New York SBDC Research Network

Employees spend nearly one-fourth of their workday, on average, sorting through their email inbox, a study by McKinsey found. Email is the most used form of communication in the workplace, but it's also easy for the emails you send to be quickly deleted or marked as irrelevant. Salespeople, particularly those who rely on email as their first point of contact with prospects, need to ensure their emails are relevant, appropriate, and able to cut through the noise of a busy inbox. Needless to say, so do marketers. Here are my top tips for crafting an email that will encourage opens, generate interest, and warrant a response. 1. Perfect the subject line A subject line is the gateway into your email. It needs to instantly grab the receiver's attention to ensure your email doesn't end up in the dreaded junk folder. First, keep it short: A recent analysis by MailChimp suggests fewer than 50 characters—but still descriptive. Place the most descriptive words at the beginnin

Consider the following email marketing statistics from a recent consumer research study of British consumers: The average person's inbox has 260 unopened emails, 56% of which are from brands. 60% of those people who never open brand emails admitted they would if the subject line were personalized. The above facts tell us that consumers find impersonal marketing communications—let's call it "brand spam"—irrelevant as well as annoying. Often, unread emails from brands are those the consumer initially elected to receive, a process we call "self-selecting." Self-selecting is defined as ignoring emails originally requested but no longer relevant by the time they reach the individual's inbox. The solution to eliminating brand spam is to provide greater context for improved personalization. Read more from MarketingPros

There has been no shortage of conversations about women at mid-career and the challenges they face. Offering some clarity are 10 rising stars in the field of communications, who are the winners of the inaugural New York Women in Communications' WiCi Awards. Drawing on their careers in advertising, journalism, marketing and social good, the WiCi Award winners shared words of wisdom, including the best advice imparted upon them by the people they look up to most. Lesley Jane Seymour, editor-in-chief of More magazine, asked the honorees on Sept. 18 about the turning points in their careers and their biggest influencers, which ranged from encouragement from Steve Jobs to sage advice from their parents. More from Mashable here .

From CBS MoneyWatch : There is one thing you need to do, and one thing you insist others around you do, to keep business relationships vibrant: Communicate in real time. If something bothers you, say it while it's fresh. If you like something, say it. Unexpressed communication sinks into people like industrial dumping sinks into the dirt. It leeches into the groundwater, makes plants die and children get sick. Unexpressed communication withers relationships, builds up hostilities and finally erupts, often in a way that is almost never helpful.

Follow these rules, and you'll see a dramatic difference in your own team's ability to innovate: 1. Manage Creative Friction The wrong type of friction on teams makes people hate each other and hold back, but the right type gets results. How do you encourage good creative friction? Share the experience. The whole team, including the client, work together through all steps of the ideation process from consumer learning, to analysis of possibilities, to envisioning the final idea. Working with consumers directly to understand their needs and aspirations is an especially powerful bonding experience that gives the team a common sense of purpose, and creates a shared foundation of facts and feelings. Remove communication barriers. People communicate in different ways, so we do social styles analyses to help people understand how their teammates tend to communicate. Are they a driver, amiable, expressive or analytical? They learn that it is not that Harry is necessarily overb

Great communication is a key to being a good leader. Communicating with the entire team can be a challenging thing to take on. An article posted in linked in highlights several key areas in which a leader can increase the level of communication with employees at all levels of the organization. The improvement in communication with employees will result in higher employee engagement. This blog post will highlight five key areas any leader can concentrate on to improve his or her ability to communicate more effectively. More HERE .

High-profit salespeople recognize that a lot of little things go into building great client relationships. Taken individually, those things may seem like no big deal. But taken collectively, they compound into such a difference in your sales. More HERE .

The buzzword for the Obama campaign - besides "Change" of course - was "transparency". I suppose that's part of what the transition website has been all about. Likewise, just as it is important to be transparent with the outside world and potential customers, the same goes for your business's internal affairs as well. Be transparent with your staff. "It is all about internal communication and trust...[M]any companies are actually reducing communications just to cut costs...this is the last thing you want to do."

In most organizations the raw materials of the successful team exist; like dedication to service or professional ability, quality control. Where many, many organizations fall down is in the area of communication, sharing expertise, and a supportive environment. In particular, an appreciation of differing styles of working is essential to the smooth running of any organization. The detail oriented worker cam still have an appreciation of the big-picture worker; the process man can make room for the innovator. Organizations or businesses may have a plan but no process to truly implement it - the goal may be to empower employees but in practice, employees are micromanaged, evidence of a lack of trust. Or there is lip-service to the idea of communication but no process or game plan for dealing with conflict. To read up on teambuilding, check out Free Management Library

While I am on the subject... We have been trying to streamline our processes and use the tools we have, that perhaps we were not using to their full capability. More and more, we are trying to do things electronically. It has saved an enormous amount on postage, has made our processes more transparent and cut down on a lot of duplication of documentation. We understand using methods that feel safe and comfortable, and we still encourage the oldest of methods - a phone call- to get in touch with us, but we would request, that if you do prefer to send the written word, then please send it in an email to the RN address. It allows us to share the document between us, and it is instantaneous. Most faxes that we receive come through our individual fax numbers and are automatically converted into an email. Those that come through the main fax number: 518 443-5275 come through in paper only. Usually Cheryl will run the paper around to a researcher and then that person will have to retype the