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Over 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI. Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to engage your contacts and nurture them to becoming long-term customers, one email at a time.

But how can you get the best results from email marketing?

Some of the best practices for effective email marketing include:

• Personalization and segmentation for the most tailored messages
• High-quality content that delivers value with every email
• A/B testing emails, especially workflows, to refine your messages
• Not sending emails too often, nor forget to send them for so long that your contacts forget who you are

But to be in the best position to increase your email marketing conversions and get the highest ROI, there are many valuable tools worth adding to your marketing stack. We’ve compiled 10 of the best to get started with.

10 Tools to Get Better Results From Email Marketing

1. Email Marketing Service

Getting more email conversions starts with an email marketing tool you love using. This could be part of your CRM or a standalone tool, but it needs to be a tool that you can get the most out of.

Some of the best email marketing tools to compare when you’re starting out are Mailerlite, Sendinblue, and Mailchimp.

When you’re choosing the best email marketing tool for your business, start with free trials and compare your shortlist of services on:

• User Experience – Do you like using the app and find it intuitive?
• Functionality – Does it include well-designed drag and drop templates if you need these? What about easy-to-use automation and A/B testing tools?
• Price – Does it fit your budget?
• Integrations – Does it sync with your other favorite apps?

2. Data Enhancer Tool

With personalization comes conversions. To craft the most personalized emails and get high engagement rates from your messages, use a data enhancer tool that increases your scope for personalization.

Clearbit allows you to enter an email address or corporate domain and receive useful data from over 250 sources on 85 unique data fields, including company sector, job title, and more.

3. Marketing Automation

Are you using marketing automation yet? This enables you to automatically send the right emails to the right people at the right time, which is one of the best ways to increase conversions from email.

Some of the best marketing automation tools for small businesses are:

• ActiveCampaign – its goal is to provide “true marketing automation”
• HubSpot – CRM with automation for internal workflows and external communication
• SendinBlue – a powerful email provider with built-in email automation features
• Mailchimp – the most popular email marketing service is now all-in-one marketing software

4. Inbox Tool

With your current tools, can you check if a particular contact has opened your email? What about scheduling messages to send at a specific time? With tools like Boomerang for Gmail, you can easily see if your emails have been opened.

Many CRMs also have inbox sync — including Copper, which is built for G Suite and works inside your inbox.

5. Landing Page Optimization

To increase your email marketing conversions, think about the pages where you want your contacts to convert. Are they fully optimized? Take time to check if every page you link in your emails is high-quality, user-friendly, and has a clear CTA that’s a logical next step from the email content.

To maximize the conversions you get, use a landing page tool like Unbounce to build the most user-friendly page with an effective CTA.

6. Email and Conversion Analytics

How much data do you have on the emails you send? By collecting data throughout the funnel, you’re in the best position to identify and fix any leaks that are losing you conversions.

For email marketing that converts, some valuable data to inform your strategy is:

• Email sends, opens, bounces, clicks
• Conversion rate on landing pages
• Revenue, time to close, and ROI from email marketing contacts and customers

7. Email Verification and List Cleaner Service

Reviewing your performance data after sending a campaign is all well and good, but what if you could check key information before sending to increase results?

With a tool like DataValidation, you can quickly see the percentage of deliverable and undeliverable email addresses on your list prior to sending. This is a great way to eliminate bounces, improve email marketing conversions and boost ROI.

You can also sync DataValidation two-ways with the rest of your tech stack to remove undeliverable emails from all tools.

8. Calendar Scheduling App

What does conversion look like to your business? If it’s booking a time in your team’s calendar, such as for a demo call, maximize the number of meetings set with a calendar scheduling app.

With a tool like Calendly, you can include links in your emails that enable qualified leads to quickly book a meeting at a time that suits both of you.

9. CRM System

The businesses with the best operations tend to have a CRM that their team likes using and can rely on. Your CRM increases email marketing conversions by helping you send the right content to the right groups of people, maximizing the chance that they’ll respond to the CTA and convert.

To get the best results from your CRM, make sure that all of your contacts from all apps are synced to it as well as your mailing list. Make sure the right segmentation and data are synced too, like original source, business information, and up-to-date contact details.

10. Two-Way Data Syncing

To get better results from email marketing, look at who you’re sending to. Are all contacts who have opted in across all apps in your mailing list? You might be missing email addresses from your webinar tools, personal inbox, or other lead gen tools.

To make sure that every single contact is synced to the right place, use a two-way data sync to connect your data between apps and have every piece of data exactly where you need it.

So you’ve decided to grow your business. You might already be thinking about best practices to avoid common pitfalls when scaling. But this doesn’t mean that your business will be immune to challenges.

The best strategy for growing businesses is to be aware of common problems so you can prevent them or fix them fast.

Here are seven of the most common growth problems faced by small businesses and the best ways to prevent and solve them.

7 Challenges for Growing Businesses

1. Your earliest employees are unhappy.

The Problem: While working for a growing business sounds good in theory, some of your earliest employees might start to show signs they’re unhappy. Why do things have to change? Why can’t we all sit around the same meeting table anymore? Why can’t I chat with the CEO whenever I need to?

How to Avoid It: If your longest-standing employees are unhappy, your team culture has likely changed and they would like things to remain the same. This is hard to avoid completely, but there are some things you should keep in mind.

Pinpoint what is important to your team culture — although this will change with time, there will be some aspects you want to protect as you grow. Also, make efforts to keep the same levels of transparency and communication you’ve always had.

How to Fix It: Increase your business’s transparency and communication with employees as you grow. But also realize that not every employee is right for every stage of your business’s journey. Some people prefer small startup teams, others prefer corporate and enterprise environments. Do what you can, but understand if it’s time for some early employees to move on.

2. You’ve outgrown your tools.

The Problem: The tools you chose when your business was just starting out don’t cut it anymore. You’re running into problems with your apps, maxing out plan limits, and you know you need to make some changes.

How to Avoid It: Take a good look at your tech stack before intentionally scaling up your business. Will your most important tools (including your CRM, email marketing provider, and accounting software) offer what you need as you grow? Will you be able to upgrade your plan, or is the only option switching to another provider? Save time and money in the long run by making these decisions early on.

How to Fix It: Take time to look at your tools and audit what needs to go, change, or be added. We’ve compiled our recommendations of the best SaaS tools to get you started.

3. You’ve hired too fast.

The Problem: With budget in the bank, you’ve done what many growing businesses do: increase your team size. But a few months down the line, you might be thinking you’ve hired too fast. Your cash flow might be in trouble, productivity might be dwindling while new employees are trained up, or your team culture might be suffering.

How to Avoid It: Hiring too fast is one of the biggest business expansion problems — and it’s one you really want to avoid instead of fixing. Don’t grow your team more than is truly necessary and validate every addition to the team.

Remember to learn from other startups’ mistakes and avoid over-aggressive growth choices and risk appetites. You can also follow our guide to scaling your small business successfully.

How to Fix It: If you’ve hired too fast and you need to make some tough decisions, don’t delay making them but do it with heart and empathy. Be transparent about what went wrong.

Buffer opened up about the most difficult decision for its business so far: making 10 layoffs and saying goodbye to 11% of the team after it started to burn cash instead of being cash flow positive.

Buffer attributed this mistake to over-aggressive growth choices and moving into a house it couldn’t afford, said CEO, Joel Gascoigne:

“We thought we were being mindful about balancing the pace of our hiring with our revenue growth. We weren’t. One of our advisors gave us an apt metaphor for what happened: We moved into a house that we couldn’t afford with our monthly paycheck.”

As well as making 10 difficult layoffs, Buffer got its cash flow back in the green by cutting founder salaries by 40%, discontinuing two employee perks, cutting sponsorship budget, and canceling a team retreat. It ripped the band-aid off quickly and are very conscious of avoiding similar mistakes.

4. Budget has doubled but not your results.

The Problem: We’ve doubled the team, why haven’t we doubled the results? We’ve multiplied our spending, why don’t we have more customers? Whether it’s you or your investors asking these questions, it can be difficult to find answers.

How to Avoid It: Scale slowly. Make gradual improvements and investments and keep your finger on the pulse of your business’s core financial metrics.

Following a slower growth philosophy and maintaining nimble teams can keep your business more productive than making large hiring rounds that disrupt your team’s flow and require time-consuming onboarding.

How to Fix It: Slow down and look at what’s gone wrong. Has productivity gone down? Are you burning way too much cash? Have you hired the wrong people? Or were you just too optimistic?

Get clear on what the real issue is and decide how best to pivot your growth strategy.

5. You’re spending too much time on coordination instead of actual work.

The Problem: Hiring people should free up your time, right? Eventually, yes… but usually not at first. Onboarding new employees is one of the most time-consuming tasks for any business.

How to Avoid It: This is another business growth problem that’s best avoided by growing cautiously. By hiring more gradually, you and your team will have more time and energy for onboarding new team members.

How to Fix It: If you or your business’s management team are spending every minute managing people instead of focusing on your “real work,” look at your processes.

Identify where the inefficiencies are and understand what needs to change in your strategy, leadership team, and business tools. What are you wasting time on?

In an interview with First Round Review, Bob Sutton, organizational behavior expert at Stanford’s School of Engineering, shares that scaling is often about less, not more:

“Scaling is actually a problem of less… There are lots of things that used to work that don’t work anymore, so you have to get rid of them. There are probably a bunch of things you’ve always done that slowed you down without you realizing it.”

6. Departments are becoming less aligned.

The Problem: You once sat together around a table, but now your team has multiplied. Your sales team has their own meetings while marketers talk amongst themselves. And, data silos have started to set in.

How to Avoid It: Scaling a business successfully requires excellent communication and collaboration. Keep your departments working closely together, maintain individual accountability for overall business goals rather than just departmental numbers, and make sure you synchronize your tools transparently.

How to Fix It: No surprises here; you solve unaligned teams by increasing alignment. This means more face-to-face time, collaborative tech tools, and cross-departmental projects. Also, make sure your data is in sync to fix silos.

7. Contact management is getting messy.

The Problem: As your business is using more apps than before, the number of contacts in your database is multiplying fast. And, they’re not even close to being organized.

How to Avoid It: The most effective way to prevent and fix messy contact management is with a two-way data syncing tool. By setting it up, you can quickly align contacts across all of the right apps, with exactly the right data and segmentation synced between tools.

How to Fix It: It’s never too late to introduce two-way syncing and restore order to contact management. You can also use this as an opportunity to do a contact clean-up and get a clearer picture of your leads and customers.

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley,” wrote Scottish poet Robert Burns. Even the finest, most well-thought-out plans sometimes have to be set aside for reasons outside of your control.

During times of uncertainty, one of the most important traits for any business to have is flexibility.

With a willingness to adjust plans, divert from the original strategy, and make small or large pivots, your business can be more resilient during stormy weather.

If your business is facing uncertainty and the road ahead is unclear, here’s how to add more flexibility to your plans, projects, and strategy to help you get through it.

How to Make Your Business Flexible During Uncertainty

Accept what you need to postpone or change.

If the landscape your business exists in has suddenly changed, you will need to make changes inside your organization, too. That’s especially the case if you need to tighten budgets and make sure it’s spent in the places with the highest return.

Take a look at all of the projects in your pipeline and assess what really needs to be prioritized right now, what can be postponed, and what can be discarded.

Encourage each department in your business to ask:

• Is now the best time for the projects we are focusing on?
• Should we adjust our content and communications to deliver the most value to our audience?
• Is our budget in the right place, or do we need to change allocations?
• Would team members offer the most value working on different priorities?
• What pivots should we be making?

If your business is experiencing higher levels of churn or lower profits, you may also need to reassess some goals during times of prosperity or at least adjust expectations.

Identify where your focus is most valuable.

After you have reassessed the projects that your business is working on, it’s time to look at your own to-do list.

Ask yourself: where can I add the most value with an hour, a day, a week, or a month of focus?

Even if you can’t forecast the future, you can think about what’s the most valuable way to spend your time right now. Make sure your agenda is aligned with the tasks that matter most instead of the busy work that’s landed on your desk.

Maintain transparency with your team.

When your business or industry is going through some turbulence, it’s more crucial than ever to maintain strong communication with your team.

To sustain the trust that’s essential for a focused and happy team, make sure that leadership is honest and transparent about where your business stands right now, key goals for the upcoming period, and what the current challenges are.

A transparent and engaged team is essential for a resilient business that can endure times of change.

Embrace different working styles.

Building a resilient and flexible business requires a willingness to do things differently than you have done before. You may need to embrace new ways of working instead of stubbornly saying “but this is how we’ve always done things.”

This can include adapting to different working styles, such as remote work — which might even be a necessity to a lot of businesses. To help your team adapt to remote work, think about team-wide policies you can introduce to encourage better focus, well-being, and productivity.

These can include:

• Introducing remote-friendly apps for video calls
• Adopting a company-wide communication tool such as Slack
• Scheduling remote meetings to catch up with your team and share information
• Encouraging team members to focus on their mental health and well-being

Reinforce the foundations.

If your business is less busy with new leads and projects, it’s a good time to focus on strengthening the foundations so you’re in the best position when things start to pick up again.

Look at the important tasks that are often overlooked, for example, improving contact management processes or introducing automated workflows to make your team more efficient.

You could also use this as a time to look at your tech stack and identify weaknesses and areas for improvement.

Some questions to help optimize your tech stack include:

• Which apps are we paying for that don’t add value?
• Could certain apps be replaced by free tools?
• Do we have any overlapping tools?
• Where are there opportunities to integrate data between apps to increase productivity?

Facing times of uncertainty is challenging for any business, but the right amount of flexibility and resilience can help your organization weather the storm.

You’ve decided to become a freelancer. You’re the boss of your own time, your business, and the projects you choose to work on. There’s a lot going on, from finding new clients to managing your workload. The truth is… you kind of have to do everything, especially when you’re just starting out.

To maximize your chances of success, one of your first decisions as a freelancer is how to manage your processes – especially your invoices, accounting, clients, and projects.

To find, retain, and receive glowing reviews from clients, you need an efficient and scalable way to stay on top of invoicing, accounting, time tracking, and client management. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to neglect the billable tasks that build your business and always be playing catch-up.

After a lot of testing, here’s our pick of the best freelancer apps to manage your business and prime your freelance career for max results.

7 Best Apps for Freelancers in 2021

1. FreeAgent

FreeAgent is a popular, all-around accounting tool that tracks your time, manages projects, sends invoices, and preps your tax return. It’s especially powerful for freelancers and small businesses in the UK.

Although FreeAgent’s user experience is a bit more old-school than some of the other apps for freelancers in this post, it works remarkably well in a huge range of use cases.

If you’re paid in multiple currencies and use an app like TransferWise to receive and convert money, FreeAgent provides an easy way to streamline accounting. It’s simple to invoice clients in the right currency, then record payments in that currency and instantly convert to your home currency, too.

As FreeAgent connects to many popular banks, it’s easy to automatically add expenses made on a business card. Or, you can import a CSV of bulk expenses.

On the FreeAgent dashboard, there’s a quick overview of all of your freelance business’s key metrics at a glance:

FreeAgent has separate websites for the UK, the US, and the rest of the world to give you the most relevant information. For FreeAgent users in the UK, you can use the software to prepare your Self Assessment forms and view a handy timeline of your tax estimates at any time of year.

FreeAgent could be the best freelancer software for you if:

• You’re based in the UK and want built-in Self Assessment and tax timelines
• You get paid in several currencies

2. Xero

Xero is one of the most popular accounting systems on the market, offering freelancers a higher-end solution to manage their pipeline and accounts.

Along with QuickBooks, Xero is one of the most popular accounting tools on the market. It’s extremely user-friendly, beautifully designed, and is perfect for freelancers planning to scale up their business in the next few years. You can just switch to the next plan whenever you’re ready for more power from Xero.

Xero is laser-focused on saving you time as a freelancer – connecting directly to your bank, creating and following up with invoices at speed, and integrating with your favorite business apps. With Xero’s Hubdoc data capture and automatic entry tool, you can cut paperwork clutter and save even more time.

As a freelancer, you can choose between Xero’s three plans: Early ($9/month), Growing ($30/month), and Established ($60/month). However, we recommend the most expensive of those three tiers – the Established plan – as this is the only plan that includes multi-currency, time tracking, and project cost tracking features. 

Xero is also valuable for freelancers with a growing retail business. The accounting platform seamlessly connects with leading ecommerce apps for point of sale transactions (such as Square), inventory (such as CIN7), as well as payment systems like Stripe and PayPal.

Xero could be the best freelancer software for you if:

• You want strong native integrations with your other favorite apps
• You want instant bank reconciliation for transactions
• You want retail app integrations
• You have an accountant who is a Xero partner

3. QuickBooks Self-Employed

QuickBooks is the market leader in accounting software and a great fit for many small businesses, although freelancers can find it hard to find the perfect plan.

If I ask you to name an accounting software, there’s a high chance QuickBooks will spring to mind. With QuickBooks Self-Employed, freelancers can access a lighter plan than the most popular cloud-based product (QuickBooks Online) offers.

However, QuickBooks Self-Employed has its limitations. Although you can send and track simple invoices, track mileage, and separate business and personal expenses, there’s limited scope for customization and no time tracking functionality in this plan. For this, you’ll need to choose a QuickBooks Online plan for small businesses instead.

Once you choose a QuickBooks plan, your freelance business is in a great position to scale: you can switch plans and products as and when you need to.

QuickBooks is also one of your best choices if you want a wide range of integrations and a comprehensive feature set.

QuickBooks could be the best freelancer software for you if:

• You’re planning on scaling your freelance business in the next few years or becoming an agency
• You want strong native integrations with your other favorite apps
• You want instant bank reconciliation
• You have an accountant who is a QuickBooks partner

4. Cushion

Designed to give freelancers a clearer view of their workload and availability, Cushion improves cash flow while offering strong invoicing and time tracking features.

Cushion promises “Peace of mind for freelancers,” providing beautiful UX and unique features to help you avoid taking on too much work. It’s easy to visualize future workload, earnings, expenses, and invoices, so freelancers can anticipate their financial situation ahead of time.

Where Cushion shines is as an app for freelancers to stay on top of their workload, improve cash flow, and find valuable balance. It’s also easy to track time and invoice clients with the app.

However, you’ll need to use another app to manage core accounting needs such as compiling expenses and income for the tax year. Cushion handily integrates with FreeAgent, FreshBooks, and Xero to enable this.

Cushion could be the best freelancer software for you if:

• You don’t need comprehensive accounting software right now, or you have another system that syncs with Cushion (FreshBooks, FreeAgent, or Xero)
• Your goal is to have a clearer view of your workload and avoid taking on too much work

5. FreshBooks

As a powerful all-in-one small solution for business accounting and invoicing, FreshBooks is a simple but mighty software choice for freelancers and entrepreneurs.

FreshBooks has a great all-around feature set while still being simple to use. For the $15/month Lite plan, you get unlimited customized invoices, expenses, time tracking, estimates, online card payments, and bank transfers. You also get insightful Tax Time reports.

With the Plus plan (from $25/month), you can add more automation to your freelance business, such as with scheduled late payment reminders, recurring invoices, and late fees. You can also access client retainers. The Premium plan is for growing businesses that need to manage up to 500 clients.

FreshBooks could be the best freelancer software for you if:

• You need time tracking functionality at a low price point
• You want unlimited invoices, estimates and card payments
• You prioritize simplicity and ease of use

6. AND.CO

AND.CO is a powerful all-in-one tool for freelancers to manage and grow their business. The platform was acquired by Fiverr in 2018.

AND.CO is an excellent fit for freelancers who are just getting started. Self-titled as “the one app to run your freelance business or studio,” over 300,000 businesses use AND.CO to send proposals, invoice clients, get paid, and manage their time, expenses, and tasks.

Once dubbed “free forever,” AND.CO changed tack and introduced paid plans after being acquired by Fiverr in 2018. You can still get started with its free plan, but this only supports one active client – which isn’t going to cut it for most freelance businesses.

For $18/month, you can manage unlimited clients, remove AND.CO branding, edit contracts, and pay 2.9% + 30 cents for online payments. You can also connect up to six bank accounts to keep track of when invoices have been paid.

AND.CO neatly integrates with your other favorite freelance apps, including Mailchimp, Spotify, and Stripe.

Extra tip: For extra value from AND.CO whether you’re a customer or not, listen to The Six Figure Freelancer audio course for free. AND.CO opens up the mic to top professionals who share their formulas for success in starting, growing, and maintaining six-figure freelance careers.

AND.CO could be the best freelancer software for you if:

• You want to manage unlimited clients
• You don’t need advanced accounting features
• You want a simple user-experience

7. Wave Accounting

Financial software that offers freelancers the most value at the lowest price point – you require exactly zero budget to get started.

Wave is a very popular tool for freelancers for good reason – it’s free. The financial software for entrepreneurs offers the core accounting, invoicing and receipt scanning features you need to make running your freelance business a breeze. You can pay-per-use for access to online payments if required.

Here’s a glimpse of the Wave integration with Stripe to track cash flow, profit and loss, and overdue invoices:

Wave could be the best freelancer software for you if:

• You have a limited budget and are looking for a free app to manage your freelance business
• Your focus is on invoicing, basic accounting, and receipt scanning
• You don’t need to track mileage, time, or inventory

Want to streamline your processes even more? A two-way data sync solution keeps data flowing freely to the right places in your small business, from your freelance management tool to your email marketing provider and CRM.

Old email addresses, duplicate contacts, misspelled names… these are the bane of your marketing and sales efforts.

After all, your CRM and marketing tools are only as strong as the data you’ve got in them. If you have poor-quality data in your databases, you’re setting up to fail in your sales and marketing initiatives. Your customer data is the most valuable asset your organization has, so it’s important to ensure it’s serving your business’ bottom line as much as possible.

A solid data quality strategy will not only save you hours of janitorial work, but it makes sure your data is trustworthy – which means that any insights you gain from this data are much more accurate and useful for your business.

So, to help you figure out how to have the best possible contact data in your business databases, we’ve put together four tips to clean up your data.

How to Clean Up Your Company’s Data

1. Get rid of duplicate contacts.

Duplicates are usually caused by two things: inconsistent data entry and multiple channels that capture contact information. There are tools to help you remove duplicate data. For instance, if you work with Google Contacts, you can merge your contacts and detect duplicates for free.

If you’ve never done a de-duplication, you might have to manually scan and edit your contacts. This step will take some time, but if you implement company-wide data entry standards and make a commitment to quality data, you will only have to do this once.

Here are some tips that can help with de-duplication:

• Use a de-duplicator such as Dedupley.
• Use data validation tools that help you to determine the validity of your data, such as email verification tools. Experian Data Quality has some powerful validation programs that allow you to check emails, addresses, and telephone numbers in bulk.
• To avoid having duplicate contacts across different applications, keep your core tools in sync to eliminate the need for entering the same data into different tools.

2. Verify new data.

Implement a company-wide system to make sure all new and updated data is correctly entered into the central database. For example, you can make sure that your team always fills in certain contact fields (such as name, phone number, and email) in your CRM using the same format. You can also make certain fields mandatory when creating a contact record so that the required information is always there.

You can also set up a contact sync between your CRM and other tools. If the data is only entered in your CRM and it’s automatically synced with your other tools, you can make sure all applications have the same information, thus reducing the likelihood of data entry errors.

3. Keep your data fresh.

All databases degrade – some estimate that 30% of CRM data becomes outdated each year. This is due to many factors, including people changing email addresses, getting new phone numbers, leaving organizations, changing job titles, and many others.

It’s best to keep your data fresh by implementing a few tactics. You can do this by using parsing tools, which scan all incoming emails and updates contact information as it comes to hand.

So, if a contact gets a job with a different company, for example, your central database will be instantly updated. It’s also a good idea to delete all email addresses that have bounced or opted out — this kind of information can most likely be found in your email marketing tool. Not only is this good practice for keeping your data fresh, but it also helps keep you out of spam folders.

4. Implement consistent data entry.

All these measures are pointless if you don’t get everyone on your team behind them. Ensure that all employees are aware of company-wide data entry standards. For instance, make sure they all know which information fields to fill in when creating a contact record, how to check for duplicates before creating a new contact, and that everyone is entering data on the correct apps.

By following these simple tactics, you can make sure you have a much cleaner and more organized contacts database. Don’t forget to bidirectionally sync the data between your key business applications: it minimizes manual data entry and ensures you’re always looking at the most up-to-date, accurate contact information in all your tools.

With the technological developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution impacting how we all live, work, and relate to one another, a rapid pace of change is happening across all businesses.

This is doubly true in uncertain times, where organizations in every industry are faced with a sudden need to switch to working styles and make their business more resilient and flexible.

It’s a good time to ask how your business can organize its key processes to deliver the best experience for both your employees and your customers.

With the optimal blend of people, processes, and technology, you can make your organization adaptable to change and in the best position to grow and thrive.

With that in mind, here are seven organization tips for businesses to help you continue on the right track. We’ve also included relevant goals for each tip, so you can measure your success over time.

7 Organization Tips for Growing Businesses

1. Cut the tech bloat.

Goal: Streamline your business tech stack to help your team get the job done most effectively.

Technology can boost your business’s organization, productivity, and collaboration. However, there is such a thing as too many tools – otherwise known as tech bloat.

When an organization uses far more apps and tools than it needs, it can quickly experience problems from excessive complexity, distractions, and security concerns.

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to assess, prune, and optimize your business’s tech stack.

To keep your technology ecosystem under control and reap the benefits that cloud apps can offer, establish a consistent set of processes using the apps and functions you need to get the job done.

Set the groundwork so employees don’t end up trying to juggle a hundred different things at once on too many apps.

2. Build a culture that rewards focus.

Goal: Instead of expecting constant communication and collaboration from every team member when they’re at their desk, carve out time for every employee to focus on where they deliver the most value.

Staying organized depends on your ability to avoid distractions – which isn’t always easy in organizations that have a culture of constant interruption disguised as collaboration.

Common daily time wasters include: using business tools that are too complex or a bad fit for the job; distractions on social media; and manual data entry on multiple different systems that don’t work well together.

Let’s also not forget about the so-called notification fatigue caused by being bombarded by irrelevant notifications and emails every day.

Here are some of the best ways to get rid of the time-wasters in your business:

• Use carefully selected cloud-based tools that everyone in your company knows how to use.
• Build an integrated technology ecosystem that maximizes efficiency.
• Establish company-wide processes that minimize unnecessary business meetings.
• Encourage team members to block out distractions for set periods of focused time.

The most organized businesses are those that realize that they don’t have to do things the way they always have.

What processes and assumptions can you rethink to make your business more organized and productive?

3. Migrate to the cloud.

Goal: Identify business practices that are still managed via outdated systems or tools, and plan out how you’ll replace them with cloud-based workflows and apps.

Almost every business is using some form of cloud technology, even if it’s nothing more than web-based email. But there’s a lot more to the cloud than many businesses realize.

Whether it’s customer relationship management (CRM), data storage, or business automation delivered through the web, almost any digital workload can be migrated to the cloud.

With SaaS tools – or cloud-based apps with a subscription model – your business can escape the physical limitations of desktop computers and enable employees to take their work with them wherever they are.

Continue to bring your business further into the cloud and minimize the back and forth that comes with outdated computing environments.

4. Embrace different work styles.

Goal: Create a plan to future-proof your business by embracing different working styles, such as remote working or flexible hours.

From agile startups to enterprises driven by digital transformation, many organizations are already embracing the advantages of different working styles — including enhanced productivity, reduced office costs, and access to more diverse talent.

But even if your organization is far from ready to enjoy all the benefits of remote work and flexible hours, making it a long-term priority will help you future-proof your business and make it easier to adapt.

If you’re looking to enable more remote working in your business, here are some tips to make the transition as seamless as possible:

• Pivot your company policies to cater to remote work best practices.
• Strengthen team communication and collaboration with cloud-based apps such as Slack.
• Reduce your reliance on in-person meetings by introducing video call apps.
• Adjust your tech stack to focus on cloud-based apps that your team can use anywhere.

5. Focus on smaller goals.

Goal: Look at company-wide, departmental, and individual-level goals to ensure that they are broken down into actionable steps.

It’s hard for your business to stay organized if you set lofty goals that are both intimidating and difficult to focus on.

In every department and job role, determine the most likely way that your team will reach your key targets before breaking them down into actionable next steps.

With smaller and easily measured milestones, your team will be in the best position to stay focused and avoid burnout and confusion.

6. Go paperless.

Goal: Identify what’s causing the piles of paper in your organization and create processes to minimize this.

Paper is a common source of disarray in many offices, but a largely avoidable one. If you don’t already have a digital filing system, then it’s time to build one.

Here are some of the best ways to help your business go paperless:

• Attach notes and files to customer records digitally in your CRM.
• Use team apps like Google Drive to collaborate on team projects.
• Take document signing online with apps such as DocuSign.

The more you reduce your reliance on paper, the faster your business will modernize, and the easier it will become to organize your workflows.

Established businesses may have a harder time since they often have huge amounts of information in printed documents or on physical digital media.

Start by scanning and digitizing everything and uploading it to a document management system. That’s a lot more organized than having reams of documents and paper receipts piled up around the office!

7. Automate workflows.

Goal: Identify what’s needlessly consuming time in your organization and determine how you can use automated workflows to free up more time to focus on what matters.

If there’s one thing that kills productivity above all others, it’s cumbersome manual processes that eat up time and leave workflows open to human error.

Manually importing or exporting data between your email marketing software and CRM might not sound like a big deal at first, until you realize you have to do the same thing with lots of other apps and databases. Eventually, the challenges of scale make it practically impossible.

Sage advice holds that anything which can be automated should be automated. You could get started by automating:

• Lead scoring for new contacts in your database
• Sales nurturing email workflows
• Backup and syncing routines between apps
• Customer care processes, such as alerting account managers of support tickets or carrying out NPS surveys
• Enriching data between apps with two-way integrations, such as between your CRM and email platform

The goal should be to unify your technology systems and processes into a cohesive environment in which everyone on your team has access to accurate and current information in real-time, no matter where they’re physically located.

With the right tools and data at hand, everyone on your team can stay organized without getting bogged down in repetitive manual tasks or spending hours trying to track down that one key document.

When there’s so much going on in your business, staying organized isn’t easy. But by streamlining your core processes and looking towards the future, you can meet the challenges of scale and put your business in the best position to thrive in the years ahead.

As a small business or startup, you’ve got a lot on your to-do list: increasing awareness of your brand, converting leads into customers, and supporting customers post-sale. And, of course, there’s all the admin behind the scenes.

A big part of that is contact management.

To enable your small business to grow successfully and sustainably, you need to have a strong contact management strategy in place. But what does this mean, and how can you get it right?

What is contact management?

Contact management is how you look after all of the contact data in your business, including contacts’ details, communication preferences, sales history, and customer interactions with your company. It enables every team in your organization to have the information they need to stay productive and have the context they need to deliver personalized interactions.

Your contacts may include:

• Leads (or people who are in your pipeline but haven’t bought from you yet)
• Current and previous customers

A contact management strategy is implemented with CRM software that stores all of your small business’s contact data in one centralized place.

Although contact management is traditionally the realm of salespeople, CRM has evolved rapidly in recent years. Now many all-in-one CRM platforms offer advanced features for marketing and customer service teams to store and manage their own interactions, remove information silos and boost collaboration with sales.

An all-in-one CRM, or a CRM that’s strongly integrated with your other apps, is a particularly good solution for managing and streamlining the entire customer journey as you:

• Attract and collect new marketing leads
• Nurture those leads toward being sales-ready
• Convert leads into paying customers
• Carry out onboarding services and provide ongoing support
• Offer upgrades and added value

Advantages of Strong Contact Management

Contact management impacts far more than sales. When you get it right, the benefits echo throughout your small business as every role has more data and insights at its fingertips. It also enriches every aspect of the customer journey.

With good contact management processes, you can:

• Enrich your customer experiences with data-driven insights and automation
• Spend less time on admin and free up time for what matters most
• Maximize conversions by delivering the right messages at the right time

Contact management is something that your business will always do, but most small businesses have a lot of room for improvement to maximize their efficiency in this area.

Keep reading for our tips on getting the highest impact from contact management in your small business.

Six Contact Management Best Practices

Here’s our guide to using contact management strategies to drive growth and reduce the headaches for your business, both now and further down the line.

1. Keep your contact data clean.

Smooth contact management starts with clean data. You can’t deliver an excellent customer experience if you have incorrect or contradictory data about your customers, nor can you have smooth business operations and reporting inside your company.

Although you can reduce the amount of bad data that enters your database by adjusting your lead generation forms and introducing clear processes for your team to follow, you can’t avoid all of it. That’s why every business needs regular data clean-ups. You could schedule this every quarter, for example.

As part of a data clean up, take time to remove:

• Duplicate contacts
• Incorrect or outdated contact data, such as emails that have hard-bounced
• Contacts that don’t want to hear from you anymore

Data clean-ups don’t have to be entirely manual. There’s a lot that you can automate. For instance, many CRMs and email marketing tools highlight duplicates so you can merge or delete them. 

Your email marketing software will also help you identify emails with hard bounces, alongside groups of unsubscribed contacts. Once you’re sure you can clean up this data, you can delete them from the app.

2. Choose the right CRM.

As part of a strong contact management strategy, your CRM should be at the heart of your business. It’s the software where you store all of your key contact data as well as interactions with every customer and lead.

This makes your CRM one of the most important apps to get right in your business. Take the time to research different CRMs and find the right fit for your industry, business size, sales and marketing strategy, and goals.

As your business grows, your CRM needs to grow with it. This might mean upgrading your plan, adjusting your strategy, or even switching tools as you scale.

3. Centralize your contact data.

The best contact management strategies include a centralized database that stores all contacts in one place. This will generally be your CRM, which is another reason why it’s important to follow step 2 and choose the right one!

By having a centralized contact database, you can:

• Find all of the key insights you need in one app
• Make it easy for other teams to find data, without needing to have login details and training for lots of tools they don’t need to use
• Break down information silos between departments

To start centralizing your data, identify the main apps in your stack that are collecting contact data. You can then sync this data with your CRM.

4. Automatically sync contact data between your apps.

Remember: for the most effective contact management results in your small business, you can’t let the contact databases in your apps be isolated from one another.

Your CRM, marketing apps, sales stack, and all of the other tools in your business deliver the best results when they are connected as part of an integrated ecosystem. The best way to achieve this is with data syncing.

After creating a centralized contact database, your next step is to sync relevant data from it to your individual apps.

5. Collect data that enriches your insights.

By syncing contact data between your apps, you can automatically enrich the insights you have at your fingertips.

If you collect geographic or content consumption data in your CRM, you could sync this with your email marketing platform and use it to segment subscribers into more accurate mailing lists.

6. Use good judgment with your contact data.

All businesses big and small need to pay attention to data protection regulations. However, this goes beyond playing by the rules and ticking boxes.

Be a brand that your prospects and customers can trust with their data. Protect the information they give you and respect their privacy. This might not have an easily measurable ROI, but having customers that trust your brand will always have an impact.

Despite huge investments in data, you might be surprised to learn that most executives don’t trust their company’s data. It might be that they’re skeptical of the data they’re using, or simply don’t know how to interpret the information at hand.

In fact, Havard Business Review reported that 90% of business leaders believe data literacy is crucial for company success. However, only 25% of employees feel confident when working with their organization’s data. 

The stats shout loud and clear that if you struggle to trust your business data, you’re absolutely not alone. However, this doesn’t make it any less important to fix it.

Untrustworthy data has repercussions across your entire organization. You run the risk of:

• Pivoting strategies based on incorrect assumptions
• Lacking a clear picture of business performance and ROI
• Delivering poor customer experiences
• Reducing job satisfaction for your team because of manual tasks and frustrations
• Being hesitant to share important insights across the team

Instead, every business’s goal should be data integrity. Data integrity refers to the quality and reliability of your business data, including how precise, consistent, timely, and well-preserved that data is.

With high data integrity, your business can also benefit from the surge in opportunities that big data brings.

Here’s our guide to what to do when you can’t trust your reporting data. Learn how to turn things around long-term, so your data spend isn’t spoilt by leaky processes and frameworks.

How to Make Your Data More Trustworthy

It might sound obvious, but if your business has been wrangling with unreliable data for some time, to create a different outcome you need to do things differently.

Fixing untrustworthy data requires changes to your organization’s:

• Processes
• Mindset
• Skillset

Let’s explore the best ways to make your data more trustworthy so you can benefit from accurate and timely analytics that pave the way for informed decisions.

1. Go back to the basics.

To make your data more trustworthy, let’s go back to the very beginning. Imagine you’re starting your database entirely from scratch with a clean slate. Now answer these questions:

• What data do you need to collect?
• What format do you need to collect it in?
• What data don’t you need?
• What’s the clutter or noise you would like to avoid?
• How do you need to integrate your apps?

You can use these valuable insights to inform:

• New processes for data collection, management, and integration
• What to clean up and prune from your database
• How to educate your team and increase data literacy in your organization

Once you’re clear on what needs to happen, start creating an action plan to put it into place and make your data more trustworthy.

2. Follow the data trail back to the source.

Whenever you’re faced with unreliable data, follow the trail back to the source. Where did the inaccurate data originate?

This includes looking at form fields and checking for consistent and standardized data collection. It also means making sure that Google Analytics tags are set up correctly, or that your SQL scripts for your business intelligence platform are flawless.

If this stretches your tech knowledge, perhaps because the person who implemented your systems has left the company, consider bringing in a data specialist to help you out. You could also get their help simplifying your data processes so it’s more manageable in-house going forward.

3. Tick the boxes for data best practice

No matter the industry or company size, there are some best practices that every company should follow for trustworthy data. These include:

• Consistency – Maintain the same format across systems by using consistent and standardized fields and collection processes. When you integrate your apps, use customizable field mapping to ensure that the right data is synced to the right places.

• Completeness – For each piece of data, you need to know the full picture. A few examples are the source of your marketing leads, sales history for your customers, or conversion path for new deals. Is your data complete?

• Centralized and enriched data – Rather than having fragmented and incomplete data spread across several systems, maintain one centralized database with the most up-to-date and trustworthy information. This can be your CRM for your customer data, and a system like Chartio or Supermetrics for your company performance data. Create two-way integrations between your centralized database and connected apps to enrich your data everywhere.

• Access control – Set permissions and policies that ensure only the right people see certain data. This is about balancing accessibility and transparency with security.

• Validation – 28% of customer and prospect data is suspected to be inaccurate in some way, according to Experian. For accurate data, you need a method for checking and validating it. This can include automated processes for checking for anomalies and missing fields, backed up by some manual checks.

• Real-time updates – For the best results from your data, it needs to be up-to-date. Look for real-time updates when choosing a business intelligence system and a data integration solution.

• Quality sources – Make sure you know where all of your data is coming from and that you can guarantee its integrity. Maintaining a neat and tidy database that you know you can trust beats having highly advanced data sets that you struggle to make sense of or control.

• Cleanliness – Considering B2B data decays at a rate of 2% per year, your database needs frequent clean-ups. It’s important to freshen up your data by removing duplicates, inaccuracies, and other data that’s turned from value into clutter.

• Security and protection – Maintaining high security is crucial for data protection regulations such as GDPR in Europe, but it’s also just a basic principle for being a trustworthy brand. It’s also absolutely crucial if you want valuable data at your fingertips (and only yours).

• Integrations – Over 80% of business operations leaders say data integrations are important for day-to-day operations at their organization. Data integrations reduce data silos and make data more accessible to everyone at your company, so employees don’t have to track down other coworkers to find specific information stored in their department’s database.

4. Document processes.

One common trap that organizations fall into is relying on one person to set up and manage their data processes. When that person leaves the organization, chaos is often unleashed.

You can avoid this by creating clearly documented processes that are stored in your company wiki, Google Drive, or a tool like Notion. And remember: overly complicated processes might end up doing you more harm than good. The simpler your processes, the better.

5. Simplify everything.

Complexity is often the root of bad data you can’t trust. For complex data analytics to work successfully, you need the time, resources, and knowledge to back it up.

For most organizations, it’s more effective to keep your data and reporting as simple as possible instead.

Simplifying your data means:

• Only collecting the data you need
• Organizing data consistently and in standardized formats
• Avoiding complicated workflows and systems
• Reducing your reporting dashboards
• Avoiding multiple systems for the same job
• Creating documentation that’s clear and easy to understand
• Amending processes so anyone can quickly understand them

To make your data the most trustworthy, ask yourself: where can you simplify your data collection, management, and integration processes?

6. Keep the sunk cost fallacy in mind.

You’ve invested a lot of money, you have complex systems in place… and you don’t want to throw that away. So instead of starting afresh, you build on top of what you have – and hope it will cover up what’s underneath.

Investopedia describes the sunk cost fallacy, or the sunk cost trap, as “a tendency for people to irrationally follow through on an activity that is not meeting their expectations. This is because of the time and/or money they have already invested.”

This is all too common when it comes to business data and analytics.

If you keep building on unsound foundations, it will come back to bite you. Begin by understanding exactly what you’re dealing with and the problems at hand. Bring in a second opinion here if you need it. Then, make as unbiased a decision as possible about what you need to do to increase data integrity.

Over the long term, it might be easiest to go back to the drawing board, create a much more straightforward and accurate strategy, and trash what you had in place before.

7. Communicate with stakeholders.

While concerns over untrustworthy data are often valid, sometimes you or your organization’s stakeholders still don’t trust your data when everything is sound.

If this is the case, clear communication is your way forward. Explain why your business analytics data is trustworthy and how it’s set up to ensure reliability. Answer questions to help stakeholders understand how data is collected, managed, and integrated between your apps. Also, encourage concerns to be voiced so that you can explore their validity or irrelevance together.

Piecing together a project timeline template usually involves a Google Doc and mediocre formatting skills. Then comes assigning tasks to teammates and promising to hit the agreed-upon delivery date. But a few weeks go by, and the timeline falls apart. Higher priorities pop up, and deadlines slip past without much progress.

Projects can fail for many reasons: a lack of support from leadership, unforeseen budget cuts, or overpromising outcomes. In fact, poor project management is more common than you think – only 55% of projects are completed on time.

But creating a timeline where everyone involved knows what they’re working on and when it’s due can help ensure your project doesn’t creep past its original deadline. It’s essential for keeping projects (and the people completing them) on track.

To make sure your next project stays on schedule, we’ll cover how to set up a project timeline, the best templates to use, and a handful of examples to inspire your future scheduling.

Why Create a Project Timeline?

Time management is one of the top skills employers look for in candidates. Missed deadlines and rushed projects can set entire teams (and companies) behind schedule.

A structured project timeline offers more than brownie points from your boss. It can also:

• Bring leadership and structure to a project
• Outline what is being delivered, by when
• Share who is responsible for each task and sets expectations for the scope, quality, and delivery of work
• Show how the project outcome contributes to company goals
• Decrease risk by accounting for any changes to the project scope, budget, deliverables, or deadlines.

Ultimately, a project timeline makes it easier and more efficient to manage a project. But it’s important to match the timeline structure to the project scope. Planning an editorial calendar for the quarter may take more time and effort than creating a marketing video for an upcoming product launch.

That’s where the right template comes in.

Project Timeline Example

Without the right project timeline template, organizing a project can be a lot of manual work — not to mention the formatting mess once multiple people get their hands on it.

The ideal timeline brings direction to a project, yet is easily adaptable when changes arise. Here’s a look at a project timeline for opening a new company office.

You can create a project timeline for any process that relies on a schedule (almost everything these days), like onboarding employees, handling a crisis, or planning social media campaigns. All you need to know is how to outline the steps of a project and the tasks required to complete each phase.

Let’s get into the details.

How to Create a Project Timeline

Crafting the perfect project timeline takes strategy, organizational skills, and a whole lot of collaboration. You need buy-in from supporters and clear directives for everyone involved.

To get started, follow this step-by-step guide to set up a structured timeline — no matter your job, industry, or management level.

1. Write a project brief.

A project brief communicates how you will approach a project. It includes details on the goals, deliverables, timeline, tasks, process, people involved, and resources needed to take a project from start to finish.

Asana outlined the steps to create a simple, yet effective, project brief. You can use this free project plan template to outline the project’s goals, roles and responsibilities, schedule, deliverables, budget, and more. It’s a great starting point for any planning process.

Or if you need a more comprehensive overview that includes key messaging and distribution processes, a creative brief may be the right fit for your project.

2. List all tasks and action items.

Every task involved in achieving a project’s objectives needs to go into the project timeline. After creating the brief, make a list of these tasks. You can start with large tasks and break them down into smaller to-dos.

Let’s say you’re responsible for creating a marketing video to launch your company’s newest product. Your list may include the following:

• Establish project leads from each department
• Set project budget
• Find a video production company
• Layout the video storyboard
• Choose main features for video
• Write video script
• Capture video content
• Add in sound and background music
• Add animations and graphics
• Edit video
• Write announcement copy
• Craft marketing campaign
• Create clips for social sharing
• Get video and marketing assets approved

Once you have the major milestones down, break down each task into smaller pieces. For example, choosing a video production company involves:

• Research video production companies
• Curate a list of production companies
• Get quotes from each production company
• Compare quotes and narrow down options
• Meet with the selected companies
• Choose a production company
• Finalize the contract

3. Connect dependencies.

In a project, certain tasks can’t be started until another is complete. These tasks are called dependencies. For example, a video can’t be filmed until the storyboard is finalized. And the storyboard can’t be finalized until the video theme is chosen.

Mapping out dependencies helps you solidify the order of each task and decide who’s responsible for what. Everyone will know what part of the project they’re working on, which tasks must be completed before their own, and who to contact for the deliverables they need.

Here’s a look at how dependencies can play out in a project timeline.

Image Source

In the example, you can see that hiring a caterer has to happen before finalizing the lunch menu. But other tasks, like finding a DJ and deciding on an event theme, can happen at the same time. So as you map out each task, you’ll have to see which steps can overlap and which need to wait for others.

4. Estimate the time it will take to complete each task.

Once you figure out the sequence of tasks, you need to figure out how much time each will take. Estimate as best you can. That way, it’ll be easier to create the project roadmap and understand the project’s overall time frame.

As you go, make sure to consider the other projects and priorities your team has going on. A designer may be able to come up with a rough draft of video animations in one week, but if they’re wrapping up another project, they may not be able to start on yours for another two weeks.

Being mindful of your team’s time will make it easier to put together a reasonable, reliable timeline.

5. Create the project timeline.

Build your timeline by organizing your tasks from the first to the final step. Make any necessary adjustments to the task times, add milestones, and solidify the deadline. If your team works with project management software, organize the timeline and tasks so it’s ready to share after the project kickoff meeting.

You can save time during this step by using one of the project timeline templates below. It’s simple to customize each and avoid the extra work of creating your own from scratch.

6. Share the timeline with the project team.

Whew, your timeline is complete! Now, you have to share it with stakeholders. This includes everyone who is involved in the project. You’ve already listed these people out in your brief (during step one), so it’s time to share your clear path forward for the project with them.

It’s a good idea to hold a project kickoff meeting with both stakeholders and individual contributors so everyone starts on the same page. You can communicate the project goals, deliverables, roles, and deadlines — without going into an overwhelming amount of detail. From there, you’ll want to schedule time with the project’s immediate contributors to chat specifics and answer any questions before the work begins.

Need help visualizing the entire project? It can help to include a timeline graphic like the one below to give everyone a sense of the overall time frame. You can add or remove steps, depending on the complexity of your project.

Image Source

7. Adapt as you go.

Remember how just over half of projects are finished on time? Roadblocks and setbacks are inevitable in every project. So if your team runs into a delay, you’ll have to understand the impact and adjust the timeline if necessary.

While it’s possible to make up for delays without changing the final deadline, it’s your job as the project owner to update stakeholders on the project’s progress. Reporting a minor issue (like a coworker being out sick for a few days) isn’t always necessary to higher-ups. But if it’s a major roadblock that requires an extreme adjustment to the timeline (like a core contributor leaving the team), you have to communicate a new timeline to stakeholders.

Change is part of every company, so don’t panic if you have to adjust your timeline. It’s better to be transparent about the scope of work and timeline than keep people in the dark until the deadline hits. The earlier you adjust to change, the easier it will be to get back on track.

Project Timeline Examples

Visualizing a project makes it simple to understand what needs to happen from start to finish. Whether you need a template for a product launch or campaign meeting, these well-designed project timeline templates are perfect for your next planning session.

Employee Onboarding Timeline

Product Launch Timeline

Crisis Response Project Timeline

Historical Timeline

Task Project Timeline

Meeting Project Timeline

Need as many templates as you can get? Download all of these project timelines (and more) for free. With the right timelines in hand, it’s easy to keep everyone up to date and informed. Now all you have to do is make sure your projects stay on schedule. Good luck!

Have you ever presented results from a marketing campaign and been asked, “But are these results statistically significant?” As data-driven marketers, we’re not only asked to measure the results of our marketing campaigns but also to demonstrate the validity of the data — exactly what statistical significance is.

While there are several free tools out there to calculate statistical significance for you (HubSpot even has one here), it’s helpful to understand what they’re calculating and what it all means. Below, we’ll geek out on the numbers using a specific example of statistical significance to help you understand why it’s crucial for marketing success.

In marketing, you want your results to be statistically significant because it means that you’re not wasting money on campaigns that won’t bring desired results. Marketers often run statistical significance tests before launching campaigns to test if specific variables are more successful at bringing results than others.

Statistical Significance Example

Say you’re going to be running an ad campaign on Facebook, but you want to ensure you use an ad that’s most likely to bring desired results. So, you run an A/B test for 48 hours with ad A as the control variable, and B as the variation. These are the results I get:

Ad	Impressions	Conversions
Ad A	6,000	430
Ad B	5869	560

Even though we can see based on the numbers that ad B received more conversions, you want to be confident that the difference in conversions is significant, and not due to random chance. If I plug these numbers into a chi-squared test calculator (more on that later), my p-value is 0.0, meaning that my results are significant, and there is a difference in performance between ad A and ad B that is not due to chance.

When I run my actual campaign, I would want to use ad B.

If you’re anything like me, you need more explanation as to what p-value and 0.0 mean, so we’ll go through an in-depth example below.

1. Determine what you’d like to test.

First, decide what you’d like to test. This could be comparing conversion rates on two landing pages with different images, click-through rates on emails with different subject lines, or conversion rates on different call-to-action buttons at the end of a blog post. The choices are endless.

My advice would be to keep it simple; pick a piece of content that you want to create two different variations of and decide your goal — a better conversion rate or more views are good places to start.

You can certainly test additional variations or even create a multivariate test, but, for this example, we’ll stick to two variations of a landing page with the goal being increasing conversion rates. If you’d like to learn more about A/B testing and multivariate tests, check out “The Critical Difference Between A/B and Multivariate Tests.”

2. Determine your hypothesis.

Before I start collecting data, I find it helpful to state my hypothesis at the beginning of the test and determine the degree of confidence I want to test. Since I’m testing out a landing page and want to see if one performs better, I hypothesize that there is a relationship between the landing page the visitors receive and their conversion rate.

3. Start collecting your data.

Now that you’ve determined what you’d like to test, it’s time to start collecting your data. Since you’re likely running this test to determine what piece of content is best to use in the future, you’ll want to pull a sample size. For a landing page, that might mean picking a set amount of time to run your test (e.g., make your page live for three days).

For something like an email, you might pick a random sample of your list to randomly send variations of your emails to. Determining the right sample size can be tricky, and the right sample size will vary between each test. As a general rule of thumb, you want the expected value for each variation to be greater than 5. (We’ll cover expected values further down.)

4. Calculate Chi-Squared results.

There are several different statistical tests that you can run to measure the significance of your data, and picking one depends on what you’re trying to test and the type of data you’ll collect. In most cases, you’ll use a Chi-Squared test since the data is discrete.

Discrete is a fancy way of saying that your experiment can produce a finite number of results. For example, a visitor will either convert or not convert; there aren’t varying degrees of conversion for a single visitor.

You can test based on varying degrees of confidence (sometimes referred to as the alpha of the test). If you want the requirement for reaching statistical significance to be high, your alpha will be lower. You may have seen statistical significance reported in terms of confidence.

For example, “The results are statistically significant with 95% confidence.” In this scenario, the alpha was .05 (confidence is calculated as one minus the alpha), meaning there’s a one in 20 chance of making an error in the stated relationship.

After I’ve collected the data, I put it in a chart to make it easy to organize. Since I’m testing out two different variations (A and B) and there are two possible outcomes (converted, did not convert), I’ll have a 2×2 chart. I’ll total each column and row so I can easily see the results in aggregate.

Once I’ve created my chart, the next step is to run the equation using the chi-squared formula.

Statistical Significance Formula

The image below is the chi-squared formula for statistical significance:

In the equation,

• Σ means sum,
• O = observed, actual values,
• E = expected values.

When running the equation, you calculate everything after the Σ for each pair of values and then sum (add) them all up.

5. Calculate your expected values.

Now, I’ll calculate what the expected values are. If there were no relationship between what landing page visitors saw and their conversion rate in the example above, we would expect to see the same conversion rates with versions A and B. From the totals, we can see that 1,945 people converted out of the 4,935 total visitors, or roughly 39% of visitors.

To calculate the expected frequencies (E in the chi-squared formula) for each version of the landing page, we can multiply the row total for that cell by the column total and divide it by the total number of visitors. In this example, to find the expected value of conversion on version A, I would use the following equation:

(1945*2401)/4935 = 946

6. See how your results differ from what you expected.

To calculate Chi-Square, I compare the observed frequencies (O in the chi-squared equation) to the expected frequencies (E in the chi-squared equation). This comparison is done by subtracting the observed from the expected value, squaring the result, and dividing it by the expected frequency value.

Essentially, I’m trying to see how different my actual results are from what we might expect. Squaring the difference amplifies the effects of the difference, and dividing by what’s expected normalizes the results. As a refresher, The equation looks like this: (observed – expected)*2)/expected

7. Find your sum.

I then sum the four results to get my Chi-Square number. In this case, it’s .95. To see whether or not the conversion rates for my landing pages are different with statistical significance, I compare this with the value from a Chi-Squared distribution table based on my alpha (in this case, .05) and the degrees of freedom.

Degrees of freedom are based on how many variables you have. With a 2×2 table like in this example, the degree of freedom is 1.

In this case, the Chi-Square value would need to be equal to or exceed 3.84 for the results to be statistically significant. Since .95 is less than 3.84, my results are not statistically different. This means that there is no relationship between what version of landing page a visitor receives and the conversion rate with statistical significance.

8. Report on statistical significance to your teams.

After running your experiment, the next step is to report your results to your teams to ensure everyone is on the same page about next steps. So, continuing with the previous example, I would need to let my teams know that the type of landing page we use in our upcoming campaign will not impact our conversion rate because our test results were not significant.

If results were significant, I would inform my teams that landing page version A performed better than the others, and we should opt to use that one in our upcoming campaign.

Why Statistical Significance Is Significant

You may be asking yourself why this is important if you can just use a free tool to run the calculation. Understanding how statistical significance is calculated can help you determine how to best test results from your own experiments.

Many tools use a 95% confidence rate, but for your experiments, it might make sense to use a lower confidence rate if you don’t need the test to be as stringent.

Understanding the underlying calculations also helps you explain why your results might be significant to people who aren’t already familiar with statistics.

If you’d like to download the spreadsheet I used in this example so you can see the calculations on your own, click here.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in April 2013, but was updated in September 2021 for freshness and comprehensiveness.