John

Questions Online Shoppers Want Answered Before They Buy

ecommerce / By /

Ecommerce QuestionsMost online shoppers are wary the first time they are visiting an estore. If you have an ecommerce website, building trust should be one of your priorities. Does your ecommerce website have the answers to these questions? If not, you have some work to do.

  • Who is this company?
  • How long have they been in business?
  • Where are they located, and where do they ship from?
  • What does shipping cost? (Don’t ask for anything but my zip code before telling me.)
  • Is my credit card safe?
  • Is this product description accurate? Where are the details?
  • What happens if something goes wrong?
  • Where is the phone number (and business hours) and other contact information?
  • My Privacy. Do they respect it?

It all comes down to building trust. If your website doesn’t have the answers to the questions above, it doesn’t matter how great your products and/or prices may be. No trust. No sale!

Members of the Parliament of Victoria, Australia Visit Uplands Cheese in Dodgeville, WI

Announcement, Broadband / By /

RRC Members touring Uplands CheeseMonday, May 20 UW Professor Andy Lewis, Broadband & Economic Development Specialist at the Center for Community Technology Solutions, UW-Extension, led a group visiting the facilities at Uplands Cheese north of Dodgeville, Wisconsin. The group included three members of the Parliament of Victoria, Australia, who are members of the Rural and Regional Committee. They were Mr Paul Wellner (Chair), Mr Geoff Howard MP,  and Mr Andrew Katos MP. They were accompanied by Lilian Topic, Executive Officer of the Rural and Regional Committee. I was privileged to participate in this event. Mike Gingrich of Uplands Cheese graciously acted as tour guide. He was a wealth of information and ended the tour with a tasting of the multiple-award winning Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese.

The Rural and Regional Committee members were in the United States as part of their Inquiry into the Opportunities to Use Telecommuting and E-Business in Rural and Regional Victoria. After touring Uplands Cheese, the members of the committee, Andy, and I continued with discussion of the pros and cons of telecommuting and remote working. We also discussed entrepreneurship challenges in rural areas, including broadband access and costs. I related my experience of bootstrapping a small business and over seventeen years of running WebWise Design & Marketing in a small community in southwest Wisconsin. We discussed how a committee of dedicated members (including Andy and me) helped establish local dial-up Internet service availability in 1997 to nearly everyone in Grant County, WI. That local access grew from the city of Platteville only to covering nearly everywhere in Grant County in approximately six month’s time.

We concluded the day with a bit of a hike to a rocky point with a panoramic view overlooking Wyoming Valley, followed by dinner at a local restaurant, where our Australian visitors enjoyed their first taste of fried Wisconsin cheese curds. Thanks to Andy and Mike for making this wonderful exchange of conversation, information, and ideas possible.

First Impressions are important! How does your website look?

Branding, Marketing, Web Design / By /

First impressions matter. In today’s world, the first impression of your business is made by your website. Does your website present your business as professionally as you do when you are meeting someone for the first time? Before meeting or greeting prospective customers, most of us generally take a look in a mirror to make sure we don’t embarrass ourselves. We check our smile, our hair, and our clothes. We polish our shoes or in my case, boots. Sometimes we practice our greeting. Why? First impressions matter.

When was the last time you seriously looked at your website? How does it look? How does it read? How does it navigate?

First impressions matter.

Branding With Every Email – Get Your Email Delivered – Professional Presentation

Branding, Email, Marketing, Tips / By /

Domain emailI wrote here about using domain mail over five years ago. With the number of people not taking advantage of one of the simplest means of branding available, I believe the subject deserves another go round. I am talking about those who are not using their domain email accounts when sending or replying to business email. Domain email is simply an email account using a name of your choice, e.g., you@yourcompany.com or info@yourcompany.com.

Here are just three of many reasons it is important to use domain mail.

  • Branding
  • Deliverability
  • Professional Presentation

Branding 

In businesses and on websites of all kinds, too often you will see contact email such as billybob@yahoo.com, 2cool@hotmail.com (now outlook.com), you@yourISP.com, sally312@gmail.com or something similar. Those same addresses get used routinely in emails to clients, prospects, and co-workers. Instead of those personal addresses, your prospects, clients, vendors, and others should be seeing email from you@yourdomain.com, bill@yourdomain.com, sally@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, or anyone@yourdomain.com.  EVERY email sent from and replied to your business should be reminding your prospects, clients and vendors of your brand. Using domain mail is the least expensive branding tool you can implement, and you are branding with every email you send.

Deliverability

If your email doesn’t get delivered and opened, you are wasting your time writing and sending it. Spam has become ubiquitous, and your prospects and clients may hesitate to open an email from a toocutesy@yahoo.com, allnumbers@hotmail.com, silly@gmail.com or inappropriate@someother.com address. Deliverability can be critical when you are sending a proposal or answering a specific request. Domain mail addresses are not as prone to be caught in spam filters as the “other” @ addresses I have been mentioning. Your recipients will, at a glance, know the email is coming from your business if you use your domain mail account.  Get every email you send delivered and opened.

Professional Presentation 

In other manners of communication, i.e., phone, letters, faxes, and face-to-face, nearly everyone does their best to present themselves and their business professionally. You would be surprised at the number of people who spend thousands of dollars on traditional marketing materials, their web sites and nicely done email campaigns, yet diminish their value by including an inappropriate email address. Using your domain email will present you professionally as many times as you send an email. Why wouldn’t you want to do that with every email you send?

Okay, let’s address the two most common excuses for not using domain mail. The first is, “I don’t want to check two or more email accounts.” With today’s email programs that easily check more than one account at a time (I check over a dozen at a time), that is not a very good reason to miss out on branding with every email. If you honestly feel you can only check one email account, then your email provider can forward as many accounts as you like to just one account. Of course, that account should be a domain mail account.   The second reason is, “I like Gmail, and I use mydomain@gmail.com.” I will grant that doing this is better than using personal non-domain email accounts. It still doesn’t give you the branding or level of professional presentation that is afforded by using domain mail. If you feel you can’t live without Gmail, then use Google Apps for Business, which included Gmail that uses your domain mail. Your mail will get sent from and to you@yourdomain.com, but you will still have all the advantages of Gmail’s web-based interface. Google charges $5/user/month or $50/user/year.

Start using your domain mail for every email you send today!

P.S. If you are a client of ours and are not using your domain mail, call or email us and we will be happy to help you get started.

12+ Tips for Empowering Automated eCommerce Emails

Customer Service, Email / By /

Sending emailDo you know what the automated emails sent from your website, especially your ecommerce website, look like? Hopefully, you carefully crafted them before your website went live. If not, please do yourself a favor and review them now.

Here are some quick tips to make your emails look professional. Because of the seasonal timing, we are going to talk about ecommerce “transactional” emails, though many of these tips apply to other automated emails as well.

  • Do not send them from a no-reply@yourcompany.com email account. Send from an email address that gets monitored daily (preferably multiple times per day). Respond quickly to any email received.
  • Put the most important information right at the beginning of the subject, to make your emails more helpful, e.g., “Thanks for Order #12345 – My estore” (Be careful of the length so it does not get truncated.)
  • Make sure your emails are consistently branded and well-designed.
  • Make the words Thank You bold or bigger than the other text. While you are at it, tell them you appreciate their business.
  • If you won’t be furnishing a tracking number, tell them why, and when and how they can expect delivery.
  • Include links back to your shipping and returns page(s).
  • Be sure to prominently display your Toll-Free phone number. If you don’t have a Toll-Free customer service number, you are not serious about wanting repeat customers.
  • Include office hours (and time zone), so your customers have the opportunity to talk to a real person.
  • Prominently display your customer service email address they can use if they want to contact you later instead of having to use your form again.
  • Use Google’s URL Builder for Google Analytics (or something similar) to track your links. Remember marketing without measurement is not marketing.
  • Test all of your email responses with multiple email clients for both PC and Apple computers.
  • Don’t forget to test on mobile devices including iPhones & iPads, Android Phones & tablets, and others when possible.

Please don’t underestimate the power of automated email. They are often read at a critical point of your relationship with your customers. Use the opportunity wisely.