 |
Marketing Your Site |
It is very important that you value feedback, reputation, and relationships when attempting to make your site or E-business a success. Involving your customers by keeping them up to date, allowing them to contact you, and having personal interchanges with them will not only keep your customers coming back, but will also prompt them to recommend your site to other potential customers. Having good customer service is your best tool for beating out compeditors.
As mentioned in the Reassurance section of this site, making yourself available to customers makes them feel more comfortable purchasing from/through you.
Another great way to involve your customers is through email. You can buy or rent mailing lists from a number of sites (Yahoo Directory has a good listing) or you can build your own mailing list from people that visit your site and past customers.
It is very easy to take a customer's name from a submission form and simply add them to your mailing list; however, this is a form of SPAMMING, and you may lose customers in doing so. A better option is opt-in/opt-out. Supply a box at the bottom of your purchase page for customers to check if they want to join your mailing list. (Also offer an option at the bottom of each of your emails which allows your clients to get off the mailing list.)
Once you have a mailing list, you have a customer base to whom you can send out monthly newsletters or promotions. Be creative with these and follow the same guidelines you did when assembling your webpage. Keep them interesting, infomative, and fast.
There is no better way to make your customers feel involved than to offer them forums or polls that provide direct feedback. If you grab an HTML book it will direct you on how to create forms (to use in conjunction with a script), but if you'd rather not do it on your own, there are a number of sites out there that help you out:
But why stop there? If you have the means, you can directly communicate with you clents online. These are a little harder to set up on your own. I've listed some services that can help you:
Designing a Friendly Site | Becoming an Affiliate | Opening Your Own Store | Marketing Your Site | About This Site
HOME | Copyright © December 2004 by Valerie Rigsbee
For References See About This Site