Website Tips

Email Addresses and What They Tell Your Customers

Unlike having a customer walk into your business and ask a question, online customers typically only have two options: the telephone or email. Email is most often the preferred initial contact for your new customers, and how you reply will usually determine whether or not you secure them as a customer. No pressure here!

Unlike a face-to-face meeting or even a phone call, email does not offer a way to make a personal connection with a potential customer. This means you need to be careful to keep your email brief and on topic because subtle humor may not be read that way. Dust off the grammar skills and by all means use a word processor if you are a little rusty on those grammar and spelling skills.

If you insist on avoiding the word processor, then at least read your email message backwards. This is an old trick for writing ad copy before the days of spell checkers. The words do not flow together when reading backwards so you will catch more typos.

Free email is great...unless you are running a business and want everyone to recognize that fact. Using a free email account is great for family and friends, but your customers are looking for signs of trust online. An email address like: buisinessowner@yahoo.com does not convey confidence like businessowner@mybusinessname.com.

Not only does the free email address break the continuity of the new website brand that you worked so hard to get right, you also miss an opportunity to have your website URL reinforced each time a customer looks at your email address.

You spent the time and money on your website to attract customers so make sure your web hosting account will allow you to have a webmail account with your domain name as the address. This, along with decent grammar and spelling, will help turn potential customers into new customers.

Search Engines and Web Design

Search engines look for text so all the cool graphics and trendy layouts in the world will not impress them. They just look for words. While that sounds like a boring website, it does not have to be, you just need to work with search engines in mind from the very beginning of your website project.

If you have the money to spend getting your business name out there, then going with flashy can work because customers will search for the name, and searchable content may not be as important.

If you are like most small businesses and advertising dollars are tough to find, then you need to win the 'content war'. Good fresh content will attract in the search bots from Google, Yahoo, Bing and others, and these same bots will pass by flash animations, fancy menu systems, etc. in search of words. So while a competitors site might look flashier and have a higher page ranking, your site may very well crush them in the search engines.

Carefully chosen keywords, used in the right way, will help potential customers find your site and that is what matters at the end of the day. Use keywords in every page title, product descriptions, image titles, and best of all... articles and tips sheets. Write help documents or product reviews and link back into your site so readers can easily find the product or page you are talking about.

Remember that people do not typically search using only one word, they tend to use short phrases such as: "Search Engine Optimization" or "Websites for Small Businesses". We encourage our customers to come up with new content for their websites on a weekly basis.

If your website sits unchanged for months at a time, the bots will stop coming by and will go elsewhere to look for something they haven't read before. Your customers react in much the same way so keep your website content fresh and interesting so that more visitors find it worth returning to.