Lately I feel as if everyone I know is experiencing a personal tragedy or profound loss of some sort – the death of parent, a beloved pet, a grandparent, a miscarriage, the diagnosis of a terminal illness – maybe it’s our age. And of course Covid-19. Maybe it’s bad luck. Whatever it is, it just plain sucks.

Here’s the thing though – you can choose to wallow in tragedy, or you can choose to make hardships and the worst times of your life teaching moments and turn them into something good. You’d be surprised just how resilient each of us are if we just believe it.

Also, some of us must choose to be happy at certain points in our lives in order to turn the tide around or just to carry on and not to fall into a dark hole of despair. Happiness doesn’t always come easy to everyone all the time (more on that in a bit). Sometimes a tragedy can serve as the catalyst to cause us to reevaluate what we want from our lives.

Unfortunately, time doesn’t stop just because we are going through a personal tragedy. The sun still rises and sets, and we all still must get up and put on our game faces and work, and take care of our families, and just keep going no matter how hard it is.

This article is intended to help those who are facing something profoundly difficult in their personal lives and those around them so that those people can hopefully become more understanding and empathetic toward others, because you just never know what someone else is going though. So many successful people are trying to hold it together when inside they are struggling with loss and grief. I just want you to know that it’s okay and that you aren’t alone.

Email marketing should be a core part of everyone’s marketing strategy.

Email marketing is still the most effective marketing channel surpassing social media and SEO. It is simply because people use email more than other platforms.

I find so many B2B businesses aren’t sending emails as often to communicate with their clients and prospects and are instead relying on social media to distribute their content and other information– and this is a big mistake.

There is no better and direct way to reach clients and prospects (if your contact list is updated and segmented) than email. It is particularly important for boutique, small- and mid-size firms to utilize email to stay top of mind with their referrals and clients.

Why? Because it helps you stay top of mind. It also puts the content directly into their inboxes, your name appears front and center in their inbox – whereas on LinkedIn or any other social platform, they may or may not see your post due to whether they are on that social platform at that moment, whether that piece of content gets buried in their news feed due to their settings and LinkedIn’s tricky algorithm.

As I mentioned above, you simply don’t know if or when someone is on social media at any given moment on any given day. And that means they may or may not see your content. But we know business professionals are on their email all day long. That’s why sometimes good old email is the most effective and direct way to reach your target audience.

So, if you write a substantive blog post or article (which you should be doing) or are hosting a virtual event and want to make sure your clients and prospects know about it, make sure to send it directly to your mailing list so you increase the likelihood that they will see it.

You should use email to build upon existing relationships with your clients and prospects by providing relevant, valuable information.

Remember, your clients, prospects, referrals, alumni, media and others who are on your lists actually prefer to communicate with your company through email because it is permission based. The people on your list actually signed up because they want to get updates from you.

A great benefit of email marketing is that it’s incredibly easy to track your ROI. Everything is trackable with the use of email marketing software so you can determine who is opening your emails, who is clicking onto your site through your emails and more.