Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Today in episode 60 of the Be A Marketer podcast, you'll hear from an owner with a background in automation software turned chocolatier. And I'm sharing why you should follow the natural rhythms of your business when it comes to marketing. This is the be a marketer podcast.
Dave:I'm your host, Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore how to find the time to be a marketer. Remember friend, you can be a marketer and at Constant Contact, we're here to help. Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. You know, near the end of last year and, of course, into this year, I've really been trying to find the times when I am most energized throughout the day so that I can use those times for creative work.
Dave:And so I've been using my calendar to really hold that time for that type of work and leaving other spots open so I can do those things that really don't require the same creative energy. And I was reminded of this stuff that I've been doing in this idea of working with your natural rhythms from the guest that you're gonna hear today. Now he runs a seasonal business that he uses the downtime to and I'm gonna use that term loosely because there's always things to do with your business, of course, but he uses what we'll call downtime to really get other things done, including marketing. And, you know, you may not have a seasonal business per se, but there may be rhythms in your business that really allow you to breathe a bit more. And if you can identify those times, they may be good to take advantage of that time to make plans and really tackle those larger marketing items that maybe you've been meaning to get to.
Dave:Because as you'll hear from our guest today, and I'm sure you've already found, you're not gonna have time for marketing and other items when you're really busy within the business. So my question to you is, how can you use the rhythms of your business to find time for marketing? Well friend, today's guest is Mark Chinsky, co owner of Enjou Chocolat in Morristown, New Jersey. Founded in 1983, the chocolate shop celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. And it was about a year and a half ago that Mark and his partner Rose bought the business after Mark received a buyout from previous business partners.
Dave:It wasn't enough to retire just yet, and so Anzhu offered an opportunity to buy a business that would hopefully continue an income stream. Plus, for Mark, well, it looked kind of fun. After all, people love chocolate and you get very few unhappy customers when you have a really good chocolate product. Mark's background before getting into the chocolate biz, enterprise resource planning software, which is software for manufacturing distribution companies to automate purchasing, inventory, and production management. And so, as you might imagine, Mark spent some time early on updating Anzu's out of date systems.
Mark:So here, actually, what lot of what I focused on in the 1st year, the prior owner was basically 100% paper based. Literally a giant, you know, cork board with handwritten orders that worked. Paper systems have worked for 1000 of years, but could only be worked if you were physically in this very small room because there was only one place for it. And we completely, implemented Shopify or ecommerce and order processing. I've put in a number of customizations to optimize it for our wholesale side of our business because we sell to supermarkets and other regional stores, as well as completely rebuilt the customer facing side of our site.
Mark:It was very amateurish. The photography, the design was something out of the 19 nineties and so forth. So
Dave:So tell me a little bit about that then. So you've got a whole side portion of the business. I believe you do some corporate stuff as well and there's a there's an actual physical location. Correct?
Mark:Mhmm.
Dave:And then e commerce. Yeah.
Mark:Right. So many people know Onju as our retail store here in North Central New Jersey in Morristown, New Jersey, which is famous for George Washington being headquartered here during large chunks of the revolutionary war. So it's a very historic town with a lot of old buildings. And it's kind of a if anybody wants chocolate in this 30 mile radius, this is the place they go. They knew it.
Mark:And that's what I was buying is that reputation and just recognition of the product. And that's represented by, you know, a really interesting retail store. We have 100 of different products in the store. We're well known for our molded products which are things like if you wanted a, you know, molded envelope to represent Constant Contact or the Constant Contact logo. We can have that embedded in a mold for chocolate, and then from there, we're able to create a circular disc or a chocolate bar or something that goes with an assortment and then Constant Contact can give it out to perspective corporate clients, to employees for birthdays.
Mark:We've done work for Lexus, for SiriusXM. We've done work for Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. So a lot of local businesses, CPAs, professionals, and a lot of national companies as well.
Dave:I'm making a note for our team. I enjoy chocolate as well. See if we get some logo.
Mark:Right. Here here happens to be one of our our most popular. This is very popular for birthdays. So you buy, you know, if a person's turning 2, there you go. If you're turning 22, you put 2 together.
Dave:There are 2 of them. I love them. So forth. Yep. And you can do math with them too, I think.
Dave:Right? You can get 22 and you get
Mark:You know, but, unfortunately, then you end up eating. Ah, there it is. You can't do the math. I well,
Dave:math. I well, hopefully not unfortunately. Right? That seems like the fun part.
Mark:Well, tell my stomach that. I I was probably 15 pounds lighter, poor start. But I do I recall the, the producer of the new Willy Wonka movie saying he put on over £25 in the movie because there was so much chocolate around the place and he couldn't control it. Or Timothee Chalet was very restrained with it.
Dave:So tell me a little bit about, you know, as you've what's it been a a couple of years right now since you've About a year and a half.
Mark:Year and
Dave:a half now? Okay. So, I mean, what would you say has been your biggest accomplishment with the business so far?
Mark:I think our biggest accomplishment is probably the host the automation of the system. So we can be anywhere. We literally we put in RingCentral for unified communications. So in the past, if somebody called the 6:30 and the store was closed, all they got was a literally cassette tape answering machine, and now we can pick up the call in our car or anywhere. We get voice to text translations.
Mark:With the Shopify, we can see order statuses. We're now in the process of automating production planning with it because now we know what's on order and we can aggregate it, make like things together, and make things more efficiently, know when we're gonna run out of stock, etcetera. So the automation has been a big part of the business. We also did a light store renovation about 7 months ago because it did look kinda eighties with the, color themes. But we didn't put too much in because we may be moving somewhere nearby in the next year or 2 depending on our lease situation here.
Dave:Gotcha. Gotcha. I mean, it sounds like you're doing a lot of really great work just in terms of kind of bringing up the technology and doing all of those things. So, I mean, how does that make you feel to get that accomplished?
Mark:Oh, it's really good. It just does amaze me though how much time things take over the period. There's still these day to day flow of customers coming in. You might be picking up the bell in the background. That means somebody walked in the store, and obviously, we have a really good staff for that here.
Mark:One of the things that has been a lot of work is making sure we absorb all the knowledge from the prior owner Right. So that, you know, again, none of us being chocolate experts originally to make sure that, you know, everything is running smoothly, things are ordered on time. Especially the supermarkets, you have to plan many months in advance of the particular holiday to have the right products out, whether it's bunnies for Easter or hearts for Valentine's, etcetera.
Dave:Well, how's it been like really, I mean, learning the ins and outs of, I would assume for you, is like a whole new industry, right?
Mark:Yeah, it has. And unfortunately, at the same point, we walked into the business right before a few macroeconomic things hit that we didn't have any knowledge of. One of the things in New Jersey, they doubled the minimum wage over a period of 2 years and much of our production of our product is made by lower skilled packaging labor, so that's really hurt. The other thing is the price of cocoa has skyrocketed over 200% in 1 year, which is way beyond even inflation because of some issues with the heavy rains in Africa where most of the world's cocoa supply comes from. It's so bad that we were actually just on Fox Business and Fox News last week in a live segment with Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer and then later with Stuart Varney talking about the whole cocoa issues.
Mark:So that of course, all PR is good PR even if you're talking about the need to raise your prices. So
Dave:Sure. Yeah. So are you manufacturing on-site too? Or
Mark:Yes. That's a good question. We make almost all of our own products, which is kinda unique. Most chocolatiers basically buy something and rewrap it, then Mhmm. You know, package it and sell it.
Mark:But the vast majority of our items we make, and that has also been a challenge because the space in this building, which is probably a 120 year old building, is limited and certain pieces of equipment require 14 open feet for cooling. And so, you know, a lot of processes are hand done that we need to automate, get more space. But, yeah, everything we we do, we make ourselves. And that we use copper kettle pots, which is pretty rare nowadays, and it gives a unique flavor to our chocolate profile.
Dave:I'm I'm gonna have to place an order of that there, chocolate. So I mean, we're talking about some of the challenges that you've been running into, but what would you say do you love most about it?
Mark:Yeah. Really. Now that I look back, it's probably all negative. But, you know, what I love most about it, my favorite part was so we do a lot of either pop up sales, we do something called the chocolate expo which is a regional show where all sorts of vendors chocolate, chocolate wine, the weirdest things that have chocolate in it. And and when you get you let people sample your product, and we have one particular product, our sea salt caramel.
Mark:And when they take a bite, you watch their eyes roll up into their head and you're like, oh, I guess this is what their orgasm looks like because I have one video I took on my phone from a fancy wine tasting. This guy was an attorney. You know, he might have been 2 or 3 drinks in, but you know, takes a bite. And I don't know if I can curse on this, but he's basically like, this is the best effing thing I have ever effing put in my effing mouth. Wow.
Mark:I was like, wow.
Dave:So I should order the sea salt caramel. Is that what you're telling me?
Mark:That's the one that nobody has ever said this is not amazing.
Dave:Well, so there's a guy that I think of video as a good marketing piece, right, to to sell that chocolate. But I guess what level of experience are you bringing in terms of marketing as you come into the business?
Mark:Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the work I did a lot of the marketing in the IT industry, and we used Constant Contact there as well, which worked out well because this owner was also using it, but most of her campaigns were pretty amateurish in terms of the graphics and so forth. And I also was heavily involved in doing a lot of blog writing because in the IT world, having relevant information in a blog is a very strong way to get long tail keyword recognition on Google. I'm never gonna win the Googling of the word chocolate. That's Nestle, you know, that's M and M.
Mark:We're not even gonna go there. But we just got a $2,000 order because we have a chocolate dart set. It's a chocolate dart board with chocolate darts And a, a new company from the UK that if you've ever been to an axe throwing place, they do dart throwing restaurants with bars. And they wanted to do a promotion to give away to customers something, you know, that's themed with them. And they found us by googling and only because we made sure that we try to get all of our products on the web and out there with the proper keyword recognition in the description.
Mark:So that's really important, the kind of stuff that I have to do going through our site.
Dave:So that's interesting. I mean, are there any other not to give away, like, your secrets necessarily, but not every business has the opportunity to kind of find those types of opportunities. And so are you kind of have you done or are you set to do more of that work to uncover more of those things that you, you know?
Mark:Yeah. So our business is extremely seasonal.
Dave:Yeah.
Mark:You know, we can do in December what we do from June to October combined. So because of that, things are now officially slow here and it's just it's normal. It's the way people just don't think chocolate in the summer just like ice cream shops don't do very well in January in the Northeast. So what we're doing, we have 50,000 molds but we only have about 5,000 products or variations of our products on our website. So if somebody says, hey, do you have a fish hook?
Mark:And I look on our website and I don't see it, I go into our Excel spreadsheet, which has every mold we have. Oh, we do. It's somewhere. We gotta go dig around, grab it, and take a look, and maybe make a sample. So one of the goals is to go through all of our molds and have our kitchen mat turn them into a chocolate colored product and then photograph it and describe it and get it on the website because it isn't gonna sell if it's sitting in a box upstairs as a as a clear mold which is, you know, what molds look like before the chocolate's poured in them.
Dave:So as you think through kind of all you have to get done and all that you're trying to do, where would you say marketing ranks on that list of priorities?
Mark:So marketing is very important. There's only so much, you know everybody in this area who's gonna go out for chocolate is probably already gonna come here, who's, you know, within a reasonable radius. There's not. There aren't a lot of chocolate shops left like this. You know, those traditional chocolate shops have disappeared as the founders have aged out and young generation doesn't necessarily want it.
Mark:But if you walk in the most supermarkets, the only chocolate they have is either the junk from Nestle's, which if you know chocolate, Nestle's is the chocolate like what Thunderbird is to wine. And, I mean, it's fine. It's cheap. It's good for, you know, the kids or whatever. But once you've had real chocolate, it's like you can't you can't go back to that muddy stuff.
Mark:Or they may have gourmet, but it's all bars. It's just all in the, you know, organic and sugar free and all these like high cocoa, but you can't get chocolate chopped like chocolate there. You can't get seesaw caramels. You can't get truffles, you can't get all those things that we have. So I think that's something that from a marketing standpoint, we have to make sure people know is that we have so much more variety than you're ever going to get through a traditional candy store or supermarket type source.
Dave:Who's involved with marketing now?
Mark:So right now, it's myself and a relatively new employee, Carol Anne, who has a marketing degree and she's actually playing you know, we're not a big company, so she has a dual role of helping out on the retail storefront, but also she's doing all of our social media. I trained her on Constant Contact because I was doing all of the campaigns and most of those I inherited from the prior owner. And as I said, they were very amateur looking. You know, the graphics were very weak. The photos were dull.
Mark:So I've worked on those templates, but now she's working with Constant Contact get I kinda aged out at Facebook. And that's important to get a younger crowd because I would say a fair percentage of our customers are older. And to get to the younger crowd, we're gonna have to start doing more interesting TikTok type videos and other, you know, social media marketing.
Dave:Do you embrace that stuff or are you
Mark:We absolutely do but it's been kind of hit or miss like, Hey, we got something. We're gonna do 1 and then we do 3 and then a month later, there's nothing new. And I know from experience, you gotta marketing has to be constant and hence constant contact over and over and over again and
Dave:We were onto something there.
Mark:Yeah. And I'm only one person running all these different aspects of the business. So that's why we're really happy to have Carol Anne on board so she can really focus the time necessary to make sure that we're always out there in, you know, messaging. In a way, there's that fine balance of being spammy and sending too much email, which is why Constant Contact is one component, but its ability to integrate with Instagram and etcetera, you know, is important so that we can get some of that same messaging out in different channels. It would be nice to see even more improvements on that front, but yeah.
Dave:So when you start thinking about how you're, I guess, focusing on the type of work that the 2 of you are gonna do from a marketing perspective. You know, do you meet do you talk about goals for the business? And then do you set, like, what success looks like? Do you do any of that work together?
Mark:We should. You know, when I came from my corporate background, we did a lot of that stuff, but we are still a mom and pop chocolate shop. So Sure. Having a lot of meetings and discussions and death by PowerPoint is not in the cards here. But the goal, we're always challenging, do we keep the wholesale going?
Mark:Do we maybe push more corporate and less wholesale because the wholesale had the thin margins and then when your cost of labor doubles and, you know, how much can you charge a supermarket who has to then take your product and double it before somebody walks along and says, I I can't afford this, you know? It's either hamburger meat or chocolate, you know. So
Dave:Right. Yeah. So would you mind sharing maybe where is your where's the breakdown of your business now in terms of like wholesale, retail, all of that.
Mark:So right now, I would say it's 40% wholesale, 40% retail, and 20% web and
Dave:corporate. Is there an ideal state you'd like to get to?
Mark:Honestly, I would love it for wholesale to be less than 30% but not at a reduction in overall revenue. I would just like a because so basically, for every dollar you sell, you'll make drastically more retail than you do wholesale because of the margin issue. The revenue doesn't do any good if there's nothing left after you cover all your costs.
Dave:So when you start thinking about how you're marketing Anjou now, what are some of the things that you're doing?
Mark:So just for example, today, we're buying ad space in the New Jersey Jewish publications because there's a lot of bar and bat's mitzvahs in this region. It has a large Jewish population. Some of our chocolate is kosher. And demographically, income wise, it's a good fit for our products. So we're trying to pick niche targeted marketing.
Mark:We cannot afford to be in, you know, your general cable TV, you know, or other large scale advertising because it's too expensive per head and to many of the people are still gonna buy their cheap Hershey's chocolate. So we wanna go for people who would typically, you know, be looking for something more specialized. We do a lot of wedding based events because we do wedding favors, we do baby showers, bachelor and bachelorette party chocolates, which let's just leave it to the imagination, can be very creative and hilarious. And so we're trying to target specific markets where you can reach people who are in the stage of buying, like they're going to have a wedding and they need favors, you know, much more cost effectively than blast marketing, you know, to television and just general magazines or the newspaper. And again, obviously that's where Constant Contact comes in because from being in 40 years in business, we have a roughly 16,000 person email list here.
Mark:The original owner wasn't always great about capturing all those emails, but we've started making sure that wherever possible when people come in the store, we try and capture that.
Dave:I wanna get into some of the things that you're doing with those email addresses and how you're using Constant Contact as part of that. But before we get there, I'm wondering what do you find to be the biggest challenge with marketing?
Mark:I guess the challenge is obviously marketing is not inexpensive. Constant Contact's very affordable, but you can only, you know, email people so often, so much. And these are people who already know us. You know, we're not obviously buying random lists and spamming people. So these are people these are obviously opt in people that almost every one of them have bought something from us.
Mark:It's, you know, the challenge is finding new customers who would like our product but don't know we exist. I mean, an interesting example was when we were on Fox News the next day, a number of customers came in and said, I forgot all about you. I used to go there 15 years ago, but I saw you on Fox this morning. And I was like, oh, I gotta get down there. And they came in the store and bought some stuff because it was around Easter time.
Dave:I'm interested. It sounds like you kinda keep up. Do you see any notice anything just in terms of, like, traffic to the website or anything like that after that?
Mark:Literally. It was like zoop. It more than doubled right after we were on. I was really surprised at how many people came in the store and said, I saw you on TV. Yeah.
Mark:Because it was a morning show. Most of the hits were on Fox Business, which doesn't have yearly the viewership of CNBC but beggars can't be choosers.
Dave:Take what you can get. Right? Yep.
Mark:But yeah, surprisingly large number of people did see us.
Dave:What have you been finding? I know you are using that Shopify integration. What are you finding? How is that helping you in terms of, is that saving you time at all or what does that do for you?
Mark:It is because basically anybody that does find us and buys product from us now, then once they become a customer in Shopify, I don't have to do anything. They're automatically now in my Constant Contact database as long as, you know, they don't choose to opt out during that process.
Dave:I believe too you're also taking advantage of the product blocks in there. Can you talk me through that a little bit?
Mark:Yeah, we are. So we're using that ability where we're just directly pulling the product in from within Constant Contact from Shopify versus extracting the picture, saving it as a temp, importing it, etcetera.
Dave:Yeah. So how does that feel in terms of time savings for you? Doctor. Robert W.
Mark:Bacharach, MD, It's a good time savings, but I am having to remind our person that does that to test these emails Mhmm. Because there was a really weird one where we were updating the photos of our baskets. She created the mailing and then I changed the photo and the link became no longer valid and then sent out 10,000 emails and it just had broken link here kind
Dave:of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So You mentioned finding that balance in terms of just how often you're sending to people. And so what is the frequency that you go in terms of sending emails and what have you found so far with that?
Mark:So when I first started, it was pretty I was super careful. I just didn't wanna spam people because, you know, there is very much a burnout factor. But this year, the way Easter came so early, Easter was March 31st, it's usually like around now or a week ago, you know, and then we have Mother's Day and we have Passover. We're finding we do unfortunately have to send out a little more mail than I would like, but you only have that week or two window, especially if people are gonna order online and want the product shipped. So we could be sending out 3 or 4 emails a week during these compressed holiday seasons, but then, you know, in the normal months, I try to keep it to less than well, maybe once per week or less just because I don't wanna have people decide to unsubscribe because it's like, oh, another mail, you know, piece.
Dave:Yeah. Well, are you doing anything from a, like, a list standpoint? Are you segmenting out audiences at all in terms of the contacts that you're sending to?
Mark:I have not been doing that as well as I should be. It's just been one of those when I get to it. And life only has so much time. So they aren't heavily segmented. We do have lists of corporate versus traditional retail buyer.
Mark:A corporate buyer might be a Constant Contact that says, hey. We wanna send out, you know, a 100 gift baskets to, you know, our top customers versus a retail is, hi, I'd like a pound of sea salt caramels shipped to me.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. I'll send you some information on the segments feature that we have in there. There's a portion of the product that will help based on criteria that you choose. We'll actually build some lists for you.
Dave:Okay. That might be helpful to you. So because I know, again, like, time. Right? It's like, yeah.
Dave:Okay. I know I'm gonna get there and do that. So that might be helpful to you as well. If you had to choose something, what would you say is your favorite constant contact feature?
Mark:I like the way that it will auto resend to people who haven't opened the email. Dirty little secret, I used to use Mailchimp. Mhmm. And they just the product got more and more complicated for no good reason over the years where it no longer became a nice little easy to use small business program. So when I first got here, she was on Constant Contact and I was like, I gotta get rid of that.
Mark:I gotta go to Mailchimp because it's what I knew. And then when I actually started using it, I realized, you know, this isn't bad. And in the end, I'm actually finding it's much easier and it's much easier for me to have my staff use it. Mailchimp, they practically have to be now an IT person to understand the way they set up their list management and so forth.
Dave:Anything you do to build those lists up? I mean, you've got a pretty decent sized list. Like, obviously, things are coming from Shopify and things
Mark:like that.
Dave:But what else are you doing?
Mark:Currently, the only thing we're doing is, you know, capturing all the new customers in. I don't know where else to get lists in a way that is meaningful. Like I said, obviously, I'm not gonna buy lists that's both illegal and very useless. Right? Right.
Mark:Yeah. You're just gonna get spam blocked. Ever we go to do tastings and so forth, I am, you know, trying to capture more. It would be nice if there was a like we have an ability if somebody wants to do a Google review for us. We have a, NFC placard at the register.
Mark:They can tap their phone. It would be nice if there was a maybe there is and I'm missing this, but a way where somebody could just tap their phone to it and that would be in our email list because I don't wanna have to type in at the cash register what their email address is.
Dave:Yeah. I mean, I think right now the couple of things that we have, one is part of, like, the SMS add on that we have. I don't know if text marketing is ever in the cards for you.
Mark:I've thought about it and I'm like, that's one of those I gotta get to it, but I know there's a 1,000 rules around it, understandably so. Yeah. Yeah. And
Dave:so we have a text to join feature on that so somebody could just use their phone to kinda text you their address. But the other piece of it is, you know, using a QR code and you can create one of those sign up landing pages, then people can enter their own information. So there's a couple of ways kind of around that to make that a little bit easier. But what would you say what would it be like trying to run your business without Constant Contact?
Mark:I don't know how we would communicate with the potential customer base about all the seasonal new items or promotions. It would be pretty difficult. There really is no way to mass communicate with 15,000 people anymore. You're not gonna print and lick envelopes, that's for sure. And I grew up in the direct mail industry, actually.
Mark:I was one of the I was 14 years old and built software for the post office's ecomm system, which was a way where you could send out direct mail by putting it in an Apple II computer, it would use an old fashioned modem, dial up the 1 of 12 post offices in the country, and from there, the post office would print your messaging, stick it in an envelope, and then postage it and send it out. So
Dave:it was
Mark:a way of sending out essentially email before there was the Internet or computers. And we were actually, doing okay with it. My dad had the business. It was a lot of car dealerships were using it for, you know, marketing because, so that was interesting. But eventually, back in that day, MCI and Sprint were trying to do it as well, but they were much more expensive and they sued the post office, which is a government entity saying you're competing with 5 businesses, and they shut it down.
Mark:So
Dave:Any stuff from the direct mail side of things that you are using today in many of your marketing? And not I wouldn't say sending direct mail, but just any tips that you've learned through that industry.
Mark:You know, I mean, obviously, you wanna have the call to action there. You wanna have direct links that get people to where they want. One of the things I've noticed lately, and I don't know if it's a recent change to Outlook, but animated GIFs now seem to work everywhere. Mhmm. In the past, they only worked on Gmail, but they didn't work in Outlook.
Mark:And I've been starting to get direct mail, for example, from BJ's which, I don't know, it's like Costco. Yep.
Dave:Yep.
Mark:And they had some Easter ones. I'm like, Wow, that really grabbed my eye. And I saw the bunny walkies. Speaking of, that would be a nice enhancement for Constant Contact to have a library of licensed gifts that we could use because they definitely catch your eye in the inbox.
Dave:Excellent. What would be your number one tip for maybe a similar business to yourself using Constant Contact?
Mark:I think, you know, number 1, getting some nice templates set up. I guess you have to hire somebody because not everybody can work graphics software. And then just investing the time it takes to get them out and don't delay. And once you get that full year cycle of emails out, then it's really easy the following years to just take and tweak versus but that 1st year, you know, you just know that you're gonna have to invest more time creating each of those message campaigns.
Dave:Because of the the seasonality of your business and the way you're mentioning that you're here, do you actually go through and calendar? Like, when you're sending things, do you do work like that?
Mark:We probably should, but it's they're so predictable and you know how far advanced when people start buying certain products that it's just kinda in your head. There's only so many holidays that are big. There's like 6 or 7 of them for us.
Dave:Got it. Got it. What would be your best piece of either marketing or business advice that you'd share with another business owner?
Mark:Well, the business advice is know what your costs are and what the outside costs are that you can't control to make sure it all makes sense. But from a from a marketing standpoint, I think it's remember, you know, a lot of people cut marketing as the first thing when things get tight. That's the last thing you cut. You cut marketing, then you might as well close your doors because that's where your future revenue's gonna come from and the best time to really market is when times are slow. You're not going to have time to focus on marketing when your cash flow is coming in because you're so busy.
Mark:So the time to be creating those campaigns and content is if you have seasonality during the slower seasons.
Dave:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number 1, automate what you can. Now Mark spent the 1st year as owner of Enjou Chocolat updating the businesses out of day processes. This included automating as much as possible to keep things running smoothly while saving time to do other things. Make sure you're taking advantage of the automation tools available in your Constant Contact account so you can grow your business while getting back to the other things you'd rather be doing.
Dave:Number 2, use a blog for long tail keyword recognition in search. Mark knows he's never gonna win the battle in search when it comes to the word chocolate. The heavy hitters own those search terms. But terms like chocolate darts and chocolate dartboard can turn into orders worth multiple 1,000 of dollars. Now in your Constant Contact account, you'll find tools you can add to help with search engine optimization.
Dave:So you can get more search traffic to your website. I'll include more details in the show notes. And number 3, take advantage of seasonality to get things done. Mark mentions that the chocolate business is extremely seasonal. December does more than June to October combined.
Dave:So during that downtime, the team is looking to update the website with the 50,000 moles that they have so that they can make people aware of them and, well, sell them. So use your downtime to focus on marketing because as Mark advises, that's where your future revenue is gonna come from, And you're not gonna have the time to focus on marketing when your cash flow is coming in because that's when you're so busy. Here's an action item for you for today. Try using the resend to non openers feature. This is a simple yet powerful automation feature in your Constant Contact account.
Dave:When you're scheduling your email to be sent, you can tick a box to resend the email automatically to people who haven't opened it. This gives you a second chance to get your message seen in the inbox. More details, of course, in the show notes. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
Dave:You can email me directly at dave.charest@constantcontact.com. If you did enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.