DLJ Wealth & Tax - April 2021

FIND YOUR SUCCESS WITH A GROWTH MINDSET

When it comes to securing leads, the follow-up email is hard to beat. One study found that a 12% response rate from two emails increases to 15%–16% with a third email. If you play your cards right, the success of your email marketing could, in large part, depend on your follow-up emails. So, how do you create ones that maximize positive responses from leads? Know your goals. You should have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish with your email campaign. Which metrics are most important to you? The number of times recipients open your follow-up email? That they click a link in the text? That they reply? Maybe tracking total conversions resulting from follow-up emails is important to you. Whatever the case, knowing your goals is a good first step. Find the ideal number of follow-ups. Obviously, not following up at all is a recipe for abandoning several potential leads. However, sending too many follow-ups can leave potential leads annoyed and unwilling to look into your business. According to several studies, the ideal number of follow-up emails is no less than three, but no more than seven. Who do you envision you are? Maybe you identify as smart or creative. Or maybe you see the person in the mirror as a perfectionist. We are all prone to putting ourselves in boxes like this, but absolute “I am” statements restrict our full potential! If you feel stuck in a rut, your mindset might be what is holding you back from success. People with preset ideas about who they are and what they can do have what psychologists call a “fixed mindset.” These people rely on their talents and skills and believe that those things alone determine their success. However, that is not true. Imagine that you drew something and it did not come out well. How would you react? If you looked at your art and thought, “I am not an artist. I’ll never be good at drawing,” then you may have a fixed mindset. This can be limiting to one’s personal and professional development when it’s carried over to other parts of their life. Researchers have found that people with a fixed mindset often give up or don’t try so that they can avoid what they would consider “failure.” Therefore, they don’t allow themselves the opportunity to develop new skills and knowledge. People with a growth mindset see life as a continuum. They believe that through hard work, they can achieve anything, including learning new talents and skills. If someone with a growth mindset created a less-than-perfect drawing, they would think, “If I keep trying, I can become an artist one day.”

Now here’s the good news: A growth mindset can be learned. Over the past century, authors like Dr. Carol Dweck, Dr. Maxwell Maltz, and Napoleon Hill all have written about the positive effects a growth mindset has on one’s personal life and professional career. They even shared ways anyone can develop it. But obviously, one must be willing to accept change. So, how do you achieve a growth mindset? Start by acknowledging and embracing your weaknesses. (That can also be very liberating!) Figure out your learning style and remind yourself that your progress matters more than your results. Look around you, learn from other people’s mistakes, and, at the end of each day, reflect on what you learned and reward yourself for your efforts that taught you something. Remind yourself that learning takes time, so never stop trying. When you practice this mindset, you will begin to see challenges as potential opportunities. The truth is that most people have a mixed mindset, both fixed and growth, so we already have the seeds of the growth mindset within us even if our dominant mindset is fixed. And once you believe you can improve your skills, knowledge, and even happiness, the sky's the limit! To learn more, watch the video “Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck” on YouTube.

CRAFT THE PERFECT FOLLOW-UP EMAIL Time your follow-ups right.

You don’t want to space your emails so far apart that leads forget about you, but you also don’t want to spam their email box so often that they get annoyed. A good rule of thumb is to wait at least 48 hours before sending a follow-up email after the initial email. After that, wait 2–4 days before sending another. Craft appealing content. This point is worth its own article, but briefly put, your follow-up email content is incredibly important. Create a subject line that will grab readers’ attention. Then, be polite, direct, friendly, and personable in each email. As you send out more follow-ups, become more specific about the deal you’re offering and make it more enticing. Above all, you should constantly tweak your follow-up content and overall strategy as you gain new information. As you continue to create follow-up emails, you’ll learn what works best.

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