Can your web visitors contact you EASILY?

In these days of endless spam, it is incredibly tempting to try to avoid those countless reduction and enlargement messages that fill our mail boxes. Recently, I was offline for about 14 hours, due to thunderstorms blasting thru — I live in Kentucky in a 100 year old house and I unplug the computer in bad weather.

When I finally logged back on, my primary email address (which is a ancient 10 years old) had about 250 spam messages in the Junk Mailbox and another 350 messages in the Inbox. Of the messages in the Inbox, only about a dozen were NOT spam. YIKES! (To date, my personal favorite spam was promoting Pro Viagra — a concept I am still having difficulty wrapping by brain around — but, I digress!)

Anyway, we all get SPAM all the time and I am sure, we all HATE it! The temptation is to hide our email address or make folks fill out a form, but, as a business owner, it is YOUR responsibility to be accessible to your customers/clients. If they aren’t able to reach you easily, they will take their business elsewhere, and rightly so!

While there are a number of methods that can be used, I want to take today’s post to discuss an unfortunate side effect of the whole spam mess — ISP blocking. Many ISP (Internet Service Providers) and some hosting companies (the folks who provide the computer that a web site lives on) block some email addresses. Several of the big free email companies also do this.

This means that you, as a business owner may not be receiving some legitimate business email, even from folks who have no problems in the past — and — YOU MAY NOT KNOW IT!

I ran into this problem recently with a business hosted on one of the big name hosting companies. I know for a fact that many of my industry retailers host their ecommerce sites on here — and now I can no longer email them from my primary email address!

Can the problem be resolved? Possibly, but — not from my end. They have to take the initiative to do so.

Anyway, as a result of this problem, I have revised my stand on business email addresses of online businesses. I still feel that a business’s primary email address should be associated with the business’s web site – YourName@YourSite.com, for instance, but also I now believe that a business should also have — and display– a back up email address.

After much thought, I recommend using the Gmail service from Google for the backup email address. It should be reserved ONLY for business and should be checked often. There is a Cheat Sheet available and I have put a quick (and free) Tutorial up in the Academy – BASIC at SurviveAndConquerCoaching.com if you need help.

As an FYI – there is a recent Security Issue regarding Gmail and I have posted a Special Update in the Downloads area of SurviveAndConquerCoaching.com

Do have both email addresses on every page of your web site — easy to find and use. Don’t make it a scavenger hunt! ;-)

Sharing the Road to Success!

Tink