TROUBLESHOOTING

Once you have narrowed down where your visitors are coming from and which ads are pulling best, you’ll want to be sure visitors have a good buying experience when they reach your site.

You know your site. You are familiar with which pages link to what and how shopping cart works. First-time visitors will have no clue! Don’t assume your site is a breeze to navigate. Pay attention to elements like:

• ease of navigation, • shopping cart application, and • location of “help” buttons & links.

Make every effort to give your shoppers a simple and quick way to buy from you.

ACTION STEPS:

Conduct A Survey

Conduct a survey of your visitors. Find out if they were able to locate what they were looking for. Ask how their experience with your payment gateway went. Question how their contact with customer service was. One simple way to do this is to create a survey using Survey Monkey at http://www.surveymonkey.com. They offer some simple and free survey tools. Just load up your questions and post link on your site. (To get best results, you’ll want to offer a gift or chance to register in a drawing to thank visitors for taking time to participate.)

Ask

Ask a few people who have never been to your site to take it for a test drive. Make sure these folks know they should give their honest opinions. Sugarcoating problems might boost your ego, but it certainly won’t boost your sales.

By taking a little time to give due attention to how your visitors make their way to your site and what happens once they arrive, you’ll stand a much better shot at increasing your profits. While it may take a while to gather information you need, this short-term sacrifice will reap some hefty long-term benefits.

Diane C. Hughes * ProBizTips.com

Width – Keep width of your newsletter, contained in a table and no more than 600 pixels wide – You want to make sure that your email shows up in email window of recipient

Image links – If you use images, and you probably should, make sure that you use absolute links to images as opposed to relative links. In traditional web page design and image link may be something like …/images/bob.jpg. This is fine when you are getting image on your server. When you send out an email recipient needs entire path, more like http://www.yoursite/images/bob.jpg.

How Do You Distribute Them?

I use a service called AWeber - http://www.aweber.com/?204167 and it’s only one I can recommend. I have tried others but nobody comes close to what AWeber provides. AWeber also hates spammers so they do everything they can to make sure that their clients get their email through.

AWeber hosts my mailing list and sends my email newsletter out. Each week I upload HTML code to my list and AWeber sends mail out. You can buy software that can do this but once your list grows over 100 people it is far better to use a hosted solution to distribute your email.

AWeber also checks my newsletter to make sure that I haven’t inadvertently used phrases that get my email kicked to spam filter.

Text and HTML formats

Unfortunately, HTML email is used very heavily by spammers so HTML only newsletters come with a pretty hefty spam score no matter what content is. I find that if I load a text message along with my HTML message my email scores much lower. The text email also then is received by people who choose to disable HTML email.

I then also make it a habit of uploading my newsletter to a newsletter archive on my web site. This way those who only get text version can visit web site and my web site benefits from a new page of content.

Here are some turn-key solutions that might may sense for you. Constant Contact - http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp Cooler Email - http://www.cooleremail.com/index.ice Double Click- http://www.doubleclick.com/us/ Exact Target - http://email.exacttarget.com/ Email Labs - http://www.emaillabs.com/