You don’t need to be an email marketing expert to know that you don’t want people to unsubscribe from your emails.

However, an unsubscribe isn’t the end of the world. In fact, it can actually serve as a helpful signal. For example, if you notice that your unsubscribe rate is starting to climb, it might mean that you’re overloading your audience or failing to target them with sufficiently relevant content.

Your email send time can also have a big impact on your recipients’ decision to unsubscribe. By examining the time of day and day of week that are most successful for your campaigns, as well as the timing of unsubscribes, you can gain a more holistic view of your audience’s behavioral patterns.

At Seventh Sense, a HubSpot integrated time optimization and analytics platform, we recently completed a study that analyzed over 150 million campaign events and 100,000 unsubscribe events. This study helped us identify the time of day, day of week, and month of year in which each contact unsubscribed.

After correlating this timing information with industry segments, we put together the following infographic to highlight some standout trends. Check it out.

Biting your nails. Chewing with your mouth open. Speaking before you think. This is the kind of stuff we usually think about when we think of “bad habits.”

But what about the bad habits that are hurting your performance at work?

There’s a whole host of things many of us are guilty of doing every single day that research shows ends up really hurting our productivity. And the more aware you are of how these things are affecting your productivity, the more proactive you can be at taking responsibility for your choices.

So, ask yourself: Are you guilty of any of these bad habits? If so, it may be time to cut it out.

12 Bad Habits That Are Making You Less Productive

1) Rushing in the morning.

We all have those mornings where you’re rushing your morning routine and barely have time to brush your teeth before running out the door to make it to the office on time. It’s when the morning rush becomes a habit that there can be negative consequences to your sense of well being and your overall productivity.

When you start off your day in a frenzied state of mind, you’re not giving your brain any time to decompress, reset, and prepare for the day. Instead, you’re pumping it with adrenaline first thing in the morning, which can cause you to crash later on.

If your mornings lack time and space to breathe, try waking up 10–30 minutes earlier and starting off with a quick meditation session. According to a 2012 study, people who mediated “stayed on tasks longer and made fewer task switches, as well as reporting less negative feedback after task performance.” Try the free app Headspace to start: It gives you 10 free guided meditation sessions, with the option of signing up for a monthly subscription.

2) Skipping breakfast.

I’ve never been able to skip breakfast, but I know plenty of people who do. Whether you blame it on being too rushed (see #1) or just not feeling hungry, eating a well-rounded breakfast just isn’t a priority for a lot of people.

But it should be. Why? Because, technically, when you’re sleeping, you’re fasting — meaning you wake up with low blood sugar. That low blood sugar is exactly why many of us feel tired, apathetic, and even a little irritable first thing in the morning. It’s not you; it’s your inherent need for the sustenance that, you know, keeps you up and running as a human.

What about replacing food with coffee? Sure, the caffeine rush from your morning coffee can help hide the symptoms of low blood sugar — but it won’t satisfy your need for food. In fact, it’ll likely cause you to crash later in the day, which can really harm your productivity.

Prioritizing a healthy breakfast is a key to boosting productivity for the rest of your day. Try healthy breakfast foods that have the fiber, protein, vitamins, and minerals that’ll give you energy. Foods rich in vitamin B — like oatmeal, bananas, pineapple, and avocados — can help improve your concentration. Avoid breakfast foods with added sugar like sugary cereal, donuts, Pop Tarts, and even bagels.

3) Tackling the easy stuff first.

It can be very tempting to get all the easy tasks out of the way first before tackling the tough stuff. This is especially true when you’re dreading that challenging task. You push it further and further down your to-do list … until you’ve left it untouched for days or even weeks.

But tackling the most difficult tasks on your to-do list early on in the day is actually better for your overall productivity. Researchers have found that willpower is a finite resource that steadily decreases throughout the day, according to the book The Willpower Instinct. So your brain is much better at handling the hardest tasks at the beginning of the day when you’re more focused.

Mornings also tend to lend fewer distractions, making it easier for you to get things done. My colleague James Gilbert suggests that folks “take advantage of morning hours to crank through meaty projects without distractions, and save any calls or virtual meetings for the afternoon.”

Creating a to-do list is the easiest way to prioritize tasks effectively. Everyone has their own to-do list style, so check out this list of the best to-do list tools and apps out there and see which ones works best for you.

4) Checking and responding to emails as they come in.

Email is supposed to help us do our work, not distract us from our work. So why does it always feel like a productivity suck?

In an effort to stay on top of a constantly overflowing inbox, it can be tempting to check and respond to every email as soon as it comes in. Receiving email notifications in real time certainly doesn’t help. But constantly switching tasks between work and email can really hurt your productivity.

Image Credit: Fuze & Visual.ly

To help you focus in chunks of time, turn off those pesky email alerts and limit checking your email to specified breaks.

To turn off notifications in Gmail: Click the gear icon and choose “Settings. In the “General” tab, scroll down to the “Desktop Notifications” section. From there, select “Mail notifications off” and click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page. 

If you’re worried about missing an important email, try selecting “Important mail notifications on” and Gmail will notify you for emails it thinks are important to you based on past activity. 

To turn off alerts in Outlook: On the “Tools” menu, click “Options.” Open the “Preferences” tab and click “E-mail Options,” then “Advanced E-mail Options.” Under “When new items arrive in my Inbox,” clear the “Display a New Mail Desktop Alert (default Inbox only) check box.

Pro tip: Even when you’re checking email, you don’t have to respond to every single one right away. If you’re worried about forgetting about email, I highly recommend using Andreas Klinger’s method for triaging email in Gmail, which you can read about here.

The premise behind his method is to triage emails by urgent emails that need action/reply, not-so-urgent emails that eventually need action/reply, emails that are awaiting reply, and emails you delegate to someone else.

5) Checking Twitter, Facebook, and your other social feeds.

The whole “easily distracted” thing goes for social media notifications, too. Turns out we actually have a psychological urge to check for social media notifications, which makes it hard to check our News Feeds “just this once” — and usually ends up in a lot of mindless browsing.

As my colleague Scott Tousley says, “We are madly in love with distracting ourselves.”

My colleague Alec Biedrzycki solves this problem by removing all social networks from his toolbar bookmarks. “Even if I don’t mean to browse them, some uncontrollable impulse subconsciously clicks on them when I experience downtime,” he says. “You can get sucked in without knowing it (or even intending to), so eliminating the gateway to those networks keeps me on track.”

To turn off notifications in Google Chrome: Open Chrome, click “Chrome” in the menu bar on the top left of your screen, and choose “Preferences” from the dropdown menu. In the new browser window that appears, choose “Settings” from the menu on the left-hand side of your screen, and click “Show Advanced Settings” at the bottom. In the “Privacy” section, click on “Content Settings.” Scroll down to the “Notifications” section.

From here, you can either choose “Do not allow any site to show notifications” if you want to turn them off altogether. Otherwise, click “Manage Exceptions” and see what Chrome currently allows notifications for — and then alter that list as you see fit.

To turn off Twitter notifications on desktop: Click on your profile picture in the top right-hand corner and select “Settings” from the dropdown menu. From the sidebar on the left-hand side of your screen, choose “Web notifications,” and uncheck every box. Click “Save Changes.”

6) Keeping your phone with you at work.

Raise your hand if you have a small panic attack when you realize you don’t have your phone with you — whether you’re sitting at your desk, attending a meeting, grabbing coffee … heck, even going to the bathroom. (I’m guilty of this, too.)

There’s a reason Blackberries were nicknamed “Crackberries” back when they were popular: It’s because smartphones are probably the easiest distraction on the planet. And when you keep your phone with you at work, you’re putting your productivity levels at risk. 

A 2015 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance found that when people who were performing a task that required intense focus received a text or call on their phone, they had more incorrect answers and were more likely to make quick guesses. People who received notification of a call — even if they didn’t pick it up — were 3X more likely to make mistakes. In fact, error rates were about the same whether or not people answered that call or text.

Why does receiving that text or call hurt our productivity so much? Researchers from that study say that, although the actually moment of interruption is short-lived, our thoughts are disrupted for a considerably longer period, making it tough to refocus.

There are a lot of different ways to curb your phone addiction. The simplest is to turn your phone on silent and put it away while you’re at work. If that isn’t cutting it, try an app like Forest. This app will prompt you to plant a virtual tree when you start working, which “grows” over the course of 30 minutes. The more 30-minute periods you don’t use your phone, the larger your forest will grow; but if you leave the app, you’ll have to start all over again.

7) Black hole browsing.

You know the feeling when you search for something on the internet, then click on a “related article” or other link … and before you know it, you’ve charted the entire Russian Revolution?

Yeah … I’ll be the first to admit it: I do this a lot. It’s a dangerous side effect of having a job that requires internet research. It’s one thing to mindlessly browse the web outside of work or when you’re on a break. (In fact, I have a great list of the best sites for wasting time on the internet for times like those.) But it’s another entirely when you’re supposed to be doing actual work.

That’s what Tousley likes to call “black hole browsing,” and it’s become one of the most productivity-sucking psychological addictions out there.

Image Credit: HubSpot Sales Blog

You might feel like getting lost in the black hole is inevitable, but there are tools out there that can help you prevent it from happening. For example, StayFocusd is a Google Chrome extension that breaks the black hole browsing cycle by blocking distracting websites after a set amount of time. You have a set amount of time to browse a certain website per day, and after that time expires, you’ll get this message in your browser:

Image Credit: HubSpot Sales Blog

It’s genius. Read this blog post to learn how to set it up.

8) Working through your lunch break.

Eating at your desk doesn’t just make you antisocial. According to NPR,  it’s also “bad for thinking, bad for creativity, bad for productivity, [and] bad for your body.” Sadly, though, only one in five people actually leave their desks or the office for a lunch break.

To be fair, if you’re among those people who take lunch at your desk instead of taking a break, it may not be your fault. Perhaps it’s not built into your office culture, or maybe you have a deadline that’s pressuring you to squeeze every waking moment out of your day.

But research shows taking the midday break can be mentally rejuvenating — and, in many ways, more productive than plugging away at your desk between mouthfuls. The best way to take a lunch break is to remove yourself from your desk or workspace and eat somewhere else — like a cafeteria, restaurant, or public park. Better yet, build your network at work by eating with a colleague. (Here are some more ideas for what to do during your lunch break. My favorite is probably “build a helicopter obstacle course.”)

9) Not listening. (Like, really listening.)

One of the sad consequences of being constantly distracted is the epidemic of only half paying attention — and thinking that’s OK. You might think that any time someone else is talking and you’re not, that means you’re listening. But, as my colleague Andrew Quinn wrote in his post on bad conversational habits, it doesn’t. “The real question is who are you listening to when [someone else] is talking,” he wrote. “I’m willing to bet a good portion of the time, you’re actually listening to the voice in your head.”

That, or you’re reading that email that just came in. Or checking to see why your phone buzzed. When you’re in a meeting, how much can you really be paying attention when your laptop is open?

Not only can not listening carefully cost you relationships, it can also cost you in the time it takes to make up for whatever information you missed. Becoming an active listener is a critical part of becoming more emotionally intelligent. This mean really, truly paying attention to what people are saying — and it’s a skill that’ll set you apart in both your professional and personal life.

10) Saying “yes” to every meeting.

Being “in the zone” is when you lose yourself in whatever you’re doing — so much so that you lose track of time. It’s one of the keys to both happiness and productivity at work.

… And nothing disrupts that flow like a meeting. Especially an unnecessary one. It turns out that the average person wastes 31 hours in meetings per month. These unnecessary meetings are ones where you or the organizer isn’t prepared, you didn’t really need to be there, and so on.

Want to get those 31 hours back? Here are a few suggestions:

• Be sure you’re only attending meetings you actually need to attend. If you don’t see yourself actively contributing to the group, politely let the meeting requester know that you won’t be able to attend.
• If you’re the one calling the meeting, send invitees a note, description, or some sort of heads up along with your calendar invitations. This’ll give them an idea of why they were invited or need to be there. Try an app like Do or Solid to help keep your meetings organized and actionable.
• Schedule meetings in bulk if you can. This is a strategic way to ensure the time you do have outside of meetings is spent as productively as possible, since it takes people an average of 25 minutes to refocus after switching tasks.

Speaking of which …

11) Multitasking.

Multitasking can seem inevitable in our modern, ever-connected lifestyles. But research shows it can make us less effective, increase mistakes and stress, and costs the global economy an estimated $450 billion every year.

Think you’re an exception? Consider this: Only 2% of the population is capable of effectively multitasking. For the other 98%, all it does is cause us to be 40% less productive and make 50% more mistakes than non-multitaskers.

Image Credit: Fuze & Visual.ly

Remember that bad habit of not listening? People do that a lot during meetings when they try to multitask — whether it’s reading and responding to emails and messages, scrolling through their Twitter feeds, or something else. In fact, 92% of professionals admit to multitasking during meetings, and 41% admitted to doing it often or all the time. 

Image Credit: Fuze & Visual.ly

Getting out of the habit of multitasking is difficult, but certainly doable. Removing notifications from your work computer (see #5) and putting away your cell phone (see #6) are two great ways to start. Other ideas include establishing a no-laptop rule for meetings, using the Pomodoro Technique (where you work in sprints in a way that complements the body’s natural ultradian rhythm), and planning your day in blocks that include built-in breaks.

12) Playing with your phone before bed.

Have you ever lay in bed with the lights off and spent a few minutes scrolling through your phone to respond to last-minute texts and emails, check your Twitter feed, or scroll through Instagram? Now, raise your hand if those few minutes have ever turned into half an hour, forty-five minutes, or even an hour.

Imagine how much more sleep you could’ve gotten that night if you’d simply gone to bed when you first turned the lights off.

But it’s not just about the amount of sleep — it’s also about quality of sleep. Studies have shown that people who gaze at a backlit screen right before bed actually report having lower-quality sleep — even when they get just as much sleep as someone who didn’t look at their electronics before bed. This is because presence and absence of light tell our brains whether or not they should release the sleep hormone melatonin that makes you tired. Because the LED lighting emitted by the screens on our electronic devices is so similar to daylight, it can trick our brains into thinking it’s daytime, causing us to stay awake for longer.

The best way to break this habit? Buy an alarm clock that’s not your phone, and charge your phone in a separate room so you avoid the temptation of checking it altogether. If you’re worried about missing an emergency call, then try sending those last-minute texts 30-60 minutes before you hit the hay. It’ll mean you get more sleep and higher quality sleep, leading you to operate at peak productivity the following day. (Read this blog post for tips on getting the most out of your sleep.)

What other bad habits hurt productivity? Share with us in the comments.

When it comes to reaching and engaging target audiences, distribution is only part of your marketing equation. In addition to choosing the right channels for generating visibility and making members aware of new opportunities, organizations need to develop compelling messaging and increase goals around newsletter subscriptions, new member sign-ups, existing member renewals, and donation. This process, known as conversion optimization–known in the for-profit world as the act of transforming website visitors into first-time customers and first-time customers into repeat buyers—is one of the pillars of inbound marketing.  

And one of the central tenets of conversion optimization is that you need to plan before you launch a marketing experiment, which you will iterate upon before deploying a new initiative in full. It’s a dedicated commitment to learning that connects all of these aspects of your audience acquisition and engagement strategy. That’s why it’s essential that you to identify and build marketing programs around this audience segment.

Not sure how to find your most engaged members and donors? Here are some concepts, inspired by inbound marketing methodology, that will help provide guidance:

Learn as much as You Can About Your Audience Database

Log in. Click through records. Learn about the people you’re aiming to reach on an individual level. Pinpoint qualitative patterns that you can validate with quantitative information.

After you’ve skimmed your database, come up with a list of segments that make it possible for you to categorize every single person to whom you’re marketing. From there, come up with a member or donor persona list and then conduct even more in-depth research around members who fit those audiences.

At this point, you’ll want to connect these insights to clear action items: you’re going to need to rank-order your segments from most to least valuable based on success criteria that you determine (i.e. engagement rates, donation rates, membership duration).

This process will allow you to create messaging that is truly impactful among your audiences. By segmenting your databases, you’ll create more engaging content, nurturing, and newsletter programs. Bonus: in completing this step and putting your findings on paper, you’ll have created an organization-wide blueprint for your nonprofit’s inbound marketing strategy.

Audit and Streamline Your Operations

As you skim your audience database, you’re likely going to catch some problems. For instance, your member records may exist in multiple systems. You may not have a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that integrates with other tools and software.

This process may feel like teeth-pulling, but it’s one of the most important steps that your nonprofit marketing team can take. The reason?

Inbound marketing is, ultimately, a framework for driving growth. If you grow too quickly without taking care of your housekeeping, you’ll put a tremendous strain on your systems. By auditing your audience database early, however, you can take preemptive steps to ensure that all systems are aligned.

Here’s what you’ll want to keep in mind during your audit, along with steps that you’ll want to take to ensure that your systems are in check:

• Unify your systems with your CRM at the epicenter. Learn how to do it by following the tips from this webinar, which teaches corporations how to unify their marketing and sales.
• Ensure that you have systems to track different aspects of your member journey including email marketing performance, social engagement, and interactions with particular content pieces and offers. Learn how to do it by following the tips in this article on email analytics and this article on tracking content ROI.
• Prepare to start tracking website activity by monitoring what content audiences are reading and what web pages they’re browsing along the path to making a purchase decision. Learn how to do it by reading this piece on tracking marketing data.
• Track interactions with the offers that you’re publishing on your site so that you can see what your most engaged members care about most. Read this article on lead generation to get a sense of some of the tactical best practices.

As you start this process, your systems will likely be piecemeal. Don’t strive for perfection just yet: focus on identifying your strengths and weaknesses so that you know where to make investments in your marketing programs over time. Sooner is better, but an inbound marketing strategy is something that you can develop at your own pace–which is an especially important trait for organizations that are budget-strapped.

Look for Opportunities to Engage Your Top Members

After conducting a membership and technical audit of your database, you’ll have a better idea of who your top members are and how you can engage them. Now, you’ll be in a strong position to execute upon the strategy that you’ve handcrafted over time. Here are some steps that you can take:

• Build dedicated email lists with your top members. Focus on these groupings heavily, and deliver your most personalized and refined marketing programs here. Your most engaged audience deserves your time and attention–they’re the ones sharing your content, combing back to your nonprofit, and making investments in your organization’s future, after all.
• Test out new web copy on key pages that attract your most valuable audiences. Conduct qualitative research to uncover messaging opportunities, and try them out to see if you can increase conversion rates.
• Seek out testimonials and contributed content: these resources will give your website a sense of community and give your audience a chance to become a part of your cause and brand.

Building a Feedback Loop

When you find and actively market to your most engaged audiences, you’ll build a self-sustaining and ever-growing feedback loop that creates new efficiencies and opportunities for your community to become more valuable. The first step begins with understanding your long-term strategy so that you can put the right structural foundations in place. From there, rely on research and a constant learning process to build your acquisition and engagement drivers.

We all know that sources of website traffic can vary greatly from business to business. While some businesses are social media powerhouses, driving thousands of visits through Facebook, Twitter, and more, other businesses are organic search specialists, and derive most of their traffic from scrupulously optimizing pages and posts.

And while there’s no single right answer when it comes to driving traffic, the head of HubSpot Research, Mimi An, wanted to know: What does the average traffic breakdown look like for HubSpot’s 15,000 customers? Where is their traffic coming from?

I took some key data points from the resulting report — Average Traffic Sources for Websites: Benchmarks From 15K HubSpot Customers — and turned it into the infographic below.

Note: You can download the full report (for free!) via the HubSpot Research website at research.hubspot.com.

Have any website traffic insights you’d like to share? Sound off in the comments section below.

Did you know that it only takes a tenth of a second to make a first impression?

In other words, when you meet someone for the first time, you need to be on your game from the very beginning. This includes being aware of everything from the words you choose to the body language you convey.

Whether you’re meeting new connections, team members, potential employers, or customers, I’ve put together a list of tips designed to help you put your best foot forward and make a killer first impression.

9 Tips for Making a Great First Impression

1) Pay attention to your body language and posture.

Effective body language goes beyond simply standing up straight and having a firm handshake — although those things are definitely important, too. When you’re meeting someone for the first time, keep an open posture (don’t tightly cross your arms or legs), lean in when you talk, and don’t be afraid to take up some space at the table. These nonverbal cues can make a powerful subconscious impact, so be aware of your body language and posture during meetings in general, but particularly initial pitches or interviews. 

What behaviors should you aim to avoid? It’s smart to refrain from tapping, touching your face too often, placing objects in front of your, blinking excessively, and sitting or standing too close to others (respect the bubble, people). (Read this post to learn more about body language.)

2) Modulate your pitch and tone of voice.

A high-pitched tone of voice can make you seem childish or nervous — especially if you tend to “uptalk” or use a rising inflection at the end of your sentences. In fact, it has been shown that people perceive those who have a rising intonation as viewed as less knowledgeable, no matter what they are actually saying.

Not sure if you’re guilty of this? Try practicing your presentations or simply reading aloud into an audio app with playback. You’d be surprised at how different you sound to others versus in your own head.

On the other hand, faster speakers are considered to be more confident, according to a study performed at Brigham Young University. And of course, you should avoid using filler words such as “um,” “ah,” “like,” and other similar phrases whenever possible, as it shows hesitation.

3) Choose your words wisely.

Words matter even more than you think — especially the differences between specific types of words. Positive and persuasive words and phrases will often open doors and make people feel comfortable in your presence, which can ultimately make them more willing to work with you.

For instance, let’s take a look at many marketers’ favorite show: Mad Men. Some of Don Draper’s best pitches (e.g., Carousel & Lucky Strike) were all about the positive language. That said, positive language doesn’t need to be cheesy or new-agey as Don illustrates. It can uplift your audience by being clear, simple, and emphasizing future good feelings.

4) Put some thought into your appearance.

What you wear matters, regardless of how little you personally care about fashion or style. This means that while you want to look clean and neat, it is also important to match or slightly exceed the relative level of formality of the person or business you are meeting with — whether that is business formal, highly casual, or something in between.

“You are your brand, especially if you are a business owner, so making sure that your look communicates your best self is important,” explains Laurel Mintz, CEO of Elevate My Brand.

If you want to show off your personality, including one accessory that could be considered a memorable item or even a conversation piece is helpful. This could be anything from a unique piece of jewelry to a unique tie to a pair of fun socks.

Keep in mind that appearance trumps fact when it comes to making first impressions, according to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, so following this advice can easily help you spin flaws into positives.

5) Make eye contact.

Turn off your phone (or at least mute it), turn off email and instant message alerts on your computer, don’t doodle, and most importantly, focus on the person or people you are speaking with. Make sure you make some eye contact with everyone in the room as well — it’s hard to get to know someone when you’re looking down at a screen.

However, eye contact can also backfire, according to this study by the University of British Columbia. If people aren’t already persuaded or inclined to be on your side, they may focus more on your mouth or any presentation materials you’re showcasing instead of your eyes, making attempts at eye contact a moot point or even weirdly creepy or antagonistic.

6) Know your audience.

Do your research. If your meeting is planned in advance, you should know plenty about the person or business that you’re meeting with before you arrive. This might mean that you Google the people you’ll be meeting with, the company founders/co-founders, their history, their competition, their main products, and any other relevant info before you walk into the room.

Looking for a helpful tool to help you gather some background information? Check out Charlie App. This app scans hundreds of sources to uncover information about the person you’re meeting with and sends you a one-pager with all the details. Pretty cool, right?

7) Come prepared.

There’s nothing worse than an unproductive meeting. To make a great first impression, be sure that you’re respectful of everyone’s time and schedule follow-ups as necessary. If you’re meeting with someone working remotely, plan accordingly. (Read this post for 12 helpful tips for better remote meetings.)

That said, if you’re being productive and everyone has the bandwidth, it might be okay if the meeting runs long — just make sure you check in with the group before making the call.

Meeting time management is a key aspect of building an engaged group of clients or colleagues. Plus, it shows respect for their schedules.

8) Don’t try to be someone you’re not.

When you’re meeting someone for the first time, don’t try to be someone you’re not. If you don’t know the answer to something they ask, don’t fake it — the ability to lean in to your weaknesses shows that you are self-aware.

However, be sure not to over emphasize your shortcomings. It might be seem shockingly simple, but avoiding the “report card problem” or highlighting weaknesses and how you might fix them could cause you to only showcase the negatives, or at least make them the biggest part of your overall impression. So while you don’t want to hide any weaknesses (people will likely figure it out anyways), you do want to be honest and move on to the good stuff — especially at the beginning of a business or any other kind of relationship.

9) Don’t forget to follow-up.

After an initial meeting, don’t forget to follow-up by sending any necessary information — notes, presentation docs, next steps, and so on — or sending a thank you note.

These small gestures will help prove that you’re on the ball, and that you’re making them a priority — not just another task to check off your to-do list. Whether that is true or not, make them feel special by sending any necessary info right away, rather than waiting until the end of the week. 

Sending out updated information after a meeting can also be a way to get a second chance at a first impression by showing another side of yourself or your business. In fact, a Stanford study has shown that adding more external factors can mitigate the effect of a negative first impression.

Don’t like a negative first impression get in the way of your ability to get to know someone. Follow these nine tips above to ensure that the first time you meet with someone won’t be the last.

What are your best tips for making a great first impression? Share them below.

It makes sense to implement a rigid return policy, doesn’t it? By requiring that products be returned for refund or exchange before a certain number of days pass, customers are likely to let the deadline pass without realizing. At least, that’s the basic idea (and hope) for strict policies. What if the opposite were true?

The Endowment Effect

If you give seven days, or even thirty days, for customers to try out a purchase before returning it, there is a chance that a few will miss that deadline. It’s just human nature. What about the rest of your customers, though? What about those who watch clocks and calendars, who take notes and make lists? Those are the customers who will send their purchase back immediately to avoid missing deadlines.

What if you gave every buyer a more lenient return policy? What if you, say, didn’t have a time limit at all? Those who would normally mark calendars would instead put their new purchase in a closet or drawer, promising themselves they would return it when they get a chance. Without a deadline, what’s the rush?

In most cases, buyers would soon become attached to the purchase. It’s called the “endowment effect,” and it’s a very real thing. That Hawaiian-print shirt hiding the back of your closet may go to Goodwill before you ever consider returning it, simply because you’ve grown rather fond of it—in a ridiculous sort of way. In fact, unless a product doesn’t fit or has the potential to cause harm, most will develop an affinity for it.

The “Meh” Effect

Even if consumers don’t become emotionally attached to the purchase, there’s still a big chance they won’t return it. After a certain period of time, they’ll start to wonder if their refund or exchange is even worth the trip to the post office. After all, they’ve kept it this long. Maybe they’ll feel like leaving the house extra early next week to stand in line. Or maybe they can give up their lunch break the week after that.

Without a set deadline, there’s a good chance they’ll never decide that going to the post office to make their return is more important than a few more minutes of sleep or a good lunch break in the middle of their work day. Human nature and all that.

Boosted Sales As a Bonus

If cutting down on the returns and exchanges isn’t enough of a reason to relax your policies, then perhaps the promise of higher sales might be. When buyers examine the return policy and find out there aren’t a lot of rules involved, they’re more likely to make a purchase. After all, you’ve removed all the risks associated with buying.

You always want to protect your ecommerce company, above all. Customer service is supposed to help you just as much as it helps the buyer. That means a “lenient” return policy should still cover your best interests. For instance, if you offer a two-month time limit, make sure tags are still attached to garments and soles aren’t worn on shoes. If you sell a service, make sure anything that was gained as a result of that service (such as endorsements or certifications) are also revoked with the refund of purchase.

There is always a happy medium that provides more freedom for your buyers while also protecting your bottom line. Don’t be afraid to change up the status quo to see if a new return policy could change the way you do business.

For most businesses, generating leads is the ultimate benefit of creating and maintaining a social media presence.

But first things first: In order to make social media an effective lead generation machine, you first need to generate a following. This means fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and your other social media accounts.

The more fans and followers you have for your social media presence, the better reach you’ll have. And better reach means the potential to generate more leads. So at the very core of social media for lead generation, you must take steps to increase your reach.

Download our free guide here to learn how to get more followers on Twitter. 

Sure, you could buy your first few hundred followers to get the ball rolling. But the key to a high quality social following is to actually earn your fans and followers. 

Why? Because purchased followers are either fake or low-quality profiles, so they really serve no purpose except to artificially inflate your follower count. You don’t get any meaningful interaction from them. On the other hand, followers you earn are the people who will Like and share your photos, click on the links you share, learn more about you and your business, and maybe even do business with you in the future.

To help you get started, here are eight helpful tips for expanding your social media reach.

8 Tips for Getting More Social Media Followers, Fans, and Likes 

1) Prioritize the social networks where your fans are likely to be.

“Which social media network should I focus on?” This is one of the most commonly asked questions marketers have. We recommend that you create and maintain a presence on the top social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest), but focus your efforts on the social media networks where your target buyers are spending time.

Create profiles for all the top social networks.

Have you ever found yourself wanting to tweet to or about a company, only to find they don’t have a Twitter account? I have. Not only is it frustrating, but it also kind of seems amateur and unprofessional. It also creates distance between your brand and your customers and potential customers.

I like the way JetBlue’s manager of customer commitment Laurie Meacham put it: At JetBlue, they’re all about the people — meaning their customers and potential customers — and being on social media is just a natural extension of that.

No matter what size your company is, which industry you work in, or which target market you’re going after, people are going to talk — or going to want to talk — about you on every social network. So it’s important that you at least give folks the option to get in touch with you on their social network of choice, and maintain some sort of presence there.

Here are a few resources for getting you started on the five major social networks:

• An Introduction to Twitter for Business 
• An Introduction to Facebook for Business 
• An Introduction to LinkedIn for Business 
• An Introduction to Instagram for Business 
• An Introduction to Pinterest for Business 

Focus on the networks where your target buyers spend time.

It takes a lot of time and resources to keep up multiple social media accounts, so you’ll want to make sure you’re prioritizing the social networks that matter. That means taking the time to research your buyer personas so you can find out where they hang out on social media. (Download our free buyer persona templates here.) This will help you use social media to generate real customers, and delight existing ones.

Other ways to find out where your target audience hangs out on social is to:

• Ask your customers.
• Run a survey to an anonymous audience.
• Use share data.
• See where your competitors’ content is getting shared.
• Do keyword research.
• Check if your industry is active on the network.

Learn about those tips in more detail here.

(HubSpot customers: You can connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, Xing, and blogging platform RSS feeds with your HubSpot account. Learn how to integrate these social profiles with HubSpot here.)

What about where to focus your social media advertising efforts? Read this blog post to learn the pros and cons of advertising on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.

2) Optimize your social profiles.

Whether you already have profiles for your business or you have yet to create them, it’s important to think about how you can optimize your social profiles.

This includes choosing an easily identifiable username, uploading a recognizable photo (like your company logo), including clear and concise descriptions of your business, and leading people back to your website with a trackable link. There are some nuances depending on the social network, though — like cover photos

Here are a few resources for how to optimize your profiles on different social networks.

• The Ultimate Cheat Sheet of Photo & Image Sizes on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Other Social Networks [Infographic] 

Facebook:

• 19 Essential Tips for an Engaging Facebook Business Page 
• Facebook Cover Photo Do’s & Don’ts (+ Pre-Sized Templates)

Twitter:

• The Anatomy of a 5-Star Twitter Profile 
• 20 Brilliant Twitter Cover Photo Examples From Real Brands 

LinkedIn:

• A Visual Guide to Creating the Perfect LinkedIn Company Page 
• How to Craft the Perfect LinkedIn Profile: A Comprehensive Guide [Infographic] 

Instagram:

• The Anatomy of a Perfect Instagram Profile
• How to Gain Your First 1,000 Instagram Followers 

Now that social media updates are included in search results, you should also do your best to optimize the content you’re actually publishing on those networks, like tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn company status updates. For example, including keywords appropriate for your business could help you get found in search. (Just make sure you’re incorporating them in a way that sounds natural.)

3) Promote your social presence everywhere.

And by everywhere, we mean everywhere: On various pages of your website, on your blog, on signage in your storefront (if you’re a local business), in print advertising, on your business cards, in your email marketing messages. 

Many social media sites now have official “Follow” buttons you can include on your website and blog. That way, people can start following you with a single click — without ever having to leave your website or blog. You can create them easily by following the instructions in this guide for creating social media buttons. (Note for HubSpot customers: Many of these buttons come out of the box with HubSpot’s Social Media software.) 

If you want to create “Follow” buttons for a social network that doesn’t offer premade ones, or if you’d simply rather create your own custom buttons, you can by following these instructions from the folks at iFabbo.

Cross promotion across all your social media accounts is also a great way to let your social followers know where else on social media they can find you. That way, you can get your Twitter followers to become your Facebook fans; to get your Facebook fans to become your Instagram followers; and so on. 

Depending on your goals, this could mean posting links to your other social accounts in a normal post, paying for sponsored updates pointing people to other social networks, or adding a link to another social site in the bio or description section of a different one.

For example, the folks at Cava Mezze Grill are promoting their Instagram account on Facebook by giving their Instagram feed its own tab on their Facebook Page, along with a “View on Instagram” button linking to their page. Check it out:

If you have a Snapchat account, Snapcodes are perfect for cross channel promotion on your other social media profiles. Basically, every Snapchat user has a unique Snapcode, which is an image that looks like the Snapchat logo but with a unique pattern of dots. To follow you on Snapchat, all users will have to do to is open the Snapchat app, take a photo of your Snapcode, and tap their screen. Here’s an example from Princeton University:

We’re backstage with @TriangleClub on @Snapchat today. Add us: PrincetonU http://pic.twitter.com/p4wq92X9eX

— Princeton University (@Princeton)
November 12, 2015

4) Add social sharing buttons to all your content.

Just as you should be promoting your social presence in as many places as possible, you should also be enabling your site visitors and email subscribers to share your content with their personal networks as easily as possible.

By evangelizing your audience to share your content, you’ll have better potential to reach a broader audience that extends beyond your direct network of fans and followers. (And if those people like the content that their friends are sharing with them, they may be inclined to become direct followers of you, too.)

Add social sharing buttons (e.g., “Share on Facebook,” “Tweet This,” etc.) to all of your content — on individual blog articles, in email messages, on landing pages for ebook and webinar downloads, within the pages of your ebooks, and so on. Here’s an example:

And another one:

(See what I did there?)

You can create these “Share” buttons easily by following the instructions in this guide for creating social media buttons. (Note for HubSpot customers: Many of these buttons come out of the box with HubSpot’s Social Media software.) 

5) Share useful, valuable content.

It’s not just enough to promote your presence. You need to make sure your presence is something that’s worth following in the first place.

Make sure your tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn updates consist of valuable, useful, and engaging content. Avoid product-focused content, and instead, aim for social updates that contain educational content that has the potential to attract more fans and followers. Here are four tips to help you out:

Tip #1: Master the 80/20 rule.

When in doubt, use the 80/20 rule: 80% of the content you post to social media should be helpful and valuable to your audience, and 20% can be self-promotional. Once you gain a following by tweeting valuable content, you’ll have the chance to promote yourself when you need to 20% of the time. You might not need to promote anything now — and that’s okay. Later, you’ll be glad you’ve built up a loyal following that may pay attention when you need to drive traffic to your website (or elsewhere).

Tip #2: Post a variety of content.

It’s super important to post a variety of content to keep your social media channels fresh, interesting, and engaging. Some of the world’s most famous companies use social media variety to keep their social audiences constantly interested.

For example, Amazon.com regularly supplements its “core product posts” with competitions, video, multi-media, polls, and promotions — all of which have contributed to their current Facebook Like figure of 26 million+ and 2.3 million+ followers on Twitter.

Tip #3: Post compelling visual content. A lot of it.

Visual content is probably the most powerful tool your brand can use to engage your fans on social media because it allows you to express ideas quickly and effectively. It’s a valuable tactic to set your brand apart from the vast amount of written content published online every day. Plus, your Fans and followers are 44% more likely to engage with content on social media that contains pictures, so be sure you focus a chunk of your effort creating visual content like designs and photographs for these posts.

Read this blog post for helpful tips on making your visual content on social media more compelling. It’s chock full of helpful information on how to optimize your image posts for each social network, how often you should be posting visual content to each social network, how to create visual posts for hashtag campaigns, and so on.

Tip #4: Delight your followers.

Last but certainly not least, use social media not just to inform your followers, but to delight them as well. Delightful posts are often the most memorable and shareable, and they’ll help you build a loyal following much more than those sometimes-necessary boring posts will.

For example, the folks at Amazon have a lot of stuff they could be posting about on Facebook. And yet, they consistently find space for fun posts like this one:

Here’s another great one from Innocent Drinks, which has absolutely nothing to do with their brand besides embodying their silly, best-friend-like brand voice:

There’s a programme called ‘Panda Babies’ on ITV right now. PANDA. BABIES.

— innocent drinks (@innocent)
January 31, 2016

Check out our list of funny social media posts from famous brands for more ideas on delightful content.

6) Interact with followers and anyone who mentions you.

Most social networks are all about making connections and having conversations. Just as you should be regularly sharing educational, insightful content, you should also be monitoring your presence and interacting with your fans and followers. This’ll help you build a loyal, engaging following.

Ask questions, be engaging, and participate in discussions to create a presence worth following. Be sure to monitor mentions of your username, company name, and any unique hashtags every single day. (You can read about how we do social monitoring at HubSpot here to learn how our social media team finds mentions of HubSpot on social media so they can respond and engage with those people.)

Also, take the time to reply when people @-mention you on Twitter or Instagram, or otherwise engage with your brand name. Thank them if they say something nice, answer their questions if they have them, and even respond to the negative comments.

The social media team at JetBlue is a brilliant example of engagement on social media — particularly Twitter, where they found a lot of their customers talking about them.

But they receive a whole lot of tweets — between 2,500-2,600 Twitter mentions every day. Woo boy … that’s a lot of mentions. The team at JetBlue handles that volume by prioritizing which tweets to respond to based on where they feel they can contribute value.

“We want our employees to engage smartly, and for the conversations to be organic and natural,” Meacham told me. “We look for opportunities to add value and connect with our customers, not just respond to every single mention that comes our way.”

7) Find, follow, and build relationships with people in your industry.

Social media is a great way to find and follow leaders in your industry, which can include both people and other brands that are creating great content related to your industry (and aren’t a direct competitor, obviously).

For example, you may want to find and engage with influencers who have an audience that you’re targeting. Relationships like those could pay major dividends in the future in a wide variety of ways. You might also find and follow influential bloggers and brands, and retweet or otherwise share their content on your social accounts. Start following some of your own followers — and the people they’re following, too.

Where can you find these people? Here are a few places to start.

Twitter

It’s fairly easy to find top influencers for a given topic on Twitter. You can find them by searching for a keyword on Twitter and scrolling through “Top” tweets, which are the tweets containing that keyword that have seen the most engagement. If you search for a keyword on Twitter and toggle to the “Accounts” tab, you’ll find a list of Twitter accounts.

You’ll also notice Twitter gives you suggestions for whom to follow. This list can be found on the right-hand side of your home or personal Twitter feed, and it suggests users based on patterns from your “following” history. They’re generated by an algorithm, so you may or may not know the accounts or find them relevant — but it’s worth it to scroll through those suggestions every once in a while.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Groups provide great opportunities to find connections with influencers for your business. You don’t need to start a group to get the full benefit of LinkedIn Groups. In fact, you should start out by searching for and joining groups that are relevant to your business, and then connecting with group contributors.

The trick to making connections on LinkedIn is to avoid cold connections. Make sure you contribute to the group before trying to connect with the individual who placed it. Then, create a personalized LinkedIn invitation that references your discussion. (Download our free LinkedIn invitation template here.)

If you want to moderate a LinkedIn group yourself, be sure to read this post written by our social media manager at HubSpot on how she manages LinkedIn groups.

Facebook

Making brand new connections on Facebook can be a little bit trickier than on Twitter or LinkedIn because it doesn’t have the culture of business networking that LinkedIn does, nor does it have the non-reciprocal follow expectations that Twitter does. Plus, reaching out to strangers is less socially acceptable on Facebook than it is on other social networks.

As such, we suggest giving your fans and followers content that’s worth sharing, in the hopes that they’ll share your content and your Page’s exposure will grow that way. When it comes to Facebook, a referral from a friend can be far more effective and targeted than any other outreach you do on your own.

Read this blog post for more detailed tips for how to find and engage with interesting people online.

8) Hire a dedicated social media manager.

There’s a whole lot more than goes into optimizing a company’s social media strategy than someone can do on as a “side project” — especially with all the important changes and trends that are cropping up in the social media world all the time. Eventually, you’ll need to hire a dedicated social media manager to manage your accounts, keep your profiles current, stay on top of trends, post great content, and do a whole lot of experimenting.

But searching for someone to run your social media efforts can be frustrating. While social engagement metrics can be tied back to a business’ bottom line, more often than not, social media marketers aren’t moving the metrics CEOs care about. This can make it hard to fight for budget or headcount.

Turns out, there’s a number of important skills that a social media manager must possess other than “driving engagement.” The best social media managers are content creators, marketing analysts, news junkies, customer service reps, community managers and facilitators, funnel marketing managers, and project managers. You can download a ready-made job description for the social media manager role here.

Building your social media reach will take some time, but if you’re committed to the steps above, we guarantee you’ll start seeing results.

How else do you recommend increasing your social media reach?

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2011 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Publishing revenues may be moving online, but that doesn’t mean print is dead.

In fact, parts of the media industry are moving in the opposite direction and investing in print as complements to their core brands and user experiences. While magazines, on the whole, may be waning in sales and migrating to a digital environment, other types of products continue to remain popular among readers such as textbooks, case studies, companion books, and niche magazines. And as the American Marketing Association points out, even circulation-based magazines are still popular: rather than reaching a broad scale audience, however, it’s the most engaged buyers who are continuing to read them.

The bottom line is that print is an untapped revenue opportunity for today’s media companies. Instead of aiming to reach a mass market audience, however, publishers need to double down on initiatives that introduce new and loved media products to the market. Here’s how publishers can use their digital environments to promote products that readers can engage with offline.

Use Online Data to Come Up With Print Product Ideas

One of the biggest assets available to media companies is data. In building an audience, publishers have access to a wealth of insight into their readers’ content consumption patterns. Often, publishers use this information to build more effective advertising products and to generate more web traffic.

But the industry very well understands that display ad revenue is on the decline, which means that ‘more of the same’ is far from sustainable as a long-term business strategy.

To remain popular among their readers and prepare themselves for a radically different media ecosystem, media companies need to think bigger in bringing new products to market. The good news? Publishers aren’t startups: they’re established companies with existing audiences—a portion of whom will become customers.

Here are some ways that publishers can use data to come up with product ideas:

• Examine popular content, analyze themes, and come up with potential content-based products.
• Administer a website-wide sample survey to ask readers what types of products or premium content that they would like to purchase.
• Build a product as an experiment and see how it performs as a one-off by running Facebook experiments and promoting it site-wide.

Use Inbound Marketing to Build a Scalable, Repeatable Conversion Funnel

Even for media companies with large audiences, products won’t sell themselves. Marketers at publishing brands need to pay careful attention to their readers’ decision cycles and craft campaigns that deliver the right message to the right audiences at the right time.

The rationale makes sense: when readers visit a website for the first time through search or social, they’re in the mood to learn—not to make a purchase necessarily. They may need some time to learn about a particular product and become convinced that it is the right fit for their needs. That’s where the inbound methodology enters your marketing equation.

HubSpot developed this methodology in 2006, as a way to help translate relationship-building patterns from an offline environment into the digital world.  Instead of archaic ‘outbound’ marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound focuses on creating quality content that pulls  audiences where they naturally want to be. By aligning website content with the products that audiences want to purchase, whether online or offline, media companies can build a more consistent sales pipeline that you can monitor and optimize over time.

Here are some steps that media companies can take, using inbound, to push more audiences to print products:

• Build awareness of print products through social media accounts that engaged readers are likely to be following and monitoring consistently. Ensure that this type of promotion encompasses a balance of valuable educational content and product pitches. Here’s a guide to creating a social media strategy that can help.
• Offer gated sneak peaks to print products so that readers can preview a piece of content before deciding to make a purchase. Create a drip campaign with partial content so that audiences can take some time, over the course of reading several emails, to make a purchase decision. Here’s a guide to creating an effective lead generation strategy from the ground up.
• Include smart content with a clear call to action (CTA) that makes readers on-site aware of products that are available for purchase. Tailor these resources to specific audience segments based on prior segmentation or persona work that took place during product development processes. Align your content to the right audiences to ensure relevancy and higher conversion rates, as a result. Provide sneak previews and allow audiences to ‘try before they buy’ by signing up for an email list. Here’s a guide to smart content to help you get started.

Final Thoughts

Media companies are in a prime position to develop content products, and print is a valuable, underutilized channel. If you think print is dead, think again: digital audiences are still craving books, resources, and information to help them make the most out of their time offline. Figure out what they need, and build it. Develop a marketing strategy that allows you to do what you do best–building an audience–to craft a new line of business.

Too often we hear of managers leaving employees in the dark, holding company performance data and information close to their chest.

Maybe they think their employees don’t care or that the extra information will be distracting. Maybe they think that level of information is for executive-level decision makers only. No matter their reason or thinking, they’re making a big mistake.

In a 2015 survey of 2,000 U.S. and U.K. workers, we learned that 76% of employees don’t trust bosses who fail to share company data. By withholding information, managers are not only leaving employees to fly blind to company performance, but also making it difficult for them to anticipate problems, make informed decisions, and remain productive. 

In the same survey, we also learned that only 10% of employees are aware of company progress in real time. Most of those who do receive company data only see it once a month. However, more than 15% never see any company performance data.

While this approach — commonly referred to as Mushroom Management — may seem outdated to many, it continues to raise concerns in many offices. In other words, employees are continuing to receive work without knowing its purpose. And as a result, they’re not motivated to stick around, let alone be advocates or generate business value.

What can your business do to avoid falling into this management trap? Keep reading to find out.

What Happens When You Don’t Share Data With Your Team?

You can read all the modern business books in the world, but they’re all going to tell you that a team needs confidence in their leader to be driven and motivated. Our research shows that over 75% of employees lost confidence in their bosses when they failed to share company performance information. More than half admitted that they take it upon themselves to find out the company data most important to them.

In order for employees to trust their leaders, they need to feel trusted and empowered. When they don’t, they often being to lack empathy when engaging with customers or meeting new prospects, and typically struggle to accomplish their day-to-day tasks. It’s also not uncommon for them to begin making assumptions about the company and its performance that are likely untrue. This is dangerous territory.

When you create a culture that lacks trust, you create a strained and hostile environment. And you’re certainly not going to attract top performers with that approach.

In both North America and Western Europe, a recent study by INSEAD found that empowering employees was the number one trait millennials (now the largest cohort of the U.S. workforce) want in a manager. Our survey found that one in four employees have or know someone who has left a business due to a lack of transparency on business direction and performance.

The lesson? Don’t waste the effort you’ve put into recruiting smart people. Members of your team offer a fresh perspective and will have ideas to improve the company’s bottom line that you may have overlooked. But they’re only going to feel empowered to bring these ideas to you if they’re given the information they need to understand what’s happening with the company. Employees who know and understand their company’s target metrics are able to generate better ideas, test possible solutions, and actively solve issues together.

As HubSpot’s co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah once said, “Today, power is gained by sharing knowledge, not by hoarding it.”

The Right Way to Handle Data Transparency

Some companies share all business information with their teams, and sometimes even the public. Buffer’s Open Blog is a popular example: They publicly share their salaries, equity equation, retreat budgets, and more.

Terrified by sharing that much information about your financials and operations with the public? That’s totally fine — sharing every internal number could get messy. However, it’s important to share the information that has the greatest impact on the business with your entire team, as well as how each team member or department impacts that performance. 

How do you know which metrics are most important to your team? Great question. Here are a few tips to help you get started …

1) Define your KPIs.

First, you need to know what your company is working towards. Start by defining your company goals and assigning KPIs (key performance indicators) to each. For example, if your quarterly goal is to grow revenue 5% MoM, your KPIs could be user growth, decreased churn, upgrades, trial conversions, and so on.

Next, define how each department will help reach those goals with their own KPIs. The KPIs for your marketing team could be website visits, blog conversions, webinar sign-ups, social growth, or social ad conversions. 

Many companies will make department-specific metrics available to the entire team to add a layer of transparency and build an environment of teamwork. It’s crucial, however, to keep the overarching business metrics front and center for everyone to see, which I’ll cover in the next tip.

2) Communicate your KPIs.

Delivery of company KPIs is equally as important as the data itself. Our survey respondents indicated that when their companies do actually share data with them, they do so ineffectively, often via email or spreadsheets.

This almost guarantees your employees won’t take action on the data shared with them. Your team’s inboxes are crowded, and spreadsheets contain huge volumes of data — meaning your business’s most important metrics will be missed. To combat this, make sure the KPIs you’re sharing are simple and consistent. In other words, your metrics need to be actionable.

If your team has a line graph in front of them visualizing weekly revenue vs. target, they’ll understand the health of the business and what needs to be done to reach your goals. If you build a simple and glanceable company dashboard and make it easily accessible to everybody, every team member will always know how the team is doing.

Ultimately, this means less time spent answering questions, and more opportunity for employees to take action to keep the numbers up.

3) Keep your KPI visualizations simple.

As I mentioned above, how you display data matters a lot. When designing your dashboard or deciding what metrics to share with the team, keep your KPIs and visualizations simple and consistent. Your team should be able to glance at the dashboard, understand what the numbers mean, and quickly identify what problem or opportunity needs to be acted on.

We can learn how to effectively present complex information by looking at studies of how the brain consumes data. For example, in Western culture we read left to right. This means that the most important piece of information should be in the top left corner.

The way you use color is important, too. It’s one of the most powerful tools to convey information because of its subconscious attribute. Our brains assign significance to color quickly, without conscious thought. Make a number green and we immediately know that metric is traveling in the right direction. (Learn more about color theory here.)

The less a person has to think about what they’re being shown, the better. So keep visuals clear and accurate. As Stephen Few said, “Dashboards are not an appropriate venue for artistic impression.” Anything that detracts from the metrics themselves should be stripped away from the dashboard. That way, your team can focus on what’s important: the numbers and what they mean for your business.

It’s All About Transparency

Of the respondents from our survey, 50% said that bosses sharing information and data had a significantly positive impact on productivity and motivation. The benefits of data availability will far outweigh the investment needed to begin measuring. You’ll not only create a culture of transparency and openness, you’ll have a motivated team working towards the same goals and taking action to do what’s best for the company’s success. Sounds pretty great, right?

How does your business share information with the team? Share your thoughts below.

It’s 7:30 a.m. on a Monday. It’s raining. And the subway is uncomfortably crowded.

In fact, it’s so crowded that I’m desperately trying to grip the pole with one measly finger, while strategically shielding my nose from the morning breath coming from the man to my right. 

Isn’t commuting a pain?

Whether you’re traveling 20 minutes or well over an hour, making your way to and from work can take a big toll on your mood. Between traffic jams, unexpected delays, car troubles, and inclement weather conditions, people often find themselves having to get out the door even earlier to account for extra travel time. (If you’re not a morning person, this can be seriously stressful.)

So what can you do to reduce commuter-induced stress? The folks at Auto Insurance Center put together the following infographic to help you apply a more mindful approach to your commute.