‘Best Practices’ Articles

Why not open your web site to customer involvement? The best results come from making customer interaction part of your overall marketing strategy.

What word of mouth does for selling a product or service, online interaction is doing … just on a larger platform. The online environment is part of the consumer’s life now and we want to enhance this social connectivity. Increasing customer engagement will cultivate a community that is passionate about your product, service or company.

Here are a few of the interaction benefits…

• Improves your company’s image
• You gleam consumer feedback
• Your web site will be more customer friendly
• Shoppers pay attention to reviews and comments to guide their purchasing decisions
• Customer clickthrough rates will rise
• The amount of time a customer is on your site will increase

These benefits lead to increased sales
Reviews and comments are the most common forms of customer involvement. Other methods includes polls, contests that invite participation, blogs, pictures and video.

What about negative reviews…
These reviews can be a gift. Think of them as an early warning system to spot problems with your product or service. They add credibility to all the reviews on the site. If every review is a glowing testimonial the consumer will suspect that the feedback is fake or only favorable comments are posted.

You will need software or human filters that block inappropriate, profane or untrue posts. It is just part of doing online commerce. Another useful control is to require site visitors to register before they post. With these defenses in place, you’ll see the benefits of customer interaction.

Customers are talking about companies online, so you might as well be part of the dialogue.

Use a Free Offer to Engage Your Customer

When you give something away for free on your web site like coupons, whitepapers, case studies, a PDF, a free download or something printable, why not ask for their email address and permission to send to them?

To do this… include an opt-in form on a page where visitors have to go first, before they get to the “free offer” page. Try to get them to double-opt in if you can. Be sure to communicate the benefits of what you’ll be sending them and tell them how often you’ll be emailing them.

It’s a great way to build your email list.

Following are Can-Spam Compliance Rules bullet points. To read the entire bill, click here.

• Make sure each piece of information in the header is accurate, true, and not misleading.
• Include an opt-out link and honor opt-out and unsubscribe requests with in 30 days. (Admail.net automatically handles this for you in real time)
• Include your physical business address. (Admail.net has included this option on the “Review Your Email” page.
  Check the box and it will automatically insert the mailing address you gave when you registered. One click and you are in compliance.)
• Don’t send email from or through any computer to which you don’t have access or user permission.

Here are some guidelines Admail.net users must follow:

• Don’t send to harvested email addresses.
• Don’t use automated means to guess email addresses.
• Don’t send email that contains misleading, deceptive, or fraudulent header information or content.
• Don’t continue to send email to someone who opted out or unsubscribed from your mailing list. (Admail’s Remove Link handles this automatically. If your list member contacts you by phone, fax or email you will need to remove them manually in List Builder. Select “Your List”, now at the “Manage List Members” page search for that list member and click the red remove icon.)
• Don’t share or transfer to anyone the email address of someone who opted out or unsubscribed from your mailing list.

NEED HELP? Call admail.net to speak with customer support @ 1-800-479-6233.

Is your email delivery mission critical? Is your customer base super sensitive? Improve in box delivery with our Audited Sender Program.

Admail.net has a Audited Sender Program. Our program was created to mirror current internet standards for email accreditation. With tougher compliance issues, high reputation standards are required to become accredited. Being accepted into admail.net Audited Sender Program is a big step to improving your reputation as an email sender with your customer base and with major ISP’s and Blacklist Groups. (more…)

There are many advantages to using our sign-up form. First of all…it’s free! Secondly…We check the email address for errors that cause an email to not be delivered. Most web forms created by website developers never bother to check. When admail’s sign-up form is submitted, our system checks the email address for the @ sign, spaces, double periods, and commas in place of periods–in short, all of the things that can make for an invalid email address. This feature reduces the number of undeliverable emails in your list, giving you better campaign results. And isn’t that what you want? (more…)

Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email systems address the problems of SPAM by blocking or filtering email that is not from a “safe sender.” To avoid having your campaigns blocked or filtered you will have to work with your list members. (more…)