The holidays are over and things are going to begin picking up again on a business front (if they haven’t already) . Now is the time to take a look at your business profile on LinkedIn, before things get too busy.

In November, LinkedIn rolled out a new version for businesses. What was previously called LinkedIn Company Pages is now LinkedIn Pages.

Previously, businesses were limited in their ability to have social interactions with individuals and other companies outside of their network. Now, it’s easier for small businesses to comment, post and re-share employee and member posts via the LinkedIn app. Admins can now more easily monitor conversations, use relevant hashtags and share PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, word documents and native videos. There’s also a Content Suggestions feature to see what is trending and what topics might be relevant to your audience.

Here are seven things every small business owner should do to update their individual business profiles and company LinkedIn Pages in 2019 (and the sooner the better!):

1. Revisit What Is Relevant (and What Isn’t)

Branding is important for everyone. Individuals. Companies. Entrepreneurs. Make sure your LinkedIn Pages and profile accurately reflect what you and your company do.

Re-read what is currently being used, and ask yourself:

If I were learning about my company for the first time, would this LinkedIn description get me interested in my business?Could I describe my company or what I do from reading what is posted on LinkedIn?

2. Create an Engaging Headline

For individual profiles, think of your LinkedIn job title as a marquee sign to flash your mission statement. It is a key place to show off your personal branding. Use the space to share your philosophy and brand yourself with a great headline in 120 characters.

For example, Michelle Mekky the CEO of Mekky Media Relations in Chicago writes, “I help people and brands stand out by crafting their authentic story. You in?” Derek Edmond, a managing partner and director of marketing strategy for KoMarketing, uses a mission statement headline like this: “Helping B2B Companies Generate Results in Search Engines, Social Media, and Content Marketing.”

Forbes contributor William Arrunda, the cofounder of CareerBlast, recommends using the formula “Job title/company + Keywords + Zing!” to stand out with keywords while still keeping it personal.

3. Share What You Believe

Despite what you might think, LinkedIn isn’t a place to just dump a chronological history of your work experience with every detail about your small business.

LinkedIn is about speaking person-to-person, customer-to-potential-customer (or client).

Your summary or About Us page description on your LinkedIn Pages should encapsulate your beliefs about your business. Ideally, it also evokes a strong emotional response in your target audience. Write a short, impactful statement that highlights what you’re good at and what you believe.

4. Make Sure Your (Business) Pages are Complete

While this may sound like a no brainer, make sure your LinkedIn Pages are complete and the basics are up-to-date. Companies with complete information get 30 percent more weekly views according to LinkedIn. That means:

Write a compelling description of your company’s mission, purpose, expertise and focus.Your company logo is posted You’ve included a website URL. Your address, industry, company size, city and state and headquarters are accurate and included.

Need an example? Check out LearnLoft, a leadership development management company in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the corresponding LinkedIn page of its CEO John Eades, a 2017 LinkedIn Top Voice.

5. Optimize Your LinkedIn Listing

Are you making the most of your profile or LinkedIn Pages?

See if you should add additional contacts. Ask for and add recommendations. Join, or add or remove you and your company from important groups to ensure you are following the most relevant for your industry and small business community.Make sure you’ve customized your LinkedIn page with a vanity URL. If you have a new product or brand within your company, consider creating Showcase Pages. It’s a standalone page, like a mini version of LinkedIn Pages, within your company listing to spotlight something specific such as a new product, brand, event or charity work your company is doing. You can also target niche audiences such as a high-net-worth population within a financial services company.

On your business page, update the Life tab to help job seekers get a better look into what life is like at your company. Include details such as company values, cultural stats, job openings and job descriptions. Or do like software development company Atlassian and share s link to a quiz to see how a job candidate’s values align with your business.

6. Share Engaging Content

Review the types of content you are sharing on LinkedIn. If you aren’t getting great engagement, copywriter John Espirian gives some good tips to improve your tactics including writing enough to fill at least three lines in a LinkedIn post which triggers the “see more” link and can improve the social media value of your post.

Use LinkedIn Pulse to quickly share industry news, trends, research and blog posts.

How-to articles with phrases such as “X ways to,” “how to get,” and “how to make” tend to do well.  In addition to these, newsy trend pieces such as “the future of,” “in the world,” or, “of the year,” also get great engagement on LinkedIn according to Buzzsumo, a social media analytics company, which analyzed 100 million article headlines.

7. Be Visual and Conversational

Review what type of visual elements you’re sharing.

Start by updating your company profile photo (1,536 x 768 pixels) and profile picture (300 x 300 pixels) with images that are 8 MB or smaller.

Another thing to consider is embedding photos, infographics and videos in LinkedIn posts on company and personal pages to make them uniquely yours. In additions, you should consider thought leadership videos that reinforce your brand on YouTube. Add product demonstrations, speech sound bites and engaging conference videos.

Need some inspiration? Check out Slack’s tutorial video.

Be conversational, relatable and memorable. Updating your LinkedIn company page and personal profile gets potential customers, clients and employees engaged. That can make all the difference this year.

You’ve made email marketing a key part of your marketing strategy. You’ve carefully compiled your email list, created some beautiful email designs, and wrote some amazing copy….

So why aren’t isn’t your email marketing getting a response?

There is no one definitive explanation of why an email marketing campaign doesn’t perform.  But, there are best practices you can implement to help improve your results.

Segment your email lists.

Personalized content is key to a successful marketing emails. Email segmentation essentially means separating the people on your email list into small groups, based on some type of commonality. Whether you distinguish your segments by the types of things they purchase, how recently they’ve made a purchase,or the discounts they’ve redeemed, segmentation allows you to tailor your messages based on the recipient, and what they’ll likely notice.

While segmenting your lists takes a little more effort than a generic email sent to all ,analysis by MailChimp indicates that it’s time well spent. Opens and clicks on segmented email lists are 100% higher than they are with a non-segmented list. Once you do segment, the content of your email should be tailored to the specific group, along with the subject line. (More on that later).

Schedule emails to suit your audience.

You can’t change the fact that the recipients on your email list probably have a cluttered email inbox, but you can increase the chances that your email will get noticed by sending it when you have a captive audience.

One study by MailChimp revealed that emails sent on a Thursday generally receive the highest amount of opens, followed closely by those sent on a Tuesday. Unless your email content is related to a hobby or a recreational activity, avoid sending emails on the weekend.If your email list is made up of consumers (not a business-to-business communication) send your email early in the morning, before traditional office hours begin. Your recipients are most likely to be commuting into the office, or actively checking their email before their day is in full swing.

Avoid email fatigue

In the same way that you want to schedule email sends around the time of day and week that fits best for your audience, you also want to make sure that the frequency in which you send these emails fits your audience. As you start to track your engagement metrics (see more below), you can determine how often your audience wants to be contacted. And many email platforms allow you to set up a preference center, which gives you the ability to let your audience actually tell you how frequently they would like to be contacted by you.

Why is frequency so important? If you don’t email often enough, your brand will not stay top-of-mind with your audience. On the other end, if you email too often your audience could begin to experience email fatigue.  In short, email fatigue is when your audience gets. tired. of. getting. so. many. emails. from. you.  They will stop opening them and engaging with them. If this happens too often, some email clients will begin to automatically direct these emails to clutter or spam folders.

Experiment with subject lines.

An email subject line is your first chance to make a first (or potentially, last) impression. While the “right” subject line depends on the content in your email, the audience and your relationship with the recipient, there are a few tricks of the trade you can apply:

Subject lines should lead with actionable language and a clear payoff for the recipient. Eliminate unnecessary nouns and pronouns.  Use words like “save,” “learn,” “take,” or “see” to get right to the point.Personalize subject lines to indicate that you know the recipient. Is the recipient on your email list because she purchased a similar item in the past? Perhaps she redeemed a similar promotional offer once before, or left an item in a shopping cart. Tell her why she’s got to open your email.

Appeal to your readers.

There is one thing your reader wants to know in your email: “What’s in it for me?” Your email copy should address that question within the first few lines of copy, and include a clear call to action. If you make them scroll, they probably won’t find it.

Test how your email displays.

At least half of all emails are now opened on a mobile device, according to Hubspot. Perhaps more importantly, mobile users check mails three times more frequently than desktop users. Ensure that your emails can be opened and read on a mobile device and a traditional computer screen, and that the appearance and functionality appearance works in all email clients including Apple iPhone, Gmail, Apple iPad, Android, Apple Mail and Outlook.

Use metrics to refine your marketing.

Email campaign metrics can tell you a lot about your customers and business opportunity.  Some of the top metrics include how many people opened your message (your open rate), read your emails, clicked on the links (your click through rate) and who unsubscribed from your list entirely after receiving a specific email.

Establish a cadence for when you’ll run campaign reports. Then establish and test against benchmarks so you have a foundation from which to build. Apply your findings to test variables like subject lines, creative messages, the landing pages you use and the time you send the email.  Then refine continually. Eventually, patterns will emerge and you’ll start to know how to optimize email as a channel that helps drive results.

Always remember that your customers come first

Just like they do in every other aspect of your business, your customers need to come first with email marketing. Never send emails just to send emails. Members of your audience gave you their email address with the understanding that you would provide something of value. Share a great discount. Share an educational blog post. Establish a weekly or monthly email newsletter that focuses on topics that are important to them. Just be sure to stay true to that unspoken agreement.  And always send something that will that will also strengthen your relationship with your audience.

Email marketing can be an exceptionally useful tool in your marketing strategy – if you do it right! By integrating these useful tips into your email marketing program, you should begin to see better results. Any by continuously watching your metrics and A/B testing your email content, those results should continue to improve.

Business owners and executives have a love-fear relationship with raising prices: They’d often love to raise prices, yet fear customers will choose to go to a competitor.

A combination of sharply increased optimism on the part of business owners and a continued increase in operating expenses – particularly labor – has resulted in a wave of price hikes by small business owners, according to the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

While pricing increases may be a tactical tool to react to financial pressures, concerns about potentially losing customers aren’t fanciful. Sometimes the trade-off may be worth it, as when Netflix raised prices by 60 percent and lost only 4 percent of customers. However, when you lose too much business, those price increases may not be such a good idea.

Psychological pricing strategies are ways to nudge people towards spending more without scaring them off. Here are four techniques you can use to potentially help you avoid negative customer reactions.

1. Use the pennies-a-day technique

You’ve undoubtedly seen the pennies-a-day pricing strategy. Marketers break the cost down from a single expense into a series of smaller ones, even though customers may still make the aggregate payment. According to the Journal of Consumer Research‘s “Pennies-a-Day: The Effect of Temporal Reframing on Transactional Evaluation,” the approach succeeds through consumer perception. Even though both the full pricing and break-down both appear, the pennies-a-day pricing causes consumers to focus on small, ongoing expenses rather than the single larger one. The difference between the two may, “significantly influence subsequent transaction evaluation and compliance,” as the study notes. That’s research-speak for customers being more likely to buy.

2. Offer the right framing

Long before winning the Nobel Prize, economist Richard Thayer ran an experiment in which he told lab subjects to imagine they were sitting on the beach during hot weather. Thayer then asked how much they’d pay for a beer if another person would get it for them. The subjects were willing to pay more if the beer provider was an expensive hotel rather than a corner store, according to the New York Times.

Consumers assume an upscale business will charge more and therefore see the extra expense as fair. By contrast, consumers expect value- or mid-range-positioned companies to charge less, even if the product is the same. The context is known as framing, where the “positioning of choices prejudices the outcome,” as the Times reports. If the context matches the high price, people often accept that they must spend more.

While some consumers may choose to find a different context — like looking for a discount seller — framing is one reason why high-end brands are careful about not discounting their prices. The action alone might undercut their ability to charge what they already get. By framing your prices in a way that matches your brand positioning (value, mid-range, high-end for example) customers may be more likely to purchase.

3. Present pricing in an attractive way

Ending a price in 9 is a way for prices to appear lower to consumers, while still adding margin. This may be an old pricing trick that still works as the study Effects of $9 Price Endings on Retail Sales: Evidence from Field Experiments explains. The last digit in a price can increase demand, even when researchers tested prices a few dollars lower.

Additionally, researchers found that a longer-looking price can change how customers react, according to a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

People translate visual representations of numbers into verbal equivalents, e.g., 72 becomes “Seventy-two.” So the longer a price is in the verbal equivalent, consumers mentally equate that with a higher price. To combat this effect, shorten lengthy prices by eliminating commas and decimals where possible. If you communicate a smaller verbal equivalent price, you may make the product psychologically more palatable to a consumer.  Which, in turn can increase sales.

4. Focus messaging on experiences

People don’t only buy products and services; they also purchase experiences. That is why many consumer campaigns emphasize how people will feel by using a product, instead of lower prices.

In The Time vs. Money Effect, Stanford Professor of Business Jennifer Aaker and Cassie Mogilner tested the concept by having six-year-olds operate lemonade stands. One sign read, “Spend a little time and enjoy C&D’s lemonade.” The second read, “Spend a little money, and enjoy C&D’s lemonade.” The third read, “Enjoy C&D’s lemonade.”

People could choose to pay between $1 and $3 for a cup of lemonade. Those who bought when the sign stressed time paid twice as much, because of their emotional response to the sign.

There was one exception to the findings: Ads for products people acquired for prestige did better when stressing money. The pleasure was in the possession of the product and status of the higher price, not the experience using it.

Psychological pricing tips are complex, and may even seem contradictory at times, because they are ultimately about people. Some tactics may work on certain consumers while others don’t — meaning it is likely you will need to experiment within your marketing strategy to see how they work for you and your customers and prospects; however, an investment of a little time and effort may be a small price to pay to boost sales.

To make retail a winning experience, retail spaces must be both practical and enjoyable for customers. There are still many benefits to “try before you buy” shopping — such as not dealing with the hassle of returns — which means that retail stores will continue to serve consumers.

There are many ways to design retail space to help drive additional sales by making your store appealing to the five senses. Here are four easy-to-implement sensory tips to help improve your customers’ in-store brand experience.

1. Visual: Add mirrors.

Mirrors can make your footprint seem larger and more spacious to your customers. Taller mirrors can draw customers’ eyes upward, which makes rooms feel more spacious. If it turns out that your retail space lacks windows or natural light, you can use mirrors to increase the perception of how big your space really is. In such an instance, you can use small square mirrors to create a tiling effect.

Keeping mirrors in comfortable fitting rooms may be a great way to improve your sales. A study by consumer scientists Maryke Vermaak and Helena de Klerk indicated that use of fitting rooms, and how shoppers felt about a store’s fitting rooms, heavily influenced a consumer’s decision to buy.

Get ready for the future: Soon stores will be trying out interactive mirrors. These mirrors use technology to allow people to virtually try on clothing by scanning barcodes.

2. Visual: Be smart about your use of colors.

Color has a powerful psychological impact on customers’ behavior and decisions. Color can often be the sole reason, or one of the major reasons, why someone purchases a product. Retail consultant Anand Kumar says, “Different colors tend to evoke different feelings in people, which can affect how they perceive products. For instance, red – when used effectively – can highlight passion and power.”

Be cognizant of the colors used in your displays, signage and advertising.

Color and light play combined roles in retail environments, as a Journal of Business Research report suggests, “For fashion-oriented stores, blue interiors are associated with more favorable evaluations, marginally greater excitement, higher store patronage intentions, and higher purchase intentions.” However, consumers react differently when stores use softer lighting. For example, an orange interior with soft lighting generally, “Produces the highest level of perceived price fairness.”

Get ready for the future: Enable your customers to select their own product colors or suggest new ones. Some companies are already experimenting with augmented reality apps to enable customers to test their own colors in-store.

3. Sound: Choose music based on customer behavior.

Customer behavior is greatly influenced by the rhythm and genre of music that plays. The music inside a store helps customers create their perception of your store’s identity and the brands you sell.

It’s important that music for retail spaces reflects both the personality of your store and an awareness of customer perception in each track that plays. For example, one study found that classical music performed better than Top 40 hits for wine shops, influencing buyers to spend on more expensive wines. While popular music may be a good fit for mainstream stores, the complexity of classical music seems more suited for considered purchases like high-end wines.

Get ready for the future: While there are many companies that license music for retail use, automated music selections will soon be able to determine the ages of shoppers, the density of people in your retail business, and more. Soon, the music decisions will be left to computers and be updated depending on your current customer profiles.

4. Smell: Use scent to attract customers to your brand.

“Well-received ambient scents can positively influence purchase behavior if the scent seems to match the products in the store,” according to Shopify. The opposite is also true. If the scent doesn’t seem to match the context of the shop, consumers may turn away from the retail space. This is why it is so important to pick a scent that will help grow your brand. Interestingly, “Gender-designed scents seem to matter as well. A ‘feminine’ scent in a women’s clothing store helps create positive purchase intent.”

At Starbucks, the scent of fresh coffee, without the scent of food is intentional, yet subtle at the same time. Think “New car smell” is natural? It isn’t! Car manufacturers go to great lengths to treat leather with special aromas.

Get ready for the future: As the authors of the book Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age state, brands are quite bullish on scent marketing. This may be the single-most underutilized resource in the brand game.  Yet, big brands are learning how to use scent more effectively.

5. Touch: Digital touch points are everywhere.

By the year 2020, most of McDonalds’ 14,000 locations will have kiosks installed to enable you to order your food without dealing with a human being. Simply press which menu items you’d like to eat on a full-color screen and within a couple of minutes your food will be waiting for you. This means shorter lines and less of a chance that someone may mishear your order. McDonalds will add 1,000 kiosks at its stores every quarter for the next two years, according to CNBC. And if this experiment succeeds, expect other retail and food brands to follow suit.

Get ready for the future: With devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple’s Siri ubiquitous in the Western world, customers now have direct access to AI. In the future, when you walk into a retail store, you may be able to say precisely what you’re looking for and then either a human or machine will find that product and bring it to you or bring you to it immediately.

Conclusions

There are many ways to appeal to the five senses to stimulate more retail purchases. But, ultimately, the goal should be to improve the overall customer and shopping experience. Creating an in-store sensory experience that customers can’t get online is a key differentiator for brick-and-mortar stores.

Stores that use sensory design techniques may find themselves better equipped to compete with online retailers. When designing your retail store, be aware how sight, sound, touch, smell, and in some cases, taste can improve your customers’ experience.

Since it was founded in 2008, Airbnb has rapidly grown to host more than 5 million lodging listings in 81,000 cities and 191 countries. At the end of 2017, Airbnb has facilitated over 300 million check-ins, and in 2017, Airbnb made $93 million in profits on $2.6 billion in revenues.

In late 2016, Airbnb expanded its service offerings, allowing its users to go beyond just booking places to stay by giving them the option to also book “experiences” in the places that they visit. These “experiences” can range from tame activities such as cooking classes and art walks, to more avant-garde activities like graffiti workshops, or poetry classes in the home of Harlem Renaissance poet Mr. Langston Hughes in New York.

And small businesses should take note: If you haven’t thought about creating an Airbnb experience for your business, you are losing out on what could potentially be a great income stream.

Selma Studer, 34, who runs a company that offers “gong baths,” a type of meditation induced by the sound of a gong, added her company’s services to the Airbnb platform in June 2018. She has exerienced an uptick in business since she added the business due to bookings from the Airbnb platform. Why did Studer join the platform to begin with? She says, “I see it as a way to test and offer the five-star experience of my product.”

Studer notes that she tailors the gong baths a bit differently for the typically out-of-town guests who find her services through the Airbnb platform than for her regular customers. “It’s more personal than the group gong baths I go for in the regular business, so I add all the bells and whistles, like baking in time at the end to relax and chat and connect over tea and cookies,” she says.

Studer says of the Airbnb Experience platform, “It’s a really useful lead generation tool but also the booking and calendar system make it really easy to monetize the experience from the platform in a hassle free way.”

Adding your business to the Airbnb platform is easy: a few clicks, a few photos, a description, and you’re onboarded.

Because of its size and popularity, there may be competition on Airbnb from companies offering similar products and services to yours. In New York alone, there are dozens of photographers offering photo tours of the city, for example.

Some general ways to make your business standout from the crowd include:

• Make sure you use high-quality photographs of your product or service.
• Write strong copy to explain what experiences you are offering.
• Respond to inquiries quickly through the Airbnb platform.
• Read Airbnb’s advice on how make the most out of experiences for your business.

When it comes to bookings, Airbnb says there are 3 tips to make sure you get more through their site:

1. Start with a lower introductory price. This might mean that even though you value your time at say $50 per person per hour, it might be necessary to reduce it to $30 per person per hour to get those initial customers and the positive reviews they’ll bring with them.
2. Make sure you keep your calendar optimized. The site states that most bookings occur on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, so keep these days available if you want bookings.
3. Don’t set your cut-off times too early. Airbnb notes that 40% of bookings occur within a week of the experience happening, and 20% occur within two days of the experience happening. Setting cut-off times too early may mean missing out on customers looking for last-minute experiences.

As a small business owner, you should encourage your users who come to your business through Airbnb to review your services. Airbnb says, “Setting expectations has helped many hosts find success. This can set you up for more 5-star reviews, and the higher your reviews, the more likely your guests will book.” Studer adds, “I’m not 100% sure how their algorithm works, but it’s really important to get some good reviews early on.”

“Airbnb are also great about creating communities within communities,” Studer says. “They’ve really fostered a sense of connection among fellow hosts for example by hosting a networking reception for us at their headquarters and they also maintain an active Facebook group.”

She concludes, “It’s a virtuous cycle that I hope will be fruitful for my business as well as for the businesses of my peers.”

Imagine you arrive at your automobile dealership at 9 a.m. on the dot and find an email inquiry from a customer who was prowling your website last night and wanted to schedule a test drive. Your enthusiasm may be short lived. The customer may already be behind the wheel at a competing dealership across town.

Such is commerce in an digital age where businesses and customers never sleep. Some 23% of leads come in after hours, and 50% of customers do business with the first company that contacts them, according to a survey by ReachLocal.

Customers are reaching out at all hours through email, phone, and web forms. These prospects want immediate attention, but rarely receive it. Another survey of 2,241 American companies found that those that responded to customer inquiries took 42 hours on average. Some 23% of companies never responded at all — the exact same percentage as the number of inquiries that come in after closing time.

Being Fast Closes Deals

Salespeople who follow up within an hour are more than 30 times more likely to speak to the decision-maker than those who wait a full day to respond. In the case of car dealerships, customers are three times more likely to come in for a visit when their online inquiries receive a response within 10 minutes; however, only 36% of dealers responded to requests submitted after hours.

“This potentially represents lost business as multiple manufacturers have stated that up to 40% of all consumer leads are submitted when dealerships are closed,” noted Digital Air Strike, the social media firm that conducted the study.

Respond With Technology

In a 24-7 world, the key is to automate your response after-hours. A variety of communications platforms provide options for how you can respond in a timely manner to a customer inquiry:

• An automated email can tell the customer the name of the salesperson who will contact them in the morning.
• Open-access calendars can allow customers to schedule their own appointments.
• Text alerts can immediately tell a manager or business owner about an inquiry, allowing them to decide if it’s important enough to respond to, or forward to an employee.
• Chat bots can simulate live support via artificial intelligence based on your team’s customer service chat logs.
• Digital answering services can handle inquiries, using a script provided by the small business to book the appointment.

Janette Derbyshire, a property manager at Old Pasadena Collection Apartments who uses automated technology for after-hour leads, says such technology has had a significant impact on her business. “Marketing automation tools are allowing us to respond quickly to our leasing leads and has helped us to organize all the lead sources,” she says. “And that difference in response time continues to make leasing apartments even more successful.”

In an era where the Internet is the new storefront, an online inquiry should be treated with the same respect and swiftness as a customer who walks through the front door. Don’t keep them waiting.