Читать книгу Low-Budget Online Marketing - Holly Berkley - Страница 7

To succeed online, you must have real people working behind your website. No matter how sophisticated technology gets, websites don’t run themselves. It is the personal touches and quick responses to problems that make a website work and turn visitors into customers.

The standard acceptable time to return a business email is 24 to 48 hours (although sooner is always better!). Take any longer than that and you have most likely lost the customer. If you do not have the human resources to return emails in two to three business days, you need to rethink your online marketing strategy. Although there are several email automation programs, you cannot depend on automated responses to answer your customer’s specific questions. Customers are still looking for that human touch, even through a computer monitor.

My husband and I learned this firsthand when we decided to start a travel website dedicated to Baja California, Mexico. Through our website, we offered services such as Mexican auto insurance (a necessity for any American driving across the border), hotel and airline reservations, and special products from Mexico such as clothing and artwork. We honestly thought that by posting a vast amount of information on our website such as travel tips, local events, laws, and so on, customers would get all the information they needed about traveling in Baja and the site would essentially run itself. We planned to travel Mexico while we watched the money from our website roll in. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

No matter how many links and stories we posted, we still received hundreds of emails from customers wanting more information — especially when it came to making a purchase. We were even reprimanded on our own message boards for not answering posts on a regular basis!

Websites do not eliminae the need for customer service; they should enable you to give better customer service.

We learned right away that building a website does not eliminate the need for customer service. In fact, it should allow you to give better customer service. A common misconception exists among companies that creating a website replaces customer service. Although websites do help customers find information they need about your product or service, in the process, they can actually create a need for more human resources.