Making your website work harder

One of the most powerful and often under utilised tools on the internet is the email newsletter. Every website should have an email newsletter. Does your website have one?

The email newsletter allows visitors to your website to subscribe to it and receive regular emails from your company. Email is a very valuable and extremely cost effective means by which your company can contact your customers or prospective customers. Establishing an email newsletter is quite straightforward and will quickly provide a return on your investment.

An email newsletter could be used for many purposes; such as to advertise a new product launch, to inform subscribers of a new promotional offer or to boost traffic to your website by highlighting new sections or additions.

Some of the most successful email newsletters bring together some or all of the following elements:

• Eye-catching design
• Engaging and interesting content
• Well chosen subject line
• Money saving offers
• Useful information
• Call to action

It is important to encourage visitors to your website to make contact with your organisation so contact forms should be easily available or at the very minimum an email address to direct enquiries. Due to increasing email spam we recommend clients avoid, where possible, providing an email address on their website, instead use contact forms. If an email address needs to be displayed on your website Enovate Design can employ techniques that make email addresses more difficult for spam email harvesters to obtain.

"Call me back" forms are an effective way to encourage visitors to your website to get in contact with your organisation. These forms are very fast to fill out, usually only requiring a few elements such as "name" and "phone number" and sometimes "time to call". "More information" forms are also another way to encourage visitors to your website to get in contact. Depending on the nature of your business other forms might be suitable such as quote forms, support forms, etc.

It is also very important to offer visitors to your website the option to subscribe to your email newsletter via many different routes in addition to the normal "subscribe to our email newsletter" link, for example via all the contact forms available to the user.

You can see examples of the implementation of these techniques on the Taylor Construction Plant Ltd website (http://www.tcp.eu.com/).

Last but by no means least is live support, an application that allows visitors to your website to chat in real-time with your sales or support team and even provides a facility for you to pro-actively approach visitors to your website.

Live support is rapidly being adopted by many companies and has proven its worth as a superb tool to encourage and promote communication between your organisation and visitors to your website. Live support can help to maximise sales, reduce costs in support departments as well as increase customer satisfaction.

Live support provides a means by which visitors to your website can obtain answers to questions immediately and promotes communication between your website visitors and your sales team, therefore helping to maximise sales and giving your website a totally new dimension.