This essay is part of the series, Fix Your Flow: Get the Right Emails to the Right People.
Since becoming a business owner, I’ve noticed this strange obsession with finding the perfect morning routine to optimize your day.
From Hal Elrod’s 5-step Miracle Morning to Julia Cameron Artist’s Way’s morning papers, I’ve tried out a few. And while I could get these routines to stick for a bit, they always felt very forced.
After a lot of trial and error, I did eventually come up with my perfect morning routine:
☕ Brew my coffee (pour-over, ‘cause I like the taste and the process)
💺 Sit down in my yellow, wing-backed chair
📖 Read a book (usually a novel, but occasion non-fiction) while sipping my coffee, hopefully before my kids wake up.
That’s it. It might not be the most “optimized” morning routine or backed by science, but it works for me.
There is so much nuance about how we all start our days, from what time we wake up to whether or not we have kids and/or pets – on top of their needs and when they wake up.
And sometimes you have to try out different iterations to discover what works for you. Much like setting up your email marketing.
Fine-tune your email automations
The final of the five Email Automation Pillars – Optimize – is focused on unearthing what works for your business (and stop doing what’s not).
During the Optimize phase of the Email Automation Audit, I’m looking at things like:
📊 What are your email stats telling us?
💬 Where are there opportunities to send follow-up emails based on what you know about your subscribers?
🧐 Where are ways you can automate that will allow you to increase opportunities to make sales (without giving off a robotic, transactional vibe)
Of all the pillars, the Optimize pillar is probably the most nuanced.
It’s not about following the formula that got the web celeb a 7-figure launch, or copying the exact step-by-step process that worked for your business bestie.
Just like finding your ideal morning routine, it’s about what works for your business.
It takes into account what you sell and how you sell it, how you work with people, and your email list size. Because what works for someone else’s business isn’t necessarily going to work for yours.
