There’s a reason I live someplace where gray winter skies and average lows of 24 degrees last for 6 months of the year.

I do love snow and winter sports, but that’s not the reason.

The reason is this…

I love the excuses that come with each season.

🌺Spring: An excuse to wear shorts the minute it hits 50 degrees

😎Summer: An excuse to say yes to every invitation and jam pack my calendar

🍂Fall: An excuse to make soup 3 times a week and go to the pumpkin patch

❄️Winter: An excuse to go into social hibernation and read as many books as I want

What Chicago winter actually feels like

Truthfully, I love this life strategy for myself.

If I always had sunshine and 80 degrees, I wouldn’t take advantage of it. If I always was making soup, I’d get sick of it.

Seasons are good for so much else, too.

Spring and Fall are big times for cleansing and going inwards, and I know many of you are planning to take advantage of this time.

Maybe you’re doing a full Panchakarma, a gentle kitchari reset, or have a couple of acupuncture sessions booked to clear our Summer heat.

That’s great, but I think you could add one TINY little thing to that schedule…

Set the same intention with your business and give it a little Fall reset.

Many of us get so used to working outside of our businesses – marketing, sharing on socials, collaborating, etc. – that we forget to clean up the cobwebs on the inside of our businesses. 

(Apparently this theme also ties into the Full Moon and the astrology of the next few weeks, too)

Take some time this Fall to release people, offerings, and small bits of your business that are no longer in alignment with where you’re headed:

✉️Clean Up Your Email List

I read this stat earlier this week: “If someone hasn’t opened or clicked one of your emails in a 30 day period, there’s a 70% chance they will never open up one of your emails again.”

How many people are sitting on your list who haven’t opened in 30, 60, 90, or even 120 days? Give them an opportunity to stay, but it they don’t open/click, please let them go.

This will be hard to do, because you worked so hard to get them on your list. But I promise that cleansing your list will increase your open and click rate, which is great for deliverability to the people who actually want to hear from you.

📲Clean up your Social Media Following

Another tough one to do, because everyone can watch your following count go down. Plus, it requires a little manual effort. But the same rules apply here.

I know you’ve seen how bad the spam accounts have gotten on Instagram, and when they follow you, all they do is drag down your engagement rate.

Bad news, because the engagement rate on a post is a what helps make content go viral and reach more of your own people and non-followers.

An easy place to start the clean-up is by removing any accounts that have look like spam or bots.

If you want to test your engagement rate, here’s a free tool that analyzes that for you so you have a rough idea of how much time you want to spend removing accounts.

⚙️Clean up your Processes

This is where data becomes your best friend, because you might actually be better at reaching people than you think!

I often hear people say, “I just need more followers. I just need to go viral. I need to find new clients.” That might be true.

However, sometimes when you dig into the numbers, you might realize that plenty of people go to your website, or visit your profile, or enter your email sequence.

Yet…they don’t convert.

This is an opportunity to go through your entire customer journey with a set of fresh eyes and see how you can make this experience more clear and valuable.

It’s much easier to convert someone who has already said yes to being in your email funnel than to go find someone brand new and start at first impressions again.

• Request your own Lead Magnet and read through every email in your own sequence
• Google your name or business and explore your own website
• Ask a friend to visit your IG profile and record themselves interacting with your page

These are all things I have on my to-do list for the Fall. It’s something I always procrastinate, because it’s never NOT cringey to look back at old things you created.

(This is good news, right? It means we’re growing!)

However, the ripple effects of these little things are huge.

A tiny boost in your engagement rate can mean more people see your message.  ➡️ When more people see your message, you get more people interacting with you.  ➡️ When that interaction is slightly better than it was before, you get more people saying yes to working with you.

It’s a glorious cycle of compounding interest.

XO, Rachel Murphy