:)

The answer is obvious, of course: a human face. We human beings are hard-wired to seek out human faces in the things we see, and we respond to faces from the day we are each born.

In experiments, newborn infants have shown a preference for looking at faces and face-like stimuli (e.g., Batki et al 2000). The babies are pretty discriminating, too. For example, they show a preference for faces with open eyes. And, given a choice between fearful and smiling faces, newborns look longer at happy faces (Farroni et al 2007). (ref)

Most importantly, one’s attention is held longer by a smiling face. It is built in to the deep structures of our brains for our eyes to be drawn to human faces and for our attention to be held by faces that look happy.

Email marketing is all about retaining attention. We touched on this topic from the perspective of the recipient in the article “Tips for the time poor“, in which we talked about techniques to help deal with masses of email. But as senders of business-related email we want to ensure that our recipients DO read our emails and that our recipients DO respond positively to our communications.

The key to a good website, a good blog post, or a good email newsletter is having good content. The most important thing is to have something worth reading. But your content won’t get read unless the document captures the reader’s attention. How do you ensure your document gets and holds the reader’s attention so he or she will actually notice the good content?

Stick a smiling face on it.

This advice is based on all our experience across campaigns for different clients in different industries in different countries. A/B testing has shown us time and time again that an email newsletter that features a smiling face in a prominent position performs better than a newsletter that doesn’t – in every respect.

So, next time you’re working on a newsletter with us and we say “do you have any smiling photos of yourself?”… you know why!

If you really want to geek out on this topic, check out “The Perception of Emotion and Social Cues in Faces“, Neuropsychologia, Volume 45, Issue 1 (2007) pp 75-92.

Image credits: “A Friendly Smile” by Carlo Nicora; “smiling boy – Pucallpa, Peru, Amazonia” by Szymon Kochański; images used under a Creative Commons license.

With great pleasure we invite you to try Naomi’s Chocolate, sent in by Naomi Sack of Hayes Knight SA.

Ingredients:

• Milk Chocolate
• White Chocolate
• Smooth Peanut Butter

Melt the milk chocolate and the white chocolate separately. Add peanut butter to the melted white chocolate. Pour the two melted chocolates together on a tray and use a fork to create a marbled effect. Place in the fridge or freezer until hard then break into pieces.

Too easy! Thanks Naomi :)

Domain name: chillichocolatemarketing.com

Reply requested by May 31, 2010

You must renew your domain name to renew exclusive rights to it on the Web (…) failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may resultin a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.

You may yourself have received a letter like this.

It is a scam.

Do not respond or reply to the letter in any way. The letter is designed to trick the recipient into panicking that a critical domain name is about to expire in the hope that, panicked, the recipient will transfer control of that domain name to “Domain Renewal Group”.

This scam has been well-known among technology circles for years; that it is still occurring means that the scam is successful at least some of the time.

Here are the results of a Google search for “Domain Renewal Group”:

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=%22domain+renewal+group%22

Have a look at some of the discussions taking place online right now, many of them complaints from Australian small businesses.

Don’t become a fraudster’s next victim – throw that letter in the trash!

Simon

There was no mention of the tremor on the Geosciences Australia website for hours and the first mention of the tremor in the mainstream news media was at 8.29am the following morning in a news post from the ABC. By the time the mainstream media even realised something had happened, the event was already old news to the online community.

This is the way news spreads now.

Let’s say a flood hits. Information about where it hits, how bad it is, and how high the water is rising used to come from the emergency response folks. Now it comes from social media; from tweeters sharing information about the event from their perspective. Eye witnesses can provide a fairly accurate picture of what’s happening.

In the meantime, what are the officials doing to get the information? They are busy on their cell phones and radios talking to the people in the field to get to the scene, gather information, prepare a public statement, and contact the media—all hours after everyone has learned the news from Twitter.

We are in an era when the vast majority of vital information is going to come through unofficial channels. That includes reputation crises as well as emergency communications.

– Gerald Baron

If something goes very wrong – or very right – for your brand or organisation, you can no longer expect to be in control of “The Message”. All you can hope is to be an early participant in the discussion!

Postscript: Here’s a tongue-in-cheek take on the phenomenon from popular webcomic xkcd.

Gmail (and thus also Google Apps) has long frustrated email marketers with its lack of support for internal or external stylesheets, instead requiring inline CSS – e.g., <div style=”font-size:8pt;padding:2px;margin:2px;”>YOUR STYLED TEXT HERE</div>

Well, that hasn’t changed. Sorry. However, during testing on a recent client campaign we noticed that an inline style in the form

<div style=”font: 11px lucida grande,arial,sans-serif; line-height: 15px; margin-left:30px; color:#000”>YOUR STYLED TEXT HERE</div>

…did not work. And it used to.

We found that for the style to be correctly applied in Gmail, the CSS had to be explicitly articulated as

<div style=”font-family: lucida grande,arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; line-height: 15px; margin-left:30px; color:#000”></div>.

So, a word of warning: email styling for recipients reading in Gmail just got a little bit harder. Something to bear in mind!

Tech guru Renai LeMay of Delimiter recently asked a range of industry commentators – including yours truly – about the pros and cons of using Macs in the workplace.

Read the full article: “Apple’s undiscovered country: Macs in the enterprise”

Simon Garlick (Twitter: @simongarlick)

Has it worked? Well, over the six months of the website project we’ve seen:

• Visits increase by 81%
• Pageviews increase by 87%
• Clickthroughs from Google increase by 65%
• Site bounce rate* decrease by 31%
  (* this stat measures how long people stick around to read other pages on your website beyond the first page they visit. The longer people stay at your website, the lower your “bounce rate”)

These statistics are due in no small part to a successful Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign, one which among other things has seen Homeplus Improvements claim the #1 search-result placing on Google for target keywords of “room extensions” and “Adelaide”

“We’re really happy with the way things are going. People are always talking to us about the website, the salespeople now have a great online presence to drive new business, and the website is bringing in new leads all the time. We’re thrilled!”

- Steve Davies – Director, Homeplus Improvements

If you’d like to turn your website into a marketing tool that helps drive your business, call us today on (08) 8224 3300!

Time is money, as the old adage goes. But how many of us actually consider what that means to us personally? Well, what it means is this: when you waste time in your business you waste money in your business.

Email

Australian small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) now regard email as their most important form of communication. Email is vital to doing business in the 21st century. This is reinforced by recent surveys suggesting that SMEs in Australia regard a loss of phone service as an inconvenience but regard a loss of email service as business-threatening.

Yes, email is vital for business. But what do you do when email starts impeding your ability to do business?

Does your Inbox look like this?

• group discussions where everyone Replies To All
• file attachments that need your edits or comments
• tasks you’ve been asked to finish
• requests for help or info from your colleagues
• invitations to meetings
• newsletters you signed up for
• personal messages
• sales pitches
• spam

If you answered “yes”, then your email itself has become a task rather than a tool to help you accomplish tasks. You might even be approaching email bankruptcy – the point where you just write off your unread mail and delete all your unread messages, regardless of their content.

There are a number of technological tools designed for people in this situation. But here’s a very simple solution that you can use without involving your IT team or installing anything new: set aside time to process your email and do it then.

“But I do process my email!” I hear many of you respond. But here’s the important bit: only process your email during that time. Don’t do it at any other time.

Nominate one or two times – maybe first thing in the morning and immediately after lunch – and devote those to processing your email. If you’re working on a document during the rest of the day and you hear that “New Mail” sound, don’t stop! keep working on that document! Even better, close your email program if you can and only open it at the times you’ve designated as email time. Set up an Out of Office autoreply on your email account at all other times, informing your would-be correspondents something like

“Thank you for your email. I am busy working on other tasks at the moment and will respond if necessary at a later time. If your request is critically urgent, please call our office on XXXX-XXXX and ask for a message to be forwarded to me.”

Email should be a tool – not a hindrance.

Meetings

Even though email has replaced many aspects of face-to-face communication, meetings are still an important business tool. They enable team members to stay up to date on progress, they assist with delegation and decision-making, and they facilitate discussion of important matters.

However, just like email, meetings can get out of control and can be detrimental to your ability to do business. If you are spending more hours per day in meetings about work than doing work, you have a meeting problem. Here are some tips to help keep the negative impact of meetings to a minimum:

Make sure there is a meeting agenda before the start of the meeting and make sure that everyone has it and has read it. If you have been invited to a meeting, request an agenda before confirming your attendance. The agenda ensures that everyone knows what the meeting is about, and what the meeting is not about. No-one likes attending a meeting in which half the attendees are unclear of the reasons for being there in the first place.

Never be afraid to query the duration of a meeting. If you receive an agenda that contains items that can be discussed in 30 minutes yet the meeting is to be two hours long, respond to the meeting organiser and ask why two entire hours are necessary.

If your attendance at a meeting does not appear necessary, decline the meeting invitation. There’s no greater personal time-waster than the meeting that you have to attend “just to be across” an issue. If you leave a meeting asking yourself “why was I in that meeting”, that meeting was a waste of your time.

Ensure that each meeting you attend concludes with a clear summary of the meeting and that action items for each attendee are clear. This summary is often a brief email from the meeting organiser outlining what was discussed and what the outcomes were. If the outcomes and actions from the meeting are not clear, that often means more emails and possibly another meeting just to establish what happened at the first meeting. When you start having meetings about meetings you know things are out of control.

Self-analysis and self-awareness

It’s difficult to identify exactly where your time is being lost if you don’t have a clear picture of what you’re working on from day to day. It’s like keeping track of your vehicle’s odometer – it’s hard to know where all those kilometres on the clock came from if you don’t keep a logbook.

So do the same for yourself at work: keep a logbook!

Record what you’re working on from hour to hour as you do it. Obviously the longer you record your work the more useful your data will be, but even a record of a single working week can be of immense benefit to you.

As a rule of thumb, 80% of your time delivers 20% of your effectiveness. And consider the converse: 20% of your time delivers 80% of your effectiveness.

You need to be able to identify that positive 20% of your time because what you do in that 20% is vital to your business. If you’re not keeping track of your time, how can you possibly know which activities are your business-critical ones and which aren’t?

This is something that you as a SME business operator need to bear in mind: working harder and longer won’t necessarily improve your business or your quality of life. Maximising the activities that are of direct benefit to your business will. Keeping a logbook of your time can help you identify those activities that result in revenue-generation – and, more importantly, those that don’t.

Be critical of yourself and what you’re doing. To say of a task “this is not worth my time” is often difficult, especially when that task may be enjoyable or something you find easy. But if it’s not a task that generates revenue for your business, you should be doing one that does instead.

Tim Sargent has over 20 years experience in consulting to small and medium size businesses and possesses formal qualifications in accounting, marketing and human resources. With over 10 years experience as a director of professional services firms, Tim has been consultant to a large variety of business sectors and business structures. As well as being a Director of Hayes Knight SA, Tim is a board member of and Treasurer of Flavour SA and is an associate of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

This article was authored by Simon Garlick of Chilli Chocolate Marketing and Tim Sargent for Flavour SA. Reproduced with permission.

Load time? What? Well, what this means is that Google will consider your website to be less important if it loads slowly. If you can click on a link to your company website then go and make a cup of coffee before the frontpage loads, you should be worried.

Here’s Matt Cutts from Google explaining why:

So how can you speed up your website and get back in Google’s good books?

Here are some quick tips:

Make sure your server admin has tuned your web server for speed. A simple tweak like enabling HTTP compression on the server can speed up your site’s load time by a huge degree.

Make sure your site is well-designed at the code level. Clean efficient code makes for a faster-loading website. If you wouldn’t know a well-coded site from a badly-coded one, talk to someone who would!

If you have a database-driven site, consider implementing a software solution to enable your site to be presented as static pages. Every millisecond that your site has to talk to its database now counts against you.

Optimise your site’s images. Image files like GIFs, JPGs, and PNGs each have advantages and disadvantages. If you don’t know why you should choose one over the other, you may be slowing your site down unnecessarily.

When Google announced this change to its ranking policy, we made several “speedup” tweaks to one of our testing sites and saw improvements immediately. If your website is crucial to your business and you need someone to translate the search-engine technojargon into plain English, talk to us today about Search Engine Optimisation.

The operator I spoke to informed me that I would need a new membership specific to that vehicle, effectively doubling my payments. When I queried this policy and pointed out that a membership  in South Australia’s RAA would cover me regardless of which vehicle I was in, the operator suggested that maybe I should just cancel my NRMA membership seeing as I lived in South Australia anyway.

I was gobsmacked.

“Let me get this straight. I’ve been with you for over ten years, a regular paying customer, and you’re saying… maybe I should just swap to another provider?”

The operator replied with some indifference that I might as well. I replied that if the NRMA didn’t care if I remained a customer or not, I didn’t care to.

Here are some things I might also have pointed out if I thought that the operator cared:

• It costs far less to retain an existing client than to acquire a new one.
• It’s at least twice as expensive to bring on a new customer with an existing service than it is to retain a customer with that service. A business that loses one good customer has to sign up two more just to break even.
• Current customers are any business’s best source of referrals and cross-sell opportunities.

But I didn’t. So I didn’t.

Suffice to say that I am now an RAA member :)

If anyone from the NRMA is happens to read this, you need to talk to your customer service representatives… they’re not helping your organisation!

Kelly Wright