You spent tireless hours creating your business model, even
longer perfecting your website to be the best that it can be.
Taking count of your competitors, positioning yourself with a
uniqueness that surely could not see you fail.
You agonized for weeks over the perfect website hosting company
for your business, and chose the one that guaranteed you 99%
uptime (you want your website 'up'!). You have staff in place, or
indeed if working alone, know that you will be your own 'one-
woman' customer support team.
You have made an executive decision, through the hundreds of
business meetings that you have had with yourself (in your own
head - whilst falling asleep, in the bath and eating lunch) that
you will be providing email sales and email customer support
only. After all, if it is good enough for eBay then it is good
enough for you yes.
Everything is in place, the site is live, the search engine
marketing firm has been contracted for $39.95 a month (you don't
have much of a budget just yet), the advertising is in place and
you have decided to do this yourself to save extra money (after
all you summarize, why hire a company to look after PPC when you
can easily do it yourself right).
It's Monday, the perfect 'go-live' day, 1500 hours and the site
has been live 8 hours, your pride and joy is up and running and
your dream of making an online business a reality is now yours.
You are getting visitors and hey, you are even starting to get
sales and it's all looking good.
You have employed some of the best anti spam/junk mail filter
software there is to avoid unwanted distractions whilst you
respond to your new customers and your website hosting company
also guarantees you the most vigorous defence at server level
for unwanted email.
But...suddenly there is a problem, you start receiving emails
complaining that you have not replied to other emails, which you
had never received. At first you simply thought it was a 'crazy'
customer or one of those lost emails that never get there that
you know the traditional postal service are so well known for.
But...then there are 2 emails complaining of non-response,
one from a customer who had bought from you the previous day
demanding that if you do not respond immediately that they will
charge-back the transaction! Where did that come from, you never
received an email but you did receive this email - why was that,
this really is coming more of a regular occurrence and something
that you need to take action in resolving.
Now, not only are you losing sales by not receiving emails of a
pre-sales nature but you are receiving emails from your customers
complaining that once they buy from you that you cannot be
contacted.
And so it starts, the beginning of the end, a bad reputation for
customer support, charged-back transactions that cost you and
your now struggling website business additional money and a
realization that there seems to be a problem with email, but
you do not know what it is.
Ok, so the above might seem a little extreme but we live in an
extreme world where just one issue can make or break a company
and as a small 'one-woman' online business who has spent so much
money on search engine marketing, advertising and making your
website the best that it can be, you really could do without such
issues. You want to be a success, not gain a reputation as one
whom provides terrible service.
Where do you look to resolve the issue?
No further than the spam/junk mail filter software you purchased
and/or the service mail filters that your website hosting company
put in place 'for your protection'.
The very purpose for which spam/junk mail filters are
implemented, being to protect your mailbox from unwanted email,
can be the very same good intentions that cause you great issues
with your customers and cause annoyance to distraction in
resolution.
What is an unwanted email; yes the hundreds of spam emails
selling the latest pharmaceutical product from yet another
untrained and un-web-educated affiliate. Emails that you never
asked for or indeed want - they are so annoying that you ensured
that your home PC, which is also used by your 2 kids (12 and 15
years of age) employs the same level of spam email protection as
your business PC. You didn't want your kids to become privy to
'adult' spam themed emails that pop through every mail box from
uncaring spammers across the world did you.
But wait, this is your business computer and your business
website we are talking about now, not your home PC where spam and
junk email filters are best put to use. Your business uses email
as its main communication tool, is it really a wise idea to
put your faith in a piece of software or your website hosting
companies default mail filters. Should you not really take on the
ownership of deciding what is and what is not junk email, and
the question to really ask oneself is, can your website business
really afford to put the decision of what should and what should
not arrive in your email box.
Regardless of how 'intelligent' the spam filter is, how much
control you have over it, or indeed how much control you do not
have over it if a default feature of your website hosting email
accounts, any website business worth its salt needs at the
very least to consider all of the factors that make up this
fundamental business decision - to filter, or not to filter.
Have you run all appropriate tests? Can you receive emails from
Hotmail, Yahoo and other free web accounts? What happens if an
attachment comes with the email, and are there any kind of
content filters or 'auto-responder' issues to think about. What
about the different ISP's, can you receive from AOL users - or
more importantly sometimes, can AOL users receive your emails.
Explore the next set of issues, perhaps you can receive all
emails, but what happens if your customer is using s spam/junk
email filter and they cannot receive your reply. The nightmare
scenario then of you actually responding to your customers
contact emails but because of their ISP or junk mail filter they
cannot receive your replies, have you tested this, have you
tested the content of your emails? If you lace HTML or URL's
within the content is that accepted...yes these are all issues
that you should have considered before your website even went
live but this is not a well documented or well discussed topic.
Yet, this should a subject of conversation, it should be a
topic of interest and it certainly should be something that
is addressed as part of every website implementation plan.
Do not let a spam or junk email filter ruin your business. Get it
setup properly, with thorough implementation and gain knowledge
of how to operate it correctly. Don't let technology take over
by simply selecting the 'default' option.
This article was produced by http://www.servicewrap.net. Search
engine ranking and marketing service provider - without real
visitors it will not matter if you have email communication
issues.
NOTE: Not all website hosting companies implement anti-spam
filters by default. If in doubt, ask. This article does not
assume that spam/junk email filters will ruin a business, only
that the business in question should be thoroughly knowledgeable
of any issues when running such software - and where
implementation and spam control is available that these are
properly set up.
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