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Eppie's Editorial
Check out this month's the Tips & Facts Section. We are featuring a great little article on "Netiquette". This is such a timely article now that email proliferates our lives.
Our Feature Article this month is a continuation from February's E-Service article from Ron Zemke & Tom Connellan. Ron & Tom offer practicle advise for all website owners. We use most of their suggestions when designing and optimizing our sites. If you like one of their suggesions, we are always an email or call a way to help or to implement.
Finally, an update on our "Instructional Video and Pamphlet". With out-of town visitors and an out-of-state funeral to attend, our production schedule was pushed back. Then, when we went to video-tape for the film, we ran into some serious technological problems. Unfortunately, the video portion of our Instructional Materials is being re-thought. We are going to apply the "video script" to another multi-media format. The pamphlet should be available within 10 business days. Once again, we apologize for the delay.
Sincerely,
Eppie Adams
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What A Site!
www.nifl.org
Marty Silverstrand of Raymond, Nebraska owns and operates The Nebraska Indoor Football League. There new sports facility is located in Malcolm, Nebraska in the old High School Building. The NIFL's 2003 season is underway.
Vist The NIFLsite for team and season stats, NIFL history, and information of the NIFL Youth League.
Visit our Newest Client Site:
The Print Depot located in Mission Viejo, California.
Behind the Scenes
As par of our on-going "Optimization" project, we will be creating "Site Map" Pages for your Websites. These pages allow visitor's to quickly find pages on your site without going through several steps. This additional page is free of charge.
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A Review of Our Newest Services
Small But Powerful Website Tools (without a lot of financial investment)
"Right-Click" Disabler installation. Blocks the ability to copy images using the "right-click" feature on your mouse. The one time fee is $5 for 1-10 pages and $10 for 11 or more pages.
Password Gate. This is a great protection for chat rooms, message boards, separating preferred clients from general clients, and much more. A one time $10 fee will be invoiced to your account for installation of the Password Gate.
Mini-Poll Installation ($10.00 one-time-charge). A great way to obtain instant feedback from your site's visitors. Take a poll on your service, your products, website design, prices, etc. The Sky's the Limit!
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Feature Article
Master the ETDBW (Easy-To-Do-Business-With) Design Basics (Continued)
Make it easy to navigate.
Studies show that regardless of the Web savvy of the user,
ease of navigation is the most important element of design. In fact,
the more savvy users have greater expectations of site navigation
because they know what the Web is capable of.
"Easy to navigate" means you can get to any page regardless of
where you are in the site.
The Web is not a linear experience. Shoppers will not travel
through several "departments" to find what they want. Sites like
Clinique.com and HoneyBaked.com make excellent use of tabs and robust,
yet simple navigation design to make it easy to jump around the site.
Put a Price with every Product
Consumers want to comparison shop so prices should be up front
and everywhere. List them next to every intial product link and again
with the product description. Don't make shoppers drill to the
description to find out what it costs. This wastes their time, which
is counterproductive.
Simple Beneficial Registration Process
Registration options are the latest customer service craze at
e-commerce sites. Filling out names, addresses, and shipping
information is tedious. Consumers are happy to give you the
information in exchange for a faster checkout. Registration is not
ony for companies to bulk up their contact database, it is to make
the shopping experience simpler and faster for the consumer. It is
one more way sites brand the experience and make consumers imagine
that they could shop at this site again.
Tell them what the shipping costs will be long before they get
to checkout.
Shipping dramatically changes the cost of a product and
without that information shoppers cannot make informed decisions
about what they are buying. "I want a Web site to tell me how much
shipping is going to be before I go through the process of adding
items to my cart, going to the checkout, and then finding out it's
rediculous." says one focus group participatn. A link to shipping
information on the navigation bar will give them peace of mind and
increase sales.
A study by BizRate, a company that rates online stores, found
that 24% of customers who had abandoned an online shopping cart, did
so because they found shipping and handling charges to be too high; a
reason given 3 times as frequently as the next highest category--
"Technical glitches" in the site.
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Tell customers how they can return items and make it simple.
If you are brick and mortar as well as a click and mortar
store system, let them return merchandise to any one of your
locations. If you are a dot-com, include a return label and return
shipping instructions with the package so if something is wrong with
the order, the customer cans simply retape the shipping box and leave
it for the postal carrier.
In the business-to-consumer (B2C) space, make the checkout
process fast and painless.
Once consumers are done shopping, they want to check out
quickly and easily and they only want to do it once. 3 screens to
check out is the expectation. You can further reduce that with quick
checkout options, like the ones at Godiva.com and Amazon.com that
allow consumers to save their checkout information at your site.
This is a rule that surprisingly, many existing e-commerce
sites have a tough time following. ...Every time a site makes it
impossible to complete an order, especially if time has been spent
shopping at the site, the consumer will leave, tell others not to go
there, and, of course, mark it off their own list of go-back-to sites.
Deliver Products on Time.
If you say the product will arrive on Tuesday it had better.
Need we even refer to the Christmas 1999 ToysRus.com debacle?
Hopefully your failures won't make the six o'clock news, but they
will surely be discussed over coffee and in chat rooms for months to
come.
To avoid disappointing customers, either deliver products in
the amount of time promised, which begins the very moment they
completed the transaction, or explain in detail at your site when an
item can actually be expected to arrive.
Unless your primary audience is 8 year olds, get rid of anything
on the site that blinks, spins, or otherwise moves erratically.
Whippy, zippy, childish features annoy adult shoppers.
And while you're at it, toss out that splash page that does nothing
more than make customers wait 45 seconds to see an obscure graphic and
welcome message. Nothing online says "I don't care at all about your
time, but I do like to show off" like a Web site splash page that
means nothing to--and does nothing for--the customer.
In Closing:
If you screw up apologize. It's your fault, make it better.
Recovery is one of the most effective ways to cement loyalty and turn
a frustrated shopper into a contented one. Dissatisfied e-customers
tell twice as many people about their e-experiences --both online and
offline--than satisfied e-customers, says the ICSA/e-Satisfy.com
Benchmarketing Study. Dissatisfied e-customers are also almost four
times more likely to discuss their experiences in online chat rooms.
Don't take the chance of losing thousands of potential customers as a
result of one mistake.
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Tips & Facts
Netiquette Tips for Business
(from the Nebraska Women Business Owners Network January 2003 Newsletter)
Netiquette--or "Internet etiquette"--applies to e-mail and its use in business. Compared to other forms of communication, e-mail is fast and inexpensive. It keeps us connected to our customers, vendors, contractors, and employees. And it provides an automatic "paper trail" of conversations and agreements. But e-mail can also be problematic.
The 3 greatest e-mail challenges are clarity, volume, and security.
Clarity. It's not always easy to be understood, nor to correctly interpret the e-mail messages we receive from others. The problem may stem from writing style, grammer, spelling, formatting, or simply the absence of communication cues. E-mail messages lack the eye contact, vocal tones, and immediate exchange of face-to-face and phone conversations. confusion and misunderstanding abounds! Here are 5 netiquette rules that can boost the clarity of our business messages.
Know your recipient and match the style of your communication to the recipient. Opt for a more formal style if you don't know the person well. A "business casual" style is often best (friendly, yet professional).
Avoid using chat abbreviations and acronyms in business messages.
Write succinctly. Short, direct sentences organized in brief segments (2-3 sentence paragraphs) works best. White space between paragraphs enhances comprehension.
State requests for action clearly, and position them at the front and/or end of the messages. Never embed a request in a long paragraph. The subject line is a great place to position a request for action (e.g. "Call Me ASAP--Invoice #48633").
Avoid sarcasm and irony unless you're sure it will work. In the absence of visual and vocal cues, humor is often misinterpreted. Include an emotion--for example, :-) ---to signal humor, if you're sure the recipient will understand its meaning.
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Volume. The value of e-mail's efficiency is diminished significantly by the drag it can create on our productivity. It's not just unwanted sales promotions ("spam") from unknown companies filling our in-boxes. Friends and businessa ssociates are sending us unnecessary messages too. From innocent CC: lists to Internet petitions, poetry and jokes--we're killing our friends' productivity!
Don't send copies of e-mail to people unless they truly need to be informed
Think carefully before you "Reply To All." Does everyone really need to know?
Always verify the validity of information before forwarding to others. Many hoaxes (false stories, virus notices, chain letters,and petitions) are circulated via e-mail. Check their validity using a hoax detection website such as www.symantec.com or www.urbanlegends.com.
Security. Long after business hours, as we click away at our keyboards in the dim privacy of offices, it's easy to think we're sending confidential e-mail messages across secure lines to password-protected computers at the other end. Our assumptions of privacy and confidentiality couldn't be more wrong. Messages can be printed, forwarded, stored, and read out of context. They can be subpoenaed as evidence in legal cases. The bottom line: there's no way to ensure that an e-mail message will be confidential.
Never forward something from an unknown or unreliable source. You could be forwarding a virus.
There's no such thing as a confidential e-mail message. Increasingly, companies are monitoring e-mail on their networks.
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