If you need to get hold of us over the break… well, there’s no rest for the wicked, and what’s more wicked than Chilli Chocolate? We’re available as normal on every day other than Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

In a recent article for the Barossa Grape and Wine Association I talked about using reports and testing to work out what editorial tone would be most effective in capturing the attention of a email newsletter’s readers.

(See “What’s the right tone when communicating with your winery’s email database?“)

In a new post I focus on the readers themselves – the people on the mailing list – and ask: “What’s an email mailing-list subscriber actually worth to the business?”

Read more at Barossa Dirt!

www.apple.com

He changed the way movies are made, the way music is sold, the way stories are told, the very way we interact with the world around us. He helped us work, and gave us new ways to play. He was a myth made man.

Prior to Steve Jobs, computers were alien to most of us. They were accessible to few people without an engineering degree. Not merely because of their complex operating procedures, but also because they were so cold and so inhuman. Jobs understood that they could be something more than that. That while computers would never be people, he could endow them with humanity. He could transform them into machines that not only anyone could use, but that everyday people would enjoy using thanks to the art of great design. He made them something that would be part of our lives. And he did that again and again. (Gizmodo)

The world seems a little less magical today.

Posted from my iPhone.

Here’s a collection of 10 short tips that will help you improve your email marketing!

1. Don’t use a purchased list of email addresses. The essence of good email marketing is that you are building and maintaining a relationship with the recipients. That means the recipients must consent to receiving email from you. Nobody likes getting spam!

2. Make unsubscription easy and make it obvious how to do so. Always give your subscribers an obvious “unsubscribe” link or button – and if it takes more than one mouse click your unsubscribe process is too difficult. Remember – it only takes one click to “mark as spam”, and that’s the worst possible outcome.

3. Polish the copy. No matter how pretty your design and how tasteful your typography may be, it’ll all fall apart if the words themselves feel wrong. If you’re not a skilful writer engage a professional copywriter to help craft your message.

4. Personalise. At a simple level this means engaging the reader – singular – with his or her name. “Dear Simon” certainly gets my attention more effectively than “Dear recipient”. Easy. But at a deeper level this means tailoring the email to what your readers – plural – care about and how they react to emails from you. You’re not emailing your recipients to lecture them, you’re emailing them to share a relationship with them. How do you know what your readers’ preferences are? Well…

5. Analyse the results. Of the people you sent your message to, who actually received it? Of the people who received it, who opened it? At what time of day? On what day of the week? Of the people who opened it who took an action as a direct result? Of all the people on your database, who are the people most likely to read an email from you? Of the people on your database who are the most likely to do something you ask them to do? Get this information and use it.

6. Tidy up your database. A professional email marketing firm will have processes in place to automate things like unsubscriptions and the removal of invalid email addresses, but nothing can replace personal human attention. No computer (or a programmer) will handle names properly 100% of the time, so make sure that your email treats things like titles, hyphenated names, addresses shared by two people, and mononyms sensibly.

7. Test diligently. Test like crazy. Email clients render text, styles, and layouts in unpredictable and sometimes totally illogical ways. Code and designs that are 100% valid and which look perfect in an editor or a web browser will be broken and ugly for no apparent reason when viewed in a mail client. Test and tweak until everything looks perfect and then test again!

8. Have a goal and work towards it. Email marketing is a fantastic and effective tool, but it needs to be used for something. Have a criterion by which success or failure can be judged – website visits, online sales, newsletter subscriptions, donations – and make sure your email is crafted to achieve your goal. Measure your success or failure against that goal – not against some sort of fuzzy gut feeling.

9. Be ready for the email to work. If you’re driving people to a website make sure the site is ready for an influx of traffic. If you’re asking people to sign up for something make sure the signup form works. If you’re selling something make sure you can process the sales and have stock on hand. Be prepared for success!

10. Do more testing!

Email marketing is an incredibly powerful marketing tool when used properly. So use it properly!

–Simon

Sponsorship is a fantastic–and often-overlooked–marketing channel that allows small businesses to form relationships with potential customers via a personal connection.

It is not enough for a company to offer a product to the market – even if it is an excellent one. The brand must now “stand” for something – honesty, loyalty, transparency.

Consumers are informed and discriminating and there is ample evidence available that they will change their purchasing habits based on how they perceive their relationship with a product/company.

Sponsorship offers the opportunity to connect with people when they are experiencing or participating in an activity that they enjoy and have chosen to be involved in – much like their relationship with you. If they perceive that your involvement is a positive one for them they will return the loyalty.

Imagine for a second the Mum dropping off her child to football and finding out that the local cafe has sponsored the team’s uniform. If that Mum were me, you know what I’d be thinking? I’d be thinking that cafe just saved my family $100, because now I don’t have to pay for the full cost of my child’s uniform. I would be very grateful for that sponsorship and that cafe would be first place I’d turn when the afternoon coffee hit was required. Not only that, but I would certainly be telling my friends about it.

Now, how many kids on a football team? That’s how many parents? And how many friends do those parents have?

Relationships. They add up.

If you’d like to explore the marketing possibilities of sponsorship for your business, and if you’re not sure how to find the right sponsorship property or if you’re not sure whether a particular sponsorship is a good fit for you, please call me on (08) 8224 3300 or email me at kelly@chillichocolatemarketing.com. I’d love to help!

–Kelly
@ccmkelly

I recently wrote a piece for the Barossa Grape and Wine Association on the best tone to use when communicating with an Internet database.

What is the best tone to use when communicating with a recipient database?

Well, it depends. Every organisation is different; every recipient database is different; every individual communication is different. There is no one-size-fits-all “best tone”. But here’s what an online database-driven marketing campaign can do: it can reveal the best tone for the task at hand, and it can do so more accurately than traditional marketing methods, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.

So imagine we’ve got two messages with distinct and differing tones. How do we find out which is the better of the two?

Read the full article at Barossa Dirt!

–Simon

I spoke to our friends at HR consultancy Art of Staff and Shoana McManus gave me some great information on the key benefits of hiring a agency rather than a contract employee.

There are multiple reasons why you should consider filling a marketing maternity-leave vacancy with an agency like Chilli Chocolate Marketing rather than employing someone for a contracted term.

The biggest reason is of course the simple financial benefit – you don’t have to pay salary plus super plus Workcover plus insurance plus HR and IT. Oncosts are often worth up to 1/3 of the annual salary of a staff member. We have that covered already! You can pay us a predetermined fee for the duration of the contract, paid in instalments, and the total can be substantially less than the cost of hiring a new staff member – on who will still need to get up to speed upon arrival.

What I am hearing is that often you the employer may be placed in a position of paying the maternity leave and the new employee until the government reimbursement is paid… and that payment doesn’t always come quickly.

There are bigger financial benefits – you get a professional marketing executive who can hit the ground running. Time is money and that wont be wasted when the KPIs are set and measured. We bring a variety of experiences and lessons learned from a wide range of clients which can lead to better outcomes, increased creativity, and more productive ideas.

Chilli Chocolate Marketing are a reputable organisation with a professional identity to protect so you will be getting someone who is invested in making you and us look great. We have a professional reputation to uphold so our business relies on always performing at the top of our game. Contractors can usually do the work in less time than it takes to get a staff member to do it as the staff member will be pulled into all sorts of extra curricular office activities that a contractor will avoid.

Also political issues won’t be a concern – we leave at the end of the contract and the person taking parental leave has no uncertainty about whether they will have a job on their return – there are no internal staff to be jockeying for the position. We’re not there to make friends or enemies and we are not staff members looking to advance up a corporate ladder. This makes it much easier to maintain professional integrity and focus on fulfilling the KPIs set out in the marketing plan.

The bonus is that if your procedures and policies need to be improved or replaced you will have a professional marketing resource in place to advise and assist with those changes. Importantly as well is that you don’t always get the right people for contract roles. You are limited to those people who don’t mind being out of a job at the end of a contract or someone who is going to disrespect the concept of maternity leave and actively pursue the position for him or herself.

This may not even be limited to maternity leave – you may need someone to come in full-time for a contract period to get your e-marketing set up and your marketing staff trained to manage it internally.

We talk all the time to our clients and potential clients about the benefits of using Chilli Chocolate Marketing as your out-sourced marketing team; to help businesses through the challenges of maternity leave we take the next step and become your in-house out-sourced marketing team.

Marketing experts — with benefits. If your business could use our help, call us today on (08) 8210 3399!

(Special thanks to Shoana McManus of Art of Staff for her assistance with this post)

–Kelly
@ccmkelly

Almost a year ago I made a post explaining a bit about “Website hosting” – what it is and why Chilli Chocolate Marketing provides it to our clients if required.

Now hosting a company website brings certain responsibilities. Website vandals and malicious hackers are constantly on the lookout for badly-secured websites – they’re out there 24/7 performing the digital equivalent of trying doors and windows to see if they’re locked and looking under doormats for spare keys. So keeping up to date with security patches and maintaining secure backups is absolutely critical.

A couple of months ago a large Australian hosting company – DistributeIT – was put out of business by an attack that not only took all 4800 of its hosted websites offline but destroyed its backups as well.

Rob McAdam, CEO of security firm Pure Hacking, said the issue was a “catastrophic problem” for those with websites hosted by Distribute.IT.

“If these clients of Distribute.IT had no other backup other than what was at Distribute.IT, they would then have to rebuild their site – from scratch,” he said.

“From the Distribute.IT blog post, it appears that they have lost all of the content for these web sites and any associated backups that Distribute.IT kept.”

James Turner, security analyst at IBRS, said: “This could be the nightmare scenario that every small/medium businessperson working on the internet has in the back of their minds.

If you’re a CCM hosting client you may recall me getting in touch recently to let you know that new security patches were available and new backups were about to be made and stored. You may possibly have wondered if such paranoia was really necessary.

Well that paranoia paid off -  we got attacked last week!

The administrators at the datacentre where we lease server space got in touch with a warning of “suspicious activity” on one of our hosted sites. We immediately took the site offline and performed a security audit, one which confirmed that hackers had indeed been trying to take over the site and use it to send Russian email spam.

However thanks to a sensible security and backup policy we were able to identify what the hackers were trying to do and lock them out easily. Net downtime for the affected site was approximately 15 minutes while we “checked the locks from the inside”. Then it was back to business as usual.

Sometimes it pays to be paranoid!

–Simon

Melted butter for greasing
250g good-quality dark chocolate – chopped
250g butter cubed
80ml (1/3 cup) water
175g caster sugar
3 eggs, at room temperature
150g (1 cup) self-raising flour
35g (1/3 cup) cocoa powder

ganache
100g hazelnuts
300g good-quality dark chocolate, finely chopped
200ml thin cream
1tbs Frangelico or brandy

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Brush 2 deep round tins with the melted butter to grease. Line the bases and sides with non-stick baking paper.
2. Place the chocolate, butter and water in a saucepan. Stir over low heat until smooth and then set aside.
3. Beat the sugar and eggs in a large bowl until the mixture thickens. Use a wooden spoon to stir in the chocolate mixture. Sift the flour and cocoa into the mixture and gently stir until combined.
4. Divide the mixture between the tins and smooth the surface of each. Bake in pre-heated oven for 35-40mins. Set aside for 10mins before turning onto a cooling racks.
5. To make the ganache, increase oven temperature to 180 and spread hazelnuts over a baking tray and cook for 10-12 mins. Rub the hazelnuts between a clean tea-towel to remove as much skin as possible. Roughly chop and set aside. Place chocolate in a heatproof bowl. Place the cream into a small saucepan over medium heat and bring just to a simmer. Pour the cream over the chocolate. Set aside for 1min, then stir until smooth. Stir in frangelico or brandy. Transfer 2/3 of the ganache to a separate bowl. Stir the hazelnuts into the remaining ganache. Set aside stirring occasionally for 1-2 hours or until both mixtures are a thick, spreadable consistency.
6. To assemble, place the cake on a serving plate and spread the hazelnut ganache over the top. Sandwich the remaining cake and spread plain ganache over the top and side of the cake. Place in the fridge for at least 1 hour for the ganache to set.

Enjoy!
–Kelly

Social media has changed the way we do almost everything. We make buying decisions, find jobs, play games, listen to music and learn socially. But for business it’s clearly been a more challenging shift. Engaging in social media requires a fundamental change to the way businesses function and think. No wonder so many are slow to embrace social media and devote budgets to it.

The challenge is that most businesses are stuck in traditional thinking and marketing that doesn’t translate well to a social atmosphere, on- or off-line. While many people are advocating the evolution of businesses to becoming, “social businesses,” few people are outlining specific changes that will help them.

I spotted this fascinating article from Ilana Rabinowitz over at the website Social Media Explorer.

Ilana’s article contains some disruptive, even scary, ideas on how to approach marketing in the age of social networking. Example:

Results require patience.

So, they may ask, where’s the bottom line here? If your company is used to measuring the results of a campaign, they may have to shift their thinking. Campaign thinking is antithetical to social media. You may have a campaign to bring more people to your Facebook page but it’s what happens with them over time that matters. Campaign thinking is short sighted. Social media is about creating relationships. Relationships and trust take time. You may have to act quickly on social media, but look to the longer timeline to measure results.

Many businesses simply don’t have the patience or the mindset to approach marketing in this way. Does your business?

Check out the rest of the article here: 9 Ways Your Business Needs To Change To Become Social.

– Simon
@simongarlick

–Simon