Making tiny, consistent improvements daily (just 1%) compounds dramatically over time. Instead of seeking radical change, focus on being slightly better today than yesterday.
<ul>
<li>Start small and specific</li>
<li>Track your progress</li>
<li>Be consistent rather than perfect</li>
</ul>
As James Clear highlights: 1% better each day = 37× better after one year! This is the essence of the compound effect in personal growth.

The 1% Rule

Systems trump goals for lasting change. James Clear argues that focusing on systems over goals leads to more sustainable progress:
<ul>
<li>Goals define the desired outcome but create a success/failure binary</li>
<li>Systems focus on the process that drives continuous improvement</li>
</ul>
When you fall in love with the process, the results take care of themselves. By prioritizing systems, you shift from chasing fleeting achievements to building identity-based habits that create long-term transformation.

Systems over Goals

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

True behavior change is identity change. In his seminal book, James Clear reveals that lasting habits form when they become part of your identity rather than just your to-do list.The hierarchy of behavior change works in this order:<ul><li>Most people focus on outcomes (what they want to achieve)</li><li>Better to focus on processes (what systems to implement)</li><li>Best to focus on identity (who you wish to become)</li></ul>Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you believe you are. New identities emerge from proof—the evidence of small wins accumulated through consistent habits.

Identity-Based Habits

Atomic Habits are tiny, consistent behaviors that compound into remarkable results through the power of aggregation over time. The core principle is that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.Three key insights define this approach:<ul><li>Focus on systems: Design environments that make good habits inevitable</li><li>Identity-based change: Change what you believe about yourself, not just what you do</li><li>Small improvements: Tiny 1% improvements aggregate into massive advantages when maintained consistently</li></ul>Breakthrough moments occur as a product of daily habits—a lagging measure of previous choices, not sudden transformations.

Atomic Habits

All habits proceed through the same 4-step pattern:<ol><li>Cue (or Reminder): The trigger that initiates behavior</li><li>Craving: The motivational force behind every habit</li><li>Response (or Routine): The actual habit you perform</li><li>Reward: The benefit you gain from doing the habit</li></ol>To change a habit keep the same cue, provide the same reward but change the routine. Example: If you smoke when stressed (cue) to feel relaxed (reward), try deep breathing instead of smoking.

The Habit Loop

Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop with four stages: cue, craving, response, and reward. Clear's Four Laws of Behavior Change align with these stages:To create a good habit:<ol><li>Make it obvious (cue): Design your environment to highlight cues</li><li>Make it attractive (craving): Pair habits you need with habits you want</li><li>Make it easy (response): Reduce friction for good habits</li><li>Make it satisfying (reward): Give yourself immediate rewards</li></ol>To break bad habits, invert these laws: make it invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying.

The 4 Laws of Behavior Change

One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.The formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].Examples:<ul><li>After I pour my morning coffee, I will meditate for one minute.</li><li>After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I'm grateful for.</li></ul>For best results: the trigger must be specific, the new habit should be small enough to do easily & the relationship should make logical sense.

Habit Stacking - Build New Habits on Existing Ones

Habit tracking is powerful and the most effective way to do it is with a simple method that tracks both completion and performance:<ul><li>Mark an X for habits completed</li><li>Record relevant measurements (e.g., pushups performed, pages written)</li><li>Don't break the chain. Try to keep your habit streak alive.</li></ul>After the initial phase, missing once has little impact, but missing twice is the start of a new habit—the habit of not doing. As Clear notes: The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.

Don't Break the Chain

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities—not too hard, not too easy.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. As habits become automatic, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We get bored. It's the ability to keep going when work isn't exciting that makes the difference.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

The Goldilocks Rule

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up potential energy that is released at once:<ul><li>Cancer spends 80% of its life invisible before detection</li><li>An entrepreneur works for years before becoming an overnight success</li></ul>This the Plateau of Latent Potential—the valley of disappointment where people feel discouraged by the lack of results and give up. They expect linear progress but the reality is that results lag behind behaviors, sometimes for a long time.

The Plateau of Latent Potential

Habit bundling is pairing an action you want to do with an action you need to do. The formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].For example: After I brew my morning coffee, I will do 10 pushups. After I do 10 pushups, I will drink my coffee.This strategy works because it:<ol><li>Leverages the motivational power of temptation</li><li>Uses existing routines as triggers</li><li>Creates a clear reward for completing difficult habits</li></ol>

Habit Bundling

The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases. Applied to habits, the Diderot Effect reveals their interconnectedness:
<ul>
<li>Fixing your diet may inspire you to exercise more</li>
<li>One bad habit can trigger others (having one cigarette, then another)</li>
</ul>
You can overcome it by setting self-imposed limits before any activity, by focus on quality over quantity and considering the full ownership cost of adopting a new habit.

The Diderot Effect

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. We imitate the habits of three groups:<ol><li>The close: Family and friends</li><li>The many: The tribe or wider group</li><li>The powerful: Those with status and prestige</li></ol>The culture you surround yourself with determines what behaviors seem attractive to you. We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong.

The Social Habitat

Look, we've all tried to change our lives with big goals and failed miserably, right? James Clear's massive bestseller (because he sold like a billion copies) shows why tiny 1% improvements actually work better—they compound like crazy over time. He has a system in four-steps that change the lives of millions. Let's dive in!

The #1 New York Times bestseller. Over 10 million copies sold! Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: <ul><li>make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);</li></ul><ul><li>overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;</li></ul><ul><li>design your environment to make success easier;</li></ul><ul><li>get back on track when you fall off course;</li></ul>...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

James Clear is the author of "Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones" He writes about habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement at jamesclear.com. His website receives millions of visitors each month and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular email newsletter.His work has appeared in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Time, and on CBS This Morning. He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Learn more at jamesclear.com

James Clear

Failure isn't a necessary evil. In fact, it isn't evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

Candor could not happen without trust, and trust (like candor) must be earned over time

<ul><li>Great films require both creative mastery and technical excellence.</li><li>Assemble complementary teams with diverse skills like art, animation, directing, writing and technology.</li><li>Collaboration between paradoxical abilities like mastery and beginner's mind yields breakthroughs.</li><li>Avoid silos. Value collective genius over individual brilliance. Help introverts contribute.</li><li>Build a cohesive team united by shared purpose. Diversity powers originality.</li></ul>

Assemble Diverse Cross-Functional Teams

To enable candor, build trust and mutual respect first. Question ideas, not people. Reward truth-telling. Make sharing concerns safe.Authentic feedback, however brutal, aims to achieve excellence. Hear it openly, not defensively. Truth emerges through debate, not blind consensus. Hearing the truth, though hard initially, enables growth.

Speak and Hear the Truth 

Prototype to test assumptions faster and cheaper before committing fully. Fail early to succeed faster. Use minimum viable prototypes to validate concepts.Collect real user feedback. Refine or kill mediocre ideas before over-investing. Move forward based on evidence from prototypes.

Prototype Early and Often

View work as never finished, just released. Maintain beginner's mindset for continuous learning.Evolve creative process constantly. Challenge status quo.Eliminate silos; enable idea cross-pollination. Compete against yourself, not others.Vulnerability and questioning lead to innovation.

Stay in Constant Beta Mode

<ul><li>Conduct postmortems to reflect on successes, mistakes and key learnings. Prevent recurrence of mistakes.</li><li>Maintain data integrity; record facts. Consider multiple perspectives.</li><li>Identify process improvements. Frame as a learning opportunity, not blame game. Revisit after subsequent projects to gauge effectiveness of fixes.</li></ul>

Postmortems Reveal Opportunities 

Enable people to identify deeply with company purpose. Elevate work from job to mission. Connect roles to vision to motivate. Celebrate team accomplishments.Encourage ambitious organizational goals. Align rewards to team results. Build shared consciousness and commitment beyond titles.

Instil Collective Ownership

The book Creativity, Inc. provides an inside look at Pixar Animation Studios and the leadership principles that enabled it to become one of the most creative and successful animation studios in the world. Co-founder and President Ed Catmull takes readers behind the scenes, from Pixar's early days as a small computer company to producing blockbuster hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Up.

From a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios—the Academy Award–winning studio behind Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story—comes an incisive book about creativity in business and leadership for readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Huffington Post • Financial Times • Success • Inc. • Library Journal Creativity, Inc. is a manual for anyone who strives for originality and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about creativity—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.” For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, WALL-E, and Inside Out, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his co-founding Pixar in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on leadership and management philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

creativity

Creativity

books

Books

Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull, PhD is a computer scientist and current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, DisneyToon Studios, and Pixar Animation Studios. As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics.

Ed Catmull

Amy Wallace was an American writer. She was the daughter of writers Irving Wallace and Sylvia Wallace and the sister of writer and populist historian David Wallechinsky.

Amy Wallace

Creativity, Inc.

The future doesn't start now or tomorrow. For professional futurists, it starts ten years from today. That is because it is enough time for society, and your own life, to become dramatically different. <ul><li>It's enough time for new technologies to scale up.</li><li>It's enough time for social movements to achieve victories.</li><li>It's enough time for big ideas to take root and gain traction.</li></ul> Thinking on a ten-year timeline will help you open your mind, take in new information, and reduce your blind spots.

When your mind feels stuck, make a ten-year resolution

Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous. It's easy to prepare for futures that are similar to today or make sense as they seem normal and reasonable. But, when a possibility makes us say, "That's ridiculous, that could never happen," or "I can't even imagine it", we have to spend time taking it seriously. We need to prepare our collective imagination for "unimaginable" possibilities. Then, if they do happen, we're not frozen with anxiety or stuck in old ways.

Be ridiculous, at first

Every form of creativity has its own raw material. A sculptor works with clay, a chef with ingredients, a futurist with clues. Futurists collect, combine, and build future scenarios out of clues to how the future might be different. You can find future clues by spotting weird stuff that others overlook. Things that make you say, "That's strange", and "I wonder why that's happening."

Look for clues

If your imagination feels stuck, spend time mentally immersed in “upside-down worlds.” Make a list of about a hundred things that are true today and rewrite them so that the opposite is true. For example, libraries are mostly quiet spaces. To flip it, write ten years from today, libraries are loud, wild spaces. Then envision what makes libraries feel and sound so different.

Turn the world upside down

Urgent optimism consists of three key psychological strengths:<ol><li>Mental flexibility is the ability to recognize that anything can become different in the future, even the impossible ones.</li><li>Realistic hope is knowing which threats you should worry about and which new solutions, technologies and ideas you should be excited about.</li><li>Future power is a feeling of control and agency to directly impact the future by taking action today.</li></ol>

Build urgent optimism

We can be successful at anything through future imagination training.

Jane McGonigal says urgent optimism is not a fixed personality trait. We can purposefully build more of it through future imagination training.


problemsolving

Problem Solving

This is how to see the future (and 5 ways to be ready for anything)

<ul><li>It falls into four domains: supernatural danger, body violations, violence, and the minds of dangerous people. Serial killers fall within the latter two domains</li><li>Humans have a uniquely impressive ability to imagine events and experience them through mental simulation</li><li>By imagining dangerous situations, humans can generate scenarios where the perceived learning benefit is high, but the cost of learning is low</li></ul>

Our Morbid Curiosity

This cost-benefit shift in learning about dangerous situations lies at the core of our morbid curiosity, our love of violent thrillers, and our fascination with serial killers. We thirst for knowledge about the killer. Why does he behave as he does? How does he act around others when he isn’t hunting? What are his motivations for selecting his victims? Perhaps most importantly, what are the signs that someone might be a killer? Questions like these intrigue us because they strike at something deep in our animal nature—the need to avoid predation.

Learning About Dangerous Situations

We have our imaginative minds and evolutionary history with predators to blame.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

movies

Movies & Shows

Why We Are Fascinated By Serial Killers

Imagination frees us from the confines of our immediate reality. Imagining the future enables us to evaluate alternative paths forward, anticipate how we would feel if they happened, and choose which to pursue. For instance, by simulating a potential event via mental imagery, we can “test out” in the mind potential emotional consequences.

Imagining possible futures

Counterfactual thinking (alternative versions of one’s personal past) refers to the comparison of reality to hypothetical alternatives (“what if I had made different choices”). People create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they imagine how things would have turned out differently. Imagined alternatives may trigger guilt, remorse, and shame. However, thoughts about how things could have turned out differently provide a roadmap for change.

Counterfactual thinking

Imagining events from a distance encourages abstract thinking that boosts creativity. After several years of experience, people start to repeat themselves; it becomes more of the same old approach. They become insiders. One of the most effective ways of cultivating an outsider perspective is to feel distant from the problems. For example, traveling, getting away from the places we spend most of our time. The distance allows one to view problems in a more imaginative way. Suddenly, the mind is aware of those considerations that were previously ignored, and those facts that should be ignored.

Distancing from the problem

Any situation that affects our ability to visualize events and situations may affect our judgments. Visual images are more emotionally salient than words. We recall emotionally charged events far more than mundane ones. However, this emotional partiality impairs our ability to see the big picture. For example, lawyers have known for a long time that the vividness of the testimony offered by a witness can influence the judgments made by a jury.

The vividness effects

Imagination is central to understanding and interpreting figurative language. Metaphors are figures of speech to convey a truth about the real world. They are transferred from another context to give us new ways to think. We can imaginatively see a particular perspective on the focus of the metaphor. For example, the phrase, No man is an island, implies that no one is truly self-sufficient.

Metaphor

Delusions and ordinary cases of self-deception have been characterized as disorders of imagination. Delusions can be characterized as beliefs that are dysfunctional in their content or formation. That is, a delusion is an imagined interpretation that is mistaken by the subject as a belief.

The dark side of imagination

Imagination is deeply connected with reality. What we imagine can affect what we believe and vice versa. The richer the personal experience is, the richer the ingredients for imagining. That is, imagination is nourished by various resources on which the person can draw. Through books, art, discussions with others, and education, we can build our knowledge of events and places that we have never experienced.

How to improve your imagination

A good imagination enables us to transcend present circumstances.

philosophy

Philosophy

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

5 Benefits of Imaginative Thinking

It can be described as a torrent of negative thought and associated emotion sparked by relatively innocuous triggers. Much of it is framed by what-if scenarios that give the imagination plenty of room to run free in the wilderness of negativity.This is particularly painful for leaders who are weighed down with a great deal of responsibility, and the duty to make decisions that have ripple effects in people's everyday lives.

Overthinking

Intuition works like a mental pattern matching game. It analyzes situations quickly with extant knowledge and evident context and offers a way forward quickly. Decision-making is based on existing knowledge and experience that isn't bogged down by time-intensive data research or analysis.This also takes away roadblocks we've set up in our minds that keep us from making clear-minded decisions - so it keeps us from overthinking decisions even when they are well-conceived.Intuition-based decision-making can't rule all the time. Use it in moderation, and where you feel it's appropriate.

Leverage the underestimated power of intuition

Sometimes, data-based decision-making can derail you. Maybe it's time to trust your gut.

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

The Surprising “Disinhibition” Technique Is a Powerful Way to Stop Overthinking, According to Harvard Research

<ul>
<li>If you’re in savannah and you hear rustling in the grass, you don’t want to spend time thinking about the probability that it’s a lion.</li>
<li>When making bets with friends, it’s probably best to not make any bets that can be interpreted as negative, such as betting your friend’s kid won’t get into a certain school, people can interpret that as you think that that’s what’s going to happen.</li>
<li>When betting on sports, sometimes you can hedge the emotional downside with a monetary upside such as betting against your home team because you know they will likely lose.</li>
</ul>

Can Thinking Probabilistically Make Our Decisions Worse Rather Than Better?

People will hedge against disaster with fire insurance but are less likely to hedge against their marriage with a prenup (only about 5% of married couples have a prenup).
We have this idea that if we do hedge against something, somehow if the bad thing happens, we caused it. And this is particularly problematic in situations that do have very high emotional valence.
Books such as The Power of Positive Thinking and and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne teach readers to think positively because their outcome is dependent on their thoughts.

It’s Hard For People To Make Bets That Hedge Against Their Identity

It’s hard to be happy playing poker because the losses hurt much more than the happiness you gain from winning. Instead, focus on the process.There’s this huge asymmetry between how sad people are when they lose versus how happy they are when they win. It’s one of those things that, unless you’re really focused on the process. This is a lesson for all of life, the way to happiness is to focus on the process.Be aware of the self-serving bias: We tend to attribute good things to our own skill, and we tend to attribute bad things that happen to us to luck.

Lessons From Poker

I do think that one of the things poker teaches you is that you shouldn’t assume that just because people are really skillful in one domain, their ability will transfer to another. That skill can be very, very domain-specific.

The top 500 poker players tend to be brilliant in game theory and in making real-time, high-stakes decisions.Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean that you can become a great player. you have to be smart in a very particular way.You need to be curious about being wrong and stay open-minded and you have to be so incredibly hungry to collide with corrective information. You have to be open-minded to the corrective information.Open-mindedness is the number one trait of a top poker player.

Traits of Top Poker Players

In order to really succeed at the top levels of the game, you have to be so open-minded. You have to be so willing to ponder on a daily basis the idea that you might be wrong, the idea that the things that you think to be true or what you think about an opponent — that it just might be inaccurate.

For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. “It really exposes you to the way that you’re thinking,” she says, “how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when you’re perfectly well aware that those decision traps exist. And how easy it is for like your mind to slip into those traps.” She’s spent a lot of time studying human cognition at the poker table and off it — her best-known academic article is about psycholinguistics and her forthcoming  book is titled How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Annie joined Tyler to explore how payoffs aren’t always monetary, the benefits and costs of probabilistic thinking, the “magical thinking” behind why people buy fire insurance but usually don’t get prenups, the psychology behind betting on shark migrations, how her most famous linguistics paper took on Steven Pinker, how public policy would change if only the top 500 poker players voted, why she wasn’t surprised to lose Celebrity Apprentice to Joan Rivers, whether Trump has a tell, the number one trait of top poker players, and more. Follow us on Twitter and IG: @cowenconvos Email: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Follow Annie on Twitter Follow Tyler on Twitter Facebook Newsletter

strategy

Strategy

podcasts

Podcasts

For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. “It really exposes you to the way that you’re thinking,” she says, “how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when you’re perfectly well aware that those decision traps exist. And how easy it is for like your mind to slip into those traps.” She’s spent a lot of time studying human cognition at the poker table and off it — her best-known academic article is about psycholinguistics and her forthcoming  book is titled How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Annie joined Tyler to explore how payoffs aren’t always monetary, the benefits and costs of probabilistic thinking, the “magical thinking” behind why people buy fire insurance but usually don’t get prenups, the psychology behind betting on shark migrations, how her most famous linguistics paper took on Steven Pinker, how public policy would change if only the top 500 poker players voted, why she wasn’t surprised to lose Celebrity Apprentice to Joan Rivers, whether Trump has a tell, the number one trait of top poker players, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded June 24th, 2020 Other ways to connect  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Annie on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.  

Tyler Cowen engages today’s deepest thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. New conversations every other Wednesday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Conversations with Tyler

Annie Duke on Poker, Probabilities, and How We Make Decisions

When looking at ROI and engagement, email can be a powerhouse addition to your business, especially when you use email send best practices effectively.<ul><li>Emails have 50 to 100 times higher click-through-rates when compared to Facebook and Twitter.</li><li>For every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they receive $42 in return.</li></ul>Businesses who start using email marketing effectively will keep using it as a key strategy in their toolkit and look for ways to expand their efforts through automation.

Email Is Still Gold

We know it can be exciting to get your first send off the ground, but take two steps back before jumping in. Create a plan of attack for the type of emails you want to send, how often they should be sent, and the type of content that will be in them so that you can start sending at a regular cadence. This will stop you from getting in the trap of sending sporadically or whenever something comes up, which can be bad for your <a href="https://www.addthis.com/academy/email-list-hygiene-tips/">list health</a>.

Email Best Practices: Start with a Basic Strategy

If you have opt-in forms on your site currently and you’re not seeing a good number of signups (and your website traffic is good) it’s time to review and optimize to create a signup form that converts.Make your opt-in forms work for you! They should be unavoidable and, no, we don’t mean a frustrating-to-close pop-up, but if the only way to sign up for the list is through a pop-up then that is not enough. Make sure if a user lands on the site and moves around the site they can still easily see the super awesome mailing list sign up.

Build Your Email List

Every email strategy should include a welcome campaign for new subscribers. How many email lists have you subscribed to only to forget because you didn’t receive a single email until 3 weeks later? Your customers should not be having the same experience.Email is not billboard or ad marketing. Email attempts to build a 1:1 relationship between the brand and the customer. These prospects trusted you enough to hand over the keys to their inbox. Greeting them with a welcome email creates familiarity and trust.

Say Hello to New Subscribers

There are many ways to create segments for targeted marketing based on the data you’ve collected. What did they purchase lately? Where do they live? Which pages on your site they visited most recently? All these touchpoints are opportunities to fine-tune the customer journey and start offering them exactly what they are looking for.Of course, the limits of your segments are based on the data points you are collecting. Using an integrated marketing tool will allow for tracking of more touchpoints and creating more automated campaigns around those.

Segment Your Lists

There are policies around collecting and storing people’s personal information. You may have heard of GDPR or CAN-SPAM, but with Apple Mail’s Privacy update and CCPA in California, ignoring the rules can end up being costly.It’s important to understand what to do in order to be compliant before starting to collect email addresses. Looking at other businesses might not be the best option unless you know they are a reputable sender. Because email, unlike social media channels, is largely managed by individuals on websites, it is very common to see examples of brands not following the rules.

Know the Laws

A/B testing has always been standard practice for optimizing emails once you have a list of a few thousand subscribers or more. Testing is how email marketers know whether one subject line is better than another or which day of the week gets the best engagement. Seasoned email marketers know that testing for content and engagement can be a game-changer. Marketers can test for which button colors get the best clicks, whether customers prefer reading about a topic or clicking through to an explainer video, and even if they respond better to images or copy.

Test and Experiment

Set reporting goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in advance. This will not only help make reporting a breeze once a campaign is over, but it also helps marketers look for optimizations to make along the way.Deciding KPIs in advance gives marketing teams a specific goal to work towards and ultimately push them to create better emails. If marketers understand the goals of the campaigns, whether that’s raising product awareness, clicks to a landing page, or form fills, they can use their tactics and creativity to guide people to taking the desired actions.

Decide on Key Metrics in Advance

High unsubscribe rates don’t necessarily mean that customers hate your business, but they can signal other issues that should be addressed. Rising or higher than average unsubscribe rates can point to customers receiving too many emails or emails they feel are irrelevant to them.Test an adjusted content strategy and watch to see if rates improve. Also, don’t be afraid to ask! Survey your readers on what their ideal frequency would be to gain some real insights.

Don’t Take Unsubs Personally but Don’t Ignore Them Either

We all know that Q4 sneaks up fast and the holiday season can be madness for all types of industries. If you’re just starting to incorporate email into your marketing, make sure that you account for any additional emails or special campaigns that will need to be created for national, local, and business holidays and events.Using automation here can be key to landing huge sales throughout the season. From abandoned cart emails to lead nurture campaigns after a new product release, talk to us to find out how automation has been a powerhouse for businesses.

Create a Holiday/Event Strategy

Email fatigue is real and it’s one of the main things that affect your sender status. If subscribers are getting too much email, they might unsubscribe or worse, they’ll ignore you until you start hitting the spam folder.Start slow and test how your audience responds by watching engagement rates and unsubscribes. Don’t forget to count any automated campaigns that are running. If someone is in the middle of a drip campaign that sends daily updates for 7 days, it’s good practice to keep them off the mailing list until they’ve completed it to avoid mailing them too heavily.

Quality not Quantity

Create segments for your VIP contacts. These can be contacts that interact with your emails the most often, attend the most webinars, or have purchased the most. Special campaigns can be sent to these lists to nurture the relationship. These rewards don’t have to be discounts but they can be. Rewards can be first look at new releases, asking their opinion on a new product offering, or insider content.Bonus points if your email software offers lead scoring. Those scores are an easy way to segment your most die-hard customers.

Reward Your Most Engaged Contacts

Long gone are the days of “Hey [FNAME]!” as an effective way to get opens and clicks. Personalizing data fields is still a tactic smart marketers keep in their toolkit, but personalization has evolved.Besides first name and birthday, marketing teams are using location, behavioral, demographic data to personalize the customer journey. Retail sites thrive off of this type of marketing. As consumers, we’re all familiar with the experience of viewing something at our favorite retailer only to receive an email a day later with the item and others similar to it in our inboxes.

Use Data to Personalize the Customer Journey

Often, marketing channels get treated as disconnected tools when they are all tools meant to work together to build business. Use email as another tool to leverage promotion of social media events or Lives. Social media and other channels can also be used to grow your email list. Your social media followers are not necessarily your email subscribers. Grab them in both places so they’re less likely to miss a message.

Coordinate Cross-Channel Campaigns

If you’ve ever had to send a “Oops, sorry about our last email…” subject line, then you know the pain of missing something before hitting send. The best way to combat send button anxiety is to have an email pre-send checklist handy every time before you hit “send.”

Use an Email Presend Checklist

Put these helpful tips for email send best practices to use for your agency or business and get results in your email marketing campaigns.

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Ultimate Guide to Email Send Best Practices - SharpSpring

It is more focused and developed for a specific product or market. A comprehensive Go-To-Market plan will compose of four components:<ul><li>Product strategy: to differentiate the new offering from those of competitors.</li><li>Promotion strategy: pricing promotions and cross-promotions at launch</li><li>Channel strategy: channels utilized not only to sell products but also to educate and support partners and customers</li><li>Marketing and communications strategy: entailing efforts to generate awareness with customers and employees who interact with customers for instruction, purchase, and or support.</li></ul>

The Go-To-Market Plan

<ul><li>New market entry — when extending an existing offering to a new market</li><li>New product development (NPD) — when launching a new offering in an existing market</li><li>Offering diversification — when introducing a new product into new markets. This is rather a high-risk strategy because it entails a lot of unknowns for the company. They need to learn a whole new market and tell a new audience, who it doesn’t know very well, how its new offering will deliver value.</li></ul>

Situations in which a Go-To-Market plan is needed

A Go-To-Market plan should include certain elements of research and action:<ul><li>Customer research: that probes buyer’s interest in your product, or otherwise to perform customer development</li><li>Trend research: such as whether the company is entering into a stable or growing market and how saturated the market is</li><li>Coordinated product development: get intimate with the product by bringing product managers into the research and market testing phases</li><li>Customer targeting: putting together a specific profile of your early adopters and, more importantly, why they would choose it over a competitor’s offering.</li></ul>

Understand the customer

Some goals of a Go-To-Market plan may include:<ul><li>Product brand awareness — high awareness or being easily recognized, helps drive potential prospects and sales.</li><li>Marketing to leads — leads, are qualified people who will be interested in the product.&nbsp;</li><li>Sales targets — this is the portion of the qualified potential prospects who will actually convert to a paying customer</li><li>Product adoption — high adoption rates will mean higher expected sales and economic returns</li><li>Customer satisfaction — the goal would be to decrease the number of defects and dissatisfaction at the launch and post-launch stages.</li></ul>

Set strategic objectives

Defining the customers’ problems and validating the offering that addresses them:<ul><li>Define the pain: customers do not think in terms of solutions, they only know what their pains are.&nbsp;</li><li>The urgency of the pain: Are they looking for an immediate solution?&nbsp;</li><li>The size of the pain — you will also need to think about how deep the problem runs.&nbsp;</li><li>Willingness to pay — you want to be sure customers will pay for the product.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Product-problem fit

<ul><li>Demographic factors — such as age, income, education, religion, marital status, occupation.</li><li>Geographic factors — urban, suburban or rural area</li><li>Behavioral characteristics — how relevant, consistent and frequent their behavior is toward a particular problem</li><li>Psychographic considerations — including activities, interests, the benefits sought, attitudes, and values</li></ul>

Segment the Market

<ul><li>Recorded data — obtained externally in the form of published sources such as competitors’ brochures, promotions, news articles, and annual reports</li><li>Witness or observed data — such as what you see when you go to a trade show and visit a competitor’s booth or the conversations you uncover through social media that customers are having about the competition</li><li>Ability to gather plan data — or efforts to set up opportunities to learn more about the competition.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Pinpoint your competitive advantage

<ul><li>Reduces the time it takes to get to the market</li><li>Lowers risk and the cost that may be associated with failed launches</li><li>Delivers the best experience for the customer</li><li>Invests on the right path with better direction for internal sources and external partners</li></ul>

The benefits of a Go-To-Market plan include

While a company’s marketing plan is a broad document that aligns marketing initiatives to the high level business goals and objectives, a G-2-M plan is more niche, focused, and developed for a product

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The Ultimate Guide to the Go-To-Market Plan

Freelancing can seem fantastic and freeing. It allows you to travel whenever you want to. You answer to no-one, except your clients. It makes you feel important.&nbsp;However, it also has pitfalls.<ul><li>It does not carry the benefits of a full-time job such as 401k.</li><li>Not setting professional boundaries can cause clients to demand your time at any moment.</li><li>Without boundaries between yourself and work, you can fall into unhealthy lifestyles that can take their toll.</li></ul> While there are many successful and strong freelancers, it is not for everyone

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