Happy Friday, dear readers!

It’s been an exciting week: spring came to Michigan (at least temporarily), we made some serious progress with a couple long-term client projects, and we saw new opportunities come our way. There’s a lot to celebrate!

This week, the theme of Our Favorite Headlines is inspiration, of both the practical variety (e.g. how to use behavioral triggered emails) and the more philosophical (e.g. the root cause of your procrastination). We all a little inspiration from time to time, so check them out!

The Takeaway: We’ve talked in the past about how using personalization will be key to success in the future of email. What’s important to know is that personalization isn’t only about using a name in your greeting, or even sending different offers based on demographic data. One effective way to personalize your email marketing is to use behavioral triggers to send highly-targeted, relevant emails to your audience. If you’re not sure how your business could use this type of personalization, this article gives advice on how to implement behavioral triggers in various types of industries.

The Takeaway: With the average person being exposed to more than 3,000 marketing messages per day, it’s imperative that marketing teams find more and more creative ways to highlight their brands’ products and services. Yet it can be all too easy for us to get “too close to” our work or get bogged down with daily tasks that cause our creativity to suffer. So how do we remedy that? This article presents a few out-of-the-box ideas.

The Takeaway: Speaking of creativity, we’re including this article partially for inspiration, and partially for fun. Each of the ads featured by FastCompany include some form of storytelling – whether it’s highlighting how obsessed athletes like Shalane Flanagan are with their Nike shoes or dredging up a piece of company history that P&G isn’t proud of to show how far the culture has come. Watch how each brand uses storytelling – with wildly different formats, tones, and messages – and think about how you can apply it for your own brand.

The Takeaway: Procrastination is an ugly beast. For one, it is viewed by many as the lazy approach, when the reality is that procrastination actually requires a lot of (albeit ineffective) work and stress. Second, procrastination rarely makes any sense, especially to the people who find themselves in deep water time and time again. So how can a lifelong procrastinator beat it? This article is eye-opening, as it busts the beliefs that keep procrastinators from just doing the things they need to get done. This is a must-read for anyone who struggles with procrastination, whether at work or in your personal life. Don’t put off reading this one.