By Stacey Hartman
Establishing an online presence for your small business seems like a no-brainer nowadays. So you set up your site, linked up your company social media profiles, and created an email marketing campaign. Customers are loving your weekly emails and your subscriptions (and sales) are growing. You’re good to go now, right? This is exactly what you were aiming for, after all.
Well, sort of. It’s a good start, but there are steps needed to ensure that you don’t lose the subscriber base that you worked so hard to build. Let’s take a look at a few of the major ways that you could be losing email subscribers.
1. Purchasing email lists
Your subscriber numbers are slowly growing, but they could always grow faster. And let’s face it, those email lists look pretty tempting after all the hard work you’ve done. Resist the temptation. The list is typically sold to many people, rather than just you, so those email addresses are likely already being spammed with unsolicited email. That, and some email list providers gather their email lists in sketchy ways. And, since you’re probably not the only person who bought the email list, the recipients are much more likely to mark you as spam. (more…)
Wife and husband Samantha Rudolph and Jared Miller of 
Valentine’s Day is coming up, and for many businesses this means getting ready for the fourth-largest spending holiday of the year (National Retail Foundation). To help our fellow small business owners, we’ve prepared five tips for how you can get ahead during the season of love: