a CRM? I had a guest post from a colleague who has some great recommendations.

How do you use your CRM to help with follow up?

I just had a phone call with someone about their newsletter. While we were chatting I asked how their open rate is. It was okay, but it could be better. As we looked at the numbers I noticed that it’s the same time and day each week (which can be good!) But those open rate numbers could be better. Before you panic…

Anything over 20% is a good open rate

I know right? So maybe you’re already crushing it and can stop reading now. Or maybe you’re panicked that 20% isn’t near where you are. That’s okay, I’ve got your back! Here’s 4 ideas to increase your open rate:

1. Try A/B Testing – send the same campaign out at 2 different times to half your list (MailChimp will help you with this, as should most other email campaign programs). Try 7 am and 7 pm (for example) to see when your audience wants to hear from you.
2. If you’re B2B then try early morning (6 or 7 AM), lunch (11:45 am is a time I often try to send at) or end of business day (5 pm when people are done with meetings and checking their inbox before they head home).
3. If you’re B2C then try evenings and weekends. I have a couple of clients where we send their newsletter on Sunday evening. Kids are in bed and you’re sitting on the couch watching TV and flipping through your phone with time to actually open and read that lovely newsletter you built.
4. Re-send your campaign. Yes – 4-5 days after I send out my newsletter I will re-send it to everyone who didn’t open it the first time. This increases my open rate and clicks AND it helps me to see if maybe I need to tweak my send time. I do this for a lot of my clients too. This is a great way to help you figure out if there’s a better time to send your newsletter too.

Bottom line – if you’re sending at 2pm on Tuesday’s and getting a 12% open rate it’s time to change the date and/or time. If you’re sending Monday’s at noon and have a 30% open rate – gold star for you!

Questions? You know where to find me…