“If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.” These words were uttered by Eric Shinseki, the seventh United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs and a retired four-star U.S. Army general.
As the first Asian-American Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric understands the vital importance of strategic, forward-thinking change.
In the world of email marketing, change has come at a dizzying rate. Often fueled by technology, email marketers are struggling to invest in the right tools while dealing with burgeoning workloads and responsibilities.
But change isn’t something to fear. When approached strategically, change management and progress can help you hit your goals and better communicate with consumers. Here’s why you need to invest in change.
The arguments for change
Your competitors are continuously changing, and you need to keep up.
We live in a perpetual technological arms race. The better your competitor can do things, the more you’ll need to evolve to meet that standard.
Being the first to adopt change gives you an obvious competitive advantage, allowing you to set those standards and lead your industry.
Adopting new technologies or processes that ensure you spend less time on manual work and building emails is a critical first step. Once that time is freed up, you can focus on value-add, strategic work that helps you reach those goals you need to hit.
Getting away from that busy work could also lead to improved work fulfillment and general happiness. Improving processes and your day-to-day work life starts with change, and effective change management, so there’s no better time to start than today.
How to streamline your change management
Before making any change, you need to understand your processes and operations inside and out. You need to know who’s doing what, how long things take, what’s being created, and you need to take an inventory of what you already have.
Once you’ve done that, you can evaluate the solutions available and determine which tools would lead to the most efficiencies.
After the final evaluation process, it’s important to sit down with all stakeholders involved and work out a phased rollout of these new tools.
As part of this rollout, all parties should be included in continual training and performance tracking, ensuring that everybody understands how to use the tools and sees the accompanying results.
Determining what success looks like and tracking goals early on will help your team to accurately monitor and measure the success of the rollout and its effectiveness.
While making any change may seem daunting at first, it’s a critical component of any successful business, particularly in the fast-moving space of email marketing.
Chat with us today if you’d like to learn more about the future of change management in email marketing.
