Welcome emails are the one email you should be sending.

Why?

Because they have a 91.43% open rate, can create an 86% lift in unique open rate, and have on average 5x the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign. I’ve uncovered heaps more stats that I’ll share with you later in the post.

For this article I took the time to subscribe to 40 top tech blogs and applied quantitative research to categorize and break down their welcome emails. Hopefully, this article will offer some kind of insight into how to write kick-ass welcome emails.

If you’re asking yourself whether your welcome emails should include power words, links, emojis, rich formatting, or plain text, or what’s the best way to sign off a welcome email – then this post is for you. Specifically, I’ll cover:

• What are welcome emails & why are they important?
• How welcome emails have changed over time
• Welcome emails broken down
• A quantitative approach to welcome emails: The results
• Welcome email teardowns
• Email marketing & Process Street

Let’s get to it. 🚀
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This is a guest post by Michael Zipursky, CEO of Consulting Success® and Coach to Consultants. He has advised organizations like Financial Times, Dow Jones, RBC, and helped Panasonic launch new products into global markets. Michael is also the author of the Amazon Best Sellers ACT NOW: How successful consultants thrive during chaos and uncertainty, The Elite Consulting Mind and Consulting Success® the book.

You know the feeling; you’d love to take a vacation and a break from your business…

…but there’s no one to handle the day-to-day operations for you.

You’ve built up years of experience, and you feel like you’re the only one who can run the show. I know, because I’ve been there. Early on in my career, I was convinced I could do everything.

I told myself I was better than anyone at the work I did. It would take me too long to train anyone up to my level. I persuaded myself that this was true…but I was wrong. I could have certainly taught someone else – and it would have saved me a lot of time and energy to focus on higher-value work.

Studies indicate that business system documentation can boost productivity and save up to 6,000 hours per year, equating to 2.4 full-time staff positions.

On top of this, documenting systems and processes builds a foundation to train new team members so that your business can run without you involved in the day-to-day operations.

By the end of this Process Street article, you’ll understand why it’s so important to document systems and processes, see some real-life examples and learn how to do it in your business.

• Business system documentation: What it is and why it is important
• Business system development starts with organizing your business systems
• Documenting systems for clients: Network Reactivation Campaign example
• Frequently asked questions about business systems development
• Using Process Street and process documentation for business system development

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90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from could do better when it comes to how they experience onboarding.

Customer success is about helping your customers understand and leverage the value of your product; you’re basically helping them achieve their goals. In a sense it’s one step beyond traditional customer support, taking a proactive approach to understanding and addressing customer needs.

A key component of customer success is making sure your customers are effectively onboarded.

Onboarding provides a unique opportunity for the CS team to nurture and address the key needs of a new customer, and an effective onboarding program can mean the difference between a long-term customer and a rapid churn.

For customer success teams to succeed with onboarding, CS managers should drive clear best practices and use well-structured processes to make onboarding as effortless as possible for everyone involved.

In this Process Street article, we’ll dive into:

• Customer success onboarding best practices
• Designing your customer success onboarding framework
• The customer onboarding process
• Measuring success with key customer success onboarding metrics

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The other day, my household experienced one of the great tragedies of the home delivery era: our grocery delivery was canceled.

You know what that means. I had to go to the grocery store. Like, physically, in person, go inside the grocery store.

I survived, but phew. Let’s just say there were a few close calls.

All in all, though, it was a successful trip. I picked up a couple of prescriptions, had an eye exam, switched the pet insurance, got some advice about first-time homeownership, and even remembered to get dinner fixins. I would’ve gotten my oil changed and tires rotated, too, but I don’t have a car so… Yeah. I didn’t do that.

This is what economies of scope look like. Economies of scope are when it’s more cost-effective to produce related items together than it is to produce them individually. In the 21st century economy, it’s also an increasingly familiar model as brands continue to expand their offerings to consumers.

As a consumer, this model is great. We don’t have to run around all over the place to take care of all our responsibilities. For companies, it’s not a bad model, either.

Economies of scope – offering all of these services under one roof – companies are actually spending less by offering more.

But wait – how does that work?

Well, I’ll tell you:

• What do we mean by economies of scope?
• Economies of scope: Pros and cons
• Economies of scope vs economies of scale
• Economies of scope in action
• If all your friends jumped off a bridge…

Welcome to Process Street! 👋 Right this way, please.
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When you’re doing any kind of content marketing, you want to be able to understand how well you’re doing. You want to be able to look at the performance of the content you’re creating and feel assurance that you’re:

1. Driving forward key goals and objectives tied to your content strategy;
2. Continuously optimizing and improving the quality of your content in order to hit those goals.

Especially when you’re creating this kind of content that involves a degree of creative input (writing!) it can be difficult to measure quality.

This is where maturity models come in. Maturity models can be a great way to build and assess how successful an organization or system is at achieving continuous improvement.

Ultimately, it’s the idea that you’re constantly seeking to test and improve the way in which your organization runs. You’re not standing still.

We’ve written before about more generally applicable Capability Maturity Models, but this post takes a look at our internal Blog Asset Maturity Model (BAMM) process that we use to audit and continuously improve the quality of our blog content.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• How to assess content quality
• Content marketing metrics to measure success
• What exactly is a maturity model?
• Our internal process for quality control: The BAMM review
• Using processes to systematize content creation – more reliable and higher quality

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This is a guest post written by Kashyap Trivedi. Kashyap is a Project Manager, working with an awesome team at Launch Space. He helps SaaS companies conquer the SERPs with Expert Outreach. When he is not working, you’ll find him playing Table Tennis or Meditating.

The Sales, Marketing, and Support teams form the three significant points of a business’ interactions with customers. Because of this, they must work together to create a seamless transition for the customers that are moving from one stage of the buying process to another.

When all three teams work together in sync, they can easily help each other to reach organizational goals quickly. This article will show you how these three teams can work together and how your business can benefit from it. To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below.

• How the Sales team can help the Marketing & Support teams
• How the Marketing team can support the Sales & Support teams
• How the Support team can help the Marketing & Sales Teams
• Designing a perfect process for an optimized Sales, Marketing, and Support team sync
• Using Process Street for synchronized cross-departmental collaboration
• Cross-departmental collaboration: Key takeaways

Let’s start with Sales.
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Who resolved to read more this year? ✋

Who actually has? 🙈

Let’s be honest: you’re never actually going to make it through that folder of bookmarked articles you’ve been collecting since last year. Hey – not judging. I’ve been cultivating my own To Be Read monolith for months.

So what’s the deal? How do you catch up with all those industry insights, actionable advice articles, and entrepreneurial retrospectives when there never seems to be any time to, y’know, read?

Simple: let us read them for you.

Introducing Tech Out Loud – the coolest podcast around bringing those must-read articles directly into your waiting ears.
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There are plenty of great quotes from inspirational leaders that perfectly sum up the importance of workforce planning, but in my mind, none of them quite capture it like this one:

“Making a plan without the right tools is like making spaghetti without a pot.” – Kris Hughes, Content Strategy Consultant

You are absolutely not going to be making any spaghetti without a pot, or at least a pot-like vessel that will hold boiling water in a way so as not to burn the crap out of your hands in the process. When it comes to workforce planning, the spaghetti is your business and the pot…

Okay. I took the simile too far. You get the picture: if your business doesn’t have the right people in the right place, you got nothing.

Think beyond that: if the right people don’t stay or aren’t being utilized properly, you still don’t have a pot to… make spaghetti in.

There is a lot out there about workforce planning, and by a lot I mean, a frickin lot. It’s my job to do research and even I got a little dizzy trying to sort through all the different takes on what is or isn’t or could be/might be the best way to manage your workforce.

This post aims to simplify all that. I’ll cover the foundations of workforce planning, specific considerations for remote work, and examine some common methods for finding the right approach for your organization.

This Process Street post is designed so you can jump straight to the info you need to know, so feel free to skip ahead.

• Workforce planning foundations
• Challenges for remote workforce planning
• Future-back planning process
• Recruit, retain, reinforce
• Workforce management tools

Let’s get planning!
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We’re an ambitious bunch here at Process Street.

In terms of numbers, we’ve published over 1,000 onsite blog posts, over 300 offsite blog posts, penned 5 huge ebooks, attended many an external webinar, and created many a podcast, too. And this is only our content marketing team’s efforts. If I were to discuss the phenomenal accomplishments of our other departments — from engineering to sales, product to customer success — we’d be here all day.

Despite our company-wide accomplishments, we knew in 2020 that we could push ourselves further (especially considering our $12m cash injection from Accel, Salesforce, and others). Naturally, we turned the ambitious goals and objectives we’d set ourselves up a notch.

This meant that, rather than only working with KPIs, we threw OKRs into the mix as well.

Not to toot our own horn too much, but I can say with confidence that the choice to do so went in our favor. In fact, we’ve had some of the best months ever since deploying OKRs!

This is why, in this post, I’m going to tell you everything that we learned from internally deploying OKRs at Process Street. Specifically, I’ll give you a quick recap on what OKRs are, go over our method for implementing OKRs in detail, recount my experience of getting used to (and then loving) OKRs, on top of providing 5 tried-and-tested tips for deploying OKRs at your company.

Just read the following sections to get completely clued-up:

• OKRs: A quick breakdown
• How we deployed OKRs at Process Street
• Deploying OKRs: How do they impact the rest of the company?
• 5 tips and tricks for deploying OKRs at your company

It’s time for you to pivot to OKRs and hit challenging targets like a pro, too.

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This is a guest post by Brian Skewes, a technologist into deconstruction. Over two decades of self-employment, he has accumulated a wealth of inadvertent real-world lessons related to building, running, and preserving a small company.

There’s a phrase that’s become popular in web analytics, digital marketing, and business consultancy in the last few years: data is everything.

There’s a lot to recommend it. It’s short, snappy, and captures the importance of data to the way in which we do business today. Whether you are building organic links or in the process of drafting an employee development plan, the path to success runs right through a big ‘ol pile of numbers.

Unfortunately, there’s more to numbers than just numbers.

This is due to the nature of data itself. The problem with relying on numbers and nothing else is that no matter how impressive it is, it also remains inscrutable, incomprehensible, or simply boring for the majority of people. Unless your audience is composed entirely of the type of person who can instantly visualize columns of figures, you are going to need to provide some context for the ever-so-impressive stats.

This is where the concept of storytelling comes in.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at how you can go beyond data acquisition, compilation, and presentation. We’ll show you how to make your data come alive through the magic of storytelling.

• Purposeful data, the Enlightenment, and Single Source of Truth
• Building the framework for your data story
• What’s the story behind your data?
• The happily ever after

Once upon a time…
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