Outdoor Envy: If you work in an office, you might notice your co-workers taking longer lunch breaks or staring longingly out the window at times. The nicer weather is certainly something you want to enjoy, so rather than let it distract you, take your work outside! Schedule business meetings at outdoor cafe spots or find a quiet, shady spot in your favorite park to knock out an important proposal or a discovery conversation with a client regarding their pressing needs.

Vacation Void: Chances are, you have a summer vacation planned. If you’re like us, you plan in advance to ensure that your clients’ needs are met and someone is in place to take care of everything while you’re away. But it’s not just your own vacation that affects the flow of business. Clients and vendors and employee vacations all factor into the flow of business, sometimes slowing down projects or causing missed connections. Rather than fight it, embrace the fact that project implementation may take longer. Instead, summer may be a great time to sit down with your own team and review what’s worked well in the previous year and make plans for new ventures.

Summer Slump: Whether you’re business is retail-based, or not, you may experience a decline in sales during the summer. This is partly due to your customers having their attention focused elsewhere–on vacations and downtime–and partly due to a natural sense of lethargy that the summer heat encourages. You can preempt some of this lag by having a plan in place to drive customer engagement during the summer months, whether through a special sale, email campaign, contest or other.

Embrace Idle Time: Summer is also a great time to catch up on your reading–personal and business. We’ve recommended a few content marketing books below to enjoy while walking the dog, traveling, or even while you’re sitting at the beach! A great way to just stimulate the day and the mind.

• Content Marketing Inc. by Joe Pulizzi
• Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
• Audience by Jeff Rohrs
• Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi (our next audio book for inspiration)

Share With Others: What’s your summertime strategy?  Tweet & tell us @RootedELM using the hashtag #EmailMktgSummer.

Two years later I entered graduate school at Aquinas College as a part-time student.  My company felt I had potential in Marketing. Intrigued and excited, I was ready to hit the books. I earned a Masters of Management degree four years later and discovered that I absolutely loved Marketing.

That degree helped me see the professional world differently.  I moved on to work for a distributor for Aveda products in sales and then internal marketing with Chrysler Corporation and of recent, I’ve been an entrepreneur for the past nine years.  Each professional challenge required learning corporate jargon, lingo, acronyms, technology and personalities.  Oh… the personalities… but that’s a story for another post.

Going back to school is inevitable. It’s inevitable for my children and it’s inevitable as a professional.

Knowledge is power and this industry is ever-changing. From email design to content marketing. From ExactTarget to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. From email metrics to KPI’s and dashboards.  We must stay fresh to survive.

This year, when it came time to head back to school, I chose Marketing Profs University.  I chose three online deep-dive courses to help me, and help my clients flourish: Content Marketing Crash Course, Marketing Writing Bootcamp and Marketing Measurement and Analytics.

Each time I listen to a course, my mind spins as I think of a client that would benefit from the content. It’s what I need to stay creative one day and strategic another.

What I appreciate most about these courses is that they are taught by peers, I participate on my own time and each course presents industry examples.  As a satisfied student, I highly recommend you check out Marketing Profs University.  After all, they inspired me to begin writing blog posts again.