5 Things Small Business Owners Need To Know This Week

Five Things To Know This?Week:

1) The Evolution of Email Marketing

2) How to Scale AI

3) Task Management Tips to Boost Productivity

4) Sweet Dreams

5) Well Said: Words to Live By

Hello Everyone,

?Happy May!

We are now well into Spring and halfway to Summer. Where does the time go?

This month will bring us graduations, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, outdoor BBQs, baseball games, and more.

Lots of positive vibes this week, which is why I selected Og Mandino for our quote of the week. My oldest brother James first introduced me to Og when I was in high school. He gave me a book titled?The Greatest Salesman in the World.?I still refer to it as one of the 10 best books I’ve ever read (hint: the scrolls in the book are life-affirming).

Here’s one more quote from Og Mandino to make your Tuesday a little brighter:

“Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no matter how frightening or difficult, a new meaning.?Without enthusiasm, you are doomed to a life of mediocrity, but with it, you can accomplish miracles.”

Peace!

Brian

1. The Evolution of Email Marketing

The author of?Email Marketing Rules?just released an?updated and greatly expanded fourth edition?of his book. And in his column on MarketingProfs, he talks about how much email has changed in the past 10 years:

• Email can be read on smart watches or read aloud by voice assistants
• Marketers can create interactive emails
• Privacy features launched
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have gained roles in selecting audiences, determining email content, picking send times, writing copy, and more

And he discusses three significant changes yet to come:

1. AI and machine learning?will help us scale our personalization, segmentation, and automation efforts
2. Omnichannel orchestration?will help us not only better coordinate campaigns across all of our channels but also use the right channels and incorporate data from all of our customers' brand interactions
3. CDPs?will help us centralize and clean all of our customer information so we can understand customers as whole people and use that data to fuel our AI, machine-learning, omnichannel, and other efforts

Learn more?about the still-evolving?power of email.

2. How to Scale AI

AI is capturing the attention of so many in the entrepreneurial world, partly because, I believe, there’s so much we don’t understand about it and its capabilities. And then there’s a bit of fear of the unknown, no doubt a result of seeds planted by watching?that?episode of?The Twilight Zone, where Rod Serling, always ahead of his time, scripted ordinary appliances suddenly taking over the world.

As most of us slowly dip our toes into what is sure to be an ocean of AI applications for our businesses, this caught my eye. Entrepreneur Bruno Aziza, writing on Medium, answered a question many business owners are likely asking, “How can I scale AI?” Aziza replied, “Make the “I” bigger than the “A” and explained three ways that could work. A quick summary:

1. Trust:?Trust is THE foundation great decision-making stands on. Semblance of truth is not truth.
2. Interaction: To work at scale, AI must be multimodal or contextual in input and output. .
3. Action: To work at scale, information and action need to be tied within a domain. Informing at speed is essential. Acting and transacting within an application flow is what makes it most useful.

Learn (so much)?more about AI and how it can?help you run a better business.

3. Task Management Tips to Boost Productivity

If you want to get more done in less time (and what small business owner doesn’t?), then you should check out this list of 7 productivity tips, which includes things like “eating frogs” (not literally) and knowing your Chronotype.?

Read more?about 7 ways to?improve your daily productivity.??

4. Sweet Dreams

Axios?Finish Line?briefly explored dreams and why they’re beneficial to us. Some facts:

Healthline?says most of us?dream about two hours a night, which helps “the brain let go of excess information gathered during the day.”?Time?calls it a “data dump.”

And Axios notes that dreaming may be useful for helping us make business decisions since it seems we can actually “solve problems in our sleep.”

Learn more?about?why dreams matter.

5. Well Said: Words to Live By