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eNewsletter Benefits

envelopetimmorganBy offering timely information of value, an email newsletter can be a great way to connect with your customers and business contacts to create an ongoing relationship.  Content is important to your Internet business strategy and eNewsletters give you another type of media to circulate your message.  Here are some of the other benefits of an eNewsletter:

  • Keep customers and business partners informed of new products and services.
  • Direct contact with people interested in your business.
  • Opportunity to build reputation and brand loyalty.
  • Ability to track customer interest via opens and clicks.
  • Reduces marketing efforts – can offer promotions directly to customers.
  • Collect customer research via surveys and responses.
  • Cost effective marketing and communication with a targeted audience.
  • Can schedule regular communications with customers – for anniversaries, birthdays, etc.
  • Offer information to help purchase decisions.
  • Followup on potential leads.
  • Reduce support costs via continuing product and service information.
  • Continue relationship with customers.

(photo by Tim Morgan @ Flickr CC)

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Using Facebook to Promote Your Business

facebookMany of us have heard of Facebook and many of us use it to connect with family and friends.  But, have you ever considered using Facebook to promote your business?

Facebook is now both the largest and fastest growing social network.  With people spending a great deal of time there during their personal time, there is also an increased opportunity to connect with both customers and business contacts.

The biggest concern I have heard from clients/readers is not letting business contacts see all the silly stuff you do with your family and friends.  Facebook makes it possible to create different networks of contacts each with different levels of access to your profile.  This allows you to create a business network that doesn’t have access to your poke war with your college buddies.

Ok, so how do you tap into this network of potential?  One way is through traditional advertising – ads on the side of the page.  Facebook contextual targets their ads, so there is a bit of a higher chance they’ll be clicked on.  But, as with all advertising, people tend to ignore ads.

If you start thinking a bit more about your customers, you could create a page that highlights your business and automatically imports content from various sources – your website, blog, twitter, etc.  The idea here is to provide valuable content for your customers and a means for them to interact with your company (via a discussion).  This page could then be promoted through ads on the network.

Also available are groups. You could create one for your customers so they could interact with each other as well as you.  These work best if there’s a bit of momentum, so try enlisting some of your customers and business contacts to help you out.  You’ll need to lead discussions to get things started – and don’t treat this like a spam list or it’ll have a very negative effect.

Do you use Facebook for business?  If so, how?

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17 Tips for Good Business Website Design

designgeishaboy500If you are creating a business website, or looking for ways to improve yours, here are some tips to consider:

  1. Make it Clear – exactly what your company does should be available on the upper half of your home page.
  2. Describe Benefits – Customers only care what benefits your product or services gives them.
  3. Who Are You – Contact information should be easy to find (at least a link from every page, ideally a phone number or email).
  4. Customers Need Support – If customers have a problem, support information should be easy to find.  If the information you provide online isn’t enough, give them a way to contact you.
  5. Minimize Clicks – Keep the number of clicks to a minimum – for any activity on your site, but especially for buying processes.
  6. Purchasing Information – Give customers all the information they need to make a purchase on any product page and/or landing page.
  7. Minimize Distractions – Keep flashing, moving and distracting items to a minimum – even if they provide additional information.
  8. Design Down – Not everyone has state-of-the-art technology.  Design for the lowest generally accepted standards (which are widely available around the web).
  9. Consistent Menus – Menus should be consistent throughout the site to make it easy for customers to find things.
  10. Clear Page Titles – Page titles should make it clear where a customer is – use descriptive words for both the web browser window title and for text on the page.
  11. Don’t Touch the Back Button – Do not _ever_ disable the back button.  Customers need to be able to back out of wherever they may go.
  12. Avoid Popup Windows – unless they provide pertinent information to the current page and are initiated by the customer.
  13. Let Your Customer Be In Control – any extra features, such as audio, video, popups, etc. should only activate when a customer clicks on them.  Have you ever been at work when a website suddenly started making annoying sounds out of your speakers?  Don’t do that to your customers.
  14. Make it Readable – Fonts need to be easy to read in terms of size, font type and colors – include what color the background is.  Make sure to use high contrast colors to make your text easy to read.
  15. Whitespace is Your Friend – Space between items on your page is critical for customers to be able to scan through the page to find what they’re looking for.
  16. Consistent Layout – Try to keep the layouts of your pages consistent, so at least your pages look like they belong to the same website.  Navigation and information about where on the site a customer is should be in the same place.
  17. Search Should Be Easy – Most people expect a search to be in the upper right region of a page – or at least near the top.

I intend this list to be a work in progress.  What other good design tips should be used on business websites?

(photo by geishaboy500 @ Flickr CC)