Do you send out emails with the following?

donotreply @ yourcompany.com

If you do, then you may be missing out on the opportunity to have your customers ask you a direct question that could lead to additional sales. At the very least, you will be reducing the opprotunity for conversation and this is counter-productive to building customer relationships.

I am personally on the list of 100s of marketers and companies and I am surprised at the number of donotreply emails I do get in a day.

Let me explain exactly why I do not like this from a customers point of view.

A company sends an email to me (from a do-not-reply email address) about their latest product that I may be interested in.

I am interested but I have a question, but instead of hitting ‘reply’ and sending the question in the easiest and quickest way available to me (the customer), I have to visit their website and find the ‘contact us‘ link and submit the question in this way.

I may be interested in the product but if I am in the middle of things, we have to work right, so I put this on my ‘do later list’. As the day goes on this ‘email’ will get buried under newer emails as they arrive meaning I will probably forget about it as other companies catch my attention.

The company, by using a do-not-reply email address, has essentially shut off communication with the very people they are contacting and are possibly losing sales (as is often the case when it comes to me).

Flipping this on it’s head, lets say the company sent the same email but used a contact @ yourcompany.com or even yourname @ yourcompany.com email address then it makes them appear more open to communication.

You can take this one step further and add this simple bit of text towards the bottom of your emails:

If you have any questions then simply hit the reply button and well get back to you as soon as possible.

I’m sure you can come up with something even more inspiring than the example I gave, but as you can see, this simple bit of text will open up the ability to answer questions in the most convient way to your customer.

A customer may be one step away from purchasing your product but has ‘one quick question’ about a returns policy and by NOT using a ‘do-not-reply’ email address  you are allowing your customer to ask a question quickly, for you to respond quickly and to make a sale you may have, otherwise, lost.

If you use a dedicated email service provider such as AWeber you will have to include a reply @ address so that your customers can contact you easily, the way you should want it to be! Ty to use something like, contact or yourname instead of donotreply for greater customer interaction.

If you are still deciding whether email marketing is for you and your business then why not take AWeber for a Test Drive, you won’t fail to be impressed with their service.

Try AWeber Email Marketing Risk-Free

To your success,

Karl Foxley

photo credit: idogcow

Not the best start to the day; I was in this site’s admin area (I use WordPress) and I was happily checking stats and reading the new comments from our lovely readers when the website disappeared and returned a server error page. As soon as my website stopped loading my desktop email alerts popped up confirming that the website was unavailable.

I checked all my websites on the same hosting account, yup, every single one of them returned the same error message.

I promptly pointed my browser to HostMonster, my main hosting account, logged in and went straight over to the Help Section. HostMonster are using a Live Chat client to help them promptly deal with their customers requests.

I sent my message of to the customer support representative that I was connected to. He quickly confirmed that they were doing some major work and all would be fine in an hour or so.

Today’s events prompted me to write this quick blog post for two reasons:

Firstly, to remind you that YOU need to know before anybody else when your website is down and then take the steps necessary to get it back online again as quickly as possible. It really is no good to have a customer email you with a message like ‘I’ve been trying to access the site all day but it isn’t loading, so I figured I’d email you to find out what’s going on’. Just imagine all day without any customers!

I use a few services to track my sites and these are:

InternetSeer.com

Montastic.com

FreeWebMonitering.com

All of the services are free (or have free basic plans) and include email alerts when your website is unavailable and when it becomes available. again.

Secondly, good customer service really does go a long way to making a good service great.

Okay, my traffic nosedived while my websites were unreachable but does that mean I should abandon HostMonster and start looking for a new hosting account. I don’t think so!

You see, they did send an email ahead of time to me letting me know that they were going to be undertaking some work that may result in my website being unavailable for a short period of time: I simply forgot about the email (my fault!).

HostMonster have always dealt with my support requests in a timely manner and this is of great importance when your business depends on your website (your store front) being available to your customers.

Remember, when you get a support ticket or an email from a customer needing support, be as prompt as possible. Happy customers will go on and tell their family and friends about their experiences with your company just like I’m sharing my experience of the great customer support HostMonster provide.

Your take away action for today: Go grab yourself a free account with one of the website monitoring services I mentioned above, set up your email alerts and be the first to know when your website is down.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

The answer is a resounding YES!

Just imagine having a member of your team promoting your products 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

Here are just a few of the benefits to having a website:

• a website will take payments while you sleep…
• a website will work on bank holidays, school holidays, public holidays and won’t need a day off…
• a website will NOT cost much money to set up and maintain…
• a website can answer your customer’s questions without you ever having to pick up the phone or answer an email…
• a website will (when done correctly) increase your profits and returning customers…
• a website can help you build long-lasting relationships with prospects and customers…
• and much more…

You don’t need much to get started. You don’t even have to pay a professional design team as you can have optimised sites created on the fly using specially designed software.

What you will need:

• A domain name – this will be what people type in to find your website. You can purchase a domain for next-to-nothing from GoDaddy.com. If possible purchase a .com and a .co.uk (if you are in the UK) and redirect the .com to your .co.uk URL.
• A hosting account – this will be where you host your newly designed website. I highly recommend Host Monster for the simple reason they have great customer support and CPanel in the admin area (I’ll cover CPanel in a future post but you really need a hosting provider that uses CPanel).
• A website design software. X Site Pro allows you to design websites on the fly that are totally customisable. Don’t pay for over-the-top content management systems when you can do it all yourself using X Site Pro. Visit the site and watch the video to see if the software is the best fit for you (it doesn’t cost much in comparison to the CMS systems being promoted by website design companies. X Site Pro can is as easy to edit as a Word document.
• Another essential must is to get an account with a dedicated email service provider. You can visit iContact and sign-up to receive a free mini-course all about email marketing. Briefly, you need an ESP so you can put opt-in forms on your website to capture the names and email addresses of your prospects and customers. This will allow you to build relationships through newsletters, updates, tips etc, and you’ll easily increase your profits with a successful email campaign.

You’ll find plenty of step-by-step information on the websites mentioned above making it easy to get started. The only thing you’ll need to know once you’ve got your website online is how to market your business for constant streams of visitors. You can get as head-start by signing up to our mini-course, Website Promo Success, and by optimising your website with our ‘tailored to your business’ SEO.

Be sure to get your website online as this is certainly one way of ensuring your business is adapting to current trends. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to get going.

To your online success,

Karl Foxley

Hopefully you will know how important an addition a business blog can be for increasing website traffic and extending your authority within your target market.

If you are using a self-hosted WordPress blog (from WordPress.org) you will have access to a huge array of free themes at WordPress Themes. The major draw-back to having a free theme is that they often do not have the customer support that you’ll get from purchasing a premium theme. When your site hits an error you’ll want to be able to have it recitfied in no-time at all.

Another problem is not many themes are built with the search engines in mind. It’s all well and good having a great looking blog but it won’t have much of an impact if the search engines don’t give you much relevance due to poor coding of the design (unnoticable to the naked eye).

There is one amazing solution to this and this is to buy a Premium WordPress Theme customised right out-of-the-box. Brian Gardner has teamed up with Joost de Valk of Yoast.com. Brain Gardner’s Studio Press team turn out some of the best looking WordPress themes around and Joost has created some very powerful WordPress plugins and is a WordPress SEO expert.

Take a good look at the Studio Press website, find a theme you like and then click on the link that says ‘view theme demo’. The guys have put together a great forum that is an amazing resource for customisation information and customer support.

You’ll find that the themes are a lot cheaper than hiring a web design company to put together a blog for you; you can even use the blog themes as your full website as WordPress and the Studio Press themes allow a ‘static’ homepage option.

You will certainly grab your visitors attention with any one of the themes Studio Press have on offer.

To you success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. You’ll also want to add some of the latest WordPress SEO Plugins and you can find the best of the best here.