In 2017, it’s not about if you’re using email, it’s about how you’re using email.

70% of companies are currently using a marketing automation platform. It’s not enough for small businesses just to send emails, you have to send the best emails to be heard above the noise—or even make it out of the spam box. Luckily, there’s a ton of tools that can help optimize your email campaigns to make sure you’re delivering your message as effectively as possible.

But picking one isn’t so easy. Each email marketing tool comes with so many features and integrations, it becomes difficult to sift through and find one that suits your company’s needs best. That’s why we broke the most popular email services down into four categories:

• Design
• Marketing automation
• Sign-up forms
• Analytics

We compared Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, GetResponse, and ConvertKit to help you decide on the right one to fit into your team’s existing systems.

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Are you a wannabe investor, or an aspiring entrepreneur?

There are now more ways than ever to get those valuable connections to make you and others money. The online crowdfunding world is a network of forward thinking companies and people who want to help them succeed.

In the second installment of our Future Finance series, focused on modern investment and millennial-friendly financing, we’re looking at the particular niche of equity crowdfunding.

In 2012, the total global crowdfunding industry estimated fundraising volume was $2.7 billion. In 2015, this had grown to $34 billion. The industry is booming and growing each year, so it’s about time we picked it apart for you.

In this article, we’re going to look at two key areas:

1. How you can become an investor through crowdfunding opportunities including platforms available to help you along your journey.
2. How you can raise investment for your startup through crowdfunding platforms, with expert advice from FlashFunders’s Evan Markiles.

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For a long time, the world of investing was limited to those with access to significant amounts of capital.

If you wanted to invest, you needed large sums of money. If you wanted investment, you needed someone with large sums of money.

The internet is changing this.

$30 million has been put into one micro investing app, $35 million in another, and a whopping $66 million in a further one. Investors see real promise in these micro investing opportunities, and it’s easy to see why.

These apps aim to open up investing to everyone, no matter your budget.

In the first of our Process Street Future Finance series, where we look at modern tech-driven investment options and how the millennial market is shaping the scene, we’re giving the ultimate introduction to micro investing.

We’ll tell you:

• What it is.
• Why it’s hyped.
• Where it’s going.
• How you can get started.

Hold on to your 401(k)s, we’re going in!

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The following is a guest post from Gloria Kopp, a digital marketer and a business consultant from Manville city. She works as a content manager at Paper Fellows and is a regular contributor to such websites as Engadget, Academized, and Huffington Post.

A well-planned workflow is crucial to keeping your content marketing efforts on track and ensuring that you meet your goals.  You may often find that you are receiving content late from your team, that it’s not up to scratch, has been rushed, or just never materializes. The tips in this article should help you to get back onto the straight and narrow.

Before you or your team get stuck into creating more content, make sure that you’ve read through the following points to keep your projects flowing productively.

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Whether you’ve completed a project a hundred times before or you’re faced with a new challenge, having some kind of formal project request form prevents the whole operation descending into a game of broken telephone and wasted resources.

No matter how good your team’s discipline, if all they have to go on when you request a project is a vague message and their memory of the requirements, sooner or later you’re going to have a problem. Either a project will be started which won’t be worth your time or your instructions will be lost in the trickle down to those taking action.

‘Whilst on manoeuvers, a brigadier commanding a certain brigade stationed in Aldershot passed the word to the nearest colonel to him:

“Enemy advancing from the left flank. Send reinforcements.”

By the time it reached the end of the right flank the message was received:

“Enemy advancing with ham-shanks. Send three and fourpence!”’ – Garson O’Tool, relaying a real-world instance of broken telephone from 1914

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I’m writing this blog post to solve a very specific problem.

During one of our regular marketing meetings, Vinay assigned me this post and said he wants it to be written so he can link it to everyone who messages him just “hey Vinay” on Slack and waits for a response before saying anything else.

Like many managers in remote teams, Vinay’s sick of our tendencies to under-communicate. Just saying “hey Vinay” and hoping to get a synchronous chat going is a waste of time, especially if there are time zone differences, or if general busy-ness prevents a polite, fully-fledged chat.

And so, in the spirit of that real example, this article will solve the problem of communication in remote teams.

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Communicating the right things at the right times is vital in all walks of life.

Within a complex business with multiple moving parts, the value of this communication is high and the effects of poor communication are potentially catastrophic.

As Professor Allen Webster puts it:

Without communication and the team effort it permits, the successful completion of any important project can be jeopardized.

There are two elements of communication here to be addressed:

1. How effectively we are understanding key concepts and terms
2. How effectively we are utilizing and communicating those concepts and their effects to our teams

The three concepts we’re going to tackle specifically in this article are processes, policies and procedures.

What are the differences between them? How do we effectively utilize each? How do we, at Process Street, utilize these concepts within our organizational structure?

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Processes aren’t just a set of documents and rules that help your business run efficiently and reduce human error…

They’re also something that needs to be part of your company culture. Process adherence is the culture side of systemization, and that makes it one of those hard to grasp concepts without many solid rules.

The culture of processes — instead of the act of writing and optimizing them — is something we’ve been meaning to cover for a while because we know it’s a big problem for our users.

Incidentally, we got an insightful comment on our article about creating an operations manual from MamaRed Knight. She outlined an age-old problem with process adherence:

“[Process adherence] is something I’ve been dealing with since I started formally creating documentation in ’83. It really must start at the top level where they don’t answer questions, they ask if it is “in the manual” and it ripples down.

It does take time because, frankly, a very teensy tiny percentage of people want to look something up… 98% want to ask someone and be done with it.”

In this quote, she highlights two main issues:

• Employees don’t want to look up processes
• Procedures are passed on informally by hearsay

In this post, I’m going to explain why processes fail because of human nature, and then unpack each reason with an explanation of how you can improve process adherence in each area.

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Apple is well-known for being innovative and immensely successful, to the point where the company is worth $750 billion (and counting). However, without a healthy dose of workflow analysis they would’ve crumbled under their own business model back in the late 1980s.

“We could no longer afford the limitations that went with our product development processes… The lack of a formal new product development process led to confusion, wasted time, and often caused project teams to ‘re-create the wheel’” – Jackie Streeter (then VP of Engineering at Apple), Apple Rethinks Core Process: Improves Cycle Time

The simple truth is that any company (no matter the size or success) needs to regularly review its workflows and processes in order to keep them up to date and efficient. Tasks should be updated, improved, and automated where possible to save time and money, but without using the best workflow management software around to analyze and improve your business practices, your entire business model itself can prevent your success.

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Hatch Canada uses Process Street to handle its growth by standardizing recruiting, onboarding, and multi-location operations. In one peak summer, the team ran 400 recruitment workflows from the same template.

In this customer story, CEO Peter Kuperman explains how repeatable processes helped the team see where every candidate stood, make decisions faster, and maintain consistent work across geographically distributed locations.