7 Tips To Create A Winning Welcome Email Nurture Sequence

by Female Entrepreneur School | Jun 6, 2023 | Mailing Lists

7 TIPS TO CREATE A WINNING WELCOME EMAIL NURTURE SEQUENCE

A welcome email nurture sequence is a great way to start to build deeper relationships with your email list, and in this post I’ll share 7 tips to create a winning welcome email nurture sequence.

Before we dive in to those 7 tips, let me refresh your mind about why email content is a great way to build a community of new leads for your small business, leads who can become potential buyers of your products and services, and I’ll also cover why your mailing list is one of the most powerful tools you have in your small business marketing strategy to increase sales and revenue to your brand.

WHY YOUR MAILING LIST IS IMPORTANT

Whilst many small business owners focus a large part of their marketing on making sales to followers on social media platforms, those businesses who understand sales well know that selling on social to cold leads (ie followers or non-followers who have not had a long, lengthy relationship with you), is a much harder marketing strategy to make work organically, than using a series of emails to build know, like and trust via marketing emails to every email lead on their list.

You can read more about why you need a mailing list in your small business here.

Your email list should comprise leads who are much more your target audience than your social followers may be, and the very fact that subscribers to your list have given you their email information in the first place, marks those people as much greater potential customers over your followers on social.

Seven Tips To Create A Winning Email Nurture Sequence

YOUR GOAL WITH YOUR MAILING LIST

Your goal as a female small business owner is to make sure you’re driving people to your mailing list as a key priority in your small business.

Once people have given you their email addresses and have been added to your list, you should then have a follow-up email sequence in place to immediately start to engage your new subscribers, rather than letting them sit on your list without contact from you – which inevitably turns them back into cold leads who are unlikely to ever buy.

You need to keep the leads on your mailing list warm and engaged, and a welcome email nurture sequence can be the start of that process.

One key place you should focus on driving people to your list from, is social media. You can learn more about how to drive people to your mailing list from social by clicking through to this blog post.

The best way to bring people to your mailing list is through an opt-in offer with some sort of free trial, free offer, free download, or discount against something they can purchase in your small business.

Once you’ve got any new email subscribers on your list, your goal is to send those leads through a welcome email sequence, or an email nurture sequence to help those leads get to know, like and trust you, so that they become familiarised with receiving great emails from you, and you then have the opportunity to start to use your email nurture campaigns to introduce your products and services to the leads on your mailing list.

If you need to learn where to start a mailing list for free in your small business, I cover than in another blog post that you can read here.

When anyone joins your mailing list, the worst thing you can do is ignore them. You need to stay top-of-mind with your subscribers. You can do this by creating an email nurture sequence that runs on autopilot any time new leads join your list.

Your email nurture sequence can be as long as you want it to be, but I would suggest bare minimum an effective email sequence should be at least 5 emails in a sequence, and those 5 emails should be sent to nurture leads over the course of 12 days at the most. However, the more emails you can send to nurture your leads, the better.

The ultimate goal of a nurture sequence is to encourage your leads to stick around, open your emails to read them, and ultimately take further action with you by buying in to your products and services.

Before we dive in to 7 tips to create a winning nurture email sequence, remember this. At best 6% of your followers over on social media see your content. Whereas average open and read rates for emails land between 20 and 30%. That’s a significantly higher volume of people who will personally open and read your emails, than followers who will see and engage with your content on social media.

This is just one great example why it’s essential to have an automated email sequence as part of your email marketing strategy, and why your email strategy should be a signifiant part of your daily business life.

Let’s look At 7 Tips To Create A Winning Email Nurture Sequence that you should have in place when any new lead joins your list.

1. Set a Goal For Your Email Nurture Sequence
There’s simply no point putting together a nurture email sequence of random email content just to try and get some emails out. So first step is to set a goal for your email nurture sequence.

That goal could be to encourage your leads to buy your products or services, to engage with you through emails by replying to you, to complete a survey to give you feedback and market research, to take advantage of a free offer or offers to help build your credibility.

So first choose the goal you want your email nurture sequence to achieve. Next is to decide the number of emails there will be in your sequence. Once you know your goal, and have an idea of how many emails you’ll send through your sequence, you then start to craft each email, focusing on having a great subject line in each that will encourage people to open the emails.

You should also have great, engaging content in your emails, and also further entice your leads to stay tuned by tempting them with what’s coming up in the next email, so that you encourage open rates to stay high.

2. Add Variety to Your Email Nurture Sequence
Don’t just send a series of emails in your email sequence that are all about selling. That’ll be the quickest route to people on your list unsubscribing. With each email you send, mix the content up, and keep the emails engaging. You can share valuable information, offer case studies of customers or clients who have purchased your products or services, you can provide bonus digital downloads or bonus videos your leads will find useful that will further enhance your reputation with them.

You can create a welcome message in the first email letting your leads know you appreciate them being on your list, and telling them a little about you and your company. You can tell stories, add humour, run surveys, get feedback, direct subscribers to blog posts, podcasts, social media posts. You can give recommendations, show some behind the scenes, talk about challenges your audience may be facing. Nothing is off limits, as long as you are moving your leads through an email series that takes them towards your end goal (see 1. above).

3. Be Personal in your email series
Address your leads by first name – people are more likely to open emails that are personalised to them. You can even use the merge facility in your email builder to add the person’s first name in the subject line – that can help your email stand out in their mailbox.

Best practices with email campaigns is to use the word ‘you’ in the email content, and not to use the work ‘I’ too much. Your email should be tailored to your lead, not to yourself.

4. Short N Sweet
Emails are a great opportunity to advance your relationship with your audience. But no-one has the time or patience to read emails that end up looking like some enclyclopaedic comprehensive guide. Keep the paragraphs of your emails short and to the point.

Use bullet points, headings and sub headings that guide your leads through the email, enabling them to scan and ready quickly. Use plain text emails without fancy fonts that can be difficult to read. Adding images and/or gifs can help with flow and keep the reader interested.

5. Use a Call To Action
Every email you send out in your email nurture sequence should have a call to action. And each email may have a different call to action, ultimately leading to the end goal of your email sequence.

In one or more emails your call to action might simply be to tell your leads about the next step – ie: what’s coming up in the next email, when it will be landing, and to encourage them to keep an eye open for that email.

You may have a call to action asking your lead to reply to your email to give you feedback, or ask you a question.

You may have something special to offer during the email nurture sequence – an extra bonus or training or voucher for example that you encourage your leads to take advantage of.

At some point during your email sequence you should introduce your first paid for products/services, and they should be the right products/services for that nurture sequence. Make sure any call to action you use is clear and concise and tells the lead in the simplest way, the action you want them to take.

6. Be Consistent
You must have an email sequence that is consistent. There’s no point sending email 1 out on day one (as soon as a lead joins your list), then sending email 2 out a fortnight later.

Your email nurture sequence should keep you in the mind of your leads, and should be used to educate your leads that you are going to be in contact with them often. As a minimum each step of your email marketing automation should be sent no longer than 3-5 days apart. Daily is even better.

7. Be Patient.
Email nurturing takes time, effort and consistency. You need clear strategy to build out email drip campaigns in a nurture sequence, and results in terms of capturing sales from your email nurture sequence can take time.

Don’t be afraid to keep returning to your email marketing campaigns to keep tweaking them, to make them better.

The first time you set up an email nurture sequence you may not be perfect, but the good news is the more you use any sort of engagement email sequence, the more you keep learning how to become better at sending emails to your list, the more responsive your leads will become to your emails.

As that happens, you’ll find that the lead nurturing campaigns you create will start to bring you a greater conversion rate in terms of open rates, click throughs and sales in your small business, far surpassing what you could achieve organically on social platforms, if you learn how to create great email sequences to build brand loyalty with the people on your mailing list.

Start your email nurture sequence today. Have strategy in place to welcome new leads who join your list, and then take those leads on a journey with you through automated email sequences to help educate them that you are going to stay in touch, to offer great email content that marks you out as an expert in your field, and to keep you top of their minds in their mailboxes, so that you become the go to expert they start to purchase from through the emails you send.

When you’re ready to go deeper, and to take you small business to greater success in the online space to become unstoppable in your small business, maximise your results and limit daily stress, anxiety and struggle, start by choosing one of my free small business guides below (note: you should choose both – they each have great value!).

Jenny

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How To Manifest Your Small Business Dreams Through Mindset

by Female Entrepreneur School | Jun 2, 2023 | business success, making money, mindset, Small business success

How To Manifest Your Small Business Dreams Through Mindset

There is no doubt that growing a small business in the online space is a hard journey, and that every single day we have to do our best to bring positive energy to our businesses to be able to create a dream life from the rewards our small business brings.

Negative thoughts and negative self-talk can create negative energy that impacts the way we work in our small businesses, and the success we achieve.

To manifest the business of your dreams, whilst many ‘gurus’ talk about the law of attraction, creating a vision board and using positive affirmations to help you succeed in your small business, those tools are not the be all and end when it comes to using your mind to create huge success online.

In this post I want to talk about your mindset, and how to become more aware of the conversations you have with yourself day in and day out, that may be impacting your success. I want to cover the importance of being aware of your subconscious mind and the conversations you have with yourself, so that you can take positive action in the best way to help limit negative emotions about yourself as a female small business owner, and about your small business.

I’ve had to work really hard on my internal conversations. As I look back I recognise that I lived much of my younger life with a negative attitude towards life and business (always expecting the worst case scenario), and that a positive attitude was not really part of my daily life.

The result of that negative mindset was that I saw many experiences in my small business as negative experiences, rather than just normal challenges in business to overcome. I was always waiting for bad things to happen, I had many limiting beliefs about my ability to grow a successful business, and the self doubt and negative self-talk I immersed myself in led to more of the same, and to plenty of poor past experiences in my small business journey.

Small things matter on a daily basis in your business. One of those small things is to be mindful enough to take small steps every day to become aware of the limiting conversations you have with yourself, and to take steps to turn your negative emotions into good feelings that will then help in the process of manifestation to build the small business of your dreams.

At some point in my past I recognised how much my negative approach to business was impacting not only my business, but also my health. For the sake of my future self and my future business success, things had to change.

My approach to developing a more positive mindset didn’t happen overnight. I had to put in the hard work, become much more aware of my own thoughts day by day, and take small, actionable steps towards developing more positive thoughts and taking inspired action in my business to bring good things into my business and life.

That’s not to say that I’ve been able to rid myself of negative thoughts and emotions. They still exist in my life, but over time I’ve become much more adept at noticing when I’m starting to loop through negative thoughts and negative emotions, and to take proactive steps to turn those emotions around.

This is something that successful people do. It’s not that they never experience negative thoughts and emotions, however they become aware of those patterns quickly and use positive statements to turn the negatives around.

Rarely are the negative thoughts we have the reality of our daily business lives. An essential part of being a successful female small business owner is to have a strong commitment to developing new habits and taking concrete steps using different techniques to turn negative self talk into positive self talk.

When you do this with clear intention, you automatically start to develop a more positive outlook every day, and that outlook brings with it the power to have clear vision about your business, to let go of any resistance to doing the things in your business you need to do to become successful, and to achieve small business success beyond your wildest dreams.

The strongest tool I have used to turn negative thoughts around is one that I mentioned above. It is simply becoming aware when the negative thoughts surface, and to use positive statements to turn them around. Here’s an example:-

Negative thought: “I’m no good at business. I don’t know why I ever started this journey. I’ll never be successful.”

Positive affirmation: “Look how far you have already come, how much you have learnt, the results that have already happened, the people who want your products and services. You are early on in your journey – there is so much more to come!”

By focusing on positive things as soon as I feel those negative emotions arise, I am using positive affirmation as a powerful tool to change the feedback loop I can get stuck in with the negative self talk. And the more I use those positive affirmations, the more I start to develop the powerful habit of switching out negative thoughts to positive ones, letting go of resistance and bringing myself back to the job of building a successful small business.

In my opinion, all of the vision boards, and law of attraction principles have little value unless you take the first step and the most important step to become more mindful of your thoughts. When you are able to become more mindful of your thoughts and practice positive affirmations to turn negative thoughts into positive ones, you’ll find that much of the journey you go on in your small business will comprise positive experiences, because you will see so much more of your daily business life as you living your best life, rather than you seeing everything as some awful challenge you have to overcome.

The simple act of being mindful of your thoughts, and wiping out the negative thoughts as soon as they surface, replacing them with positive affirmations can be a single powerful way to manifest your greatest desires in your business, and to bring growth and success that enables you to earn enough money from your business to completely transform your everyday life.

When you’re ready to go deeper, and to take you small business to greater success in the online space without as much stress, anxiety and struggle, start by choosing one of my free small business guides below (note: you should choose both – they each have great value!).

Jenny

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Ten Reasons Why You Should Use Canva For Your Small Business

by Female Entrepreneur School | May 28, 2023 | business success, Small Business Branding, Small business success

Using Canva for your small business is a great way to create a huge variety of designs for a wide range of content across your brand.

If you’re not yet using Canva, here are 10 reasons why you should sign up for an account and start learning how to use Canva today.

1. FREE ACCOUNT

There aren’t that many great pieces of software you can use to help with your small business branding that are free. But Canva is one platform that gives you a whole lot of design capability on their free account. From pre-made templates for all sorts of designs including social media content, a huge variety of stock images and other design elements, Canva can help any small business create branded marketing materials and other design work for free.

When you’ve signed up for a free plan with Canva, and you have got to know how the design world of Canva works, you can then always go to the next level and sign up for a Canva pro account for a small monthly fee, which then opens up all of the incredible resources the platform has to offer.

2. EASY ACCESS

Once you’ve opened your Canva account you can access the platform from your desktop, tablet and mobile devices. Any design work you do will automatically sync across all your devices, making the platform easy to access any time. The app versions of Canva on smartphones and tablets work really well. Whilst I find that detailed design work is better done on a laptop or PC, I still use the smartphone Canva app regularly to create social media content for my Instagram. The platform also updates in real time, so if you are using Canva on your laptop, and you have the same design open in Canva on your smartphone, you will see any updates you make on your laptop updating immediately inside the design on your phone. This means you never have to sync or worry that the designs in the app don’t match the design changes you’ve made on your laptop.

3. DESIGN FEATURES

There are so many design features available to you inside Canva. You can choose from thousands of ready-made templates for all sorts of design work for your small business, from business cards, to logo designs, social media images, presentations, brochures, newsletters, videos with and without audio and much much more. The platform is an excellent tool with a really easy learning curve to help you create amazing visual content for your small business right across your brand.

4. STOCK PHOTOS/VIDEOS

Canva has a vast library of stock photos you can access at the click of a button to help make any of your design work stand out. They also have a huge range of stock videos you can use in, for example social media posts (like reels on Instagram). Better still stock photos are editable, meaning you could choose any stock photo you want and remove the background, or wipe out part of the background to replace it with something else. The design opportunities really are endless.

5. BRAND TOOLS

As you get to know Canva you’ll find that you can preset brand assets to make your design work even easier. This includes the ability to set up brand colours and brand fonts so that you can easily change any pre-made Canva templates to suit your brand colours and fonts, making design work even easier.

6. REALLY COOL CANVA FEATURES

Some of the best features that I use regularly inside Canva are the background remover which allows you to remove any background from any image you upload, or any stock image you choose to use. This means that if you upload an image of yourself for example, and the background is messy and you would prefer the image of you to be on a solid colour background, you can choose the background remover feature inside Canva to remove any background clutter and replace it with a background colour or even image of your choice. You can also use their crop tool to crop any images down, their magic eraser to remove any part of an image, their magic edit to select any part of an image you’ve chosen and then ai generate any other image you want to add inside the image (for example I chose an image of a lady standing in grass and then used the magic eraser to choose part of the grass area, and asked Canva’s AI to add a cat sitting on the grass next to the lady – it worked a treat!). You can add filters to images, add animations to your designs and much much more. The design capability is endless when you learn the different ways the platform can work for your small business.

7. SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

The ability to be able to design almost anything for your social media platforms inside Canva is a huge bonus. I use Canva for all my Instagram posts. Every carousel or single post I put out over on Instagram is designed inside Canva. | have been able to improve the aesthetic of my Instagram grid using my brand colors and Canvas free social media templates to create a much better branded look for my social content on Instagram. Canvas powerful design tool helps you create an unlimited amount of unique pieces of social media content for your small business. Whilst their video design and editing tool is perhaps not as great as specific video editing software platforms, I have still used Canva to create social media video content for my brand.

8. CANVA’S TEMPLATES

The volume of templates available to small business owners is remarkable. Use the search bar inside Canva and start to find your way around all of the templates that are available to you. I’m often asked by the small business owners in my community wether they should pay for design tools like , adobe photoshop, adobe indesign, adobe illustrator, whether they should pay for a professional graphic designer to create their branded content. I always suggest they go to Canva as a starting point and check whether they can create their own design types before paying for that work to be done for them. Largely the answer is always yes – Canva can. You do not need an expensive design tool to create great content for your business. Canva pro members in particular have access to everything they need inside the platform to create any number of great resources.

9. TIME

Because Canva is such a powerful tool for small businesses, once you get to grips with the easy way you can create professional graphics for your small business, you’ll save a lot of time with your design work. As the design area becomes more familiar to you, you’ll realise how Canva is not only a great tool for your small business, but also the easiest way to create graphics that save you time and money. I have created a huge range of resources for my small business using Canva. From social media posts, editing of my own images for use across my business, logo design, through to full products I sell like my Ultimate Business Planner, PDF Guides to accompany many small business trainings I sell, Canva is my go to handy tool that is a great way to create on brand designs for my small business.

10. THE FINAL LOWDOWN

There’s more to Canva than the tips I’ve covered above. From the free templates they offer, to the wide range of color palettes, social media graphics, video and elements library, ability to create and record presentations inside the platform, to the ability to share designs with team members, there’s not much you can’t do with Canva as your go to graphic design platform for your small business. Without doubt it is the most used design platform in my small business, my go to great resource daily for all sorts of design work I do for my business, and the best part is that the monthly fee that I pay for Canva (£10.99 a month) is huge value for money based on the amount of work I can do inside the platform.

If you have not tried Canva, or are only using the free tools in Canva right now, I would highly recommend scaling up to the paid version of Canva to unlock the full potential of the platform to save you time, to increase your productivity and save you money having to pay a professional designer to do design work for you. Canva has everything you need for your online graphic design tool to become a key part of your small business life.

If you’d like more support in your small business, I have a range of guides available to help you start, grow and scale your small business in the online space. Each of the guides was designed inside Canva! Each guide (and bonus video training that goes with each guide), will become your virtual classroom for your small business – helping you to learn many of the key skills you need to learn in your business to become a more successful business in the online space. Choose your guide from the selection below.

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What’s Normal To You In Your Small Business?

by Female Entrepreneur School | May 16, 2023 | business success, making money, mindset, Small business success

I wanted to talk to you about all the things that people consider to be normal. And how trying to be normal to fit in can cause you to really struggle in your business.

Normal is one of those subjects that is a very individual thing. What may seem normal to you in your life and in your business, may not seem normal to me in my life and my business.

Normal as the larger part of society often dictates it, is something that I’ve steered well clear of for much of my life.

As I was thinking about this the other day and thinking about how normal my life has been, when I compare it to a lot of societal norms, I realised that I’ve spent much of my life running in the opposite direction of normal, and it hasn’t served me too badly doing that.

I’m going to just share a few examples of what I consider to be normal for the average person on the street that’s stuff I’ve chosen not to be part of.

Even when I look back to my younger days, I realised that as a teenager, around 16-17 years of age, I was already starting to veer away from this path of normal.

I remember I used to hang out with a girl gang We’d been friends for many years, we’d gone through infant school, junior school, and what was then called comprehensive school together. As we became teenagers and got to the age of 16, 17, and 18, we started to change the way that we hung out together.

Instead of hanging out in the local parks and playing ball games, climbing trees, we instead started going out to the local pubs and nightclubs as many teenagers that age do. This was in the 1980s when curly hair, shoulder pads, neon coloured fashion, and new romanticism was all the rage. Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, Boy George and Spandau Ballet were the hit groups of that era.

I’d be heading out on a Friday, Saturday and sometimes even a Sunday night with my with my girlfriends and they’d all be wearing their neon, ruffled shirt dresses with matching in your face neon shoes – all the height of fashion at that time. They’d curl their big 80s hair, and have their shoulder pads in. Even back then I was so far removed from what was normal in terms of fashion and taste in music.

I’d be the the one who stood out (not necessarily in a good way!) with my hair blow dried with hairspray into a semi Mohican style, all shaved at the side. My mom must have despaired. I would borrow mom’s yoga tights with stirrups, I’d have black four inch stilettos, a massive leather sailor’s belt with a huge brass belt buckle on and a teeny tiny cheese cloth fitted shirt from the 1970s.

Even back at that point in my life, I was already starting to not fit the mold.

As I move forward in time to today, and look at my life, I see so much of my life that is far from normal. Richard, my partner and I have been together for 22 years this year. We’ve never married, it’s not something that is a priority for us. I’ve never had children, nor ever really felt an overpowering need to want to have children. I never touch alcohol. I never go to pubs. I haven’t had a holiday in this country or abroad since 2006, and have zero interest in doing so. I’ve been self employed since 1998. I would rather be sat at home with a good book than going out to party. I go my own way and follow my own style with fashion.

Even when I look at my business, I’ve followed my own path. I’m not interested in viral trends on any of the social platforms. I’m not interested in doing any of the dancy pointy, on the social platforms. I’m not interested in viral challenges.

In actual fact when it comes to my business, I spend a lot of time looking around to see what other people are doing. And the moment I start to see stuff that everybody is doing, my gut reaction is to run as fast in the opposite direction as I can and go and do something that is completely anti what everybody else is doing.

It’s really interesting to me when I think about who I am, and the way that I show up, and how I live my life, because I know many females who really struggle with their own sense of self-identity, they really struggle with their own confidence and just being uniquely themselves in business.

They feel that they’re going to be judged by people if for any reason they do not fit the role of normal that society dictates.

I have no fear at all about growing my business and being myself in a way that feels intuitively right and normal for me. I never feel that I have to apologise for being who I am, and for running my business in a way that feels right for me.

I think if you can get to a stage in your life where you embrace fully who you are without apology, and you run your small business the way you want to without bending to pressure when others tell you how you should be showing up, it’s very liberating. It gives you a great sense of freedom. Because you know that you’re living your life, and you’re growing your business to a moral compass and with standards that you’ve created that are personal to, and feel right for you.

A lot of female business owners really struggle to embrace being authentically, fully themselves online. There’s this sense of needing to show up and fit in to avoid judgement, criticism, standing out too much, or fear of failing because you’re not following a norm. And it’s all BS because there is no single right way to show up. There is no single way to grow a successful small business.

But there is the normal way that means something and feels right for you.

Your small business will be much easier to grow every single day if you find the way that feels right, normal to you. Your audience will come more freely to you when you get past the barrier of needing to fit in and conform, and you start showing up as the real you, with a business that works in a way that fits who you are.

I think one of the most powerful things I’ve done for myself and my business has been to unapologetically be me, and build a small business that makes sense and feels right for me.

You have to remember that a lot of the normal in society exists because people in power want to keep the average Joe on the street like me in a little box where we are no trouble, no competition and where we can be more easily controlled.

Richard and I collectively, don’t buy into that normal. We forge our own paths. We make our own decisions. We don’t allow ourselves to be pigeon holed into following the norms of society.

We won’t do the anything that doesn’t feel intuitively right for us in our lives and in our respective businesses. We have been able to lead interesting and extraordinary lives by following our own paths and not being pulled into a societal herd.

So when it comes to you your work from home small business, if there’s one piece of advice I really want to offer, it’s forge your own path, find a way to show up and work in your business that fits you.

I believe the more you can embrace who you really are, and bring your authentic self unapologetically to your business, and build your business in a way that is in alignment with who you, you will ultimately achieve much greater success as well as a sense of peace and contentment from the small business you are showing up every day to run.

Three Critical Priorities You Need To Focus On Every Day In Your Small Business

by Female Entrepreneur School | May 2, 2023 | business success, Mailing Lists, making money, mindset, Small business success

Sometimes it’s super easy for female small business owners working from home to focus on the wrong things in their daily business life. There are three critical priorities you should have eyes on in your small business, and these can often be missed or skipped in favour of other tasks

I know you’ll have a long list of to do’s not only for your small business, but for your life.

Day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out, year in year out, the to dos never stop.

As small business owners, we wear many different hats (often because we’re working in our businesses solo or with limited support). Regularly we can find ourselves with so many different to dos we know we need to get done, that the very volume of those to dos causes us to become stuck, to procrastinate, and to not make much progress at allSome to dos can be tasks that we don’t feel confident about, or that drive fear into the heart of us, or are things that we just don’t like doing, and therefore we put them off.

We can very easily start to run our small businesses in the wrong way – focusing on the things in our business we like to do, rather than the things we should be doing. There’s a problem with that. Because in our small businesses, day by day, we have to become adept at focusing on the priorities, whether we like the work that comes alongside those priorities or not.

The three key priorities you should have focus on in your business every single week are:

Identifying the quickest and best ways to grow your audience.
Figuring out the quickest and best routes to make sales and earn more money in your business.
Always working to leverage your skill and expertise as a small business owner.

Day by day, week, by week if you’re not paying enough attention to these three key areas of your small business, doing the work that you need to do in each, you’re potentially putting your business in a very fragile position.

Let’s go a little deeper into each of these areas, and let’s start with growing your audience. I’m not talking about the amount of followers you have over on Instagram here, I’m talking about your list.

Every week in your small business, lead generation should be a priority. That means you should have strategy to encourage all those people on your social platforms, your blog, podcast, youtube channel etc., to take a deeper leap with you, by joining your mailing list. Once you have people on your list, you should then be committed every week to sending out emails to help build relationships with the people who have joined that list.

I would suggest that a greater percentage of small business owners do not pay enough attention to this, preferring instead to try and build their audiences and sell to those audiences in the social spaces. Nothing to say you can’t do that. But a big part of your social strategy should be to take those people to your mailing list as quickly as you can.

Every week, your small business mailing list strategy should include:

How to take people from your social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, websites/marketplace platforms or events, and get them on to your list?
How to engage with the people on your list so that you start to build deeper relationships with them.

I can categorically say that a large percentage of female small business owners are not paying enough attention to lead generation, don’t have enough strategy around lead generation, do not make lead generation one of the biggest priorities in their business. In not paying attention to this, they build small businesses on weak foundations.

Your mailing list still sits at the heart of your business. It’s not going anywhere any time soon. It’s stable and has been since the internet began.

Every week, you should have strategy around how you’re going to take people from all of the “edge of the circle” spaces (social, podcasts, blogs etc), and move them towards the inner circle of your small business by getting them on your mailing list.

3 critical priorities you need to focus on every day in your small business

Priority number two that all female small business owners should have focus on is effective daily and weekly planning. Why? Because doing so helps you to organise your daily business life in a way that means instead of keeping your focus only on the things you like to do, you’re identifying the priorities that will lead to the best sales and growth instead.

Playing around with your brand aesthetic, creating more products and services to add to the many you already have out there that aren’t selling, trying to go viral on Tik Tok, these are not the daily business activities that will lead to your growth.

Day by day you need to work to a to do list that you pull from the bigger list of tasks you have on your plate in your small business, and those day to day to dos should be focused on the priorities that are: what can you do today to grow your audience, what can you do today to encourage people to join your mailing list, and what can you do today to get more sales in the bag.

3 critical priorities you should focus on daily in your small business

The third priority you should have focus on in your small business is learning. Every week identifying what learning you can accomplish that will help you make your business better, help make you a better female business owner, help make your business even better for the audience you’re showing up to serve.

There’s a cheesy saying “failing to learn is learning to fail”. There’s a huge amount of truth in those words. Learning should stay by your side week in and week out throughout your business life.

The Three Critical Priorities You Should Focus On In Your Small Business

Day in and day out, those priorities should be:

Building your email list.
Finding ways to sell more of your products and services.
Learning how to get better at business.

If you need help getting to grips with these three key priorities in your work from home small business, why not become part of my community inside my Unstoppable Club, you’ll get all the support you need over there. Click Here To Find Out More.

Catch you again real soon.

Jenny

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