Spring Cleaning for Your Wellness Practitioner Business
For wellness practitioners and business owners, spring can mean many different things,
It’s definitely a time to think about Mother’s Day sales promotions and planning ahead for the summer, when your clients may be finding themselves busier with holidays and outdoor activities.
But what if we looked at this season differently?
What if spring could represent something different for your business, something rooted in the themes of renewal and regrowth that are happening right outside your window.
We know this is hard to do. We just published our article on dealing with the effects of overwhelm, and we know that running a growing business leaves little time for reflection and rest.
Still, we want to make our case for taking time to “spring clean” your business. Sure, you can do this any time of the year, but there’s something special about the importance of matching the natural rhythm of the world around you.
Our kind of spring cleaning is all about tidying your to-do lists, maintaining your online marketing channels, and updating your online business listings, but if you have something that needs cleaning the old-fashioned way, don’t let it stop you!
Here’s how to practice spring cleaning for your wellness practitioner business. It’s a great way to catch up on some tasks you have been leaving for too long, and enter summer with a feeling of renewal.
Review and Revise Your Website
It’s best to think of your website in the same way that you would think of a physical storefront.
If you ran a coffee shop instead of a wellness-based practitioner business, you would care about the way that your business appeared to people walking by. Peeling paint, a dirty sign, or incorrect operating hours would be a huge concern – these are easy things for potential customers to notice, which can influence their decision to take their business elsewhere.
But for some reason, many people don’t feel the same about a website. This could be because it isn’t physical or tangible, or because people don’t know what to look for.
Here are a few simple tasks to “clean up” your website.
- Check for broken links: Use a free tool like this one from ahrefs to identify whether all the links on your website are broken. Broken links can happen when other sites change the URL structure for pages you have linked to, or even errors with your own in-site navigation.
- Is your site mobile friendly: As of February 2023, 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile sources. Run a mobile-friendly test to ensure that your website is functional on a range of devices.
- Update software and plugins: These updates are important for addressing potential security vulnerabilities on your website, and ensuring regular functionality.
- Test your website speed: Check whether recent content you have added to your website is affecting load speed.
Clean Up Your Email Lists
Although maintaining your email lists is an ongoing task, there are certain processes you should aim to do every year that go deeper.
- Determine why your emails bounce: Emails can bounce for a number of reasons, and are generally classified into “hard” bounces (permanent errors that will not be resolved) and “soft” bounces (temporary errors). Ensure that you aren’t losing subscribers because of human error, or because your emails don’t send properly to certain email addresses.
- Re-engage subscribers: Build a campaign for subscribers that haven’t opened or engaged with your emails for a while. This could be a special promotion or effort that is a “last chance” to keep receiving emails and engage with your business.
- Remove inactive subscribers: If you still don’t hear back from inactive subscribers, it is often best to remove them – many email marketing tools charge by subscriber count.
- Review notes, label VIPS: Go through your contacts with the purpose of identifying who your most important subscribers are, and revising any information you have about them in your email marketing software.
- Check in with your subscribers: Build a survey that asks your subscribers what kind of content they find useful, and what they would like to see more of in the future. A gift card or free service is a great incentive to get people to respond.
Refresh Your Branding
Run through your website, social media accounts, and any other customer-facing channel to ensure all brand assets you are using are accurate and up-to-date. Make sure that your official branding files are in a central location, so you are using the right one every time.
While you are at it, review the imagery and graphics that you have used on your website. Consider updating these branding assets with new stock images, or images from any custom photography work that you have done.
After seeing the same images and graphics on your website for a while, many business owners have a tendency to get used to how they look, and “gloss over” anything that might not look quite right.
If it helps, show your website to someone who hasn’t seen it before, and ask them for their honest first impressions.
Check Your Online Reputation
Keep an eye on your reviews on popular ratings websites like Google Reviews and Yelp. But don’t stop there – make sure that you are aware if your business is being talked about on other, smaller ratings websites.
In addition, look for entries for your business on a range of online directories. It is common practice for many of these websites to add listings without the direct involvement of the business, which can lead to out-of-date information being posted online.
This is a great opportunity to make sure that your business and brand messaging is consistent across all channels that you do not control.
