How Ecommerce Businesses Build Healthy Relationships With Customers

A customer walks up to your store. What’s the first thing you do?

Ask them what they need? Show them a few choices that are trending? Let them check the store out before reaching out to them?

The question is: why?

Why do you need to make contact with your customers and understand their needs?

Showing interest in your customer’s needs makes them feel valued and important. And that’s what every customer wants to feel when they walk into a store. It’s this feeling of attachment to a brand that makes customers come back and buy something again.

But how will you go about the situation if you’re starting an ecommerce business? How do you build relationships with your customers online?

It may seem like a difficult question, but it isn’t. There are so many ways you can build relationships with your customers online.

Here are a few tips that will help you build and maintain a relationship with online customers.

How Ecommerce Companies Build Relationships With Customers

1. Direct Engagement on Social Media

Every business needs to be on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. They are some of the most significant online marketing tools that businesses can use to publicize product offerings, advertise the company, share news about the industry, and connect with customers.

On social media, you can create a page and fill it with content about your product. Potential customers will drop their comments, and you can reply and start conversations with them. When you get along with them they will be convinced to trust you. The trust you build with them will lead them to purchase your goods or services.

Apart from building trust, communicating with customers makes them feel confident and important. By talking to customers, you will provide them with your business contact and assurance of quality service. Other prospects can also go through your social media conversations and decide to support you.

When you have direct conversations with your customers you'll build personal connections and also make them see how responsive you can be to their questions and feedback.

2. Follow-Up

When a customer has made a purchase, following up is important. Calling or sending personalized emails may be ideal but you may not have enough time. You can use automatic messaging and emailing strategies to customize your messages and make them more personalized.

For a seamless process, create a base template and after each purchase, personalize it and reach out to the customer to make sure they got their product in good condition and if they are pleased with the experience.

This way, you will gather valuable customer feedback that will help improve the experience of future customers. You can even use automation to include the customer’s name and other relevant information in the email.

3. Email Communication

You must build an email list if you intend to keep in touch with customers. And, make sure that the emails you're sending out are not sales-y. Every email sent to a customer should contain relevant content that can help them solve a problem. That way, you will create a connection with your customer and improve your online relationship.

Other than this, you need to have an email strategy: When do you plan to send out emails to your customers? What will you wish to achieve through emails? What USPs will you promote via emails?

Another reason to send out emails to your customers is to capture their feedback. Whether a customer avails your service or purchases a product through your website, it is essential to send out surveys and get an insight into their overall purchasing experience. This way, you know whether you need to improve upon your customer journey and what stops you from providing a delightful customer experience.

4. Creating/Hosting Events

When you invite your customers to a promotional event or a product launch, it allows you to socialize and improve your relationships. The invitees will know more about your brand from the event while it gives you the chance to meet with your customers personally, create a strong impression, and foster trust.

Let's say you run an online clothing and accessories brand. You can invite your online customers to attend a fashion show, for example, so you will have an idea about the audience you're targeting and they will have a close look at your products.

5. Excellent Customer Support

Your customer service should be top-notch, since there are only a few moments of two-way communication between your business and customers in the ecommerce world. Therefore, those few times should count.

You have a lot of options to choose from because online customer support has been improving steadily in the past few years. You can use FAQs, customer forums, searchable knowledge bases, and many other methods to provide information. Some businesses use self-service support, but if you are determined to maintain long-term online relationships, live chat and phone support are your two best bets.

This is because these support channels provide a direct line of communication between your business team and customers. If your support team communicates directly with customers, they'll be able to understand the customer's needs perfectly and improve their experience. These are some ways you can provide the best support experience for your customers:

• Let support be your competitive advantage: Your customer base will increase if you're able to provide excellent support. You can use that as an advantage against competitors offering the same service and products.
• Let customers have personal attention: When you provide live chat for your customers, support reps can attend to the problems of several customers at once.
• Listen: Because of how many customer complaints they respond to, support teams may just pour out the first solution they think of. However, for customers to have a better experience, reps must break a little and listen so they can offer the best solution.
• Equip support agents: Your customers will have a bad experience if you keep pushing them from one team of agents to another. Equip your support team with the mastery needed to solve real customer problems quickly and easily.

6. Customer Loyalty Programs

Another strategy to improve customer relationships and increase revenue is creating a loyalty program to benefit both old and present customers. They can be enticed with discounts or coupons so they can sign up for the program. You can also give extra benefits to those who buy repeatedly.

Also, show gratitude by celebrating with your customers on birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries with personalized messages.

Ecommerce businesses can also improve customer relationships by using applications to make things easy for them. However, no matter the method adopted, every online business should aim to build strong customer relationships.

Right from creating insightful surveys to providing 24/7 customer support, these tips will help you build a long-lasting relationship with your customer base.

How Ecommerce Businesses Build Healthy Relationships With Customers was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

7 Effective Ways to Automate and Grow Your Business

There's more scope for automation in your business than ever before. With automation, you can schedule emails to be sent at the perfect time, follow up with leads that have abandoned their cart, sync data between apps, and notify team members of new tasks.

However, all of these options can be overwhelming, especially if your business isn't a huge corporation with a lot of budget and resources to throw at automation.

You might be wondering:

• What types of automation will benefit my business the most?
• What should I stay away from?
• How can I easily implement these while keeping life simple?

Let's explore the best types of business automation so you can start implementing a strategy in your own organization.

7 Ways to Automate Your Business

1. Email Marketing Automation

When you think of automation, email marketing automation might come to mind first. It's not only one of the most popular types of automation, it's one of the most accessible, too.

Types of Email Automation:

• Triggering emails based on actions, such as webinar sign up confirmations or abandoned basket notifications
• Email drip workflows that send content at set intervals
• Delivering content or requested information after filling out a form
• A/B testing content and automatically sending the best performing version of the content
• Personalizing each email you send
• Segmenting groups based on data and automatically sending the right email to each group

A good way to get started with email marketing automation is to have a look at the automation capabilities that your email marketing platform already has and think about how you can use them to execute your strategy.

All popular email marketing tools have built-in automation functionality. However, if you haven't picked an emailing tool yet, make sure to pick an option with enough automation functionalities to meet the needs of your business.

2. Marketing Automation

What about the other types of marketing automation beyond email marketing? We can divide these into external automation that is customer-facing and internal automation that helps streamline the workflows inside your team.

Examples of External Marketing Automation:

• Automated SMS messages
• Scheduling or republishing social media messages
• Unlocking new course content at set intervals after enrolling

Examples of Internal Marketing Automation:

• Lead scoring and qualification
• Routing qualified leads between apps, such as from your CRM to your email marketing platform
• Notifying team members if a contact meets conditions or takes certain actions
• Creating a strong bridge between marketing and sales
• Streamlining multi-stage processes such as publishing content or setting up a new marketing campaign

3. Sales Automation

Sales automation is about managing your pipelines more effectively, reducing friction, and increasing conversion rates.

Benefits of Sales Automation

• Stay on top of a busy pipeline
• Better calendar management
• Identify and focus on the most sales-ready leads
• Collect and act on data insights
• Sync the latest data across all apps
• Create a strong bridge with marketing
• Pass new customers to onboarding
• Avoid spending time on bad-fit leads

To get started with sales automation, first look at any built-in automation functionality that your CRM offers. You can then look into adopting and integrating other apps to automate more powerful workflows.

4. Data Automation

Although automation is great for streamlining repetitive tasks and freeing up time for important work, it's also powerful at managing data behind the scenes.

While our brains are good at looking at data insights to draw conclusions and plan actionable next steps, we're not so good at manually managing that data. We don't have the time, attention to detail, or accuracy to control large data sets — and we don't need to.

With automated data management, you can leave the heavy lifting to the machines and free up time for taking action on the insights instead.

Ways to Automate Data:

• Trigger/action workflows that push data between your apps
• Syncing contact data two ways between apps and automatically making updates as soon as anything changes
• Sending all contact data to your CRM for a centralized database
• Combining data from all apps for integrated reporting on one dashboard
• Automatically merging or fixing duplicate contacts in your database

To get started, first optimize the data in your individual apps. You can then use software integration tools to allow them to communicate data with each other.

5. Customer Care Automation

What about your support and customer care teams?

Ways to Automate Customer Service:

• Optimize customer experience
• Personalize interactions
• Make sure your customer care team automatically has access to all available customer data

Automation is not about removing the human element from 1-1 interactions. In fact, it's about making more time for these and providing a better experience for your customers.

You can automate notifications to let you know when is the right time to reach out to a customer, meaning you can spend less time working out what you should be doing every day.

You can automate customer satisfaction surveys that alert you when a customer needs quick attention to reduce the risk of churn.

You can introduce chatbots or knowledge bases with built-in AI that quickly answer simple questions, or route a customer to the best support rep for their inquiry if that doesn't fix it.

Simply put, automation enables your customer care staff to manage a higher volume of customers more effectively, without burning out or diminishing the quality of 1-1 interactions.

6. Ecommerce Automation

It used to be that to sell products, you had to do it yourself. You had to oversee production of your inventory. You had to open up your shop in the morning, answer customers' questions, and process their payments for your products.

But that's all changed. As an ecommerce store owner, you don't even need to be there. You can keep your store open 365 days a year, even while you're sleeping or traveling.

Types of Ecommerce Automation:

• Purchases via an online shopfront such as Shopify or WooCommerce
• Online payments through providers such as Stripe and PayPal
• Discount codes to prospects, first-time customers or engaged buyers
• Abandoned cart notifications to customers
• Product suggestions based on previous purchases
• Inventory management
• Requesting reviews post-sale

With dropshipping, you can even automate all of the fulfillment work for an order. As someone else creates the products, stores them in a warehouse, and sends them to the customer, all you have to do is create an online storefront and get eyes on it.

7. Management Automation

As with customer care automation, management automation isn't about removing the human-to-human interactions. Instead, it can free up a manager's time to look after their team and support their growth.

Types of Management Automation:

• Team reminders to prep for meetings
• Chasing overdue work
• Following up on tasks after set intervals
• Sharing onboarding materials with new hires
• Collecting daily feedback on wins and blockers
• Self-reviews and performance tracking
• Reporting dashboards
• Syncing data with meeting slides

For simple ways to start automating management processes, Trello, Slack, and Asana are tools you might already be using that also offer great automation functionality.

Automation is a long-term strategy: it's not about trying to change everything at once or creating processes that are overly complex for the stage your business is at.

Take a look at where your business is now. Where are the blockers, manual tasks, and inefficiencies?

Ask yourself how can you start automating these areas to free up your focus for the areas where you have the most impact.

7 Effective Ways to Automate and Grow Your Business was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

9 Ways to Make Your Business Data More Reliable

Your business data is the lifeblood that runs through your organization. It powers automated workflows, gives customer service reps the full story every time the phone rings, and informs decision-making.

Even small businesses can benefit from the rise of big data by optimizing their organization's data and creating processes to put it to work. According to Experian, eight in ten businesses believe data is one of their most valuable assets.

When your business data is reliable and accurate, it's smooth sailing. But when errors, duplicates, and question marks surface... it's not so pretty. When you can't trust your business data, problems quickly arise and multiply in every area of your organization.

Businesses lose as much as 20% of revenue due to poor data quality, shares Kissmetrics. Back in 2013, HBR also talked about the ripple effect of unreliable data as part of "Data's Credibility Problem":

"When data are unreliable, managers quickly lose faith in them and fall back on their intuition to make decisions, steer their companies and implement strategy. They are, for example, much more apt to reject important, counterintuitive implications that emerge from big data analyses."

To get the best results as a data-driven organization, here are some of the best practices to strengthen the foundations and make your business data the most reliable it can be.

9 Ways to Fix Unreliable Data and Increase Accuracy

1. Improve your data foundations.

Data debt – the cost attached to poor governance of data in a business – is a significant problem for many organizations, and 36% of businesses say data literacy is crucial to future-proof their organization, shares Experian.

Making your business data more reliable doesn't just happen by magic: it requires strong frameworks, processes and a data-literate workplace. As early in your business journey as possible, ensure that you have:

• A strong CRM system to centralize all contact data
• Processes to organize and segment data
• Integrations between apps
• Formal data literacy programs in place to educate your team
• A clear strategy of how you will use and maintain the data you collect

Remember the old proverb: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is now. The same goes for getting your data in order!

2. Look at where new data is coming from.

Just like reliable data, messy and unreliable data doesn't happen accidentally. There's always a source. To make your business data more reliable, follow the trail back to where data is coming from.

How is data being added to your CRM? Are there forms or manual imports that are causing bad data to clutter your database? Are different team members importing conflicting data in different ways to multiple apps?

3. Optimize forms and data collection channels.

Once you have identified how new data is entering your apps, take some time to optimize these data collection channels.

To collect valid and reliable data, make sure that these factors are true for every piece of data you collect:

• You actually need to collect the data
• You are collecting it in a consistent and standardized format between apps
• You have clear permission to collect it based on data protection regulations
• It will be stored and organized in the right app for the right purpose

4. Break down data silos.

A recipe for unreliable data is having data silos. A data silo is a collection of data that one department has access to but others do not.

The negative effects of data silos are bad news for performance and productivity for any organization: they include a lack of transparency, efficiency, collaboration, and trust.

To remove data silos, use a central CRM between departments, connect data between the apps in your tech stack, and focus on building a culture of collaboration between departments.

5. Segment your data.

Good business data is organized, adds value to your company, and is collected with explicit permission from users. To make your data more organized, segmentation is your friend.

Segmentation can look like labels, tags, list memberships, groups, or other properties that tell you more about each contact and divide your database into clear categories of preferences, demographics, buying history, and more.

When you integrate your data between apps using an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), you can create syncs based on your segments and connect the right data two ways between your apps.

6. Clean up your databases.

To make your business data more reliable, clean up any messy data as soon as possible. This means fixing or removing:

• Incorrect data
• Outdated data
• Duplicate data

According to SiriusDecisions, on average it costs about $1 to prevent a duplicate, $10 to correct a duplicate, and $100 to store a duplicate if left untreated.

To help prevent duplicates and other bad data, create company-wide standards for data entry and maintenance, then sync data from the most accurate source to your other apps and create a holistic view of your database. It's also valuable to set up and document processes to standardize and verify new data.

7. Connect your apps to integrate data.

The most effective data management strategies connect data between apps. This removes data silos, creates an integrated view of all of your data, and syncs up-to-date data to the right places as soon as anything changes.

The easiest way to achieve quality data integration is with a zero-code iPaaS solution that connects the dots between all of your key business apps, from your CRM to your email marketing system and customer support software.

8. Create accessible reporting dashboards.

Instead of hiding your data insights away on private dashboards, make them transparent to the right people in your team. For many KPIs, that means your whole team.

Organizations with the most effective and reliable data typically choose a limited number of impactful KPIs and make these very visible inside the team.

Not only does this help your team to be invested in company, team, and individual performance, but it increases the odds that errors and discrepancies in your data are picked up on. *The most reliable data has eyes on it. *

9. Schedule regular maintenance.

Maintaining data quality in your business isn't a one-time job: it requires continual upkeep, cleanups, and optimization. If your organization has a dedicated operations manager, part of their job role can be to monitor and optimize data quality. But in any case, it's worth making data integrity and literacy part of your company DNA – or part of every team member's day-to-day role.

This means creating the foundations for healthy data to flow into your organization and undergo regular cleansing, alongside processes to fix problems and automate integration.

By optimizing data reliability, you can ensure your company can receive the most accurate results and insights from your database both now and further down the line as data integrity keeps gaining importance.

With automated two-way syncs between apps including your CRM and email marketing tool, you're in the best position to manage your data holistically, perform regular health checks, and create an updated 360-degree view of your customer data.

9 Ways to Make Your Business Data More Reliable was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

14 Ways to Automate Your Ecommerce Business

When it comes to owning a business, time is your most valuable resource — but, time is finite, and are a lot of tasks competing for your attention. You need to make sure the right products are listed on your website, that you're fulfilling orders and payments 24/7, and that you're processing and dispatching packages efficiently... all while staying on top of marketing campaigns, user reviews, and customer service.

And, as you scale, your ecommerce processes get even more demanding.

So, how can you make time for the work that brings in more customers while keeping everything else on track?

With ecommerce automation.

Automation is playing a vital role in the future of tech — and it's no surprise that we're seeing more of it in tools designed for ecommerce businesses. As a store owner, it's your secret to putting your time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot.

In this post, we'll explain what ecommerce automation is, then show you what it looks like with 15 ways you can automate your online business.

What is ecommerce automation?

It means using software to turn manual tasks into automated workflows. These workflows can trigger internal or external emails, notifications, or actions in other apps — such as creating new support tickets in your help desk. To make sure everything works perfectly, you can set multiple conditions that need to be true for the workflow to run.

Although ecommerce automation saves you time, it doesn't mean firing your employees — or yourself. Rather, it frees up your team's time for the customer interactions, creativity, and big-picture thinking that matter most in your line of work.

To get started, here's a list of some of the best ways to use marketing automation for ecommerce, whether you're using Shopify, WooCommerce, or another platform.

Ecommerce Automation Software

There are several types of automation software you can use for your ecommerce business. The most popular tools are:

Shopify

One of the most popular ecommerce platforms, Shopify offers plenty of powerful productivity apps in its App Store. Many of these are designed for automation, including Arigato Automation, or "the app with a million uses," Shop Workflow Automation, and Stock Sync.

Shopify Flow

This ecommerce automation suite is available with Shopify Pro – which certainly isn't the cheapest (you'll want to be making over $1 million in annual revenue to justify it). It's workflow-based and makes it impressively simple to create automation both within Shopify and with other apps via seamless integrations. It includes automation templates that you can copy and adapt to easily get set up.

Shopify Flow automation templates are divided into buyer experience, customers, inventory and merchandising, loyalty, orders, promotions, and risk.

WooCommerce

If you're using WooCommerce to power your store on Wordpress, you also have a lot of options for automation. Most of these are powered by WooCommerce's huge number of extensions, which enable you to power up your WooCommerce site with premium features and integrations.

Other Software to Integrate With Your Ecommerce Platform

You can also use automation software on top of your ecommerce platform. These include:

• Email marketing automation tools, like Mailchimp to trigger emails to your customers
• Automation tools like ActiveCampaign to trigger workflows for internal process and communication with customers
• CRM tools with automation features, like HubSpot
• Help desk tools with automation features, like Freshdesk and Zendesk
• Accounting and invoicing tools like Wave Accounting, Xero or Quickbooks Online

Read on for 14 of the best ways to automate your ecommerce business, including features from your ecommerce platform as well as other automation tools you can easily keep in sync.

15 Ways to Automate Ecommerce Businesses

Customer Experience & Management Automation

1. Track and reward your most engaged customers.

Do you reward your best customers? Customer retention is valuable for all businesses, including ecommerce.

Turns out you can increase your profits anywhere from 25-95% by increasing your retention rates by just 5%.

To reward customer loyalty, you could automatically add a free gift or free delivery to orders over $100. With a tool like ActiveCampaign, you can also segment customers based on lifetime spend and send them automated emails with rewards inside.

2. Sync your customers to a Mailchimp list.

All of the top ecommerce platforms — including WooCommerce and Shopify — have native integrations with Mailchimp. So, if you're using the popular email marketing tool to send your newsletters and email marketing workflows, make sure to sync your accounts.

An integration with Mailchimp can automatically pass the email addresses of shoppers who show interest in your emails into a specified Mailchimp list, so you can keep them updated with your latest products and offers.

3. Gather feedback after a purchase.

Every ecommerce store knows how powerful reviews and honest feedback are. It can make or break your business. To encourage reviews, set up automated email workflows to send follow-up emails a certain amount of time after a purchase is made. Ask for honest feedback and share a link to where they can post their review.

4. Reach out to negative reviews.

If you receive an unfortunate 1-star review, make sure you respond to it. You can set up an automation to create a support ticket in your helpdesk software to make it easier to reach out quickly and make amends — or at least listen and understand what's happened.

5. Tag and segment customers based on buying behavior.

Segmentation can help you understand your customers and stay on top of the different individual needs they might have. With a CRM, you can tag or segment based on demographics (e.g. gender or location), lifetime order value, milestones, number of orders, or any subscriptions or memberships, for example.

Inventory Automation

6. Automate inventory management for low-stock items.

Running out of a product can mean missed income and frustrated customers. To avoid this, automate your inventory management so you know when a product is low in stock.

With Woocommerce, you can trigger low stock notifications (based on thresholds you set) and out-of-stock notifications. This way you can instantly know when a product needs reordering from your supplies.

Order Management Automation

7. Send abandoned cart emails.

75% of ecommerce shopping carts get abandoned. Abandoned cart reminders help you bring customers back to your site — and with automation, you don't have to do a thing.

Integrating your ecommerce software with a mailing provider is an easy way to send abandoned cart emails. You can also look at other native integrations between your ecommerce platform and transactional email providers.

8. Try dropshipping for passive income.

Did you know some ecommerce businesses automate order fulfillment and delivery? It's possible with dropshipping — a way to find products, add them to your online store, and ship them directly to your customers without holding any inventory or risk yourself.

Oberlo, acquired by Shopify in 2017, is one of the most popular dropshipping tools. As expected, it integrates neatly with Shopify and you can add dropshipped products to your existing Shopify store, or create a new one for your dropshipped products.

The main challenge with dropshipping is finding the products that match your store's branding and quality standards.

9. Print shipping labels and send out tracking numbers with one click.

By integrating WooCommerce with ShipStation, a single click can complete several time-consuming tasks:

• Sync your orders with ShipStation.
• Create and print shipping labels for your WooCommerce orders.
• Mark all orders as complete.
• Generate and send tracking numbers.

10. Send reminders to re-order consumables.

Do you sell food, health, or beauty products? Your customers might be interested in repurchasing consumables once they run out.

To let them know, set up automated workflows to send reminder emails for these products a certain time after purchase.

Marketing Automation

11. Nurture leads into customers with email marketing.

People don't always become customers right away. Your company will have its typical customer journey, with people spending time in research and consideration phases before deciding to hand you any money.

However, if someone has given you their email address and permission to contact them, you can nurture this process along with marketing content. Just make sure that anything you send them is top-quality and valuable, perhaps with discount codes or free gift offers.

12. Schedule social media posts automatically.

If social media takes up too much of your time, there are lots of tools out there to streamline processes.

Use the Shopify app, Post Studio ‑ Auto Posting, to automatically post products to your Facebook and Twitter pages every day.

Buffer is another app that lets you easily schedule messages ahead of time. It's simple to reschedule content that's performed well, too.

Business Management Automation

13. Add tasks to Trello, Asana, or Slack.

If you've used automation to find out when a product is low in stock or when a customer left a frustrated review, you will also want to notify your team so they can do something about it. Another perk of using automation is that you can notify your team on the internal platforms that you use most — like Trello, Asana or Slack.

If you're a Shopify user, Arigato Automation offers 100+ pre-built automation features including pushing data to Google Sheets, Slack messages, Trello cards, and more.

14. Choose a powerful help desk software.

As you scale your ecommerce business, it's important to make sure your customer service is covered. Implementing help desk software is one of the best ways to do this.

With a help desk platform, you're in the best position to centralize your customer support in one place and get a clear view of tickets from all channels. These tools also give you many options for improving your customer experience with automation, such as with bots and satisfaction surveys.

14 Ways to Automate Your Ecommerce Business was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

How to Create the Perfect Project Timeline [Template + Examples]

Piecing together a project timeline template usually involves a Google Doc and mediocre formatting skills. Then comes assigning tasks to teammates and promising to hit the agreed-upon delivery date. But a few weeks go by, and the timeline falls apart. Higher priorities pop up, and deadlines slip past without much progress.

Projects can fail for many reasons: a lack of support from leadership, unforeseen budget cuts, or overpromising outcomes. In fact, poor project management is more common than you think – only 55% of projects are completed on time.

But creating a timeline where everyone involved knows what they're working on and when it's due can help ensure your project doesn't creep past its original deadline. It's essential for keeping projects (and the people completing them) on track.

To make sure your next project stays on schedule, we'll cover how to set up a project timeline, the best templates to use, and a handful of examples to inspire your future scheduling.

Why Create a Project Timeline?

Time management is one of the top skills employers look for in candidates. Missed deadlines and rushed projects can set entire teams (and companies) behind schedule.

A structured project timeline offers more than brownie points from your boss. It can also:

• Bring leadership and structure to a project
• Outline what is being delivered, by when
• Share who is responsible for each task and sets expectations for the scope, quality, and delivery of work
• Show how the project outcome contributes to company goals
• Decrease risk by accounting for any changes to the project scope, budget, deliverables, or deadlines.

Ultimately, a project timeline makes it easier and more efficient to manage a project. But it's important to match the timeline structure to the project scope. Planning an editorial calendar for the quarter may take more time and effort than creating a marketing video for an upcoming product launch.

That's where the right template comes in.

Project Timeline Example

Without the right project timeline template, organizing a project can be a lot of manual work — not to mention the formatting mess once multiple people get their hands on it.

The ideal timeline brings direction to a project, yet is easily adaptable when changes arise. Here's a look at a project timeline for opening a new company office.

You can create a project timeline for any process that relies on a schedule (almost everything these days), like onboarding employees, handling a crisis, or planning social media campaigns. All you need to know is how to outline the steps of a project and the tasks required to complete each phase.

Let's get into the details.

How to Create a Project Timeline

Crafting the perfect project timeline takes strategy, organizational skills, and a whole lot of collaboration. You need buy-in from supporters and clear directives for everyone involved.

To get started, follow this step-by-step guide to set up a structured timeline — no matter your job, industry, or management level.

1. Write a project brief.

A project brief communicates how you will approach a project. It includes details on the goals, deliverables, timeline, tasks, process, people involved, and resources needed to take a project from start to finish.

Asana outlined the steps to create a simple, yet effective, project brief. You can use this free project plan template to outline the project's goals, roles and responsibilities, schedule, deliverables, budget, and more. It's a great starting point for any planning process.

Or if you need a more comprehensive overview that includes key messaging and distribution processes, a creative brief may be the right fit for your project.

2. List all tasks and action items.

Every task involved in achieving a project's objectives needs to go into the project timeline. After creating the brief, make a list of these tasks. You can start with large tasks and break them down into smaller to-dos.

Let's say you're responsible for creating a marketing video to launch your company's newest product. Your list may include the following:

• Establish project leads from each department
• Set project budget
• Find a video production company
• Layout the video storyboard
• Choose main features for video
• Write video script
• Capture video content
• Add in sound and background music
• Add animations and graphics
• Edit video
• Write announcement copy
• Craft marketing campaign
• Create clips for social sharing
• Get video and marketing assets approved

Once you have the major milestones down, break down each task into smaller pieces. For example, choosing a video production company involves:

• Research video production companies
• Curate a list of production companies
• Get quotes from each production company
• Compare quotes and narrow down options
• Meet with the selected companies
• Choose a production company
• Finalize the contract

3. Connect dependencies.

In a project, certain tasks can't be started until another is complete. These tasks are called dependencies. For example, a video can't be filmed until the storyboard is finalized. And the storyboard can't be finalized until the video theme is chosen.

Mapping out dependencies helps you solidify the order of each task and decide who's responsible for what. Everyone will know what part of the project they're working on, which tasks must be completed before their own, and who to contact for the deliverables they need.

Here's a look at how dependencies can play out in a project timeline.

Image Source

In the example, you can see that hiring a caterer has to happen before finalizing the lunch menu. But other tasks, like finding a DJ and deciding on an event theme, can happen at the same time. So as you map out each task, you'll have to see which steps can overlap and which need to wait for others.

4. Estimate the time it will take to complete each task.

Once you figure out the sequence of tasks, you need to figure out how much time each will take. Estimate as best you can. That way, it'll be easier to create the project roadmap and understand the project's overall time frame.

As you go, make sure to consider the other projects and priorities your team has going on. A designer may be able to come up with a rough draft of video animations in one week, but if they're wrapping up another project, they may not be able to start on yours for another two weeks.

Being mindful of your team's time will make it easier to put together a reasonable, reliable timeline.

5. Create the project timeline.

Build your timeline by organizing your tasks from the first to the final step. Make any necessary adjustments to the task times, add milestones, and solidify the deadline. If your team works with project management software, organize the timeline and tasks so it's ready to share after the project kickoff meeting.

You can save time during this step by using one of the project timeline templates below. It's simple to customize each and avoid the extra work of creating your own from scratch.

6. Share the timeline with the project team.

Whew, your timeline is complete! Now, you have to share it with stakeholders. This includes everyone who is involved in the project. You've already listed these people out in your brief (during step one), so it's time to share your clear path forward for the project with them.

It's a good idea to hold a project kickoff meeting with both stakeholders and individual contributors so everyone starts on the same page. You can communicate the project goals, deliverables, roles, and deadlines — without going into an overwhelming amount of detail. From there, you'll want to schedule time with the project's immediate contributors to chat specifics and answer any questions before the work begins.

Need help visualizing the entire project? It can help to include a timeline graphic like the one below to give everyone a sense of the overall time frame. You can add or remove steps, depending on the complexity of your project.

Image Source

7. Adapt as you go.

Remember how just over half of projects are finished on time? Roadblocks and setbacks are inevitable in every project. So if your team runs into a delay, you'll have to understand the impact and adjust the timeline if necessary.

While it's possible to make up for delays without changing the final deadline, it's your job as the project owner to update stakeholders on the project's progress. Reporting a minor issue (like a coworker being out sick for a few days) isn't always necessary to higher-ups. But if it's a major roadblock that requires an extreme adjustment to the timeline (like a core contributor leaving the team), you have to communicate a new timeline to stakeholders.

Change is part of every company, so don't panic if you have to adjust your timeline. It's better to be transparent about the scope of work and timeline than keep people in the dark until the deadline hits. The earlier you adjust to change, the easier it will be to get back on track.

Project Timeline Examples

Visualizing a project makes it simple to understand what needs to happen from start to finish. Whether you need a template for a product launch or campaign meeting, these well-designed project timeline templates are perfect for your next planning session.

Employee Onboarding Timeline

Product Launch Timeline

Crisis Response Project Timeline

Historical Timeline

Task Project Timeline

Meeting Project Timeline

Need as many templates as you can get? Download all of these project timelines (and more) for free. With the right timelines in hand, it's easy to keep everyone up to date and informed. Now all you have to do is make sure your projects stay on schedule. Good luck!

How to Create the Perfect Project Timeline [Template + Examples] was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

The Ultimate List of 394 Email Spam Trigger Words to Avoid in 2021

After spending hours creating an email marketing campaign, the last thing you want to do is get blocked by your recipients’ spam filters. Luckily, by avoiding common email spam trigger words, you can successfully prevent your emails from getting routed to spam folders.

Let’s take a look at what spam trigger words are, what gets emails sent to spam, and which spam words you should avoid when creating your email campaigns.

Spam filters can be triggered for a variety of reasons, causing your email to skip recipients' inboxes and land straight in their spam inbox. One of the easiest ways to avoid spam filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email's subject line.

Trigger words are known to cause problems and increase the chances of your email getting caught in a spam trap. By avoiding these words in your email subject lines, you can dramatically increase your chances of getting beyond the filters.

Spam trigger words alone aren’t enough to send your email to spam. For instance, if you are offering a 3-for-1 discount sale, you can still advertise that in your emails and not get sent to spam. It’s important to understand all the factors that come into play when emails get identified as spam.

What causes emails to go to spam?

Email providers look for a number of factors when deciding whether to automatically send your emails to spam. If you’ve made it on an email blacklist, that means you’ve repeatedly sent emails to recipients who haven’t signed up for your email list.

Your emails can get sent to spam if you:

• Don’t include an unsubscribe button in your email
• Send poorly-designed emails with broken or glitchy code
• Address your recipient by “my friend” or “dear” (or not by their name)
• Buy email lists online and mass-send messages to email addresses that don’t exist (resulting in a high bounce rate)
• Use all-caps text and extreme punctuation (!!!!! or ?????)
• Include strangely formatted fonts (𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘)
• Provide links to fraudulent websites

Email providers only want to deliver emails from high-reputation senders. To be a high-reputation sender, do the following:

• Include an unsubscribe button
• Design your emails with clean code using a tool such as Marketing Hub
• Personalize your emails with the recipient’s first name
• Only email those who’ve subscribed to your email list (if you don’t have any, you should learn to naturally increase your email list subscribers)
• Keep your email deliverability high
• Keep the text free of odd formatting and extraneous punctuation
• Only link out to reputable websites

If you meet these criteria, you can get away with using “classic” email spam words in your subject line and your email. The text surrounding the spam phrase also matters, as does your history as an email sender. If email providers don’t have a reason to mistrust you, they simply won’t.

Email Spam Words to Avoid

When writing your email subject lines, you want to avoid:

• Over-sensationalizing
• Over-promising
• Using strange formatting to “stand out” in the recipient’s inbox

Next time you sit down to write an email subject line, consult the exhaustive list below. In fact, you might want to bookmark this list so you can refer back to it every time you craft an email subject line.

Commerce

1. As seen on
2. Buy
3. Buy direct
4. Buying judgments
5. Clearance
6. Order
7. Order status
8. Orders shipped by shopper

Personal

1. Dig up dirt on friends
2. Meet singles
3. Score with babes
4. XXX
5. Near you

Employment

1. Additional income
2. Be your own boss
3. Compete for your business
4. Double your
5. Earn $
6. Earn extra cash
7. Earn per week
8. Expect to earn
9. Extra income
10. Home based
11. Home employment
12. Homebased business
13. Income from home
14. Make $
15. Make money
16. Money making
17. Online biz opportunity
18. Online degree
19. Opportunity
20. Potential earnings
21. University diplomas
22. While you sleep
23. Work at home
24. Work from home

Financial - General

1. $$$
2. Affordable
3. Bargain
4. Beneficiary
5. Best price
6. Big bucks
7. Cash
8. Cash bonus
9. Cashcashcash
10. Cents on the dollar
11. Cheap
12. Check
13. Claims
14. Collect
15. Compare rates
16. Cost
17. Credit
18. Credit bureaus
19. Discount
20. Earn
21. Easy terms
22. F r e e
23. Fast cash
24. For just $XXX
25. Hidden assets
26. hidden charges
27. Income
28. Incredible deal
29. Insurance
30. Investment
31. Loans
32. Lowest price
33. Million dollars
34. Money
35. Money back
36. Mortgage
37. Mortgage rates
38. No cost
39. No fees
40. One hundred percent free
41. Only $
42. Pennies a day
43. Price
44. Profits
45. Pure profit
46. Quote
47. Refinance
48. Save $
49. Save big money
50. Save up to
51. Serious cash
52. Subject to credit
53. They keep your money — no refund!
54. Unsecured credit
55. Unsecured debt
56. US dollars
57. Why pay more?

Financial - Business

1. Accept credit cards
2. Cards accepted
3. Check or money order
4. Credit card offers
5. Explode your business
6. Full refund
7. Investment decision
8. No credit check
9. No hidden Costs
10. No investment
11. Requires initial investment
12. Sent in compliance
13. Stock alert
14. Stock disclaimer statement
15. Stock pick

Financial - Personal

1. Avoice bankruptcy
2. Calling creditors
3. Collect child support
4. Consolidate debt and credit
5. Consolidate your debt
6. Eliminate bad credit
7. Eliminate debt
8. Financially independent
9. Get out of debt
10. Get paid
11. Lower interest rate
12. Lower monthly payment
13. Lower your mortgage rate
14. Lowest insurance rates
15. Pre-approved
16. Refinance home
17. Social security number
18. Your income

General

1. Acceptance
2. Accordingly
3. Avoid
4. Chance
5. Dormant
6. Freedom
7. Here
8. Hidden
9. Home
10. Leave
11. Lifetime
12. Lose
13. Maintained
14. Medium
15. Miracle
16. Never
17. Passwords
18. Problem
19. Remove
20. Reverses
21. Sample
22. Satisfaction
23. Solution
24. Stop
25. Success
26. Teen
27. Wife

Greetings

1. Dear [email/friend/somebody]
2. Friend
3. Hello

Marketing

1. Ad
2. Auto email removal
3. Bulk email
4. Click
5. Click below
6. Click here
7. Click to remove
8. Direct email
9. Direct marketing
10. Email harvest
11. Email marketing
12. Form
13. Increase sales
14. Increase traffic
15. Increase your sales
16. Internet market
17. Internet marketing
18. Marketing
19. Marketing solutions
20. Mass email
21. Member
22. Month trial offer
23. More Internet Traffic
24. Multi level marketing
25. Notspam
26. One time mailing
27. Online marketing
28. Open
29. Opt in
30. Performance
31. Removal instructions
32. Sale
33. Sales
34. Search engine listings
35. Search engines
36. Subscribe
37. The following form
38. This isn't junk
39. This isn't spam
40. Undisclosed recipient
41. Unsubscribe
42. Visit our website
43. We hate spam
44. Web traffic
45. Will not believe your eyes

Medical

1. Cures baldness
2. Diagnostic
3. Fast Viagra delivery
4. Human growth hormone
5. Life insurance
6. Lose weight
7. Lose weight spam
8. Medicine
9. No medical exams
10. Online pharmacy
11. Removes wrinkles
12. Reverses aging
13. Stop snoring
14. Valium
15. Viagra
16. Vicodin
17. Weight loss
18. Xanax

Numbers

1. #1
2. 100% free
3. 100% satisfied
4. 4U
5. 50% off
6. Billion
7. Billion dollars
8. Join millions
9. Join millions of Americans
10. Million
11. One hundred percent guaranteed
12. Thousands

Offers

1. Being a member
2. Billing address
3. Call
4. Cannot be combined with any other offer
5. Confidentially on all orders
6. Deal
7. Financial freedom
8. Gift certificate
9. Giving away
10. Guarantee
11. Have you been turned down?
12. If only it were that easy
13. Important information regarding
14. In accordance with laws
15. Long distance phone offer
16. Mail in order form
17. Message contains
18. Name brand
19. Nigerian
20. No age restrictions
21. No catch
22. No claim forms
23. No disappointment
24. No experience
25. No gimmick
26. No inventory
27. No middleman
28. No obligation
29. No purchase necessary
30. No questions asked
31. No selling
32. No strings attached
33. No-obligation
34. Not intended
35. Obligation
36. Off shore
37. Offer
38. Per day
39. Per week
40. Priority mail
41. Prize
42. Prizes
43. Produced and sent out
44. Reserves the right
45. Shopping spree
46. Stuff on sale
47. Terms and conditions
48. The best rates
49. They’re just giving it away
50. Trial
51. Unlimited
52. Unsolicited
53. Vacation
54. Vacation offers
55. Warranty
56. We honor all
57. Weekend getaway
58. What are you waiting for?
59. Who really wins?
60. Win
61. Winner
62. Winning
63. Won
64. You are a winner!
65. You have been selected
66. You’re a Winner!

Calls-to-Action

1. Cancel at any time
2. Compare
3. Copy accurately
4. Get
5. Give it away
6. Print form signature
7. Print out and fax
8. See for yourself
9. Sign up free today

Free

1. Free
2. Free access
3. Free cell phone
4. Free consultation
5. Free DVD
6. Free gift
7. Free grant money
8. Free hosting
9. Free installation
10. Free Instant
11. Free investment
12. Free leads
13. Free membership
14. Free money
15. Free offer
16. Free preview
17. Free priority mail
18. Free quote
19. Free sample
20. Free trial
21. Free website

Descriptions/Adjectives

1. All natural
2. All new
3. Amazing
4. Certified
5. Congratulations
6. Drastically reduced
7. Fantastic deal
8. For free
9. Guaranteed
10. It’s effective
11. Outstanding values
12. Promise you
13. Real thing
14. Risk free
15. Satisfaction guaranteed

Sense of Urgency

1. Access
2. Act now!
3. Apply now
4. Apply online
5. Call free
6. Call now
7. Can't live without
8. Do it today
9. Don't delete
10. Don't hesitate
11. For instant access
12. For Only
13. For you
14. Get it now
15. Get started now
16. Great offer
17. Info you requested
18. Information you requested
19. Instant
20. Limited time
21. New customers only
22. Now
23. Now only
24. Offer expires
25. Once in lifetime
26. One time
27. Only
28. Order now
29. Order today
30. Please read
31. Special promotion
32. Supplies are limited
33. Take action now
34. Time limited
35. Urgent
36. While supplies last

Nouns

1. Addresses on CD
2. Beverage
3. Bonus
4. Brand new pager
5. Cable converter
6. Casino
7. Celebrity
8. Copy DVDs
9. Laser printer
10. Legal
11. Luxury car
12. New domain extensions
13. Phone
14. Rolex
15. Stainless steel

Use Spam Trigger Words Sparingly and Within Context

So long as you use email marketing best practices and use spam trigger words within context, you can bypass spam filters. Spam filters have become much more sophisticated in recent years. Using one or two phrases won’t hurt you, but make sure to only email customers who want to hear from you and to always personalize your emails. Doing so will optimize the results of your campaign and keep you out of spam folders.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The Ultimate List of 394 Email Spam Trigger Words to Avoid in 2021 was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

How to Understand & Calculate Statistical Significance [Example]

Have you ever presented results from a marketing campaign and been asked, “But are these results statistically significant?” As data-driven marketers, we’re not only asked to measure the results of our marketing campaigns but also to demonstrate the validity of the data — exactly what statistical significance is.

While there are several free tools out there to calculate statistical significance for you (HubSpot even has one here), it’s helpful to understand what they’re calculating and what it all means. Below, we’ll geek out on the numbers using a specific example of statistical significance to help you understand why it’s crucial for marketing success.

In marketing, you want your results to be statistically significant because it means that you’re not wasting money on campaigns that won’t bring desired results. Marketers often run statistical significance tests before launching campaigns to test if specific variables are more successful at bringing results than others.

Statistical Significance Example

Say you’re going to be running an ad campaign on Facebook, but you want to ensure you use an ad that’s most likely to bring desired results. So, you run an A/B test for 48 hours with ad A as the control variable, and B as the variation. These are the results I get:

Ad	Impressions	Conversions
Ad A	6,000	430
Ad B	5869	560

Even though we can see based on the numbers that ad B received more conversions, you want to be confident that the difference in conversions is significant, and not due to random chance. If I plug these numbers into a chi-squared test calculator (more on that later), my p-value is 0.0, meaning that my results are significant, and there is a difference in performance between ad A and ad B that is not due to chance.

When I run my actual campaign, I would want to use ad B.

If you’re anything like me, you need more explanation as to what p-value and 0.0 mean, so we’ll go through an in-depth example below.

1. Determine what you'd like to test.

First, decide what you’d like to test. This could be comparing conversion rates on two landing pages with different images, click-through rates on emails with different subject lines, or conversion rates on different call-to-action buttons at the end of a blog post. The choices are endless.

My advice would be to keep it simple; pick a piece of content that you want to create two different variations of and decide your goal — a better conversion rate or more views are good places to start.

You can certainly test additional variations or even create a multivariate test, but, for this example, we’ll stick to two variations of a landing page with the goal being increasing conversion rates. If you’d like to learn more about A/B testing and multivariate tests, check out "The Critical Difference Between A/B and Multivariate Tests."

2. Determine your hypothesis.

Before I start collecting data, I find it helpful to state my hypothesis at the beginning of the test and determine the degree of confidence I want to test. Since I’m testing out a landing page and want to see if one performs better, I hypothesize that there is a relationship between the landing page the visitors receive and their conversion rate.

3. Start collecting your data.

Now that you’ve determined what you’d like to test, it’s time to start collecting your data. Since you’re likely running this test to determine what piece of content is best to use in the future, you’ll want to pull a sample size. For a landing page, that might mean picking a set amount of time to run your test (e.g., make your page live for three days).

For something like an email, you might pick a random sample of your list to randomly send variations of your emails to. Determining the right sample size can be tricky, and the right sample size will vary between each test. As a general rule of thumb, you want the expected value for each variation to be greater than 5. (We’ll cover expected values further down.)

4. Calculate Chi-Squared results.

There are several different statistical tests that you can run to measure the significance of your data, and picking one depends on what you’re trying to test and the type of data you’ll collect. In most cases, you’ll use a Chi-Squared test since the data is discrete.

Discrete is a fancy way of saying that your experiment can produce a finite number of results. For example, a visitor will either convert or not convert; there aren’t varying degrees of conversion for a single visitor.

You can test based on varying degrees of confidence (sometimes referred to as the alpha of the test). If you want the requirement for reaching statistical significance to be high, your alpha will be lower. You may have seen statistical significance reported in terms of confidence.

For example, "The results are statistically significant with 95% confidence." In this scenario, the alpha was .05 (confidence is calculated as one minus the alpha), meaning there's a one in 20 chance of making an error in the stated relationship.

After I’ve collected the data, I put it in a chart to make it easy to organize. Since I’m testing out two different variations (A and B) and there are two possible outcomes (converted, did not convert), I’ll have a 2x2 chart. I’ll total each column and row so I can easily see the results in aggregate.

Once I’ve created my chart, the next step is to run the equation using the chi-squared formula.

Statistical Significance Formula

The image below is the chi-squared formula for statistical significance:

In the equation,

• Σ means sum,
• O = observed, actual values,
• E = expected values.

When running the equation, you calculate everything after the Σ for each pair of values and then sum (add) them all up.

5. Calculate your expected values.

Now, I’ll calculate what the expected values are. If there were no relationship between what landing page visitors saw and their conversion rate in the example above, we would expect to see the same conversion rates with versions A and B. From the totals, we can see that 1,945 people converted out of the 4,935 total visitors, or roughly 39% of visitors.

To calculate the expected frequencies (E in the chi-squared formula) for each version of the landing page, we can multiply the row total for that cell by the column total and divide it by the total number of visitors. In this example, to find the expected value of conversion on version A, I would use the following equation:

(1945*2401)/4935 = 946

6. See how your results differ from what you expected.

To calculate Chi-Square, I compare the observed frequencies (O in the chi-squared equation) to the expected frequencies (E in the chi-squared equation). This comparison is done by subtracting the observed from the expected value, squaring the result, and dividing it by the expected frequency value.

Essentially, I’m trying to see how different my actual results are from what we might expect. Squaring the difference amplifies the effects of the difference, and dividing by what’s expected normalizes the results. As a refresher, The equation looks like this: (observed - expected)*2)/expected

7. Find your sum.

I then sum the four results to get my Chi-Square number. In this case, it’s .95. To see whether or not the conversion rates for my landing pages are different with statistical significance, I compare this with the value from a Chi-Squared distribution table based on my alpha (in this case, .05) and the degrees of freedom.

Degrees of freedom are based on how many variables you have. With a 2x2 table like in this example, the degree of freedom is 1.

In this case, the Chi-Square value would need to be equal to or exceed 3.84 for the results to be statistically significant. Since .95 is less than 3.84, my results are not statistically different. This means that there is no relationship between what version of landing page a visitor receives and the conversion rate with statistical significance.

8. Report on statistical significance to your teams.

After running your experiment, the next step is to report your results to your teams to ensure everyone is on the same page about next steps. So, continuing with the previous example, I would need to let my teams know that the type of landing page we use in our upcoming campaign will not impact our conversion rate because our test results were not significant.

If results were significant, I would inform my teams that landing page version A performed better than the others, and we should opt to use that one in our upcoming campaign.

Why Statistical Significance Is Significant

You may be asking yourself why this is important if you can just use a free tool to run the calculation. Understanding how statistical significance is calculated can help you determine how to best test results from your own experiments.

Many tools use a 95% confidence rate, but for your experiments, it might make sense to use a lower confidence rate if you don’t need the test to be as stringent.

Understanding the underlying calculations also helps you explain why your results might be significant to people who aren't already familiar with statistics.

If you’d like to download the spreadsheet I used in this example so you can see the calculations on your own, click here.

Editor's Note: This blog post was originally published in April 2013, but was updated in September 2021 for freshness and comprehensiveness.

How to Understand & Calculate Statistical Significance [Example] was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

The Ultimate Guide to Succession Planning

At one of my first jobs out of college, my manager admitted that my professional growth "wasn't a priority." I knew I wasn't in a leadership role that required succession planning, but the admission still stunned me. Without support for career development, I wound up leaving the company.

This situation may seem dramatic, but it points to the importance of having a succession plan in place. Of course, senior leadership roles take precedence because these can create a larger vacuum if the position is left unfilled. But succession planning can (and should) extend to all leaders across a company.

Developing a succession plan can set your company up for smooth transitions when leaders resign or accept a promotion. It can have a major impact on employee morale and can position your team to skillfully handle future business challenges.

But you don't want to wait until you absolutely need a successor. At that point, you're scrambling and may choose the wrong person. Let's look at the ins and outs of succession planning so your team is prepared for any transition.

What is succession planning?

Succession planning is a strategic process for identifying high-potential employees and taking steps to prepare them for future leadership positions. It helps your business develop and retain the talent pipeline so you can quickly fill vacant leadership roles.

Some succession plans look ahead 12 to 36 months for when a leader retires, steps down, advances, or leaves. Others, including CEO succession plans, look years into the future to secure the next several generations of leaders. We'll cover the specifics of C-suite transitions later on. But all succession planning has similar benefits for thinking ahead and identifying what you want in a successor.

Why is succession planning important?

In the Global Leadership Forecast 2021 report, 11% of surveyed organizations said they have a "strong" or "very strong" leadership bench — the lowest reported in the past decade.

The benefits of strong leadership are apparent. It improves employee turnover, ensures the execution of goals, and contributes to the company's survival. So if a crucial leader leaves, a succession plan can help ensure the role is filled and your company continues to thrive. But that's not the only upside.

Benefits Of Succession Planning

• Finding and developing people for future leadership roles allows you to promote from within. These employees have organizational knowledge and internal relationships that outside hires lack.
• Letting employees know that you're investing in them is a huge morale boost. It can also increase motivation and loyalty to the company.
• Training employees for leadership roles forces you to identify the skills, knowledge, practices, and relationships needed for each role in your succession plan. This can attract new talent, retain current employees, and keep you competitive.
• Hiring for highly specialized roles isn't easy. Succession planning helps you find people with unique competencies when it comes time to replace the current employees.

Currently, leaders looking to develop skills outside of their daily work want more coaching and development assignments, in addition to assessment and formal training. Succession planning is the perfect way to formalize training for both present and future leaders.

Succession Planning Best Practices

Succession planning isn't simple. But if you consider these best practices as you choose successors, your company will be well-equipped to manage transitions and unexpected changes.

Formalize a Plan

The earlier you set a succession plan, the better. You don't want to risk a leadership vacuum that leaves teams feeling unsupported. That can quickly waterfall into an entire team or department leaving, especially if the leader is particularly strong and has a close relationship with their direct reports. Once you have a succession plan, write it down. Then, make it clear there's a plan in place for when the inevitable transitions happen.

Stay Dynamic

Volatility is common at every company. People move cities, find new jobs, and retire. Your succession plan should be able to adapt to change. Instead of creating a plan and only revisiting it when the time comes to fill a role, see the plan as an evolving process that needs to be constantly updated.

Evaluate Talent

Part of a fluid succession plan is taking the time to assess employees' interests, skills, performance, and opportunities. This can be done through 360-degree feedback, weekly check-ins with managers, informal training, or tools like the nine-box grid. The goal is to get an idea of people's strengths and weaknesses, career goals, and growth opportunities so you know who may be the right fit for leadership roles.

Communicate Openly

Communication builds trust, which makes it easier to set expectations and ensure everyone is on the same page. As you build a succession plan, have honest conversations with employees. Find out where people want to be, and tell them where they're currently at. The whole point is to make your plan a reality, and successors will appreciate your openness when the time comes to offer them a role.

Make Diversity and Inclusion a Priority

Companies with women in leadership roles experience almost 50% higher profit and share performance. And since women, especially women of color, have been most affected by the pandemic, it's wise to consider gender ratios in any succession plan — including the 2SLGBTQI+ communities.

Succession Planning Example

When asked, a whopping 61% of organizations said they didn't have a direct report who could step into their CMO role tomorrow. That's a bad sign for C-suite succession plans. Without a strategy to replace leaders, a company can quickly go downhill.

To avoid chaos, here are a few examples of how succession planning can play out:

McDonald's Smooth CEO Succession

How does a multi-billion dollar company thrive after losing two CEOs in one year? They had a concentrated effort to develop high-potential employees and created a backup plan for their succession plan.

Coca-Cola's Failed CEO Succession

The repercussions of a poor succession plan can affect a company for decades. See the implications of Doug Ivester's term as CEO and the stakeholder concerns that caused his resignation after two years.

Succession Planning Steps

 

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1. Make a plan for your plan.

This step is all about defining the goals of your succession plan and aligning with everyone involved. For some companies, this will mean meeting with your board to outline strategic priorities. For others, it will require meeting with senior leaders to define what you're looking for in a successor.

You'll be ready to move on to the next step once you:

• Define the roles, skills, core competencies, and experience required for a successor.
• Gather information and feedback on the above from your team or experts within your network.
• Forecast your company's needs. Consider turnover trends, retirement dates, compensation strategies, and management training.
• Update your job descriptions and any leadership models to reflect the information you've gathered. You want to be clear about your expectations before looking for candidates.

2. Identify potential candidates.

Using the succession profiles and job descriptions you've created, you're ready to seek out candidates. Make sure your approach is easy to repeat and introduces as little bias as possible. It can be helpful to get support from the HR team, who can share the tools needed to engage candidates and help facilitate the process.

To identify candidates, you can:

• Look for leaders who develop others, follow through on projects, take action to support the company vision, and have strong leadership skills.
• Get insight into each candidate's goals, disposition, and potential by holding interviews, creating surveys, and setting up focus groups.
• Ask people for ideas on how to improve succession and leadership to get buy-in and discover who's engaged with the process.

3. Inform candidates.

There's a great debate on whether or not companies should let employees know they're succession candidates. But informing people of their potential will not only motivate them—it will prevent them from wondering about their future with the company. A great candidate may jump ship if they're in the dark and think they can find a better opportunity elsewhere.

Instead, communicate your intentions about the positions, people, and planning. Just keep your expectations incredibly clear on the included roles and people involved.

4. Set up professional development efforts.

Your company likely has programs in place for onboarding and training employees. But development is about creating opportunities for people to get experience beyond their current role and skillset. This is especially important for team members who can get caught in a specialist silo.

Once you identify candidates who you want to develop, you'll want to figure out the specific skills and knowledge they'll need to move to the next level. This often involves an individual development plan, continuous feedback, mentoring or coaching, formal training, and open conversations between the employee and their manager.

5. Do a trial run.

As potential successors accelerate their growth, they'll become true contenders for leadership roles. This is the ideal time to start trial runs to test their knowledge and expose them to various aspects of a position. Exposing candidates to real-world situations can highlight what effective leadership looks like and give them insight into overall company goals.

There are a variety of ways to get candidates involved, just choose the method that makes the most sense for the role.

• Job shadow a senior leader to learn about their day-to-day tasks
• Take on responsibilities when their manager is away
• Invite them to sit in on higher-level meetings
• Bring them into discussions on strategy, execution, or company forecasting
• Involve them in the hiring process for junior candidates
• Give them more responsibility on projects or involve them in cross-functional work

6. Adjust your hiring strategy.

Eventually, the time will come when you extend an offer to a potential candidate. And you'll need someone else to fill their role. Luckily, the successor can use their new leadership skills to help interview or train the person filling their position. This can be an employee a few levels down or a new hire.

That's why it's important to adjust your hiring strategy to account for successor's roles. Without them, your plan won't go as smoothly and their team will likely be scrambling to fill the gap.

7. Implement the plan.

Succession planning is a complex process with multiple short- and long-term layers. But eventually, it will be time to make the transition. Make an announcement and celebrate the succession. This will show employees that your company prides itself on strong leadership and has a plan for everyone's career development.

Sometimes, a more gradual transition is needed. Family businesses often struggle with smooth succession planning because of familial relationships, emotions, and intertwined histories. In this case, a clear succession plan based on business needs is exceptionally crucial to ensure the company's continued success

CEO Succession Planning

Only one in three CEOs rank their company's leadership quality as "very good" or "excellent." That's a low score for such a high-stakes business priority — especially considering the majority of CEO successors are internal hires.

Harvard Business Review (HBR) ranks CEO succession as "arguably the most important decision a board can make." Replacing a CEO needs to involve a long-term, well-devised plan that's linked to both short and long-term company priorities.

CEO succession planning can follow similar steps to employee succession planning, but there are specific considerations for this top-level role. HBR outlines the following tips for developing a CEO successor:

• A candidate's competencies, personal attributes, and experiences need to be connected to business priorities. A charismatic senior leader may seem like the top pick, but a company may need a successor with expert-level technical skills in addition to social skills.
• Think several generations ahead instead of focusing on the immediate successor. Succession is a long game, so you want to position it as a continuous process to develop top talent.
• Identify seven potential CEOs in your company across all generations. This can take the stress off of each CEO transition and help keep your talent pipeline top-notch.
• Train CEO candidates through a combination of on-the-job experience, executive coaching, education, mentoring, and cross-functional training.

Developing talent to take on the CEO role will require time and effort from high-level stakeholders. But it's absolutely worthwhile to prevent the vacuum this leadership role can leave if succession is poorly managed.

If a board is involved in the process, HBR recommends using board meetings to combine strategy sessions with talent development. That way, stakeholders can make sure strategy changes reflect the skills needed for potential successors.

Employee Succession Planning

Succession planning extends to employees in all roles across a company. Viewing it this way, rather than saving succession plans for senior leaders, helps you identify high-potential employees at all levels. You can then take steps to develop them into leaders who are able to take on additional responsibilities when a role opens up.

When looking for successors, keep an eye out for employees who are interested in learning new skills, are comfortable with change, can adapt to uncertainty and new leadership, and can manage various work environments. All potential successors should be motivated and engaged in the process because they have a chance to grow their knowledge and take on more challenging, rewarding roles.

When you see a path for an employee's growth, they'll see it too. So the next time a key leader steps down or a new director position is created, you'll know just the right people to recruit for the role.

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