Keep Your Business Sailing Smoothly While You’re on Vacation

Running a business is demanding. And with a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, stepping away from the office can feel scary.

But taking a break is just as important as hard work, and you’ve earned a vacation. Plus, time away gives you perspective. When you’re not in the thick of your day-to-day routine, you can look at your business through a different lens and come up with even better ideas for the future.

We rounded up a few ideas about how to prepare your business to succeed even while you’re away.

Get ready

Preparation is the name of the game when it comes to making sure you get a real break.

Once you’ve decided where you’re going and when, relay those details to your team. The more notice you give everyone, the easier it is for them to prepare.

Depending on the nature of your business, you might need to email your customers and let them know you’re going to be out of town. This will prevent them from feeling disappointed or frustrated when they can’t get in touch.

It will also help them relate to you as a person, not just a business. You might even inspire them to take a vacation themselves!

You might even inspire them to take a vacation themselves!

Send an email to your customers and clients and tell them:

• How long you’ll be gone.
• If you plan to check your emails while you’re out.
• Whether there’s someone else they should contact.
• When they should expect to hear directly from you again.

And whether you have a team or you’re flying solo, you can automate your marketing to keep things going and and take repetitive work off of your hands.

And whether you have a team or you’re flying solo, you can automate your marketing to keep things going and and take repetitive work off of your hands.

Before you leave the office:

• Schedule emails. Even if you’re not personally emailing anyone while you’re on vacation, you can still send emails from your business that promote a product, share news, or tell a story. Create the email before you leave and schedule it to send while you’re out.
• Set up Facebook and Instagram ads to run while you’re offline. Facebook and Instagram Ads can help you grow your reach on each platform, regardless of whether you’re personally logged in. Simply create and turn on the ads—then let them do the work, while you take a break from social networks too.
• Launch Google Remarketing ads to sell more stuff, even on vacation. While you’re away, people might visit your site and leave before they buy anything. But when you build Google Remarketing ads in MailChimp, you can recapture their attention and bring them back when they’re ready to buy.
• Turn on abandoned cart emails. People often put stuff in their cart but then fail to check out. When you turn on our abandoned cart automation, you can automatically remind shoppers what they’ve left behind and encourage them to buy it—that way you’ll make more money for your next getaway.

When you turn on these automations before you leave the office, you can reach your audience and grow your business, even when you’re off the grid.

Get set

When the you take time out of the office, it gives your team the chance to shine. Co-workers or employees can take on more responsibility and prove what they can do. Empower them to succeed while you’re gone—that way all of you can really relax and enjoy your vacation.

When the you take time out of the office, it gives your team the chance to shine.

Prepare your team for success

Before you catch a beach-bound or ski slope-destined flight, you should make sure your team and your tools are set up to run the show while you’re gone.

Your team will need a few things from you before you go:

• A plan. Delegate specific tasks to specific people and give them the details they need to get the job done.
• A way to get in touch. Whether you plan to check in regularly or only in an emergency, set up an app like Slack to make communication easy.
• Access. Give your people access to the documents and tools you normally use, like stuff in your MailChimp account, Google Drive or Dropbox.

Fortunately, it’s easy to share access to your MailChimp account. Before you leave town, create multi-user logins in your account for the people you’re leaving in charge of your marketing outreach. You can even set up levels of permissions so that your co-workers access only what they need.

With all of this preparation, you can leave town with peace of mind. But just in case, be sure to download the mobile app on your phone so that you can check on everything while you’re away.

With all of this preparation, you can leave town with peace of mind.

Go!

After a lot of preparing, it’s time to kick back and enjoy the rewards of your hard prep work.

Still, you may want to check in on a thing or two from afar. If you’re going to work on vacation:

• Set time aside. We recommend you use a method called timeboxing to ensure that you don’t get sucked completely out of vacation mode. Give yourself half an hour each morning, for example, to check your email and see how your campaigns are doing.
• Use the mobile app. Perhaps you’d like to work from a beach chair or a ski lodge—the MailChimp app makes it possible. Check out reports from your various campaigns. Write a new email using the templates you already built on your desktop. You can even turn on abandoned cart in the mobile app, if you forgot to do so before you left.

Most importantly, get some rest and enjoy being where you are. You’ve earned it!