Building Your Business

Web forms on your website can help make your site more effective. The most common example of a web form is the contact form that almost every site has. Many contact forms collect the basic contact information along with the customer question and then email it on to the person responsible for customer support. But depending on your organization size it may take a few hours to a few days for the customer to get a response. By using an auto responder associated with the form that sends an immediate email message you can get a rapid response to the customer. While the auto responder message may not answer all of their questions it can offer answers to frequently asked questions and give them something to get started on.

The primary job of a web form is to collect information. The question is what do you do with the information after you have collected it. If the information arrives via email and you respond that may solve the immediate problem but it makes it difficult to go back and use the information later. If you store the information collected by the web form in a database you can easily find out how many people asked about a particular product and then send them an email when you are offering a special on the product that they are interested in.

You don't have to be technical to install a form on your website. Using Relevant Tools you can select that information you would like to collect. You can define custom fields to collect information that is specific to your business. Fields can be plain text or a text area such as used for entering a question or comment. You can also have radio buttons, check boxes and pull down menus so users can point and click and you will get the answers you need. Relevant Tools will generate the html to install on your website. We are available to help you if you have questions about how to install it or if you need help customizing the code to your exact requirements.

Labels: auto responder, web forms

Regular maintenance is required to get the most out of your email database. Databases need nutrients, grooming and a little loving attention.

For example, say you run a weight loss website and send out regular email newsletters to people who are interested in losing weight. New people can join through a signup web form on your site. When they signup you have an opportunity to collect information from them that can help you to serve them better. Ask what their weight loss goal is and how many pounds a week they are trying to lose.

You can use an auto responder that is setup to send out a sequence of emails at a specified period after they signup. The email after they receive immediately after they fill out the signup form is usually a thank you for joining type of email with information about your service. Then the next day you have the scheduled auto responder send them an inspirational email that will help remind them to come back to your website and take advantage of the services that you offer. And then every week after the signup date a personalized message can automatically be sent to them to see how they are doing achieving their goals and entice them to visit your website.

Your weekly email newsletter will typically go out to your entire database. This is where you need to groom your database. When you send email and the message can not be delivered it is considered a bounce. To maintain a good relationship with the different ISPs and keep the quality of your list high the bounces need to be removed. It doesn't do any good to try over and over to send to an invalid or suspended email address. Of course anyone receiving your email that does not want to receive it any longer must have a method of unsubscribing but that should be handled automatically by the service sending the email.

You need to also look at the behavior of the people receiving the email. Say one of your subscribers told you when they signed up that their goal was to lose 10 pounds at a half a pound a week. So if they have been successful they will have lost the 10 pounds in 20 weeks. So do you keep sending them weekly emails for a year or two until they get annoyed and forget that they signed up on your site in the first place and report the email as spam?

It would be better to find out how they are doing with their goals. You can have web form on your site where people enter how much they have lost each week and then you can display a graph of their weight loss to inspire them. Then you will know if you should send them a congratulatory email for achieving their weight loss goal and switch them over to the weight maintenance newsletter. If they have completely failed with the weight loss program and are not returning to your website after a lengthy period you should consider purging them or moving them to an less active mailing list as they are letting you know by their inaction that they are not interested any longer and it is a waste of your resources to continue to email to them.

Labels: auto responder, databases, web forms

For the non-technical person creating a database can be intimidating. Depending on the type of database your are trying to create, the setup process may ask you all sorts of questions that you aren't sure what the question is, let alone the answer. But there are many alternatives to full blown relational databases such as Oracle or Sybase that are used to keep financial transactions safe. For many purposes an XML database can simplify the setup process and give you the flexibility that you need. By using a standard such as XML you know your data can be easily exported to a spreadsheet or other formats so if your business takes off and needs more muscle you can apply it.

So how do you get started? First think about how you need to use the information. If you want to send email to all people in your database who live in Ohio or people who buy organic milk you will need to collect that information and have separate fields to contain it. If it was a spreadsheet you would have a column for each of those items. In fact you can easily upload your spreadsheet into an online database and then be able to search and sort in addition to sending email.

There are a few tips to think about when you are creating fields. Keep the field names short but descriptive. We aren't back in the early days of computers where every byte was expensive so you can use field names such as first_name, last_name, state, and milk_type. The field label is an external name for the field and that can be even longer. So for the milk_type field that might be "Type of Milk Purchased".

The types of fields that you can define for an online database correspond to the field types used in web forms that can be used to automatically store data into your online database. Field types include text for short bits of text, text area for longer blocks of text in addition to menus, radio buttons and checkboxes. Menus are pull down menus where you can select one or more items. Radio buttons only allow you to select one value from the set of options so for the type of milk example your choices might be organic nonfat, organic 1%, organic 2%, organic whole, nonfat, 1%, 2% and whole.

But what if you have a family and you have to buy different types of milk for different family members? Then a checkbox is the way to go where you can select as many of the options as you want. But now this is starting to sound more technical. Don't worry - with an online database you can just focus on the values that you want people to pick from and let the system underneath take care of the details.

Another big advantage of an XML database is flexibility. You can try out the one field type and if that doesn't work, change it to another. You can also add new fields in later as you discover that you really need to know what kind of cookies they like with their milk.

Labels: databases

An email template provides the pretty wrapping for your message with the goal of helping to get your message read. Email templates can also help get your message delivered to your readers mail boxes.

A template can be any consistent structure for your email. You can create a template yourself in the program that you are using to create your messages, use an off the shelf template and customize for your requirements, or have a template designed for you.

When you structure your template make sure to clearly identify your organization and the purpose of your message. Your template style should reflect your organization and the purpose of the message. For many messages a clean professional message will be most effective but do not discount using a more casual personal style for some purposes. Whatever style you choose, the template will make sure that standard items are located in the same position from message to message.

Underneath the look and feel is the implementation of the template. You want to make sure that the html used to implement the template is clean and does not contain any spam triggers. There are numerous elements that can cause problems, such as naming a graphic banner which can cause it to not display on some email clients. Look at effective messages that you are receiving and see what elements they are using.

Take time to test your template with all different platforms and email clients, including PC, Macintosh and web based email services. Make sure your message looks good in all the different environments: it will not look identical but it should look correct. Make sure you message is being delivered and isn't being trapped by a spam filter. If you run into problems, look at each of the elements and test.

Once all your hard work developing and testing your template is completed you can then use your template for each mailing and know that all you have to focus on is the content of that particular message.

Labels: email templates

When it comes to sending html email messages you need to be aware of how your html has been implemented. Most people sending html mailings are not likely to be coding their html by hand. Instead you may be using a program that generates the html for you. This could be a web page design program or your regular word processing program.

The type of html that is generated depends on when the version of your program was released and the type of program that you are using. Older programs will use tables for formating and alignment and will specify fonts and text styles in line with the content. Newer programs may use CSS, cascading style sheets, for formating and alignment in addition to fonts and text styles.

For web pages CSS has may benefits but they may not be available yet for html email. Web based mail programs in particular may throw away the CSS in your email leaving your message naked and ugly. Other email clients may have problems rendering the CSS properly, especially when there are CSS issues involving cross platform compatibility. The tests used on a web page to determine which style sheet to use for the particular platform may not work for the email client resulting in malformed email that does not convey the image you desire.

Word processing programs are known for generating very messy and lengthy html that may not display well on different computers. The other issue associated with lengthly html is that it is one of the many flags used by spam filters to determine if your email message should be permitted to pass through the filters and be delivered to your intended recipients.

Check the program that you are using to create your messages and see if you have some options to turn off CSS and control the type of html generated so that you have clean html that is effective in email messages.

Labels: email format

There are a wide variety of message formats and each format has particular strengths and weaknesses that are important to understand. Selecting the wrong message type for your audience may result in your message being discarded as potential spam before it even reaches them. There is no one format of message that is best - it all depends on who you are sending to and what you want to present.

Common message formats are:

• plain text - don't under rate this one. It can be very effective in terms of getting to your intended readers but you won't have the open tracking information that is available with other formats.


• html - lots of options with html to do anything you want with results ranging from highly effective presentations to some absolutely hideous messages with flashing bold colors screaming at you.


• MIME - a combination of text and html that enables the email client to select the message format desired. This is the most common type of email format.


• image only messages - one giant image or sliced into seamless pieces. Image only messages can look fantastic, with the added advantage that they will look the same for everyone, but there can be delivery issues


• messages with attachments - the plus is that the document is right there with the email but attachments can deliver unwanted virus payloads or cause delivery issues if they are too large.

When choosing your message format you need to consider your message and who will be reading it. If they are likely to have older computers with very strict spam filter rules perhaps text is best. If the presentation of the message is very important or if perhaps your message contains potential spam trigger words, perhaps an image only message will be most effective. But for most cases a MIME message that includes both text and html will be the format of choice.

Tomorrow I'll write about some of the issues with html. Neatness does count.

Labels: message formats