Netco newsletter December/January 2007

this issue:
Protect yourself with simple password tricks | Make e-mail earn its keep | How To make sense of your Web site‘s activity

Make e-mail earn its keep

E-mail is probably the simplest and easiest way to stay in touch with people and its intelligent use is mostly common sense.

To set up e-mail for a small business you buy a domain: it‘s your personalised number plate on the Internet. Buy it from a domain name registrar such as OneSquared (www.onesquared.net) or by asking Netco to set it up for you.

The domain name is the bit between the ‘@‘ and the‘.co.nz‘. For around $40 a year you can buy sole rights to use the name. Using the free one tossed in by your Internet provider or Yahoo won‘t wash. Give those accounts to your kids to play with. I‘ve seen everything from boat makers to car yards trying to sell $60,000 luxury goods and expecting people to take an Xtra or Yahoo e-mail seriously. Besides, why give Xtra a free advertisement every time you send an e-mail – if you‘re proud of it promote your own business instead.

When you set up e-mail accounts for staff, follow a standard pattern such as firstname.lastname@yourcompany.co.nz then no customer will ever have trouble deducing the e-mail address they need to a send message to you or your staff.

If all your sales enquiries go through one person, don‘t make his or her name the contact. Instead call it sales@ so, no matter who is on duty, the mail always gets through. Base important e-mail contacts on the position not the person so that when a staff members leaves, his or her successor takes over reception of the sales@ e-mail address without everyone having to learn a new address. Do this through a process called ‘aliasing‘. In this, all e-mail sent to sales@yourcompany.co.nz is automatically forwarded to whomever happens to be sales manager at the time. When that person leaves and is replaced by someone else, customers just keep sending enquiries to the same e-mail, except now it‘s forwarded to the new sales manager‘s mail account.

And while you‘re at it, you might make one account a catch-all: it receives anything not assigned to someone else. Without a catch-all, your enquirer has his or her e-mail rejected if they‘ve misspelled the recipient‘s name and you may have lost a sale because of a spelling error. A second benefit of a catch-all e-mail account is that you can advertise addresses such as sales@, info@ and marketing@ and they all arrive safely in your catch-all mailbox, making it appear as though you have a work force of maybe a dozen people where, in reality, you work alone from your garage.

To become as big as Westpac on High Street you need to buy a lot of real estate. To mimic its size on-line, you can start with a simple e-mail account and appear as big as your imagination and ambition will let you.

this issue:
Protect yourself with simple password tricks | Make e-mail earn its keep | How To make sense of your Web site‘s activity