Friday, August 01, 2008
Designing a great website that works! (Part 2)
This month I am continuing the series about the basics of how to design a great website that works for your business and/or improve your existing site.
In this post I discuss an important customer communication tool you should have an importantly Use for your business to survive - email.
At the time of this post (mid 2008) I know there are plenty of local businesses feeling the pinch due to the economic times we are all experiencing (fueled by factors such as high interest rates, high oil/petrol prices, the ‘credit crunch’, inflation, etc). A lot of businesses I speak to agree that the first half of 2008 has not been good to them. I have even heard commentators start using the “R” word “Recession is looming”.
I am not that negative myself about entering a recession (well not just yet anyway!), however it is certainly a possibility depending on how a few things pan out economically, including the global economy and the US economy in particular. However what I can say is that during a recession a lot of businesses do go under completely.
But your business does not need to be one of them. In fact if you are prepared to take charge of your destiny then your business will Not be one of them.
Here are some really important tips about how to do this (these tips are simple, very ‘doable’ right now and are absolute ‘Gold’):-
1. Make sure you are collecting a database of your customers (i.e. their name, address, contact
details including email – this is the most important asset for the successful future of your
business)
2. Communicate with them regularly – this is the key, and
3. Use multiple means of marketing to your customers.
One of the best ways (still) to communicate with customers (though certainly not the only way) is email.
So for the rest of this post I will discuss a little more about setting up Website Email Accounts so you have a means/tool to communicate with your customers and provide the information they want.
Website email accounts.
A website email address is simply an email account set up using your website domain name as part of the address. For example in my website I have set up an email address info@biztoolz.com.au.
I suggest you do likewise for your business email address so you get consistent branding happening, and also separate out your business emails from other businesses you may have or your personal emails.
Your webmaster can do this for you along with forwarding all your emails to one address if you wish so you can manage all your email accounts in one place more easily. I use this system myself and it works really well.
Another feature to consider with your website email account/s is using a simple autoresponder that automatically replies back to your customers whenever they email you with a message thanking them for their email and informing them you will reply shortly.
I would suggest setting up several website email accounts using ‘info’ and ‘your name’ (you can of course set up others if you like such as ‘sales’ and so on - so in these examples this would give you email addresses of ‘info@yourdomainname.com’ and ‘your_name@yourdomainname.com’.
This way you will be able to identify more easily the source and purpose of the email. This is particularly helpful where you might have several different businesses, or perhaps where you want separate email addresses for you and each of your staff, etc.
Another advantage of setting up your business email address this way instead of for example using an email address your Internet Service Provider (ISP - e.g. Bigpond, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc), is that you can change ISP’s whenever you like without having to change your email address – those who have had to do this will know this is a really big advantage.
Let’s think a little more now about what this might mean. Let’s say you are using a Bigpond email address for your business at the moment and it is more cost effective to go to another ISP (e.g. it might be cheaper or a better service, etc). Chances are at the moment you would be reluctant to do so for lots of reasons – for example because your customers already have your current email address to contact you on or you have this email address on all your business cards, websites, advertisements, marketing promotions/materials, maybe also because you have signed up to accounts like Paypal, etc, that you use, and so on – there are lots of reasons why this causes you problems. However, with a website email address you can change ISPs at a moments notice because none of this applies. Speaking from bitter experience this is a Big incentive (I discuss this experience in more detail in my blog - http://www.biztoolzblog.blogspot.com/ - under the September & October 2007 posts headed ‘Learn From My Mistakes’ if you want to read more about this).
As I said earlier setting up an email address is a good means or tool to communicate consistently with your customers. Remember the key to communication and importantly building a relationship so they know, like and trust you is to find out what their problems, wants, needs interests, etc are and provide information/products that solve these things for them. Email is an important tool you can utilize to do this with.
In the next post I will reveal some more ‘gold’ about one the most important parts of your website if you want it to be effective, but more on that next month.
Until then wishing you every success for your business.
Kev Richardson
http://www.biztoolz.com.au/
In this post I discuss an important customer communication tool you should have an importantly Use for your business to survive - email.
At the time of this post (mid 2008) I know there are plenty of local businesses feeling the pinch due to the economic times we are all experiencing (fueled by factors such as high interest rates, high oil/petrol prices, the ‘credit crunch’, inflation, etc). A lot of businesses I speak to agree that the first half of 2008 has not been good to them. I have even heard commentators start using the “R” word “Recession is looming”.
I am not that negative myself about entering a recession (well not just yet anyway!), however it is certainly a possibility depending on how a few things pan out economically, including the global economy and the US economy in particular. However what I can say is that during a recession a lot of businesses do go under completely.
But your business does not need to be one of them. In fact if you are prepared to take charge of your destiny then your business will Not be one of them.
Here are some really important tips about how to do this (these tips are simple, very ‘doable’ right now and are absolute ‘Gold’):-
1. Make sure you are collecting a database of your customers (i.e. their name, address, contact
details including email – this is the most important asset for the successful future of your
business)
2. Communicate with them regularly – this is the key, and
3. Use multiple means of marketing to your customers.
One of the best ways (still) to communicate with customers (though certainly not the only way) is email.
So for the rest of this post I will discuss a little more about setting up Website Email Accounts so you have a means/tool to communicate with your customers and provide the information they want.
Website email accounts.
A website email address is simply an email account set up using your website domain name as part of the address. For example in my website I have set up an email address info@biztoolz.com.au.
I suggest you do likewise for your business email address so you get consistent branding happening, and also separate out your business emails from other businesses you may have or your personal emails.
Your webmaster can do this for you along with forwarding all your emails to one address if you wish so you can manage all your email accounts in one place more easily. I use this system myself and it works really well.
Another feature to consider with your website email account/s is using a simple autoresponder that automatically replies back to your customers whenever they email you with a message thanking them for their email and informing them you will reply shortly.
I would suggest setting up several website email accounts using ‘info’ and ‘your name’ (you can of course set up others if you like such as ‘sales’ and so on - so in these examples this would give you email addresses of ‘info@yourdomainname.com’ and ‘your_name@yourdomainname.com’.
This way you will be able to identify more easily the source and purpose of the email. This is particularly helpful where you might have several different businesses, or perhaps where you want separate email addresses for you and each of your staff, etc.
Another advantage of setting up your business email address this way instead of for example using an email address your Internet Service Provider (ISP - e.g. Bigpond, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc), is that you can change ISP’s whenever you like without having to change your email address – those who have had to do this will know this is a really big advantage.
Let’s think a little more now about what this might mean. Let’s say you are using a Bigpond email address for your business at the moment and it is more cost effective to go to another ISP (e.g. it might be cheaper or a better service, etc). Chances are at the moment you would be reluctant to do so for lots of reasons – for example because your customers already have your current email address to contact you on or you have this email address on all your business cards, websites, advertisements, marketing promotions/materials, maybe also because you have signed up to accounts like Paypal, etc, that you use, and so on – there are lots of reasons why this causes you problems. However, with a website email address you can change ISPs at a moments notice because none of this applies. Speaking from bitter experience this is a Big incentive (I discuss this experience in more detail in my blog - http://www.biztoolzblog.blogspot.com/ - under the September & October 2007 posts headed ‘Learn From My Mistakes’ if you want to read more about this).
As I said earlier setting up an email address is a good means or tool to communicate consistently with your customers. Remember the key to communication and importantly building a relationship so they know, like and trust you is to find out what their problems, wants, needs interests, etc are and provide information/products that solve these things for them. Email is an important tool you can utilize to do this with.
In the next post I will reveal some more ‘gold’ about one the most important parts of your website if you want it to be effective, but more on that next month.
Until then wishing you every success for your business.
Kev Richardson
http://www.biztoolz.com.au/
Labels: marketing on internet
