Jeff Shearer

Many of us live in our email client and chat tools all day, and think nothing of it. After all – we’ve got to stay informed and appear connected. But spending all day waiting for input is a bit like obsessively tracking your stock portfolio’s rise and fall. Unless you’re a day trader, this isn’t likely going to help you make good financial decisions. In fact, up-to-the-second updates are rarely what we need to make good decisions, and the same is true with your digital communication channels.

I’ve found the key in improving your relationship with email and chat is the realization that the majority of what arrives in your inbox is noise – your job is to separate the signal from it. But the only way to do this efficiently is to maintain some distance from your inbox. Simply reacting to messages as they come in means you will treat everything with similar weight.

You start treating noise as if it were signal.

Here are a few tactics I’ve picked up to help avoid this:

• Schedule your email inbox management time like meetings on your calendar. And then don’t touch your inbox any other time of the day.
• Disable push notifications on your phone and computer for email apps. If this makes your “what about emergencies!” alarm go off, give people other ways to get in touch like text or phone. 
• Treat your inbox like a waiting room, not a “to do” list – move emails that need to be actioned into a separate folder, and archive the rest of the noise. Only check the inbox when you have designated time to triage. Otherwise, just chew through your actionable email folder.

Of course, there’s many other benefits to modifying your habits like this. For one – you’re much more likely to write considered, thoughtful responses to messages, even upsetting ones, and less likely to send hot headed, instant reactions. That benefit alone is worth giving your inbox some breathing room.

The always insightful Derek Sivers wrote a great post on saying “No” recently. 

I think deep down, we know that adding to the plate is usually worse. But saying “Yes” is easier than saying “no”. And doing what’s easier is often more likely to happen than doing what’s better.

So can we make subtraction—saying “no”—easier? I think there’s two ways.

The first is calling out the fact that addition isn’t better – that it won’t solve our problems. That’s what Derek has already done for us.

But the other half is to practice “no”. After all, practice is what we do to improve in areas we’re weak. We practice. Try saying “no” every day. Not a knee jerk “no” to some random request. A considered, measured “no” that looks at what’s on the plate, and deciding what can be removed.

This tends to get used as a substitute for strategy. Find the low hanging fruit, capitalize on it, and move on to the next tactic.

The problem is, as Rand Fishkin highlights in his excellent deck “Why Your SaaS Marketing Sucks”, traffic for sites addicted to growth hacks looks a lot like this:

Growth hacks can be part of your growth strategy, but they’re not a substitute for one.

Seattle has got a lot of potholes, especially this time of year. There was one I remember every day on my way home from work. It turns out, most potholes don’t get fixed unless someone calls it in (there’s a pothole hotline).

Yet every day for weeks I’d simply swerve around the pothole to avoid it. Then one day it gave me a flat tire, and the next day I called the hotline. It took about a week, and the pothole was patched.

Our lives are filled with potholes that can be addressed now or put off until later. And to decide, we’ve got to ask two questions:

1. Is this easier to fix than I’m imagining?
2. If I wait, does this issue become worse?

If the answer is “yes” to either – It’s probably time to call the hotline.

Any time I prepare something to be published – an email, a presentation, or one of these blogs, I’ll look it over carefully for typos and other issues before hitting the big red button. And invariably after publishing, I find some obvious issue I somehow missed. The issue is attention and focus. Over time our minds become accustomed to the work, and start to take shortcuts that miss normally obvious errors.

A way to break this cycle is to make the work unfamiliar again.When reviewing your writing – change the appearance of the work – the font and size, maybe even the color. This helps trick your brain into treating the material like it’s new. It helps teases the issues to the surface.

It certainly isn’t perfect—I’m sure I missed some typos in this very post. But it’s worth a try.

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If you’ve ever used a Kindle, you may have noticed the “other people highlighted this passage” message as you read. It’s similar to how Medium handles its highlighting feature. It serves to call out what other people found popular, presumably to help you identify the key points and quotes from the book.

But by highlighting popular passages, this simply reinforces those same passages to receive even more highlights.

Other than seeing what other people thought was profound, I don’t think this social sharing of highlights does much good. 

Reading should be about forming your own opinions about the work – the availability of these highlights instead has you leaning on what others found valuable (or rather, what others found others found profound). 

Rather than simply reinforce what’s already popular, you can fortunately disable this functionality I’ve discovered. Just go to Settings > Reading Options > Highlights and then disable the “Popular Highlights” option.

Not everything in our world needs to be loaded with social recommendations. Here’s to a more focused, independent reading experience. 

Scott over at ChiefMartec just posted about the results of the 2018 Gartner Marketing Technology Survey, showing that now 74% of enterprises have martech managed by marketing, and 26% of organizations have a “dedicated martech leader and team.”

He looks at this as cause for celebration—evidence that martech is now a mainstream profession. 

I don’t disagree that that martech as a profession has come a long way in even the nine years I’ve been working in it – but I think we’re far from mainstream. I look at that “26% have a dedicated martech leader” stat much more from a glass-half-empty perspective. How are so many enterprise organizations still lacking such a fundamental proficiency? That same report outlines that 24% of orgs manage martech, but without a formal team to own it. 

Maybe I’m too hung up on semantics, but I think we still have a lot of work to establish legitimacy for the martech profession. The upside with this data is it’s a reminder that the market isn’t as saturated as I, and others in the SaaS industry bubble often imagine.

To co-opt Geoffrey Moore’s model, Gartner’s report proves we’ve got the innovators and early adopters on board—but we’re only scratching the surface of the early majority. The rest of that bell curve is yet to be tapped.

And that’s exciting to me.

Some video games like to force the player to watch every cutscene between the gameplay. They’re unskippable.

And it’s infuriating. If I’ve already played the game before, or if I just want to get to the action now, let me skip it.  It’s amazing to me that even in 2018, this practice is still pretty commonly found in major video game releases.

But it’s super common in B2B marketing too. We design our lead lifecycles and nurture programs like they’re this linear, step-by-step path that every customer must flow through exactly as designed.

Yet when we view the data, customers are going from point A to point Z, skipping all the carefully designed steps in between. Though you may have crafted an ideal experience for your users – they are most likely indifferent to it. They’ve got their own priorities.

Instead, we should be building flexible experiences that work out of order. Don’t build nurtures gating off high value resources until the next email send – feature your best additional content with each interaction. And by extension – stop measuring nurtures as if sending every email in the stream is the ideal scenario. If a lead wants to burn through your content in an hour instead a month and convert- that’s not a failure on the nurture’s part – it’s a byproduct of allowing flexibility into your processes.

So when you’re building your next marketing experience – make sure to account for the people who want to skip the cutscenes.

You can use the red squiggly spell check errors in your documents to correct typos, or to improve your computer’s dictionary.

But you can use them as a flag. Something to call out confusing or esoteric language. After all, if spell check doesn’t understand some branded phrase or co-opted marketing term, then what’s to expect the reader will either?

We marketers love to geek out with inside baseball terms, and then wonder why we’re not always taken seriously or understood by our colleagues in the rest of the company.

So we’ve got two choices. We can try and look smart with big, complicated language, and then complain when our work is lost in translation. Or we can prioritize clarity and simplicity with our writing. Maybe it means a temporary ego-hit, but if you’re doing work that matters, isn’t being understood more important than looking smart?

Fun story – when I joined one of my previous companies, I discovered our generic inbox was getting a ton of emails from major league baseball teams every day. Hundreds a day. Someone had signed up our inbox email for every team’s entire subscription center.  There’s 30 MLB teams, and each has a subscription center (behind a login, no less) that looks like this, so you can probably imagine the volume of email we were getting. 

And I see this echoed in B2B companies all the time. While most are not behind a login, these subscription centers still end up bloated and confusing. But someone at the company thought all these subscription options made perfect sense (and they probably do to an insider).

But they’ve forgotten there’s a big difference between how they internally categorize email, and how their audience does.

By adding a ton of options on your subscription center, you might think you’re offering choice and control, but in reality you’re ending up with a confusing jumble of options that no one except your email marketing team understands. And least of all your customers.

It’s a good idea to build separate subscriptions for truly distinct streams: parent/child companies, wildly different product lines, or distinctly branded initiatives. These all feel different for your subscribers, which is the only scenario a big complicated subscription center ever makes sense.

And if your email program doesn’t have those exceptions? Then stick to the basics. Giving choice and control for your subscribers is important – but don’t confuse “more options” with “better”.