Journal

You’re a busy business owner that works really hard every day to make money, increase your profits, and provide for your family. You’re diligent about collecting information from your customers, like email addresses. It’s a critical part of your marketing efforts.

Because you’re working so hard, you want to make sure as many people read your emails you send, but how do you increase email open rates?It’s frustrating. You put out forms to fill out in your store, on your website, and through social media. Even though your email is great, for some reason it doesn’t get read like you hoped. This post will show you the top techniques to ensure that your messages are opened, read, and acted on.

Write enticing subject lines

Everyone knows that headlines of articles or news stories and titles of books are written to grab the reader’s attention so that the article or book gets read. The same holds true for emails. You want to write subject lines that do any one of the following:

• Creates urgency, i.e. “A Limited Time Offer from…”
• Describes how to do something, i.e “How You Can Get More…”
• Lists Something, i.e. “Five Things To…”
• Promises something

By doing so you give your subscriber a reason to open and look at the email that you send. If you don’t do something like this there’s no reason for them to open the email. So, keep something like that in mind when you write your next email message.

Put your customer’s name in the subject line

When you are collecting information from your customers you are doing so for future purposes. Hopefully, you are collecting at minimum your subscriber’s first name and email. That’s really all you need. When you have collected the subscriber’s email and first name, you then can use it in the subject line of your next email. Good email programs like MailChimp, Ontraport, Infusionsoft, etc. all allow you to use mail merge codes to insert the subscriber’s first name into the subject line. You do this because everyone likes hearing or reading their name on their screen or device. This extra step of personalization to get people to read your important message.

Use your customer’s first name in the email salutation and the body

The same principle for the subject line applies to the body of your email. Email, for me, is still a letter sent electronically, so it should follow the standard letter format:

Dear ____________:

Body

Sincerely,

You

So, make sure that you insert whatever mail merge code for your mail system uses to put their first name in the salutation, and once or twice in the body of your email. When they see their name in the salutation they see that you are taking that extra step to personalize the message. They see their name and will want to read more of the message you send, and putting their name in the body of the email will keep them reading.

Use emojis in your subject lines

One of the latest trends in social is using emojis, those cute little pictures of smiley faces, objects, animals, etc. These little gems will help entice your customer to see the email and click it to open the email too! Be creative with them and be sure to use emojis that compliment your industry or whatever special you’re running that week. Wine glasses, party emojis for sales, etc. Ultimately, the goal in using email is to send targeted messages to your customers to build that know, like, and trust factor with them. You also do this to inform them of events in your store, new products you offer, and other news. Email is still the best way to ensure that your customers get those messages, because you can get around whatever algorithm social media changes, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or other social media.

Conclusion

With these tips; writing effective subject lines, using a subscribers first name in a subject line, using the subscriber’s name in the body of the email, and using emojis you’ll be sure to see an increase in your email open rates.

Question: So now that you know how to make sure your emails get read, how are you going to implement these tips? What other tips can you think of that I haven’t mentioned here? Let us all know in the comments below!

For years I’ve worked in corporate jobs where I got used to the routines of going to my office, interacting with coworkers, and the camaraderie that it built. In my last corporate job, I loved going to work where my boss was awesome to work for and my colleagues were the best around. I felt like it was family with the special dinners around the holidays and the birthday celebrations we enjoyed. All that changed when we were downsized and I got the opportunity to build my own business and become an entrepreneur. Almost overnight my morning commute was shortened to a walk down to the basement office and I was the only one I’d see all day. It was then that I had to learn how to battle loneliness in entrepreneurship.

The transition was, and still is to some degree, really hard to deal with. Even though I was home I felt like I was in some sort of solitary confinement and the lack of social interaction was jarring to say the least. My wife would go to work where her lunches were often catered by sales reps in her industry. I’d be left with leftovers from the night before or the basic lunch of a sandwich. I had to learn how to deal with the loneliness of working from home. In this post I’ll share what I learned and how you can succeed in your entrepreneurship journey.

While entrepreneurs may think think they are alone, in a recent report of the Small Business Administration, over 70% of the 28 million small businesses are solo businesses, with one person responsible for everything in the business.  I’ve gained solace in knowing that everyday millions of people are similarly scrapping and hustling for their dream of being self employed. When I know that there are others out there, I don’t feel so alone.

Create Your Own Routine

Working by myself I’ve had to create my own routine to combat loneliness. For me that’s taken on different forms, from a morning workout because it’s so easy to let my body go when I sit at a chair for hours and don’t get any exercise, to morning chores like laundry and cleaning because I know my wife will appreciate not having to come home and clean the house. My routine ebbs and flows depending on the season I’m in.  I think everyone should commit to a minimum of getting up early, having a healthy breakfast, shower, and putting on at least a business casual attire for the day. 

Create Your Own Support System

Even though I work from home and on my own most of the time, I’m fortunate in that I rely on friendships to help me stave off loneliness.  I’m a member of a small community group with my church and the time together has often helped me in ways not only spiritually, but to develop deep relationships with others. If you’re a person of faith, you should explore opportunities in your church to plug in in a similar way. If not, then find groups in your area that you can join to help create a board of advisors, mastermind, or networking group to build your support team. You could consider joining your chamber of commerce, a business association, or meetup group. 
I’ve been able to do both, keep active in my small group with church, and join a few organizations. I’m a chamber member, and board member of the Louisville Digital Association. In my hometown of Frankfort, KY I’ve started an Entrepreneurs Meetup in hopes of building community.

Consider Coworking Spaces

If you find that you absolutely must have some social interaction with others in an office-like environment, working out of a coworking space may be a strong choice. There is a cost to some of these spaces, but you get a dedicated space to work, office materials like wi-fi, copiers, and a place to receive mail. These spaces could also have a kitchen area where the coffee is always hot and fresh, and you can share lunch breaks with others. Often, the people that are also there can morph into working relationships and business opportunities. 

Consider Adopting a Dog

If you prefer only to work from home consider adopting a dog from your local shelter. My wife and I adopted Shiloh, a possibly full blooded Beagle more than a year ago. It was a big step for us and it was a challenge getting him obedience trained and house broken, but now that he’s a member of our family, he’s provided a great source of companionship while I work from my home office. He’s usually pretty chill until around four or five, at which point he wants to go for a walk. Shiloh also helps me with stress by providing play breaks. He’ll sometimes even make sure I’m ok by coming up and nuzzling me at my desk.

While I’m still working out my best strategy to battle loneliness as an entrepreneur, I’ve created my own routine, assembled a support team, but haven’t yet gone to the co-working space. I have adopted a dog to help though!  These things have helped me keep happy, productive, and grounded in my entrepreneurial journey.

I’m curious, how have you battled loneliness as a solopreneur in your business? I’d sure like to know in the comments below.

Whether your business is online or a brick-and-mortar your website is key to telling people about who you are, what you do, and how you can help. This website is a reflection of your brand, your business, and your overall style. Having a great website combines great design, including fonts, colors, and layout. It should also include great content, from text for visitors to read, videos for visitors to watch and learn from, and compelling graphics to see.  In this post, I’ll share with you ways in which you can create great website photos.

Create a Graphic Standard for Your Website Photos

Before you get started you’ll want to decide on some sort of graphic standard for all the website photos you’ll create. Essentially you’re making decisions on how your images will look across the board by creating rules to follow. These might be:

•      Fonts to use for title, subheading, and body text
•      Dimensions of images for blog post titles and other types of pictures
•      Colors for certain elements like text

Choose the Right Tools

Next, you’ll need the appropriate tool to create your website photos.  While in the old days you needed a rather large program and the expertise to use it, nowadays there are several programs that you can use for free and don’t require you to have a lot of technical know-how.A few of them are:

Canva

Canva is my personal favorite. It is totally online so you can create website photos from anywhere you have access to the internet. What’s nice about Canva is that they already have dimensions of popular graphics created these days like social media graphics for Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and others as well as blog post titles and general images. You are allowed to import your own photos and stock photography to use in your images, and if you need to search stock photography for your images you can purchase their images for $1.00 each and you can reuse those purchased items in future work.

Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is a new tool to create graphics online for free. It allows you to create website photos, posts (like a blog post entry), and videos. Adobe spark works in a similar fashion but where Canva seems to concentrate more on the type of graphic you make, Adobe spark seems to be more text centric. It asks, what do you want to say, and then where do you want to say it (which social media platform, blog post, etc.)

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is the industry standard for image creation and photo manipulation. While I prefer using Canva (and will probably start using Adobe Spark more often now) I still find myself using Photoshop for some website photos. I find I can’t knock out backgrounds on some photos for use in other graphics on Canva so I still turn to my trusty Photoshop. It’s the industry standard for a reason and for most graphic work it is way too powerful but I would suggest everyone be at least familiar with it for future use.

Save Those Photos for Future Use

Finally, you’ll want to keep those website photos safe for reuse.  With all this hard work you do to create images for your website you’ll want to make sure that those images are available in an archive or some other space. You could save them all on a local folder on a computer, but I would suggest you back them up on a cloud storage device like one of these below:

•      Dropbox
•      Google Drive
•      Evernote

That way you can always have a copy accessible no matter where you are. Some services are free while some charge a monthly fee.

Conclusion

Creating website photos for your business website is a great way to increase and enforce your brand. You should create graphics for your blog, social media, and email marketing messages. Fortunately there are a few tools you can use to create them and they are easy to use. 

How do you create graphics for your business? What other tools are there that you like? Let us know in the comments below