Promotion is an evolving art. As those of us with something to sell look toward the future, the Internet looms large as an area of ever-growing importance. And, with its emerging role as the e-commerce market-place, we have work to do to set up our shops, unfurl our banners and get the message out there.
One of the key ways Internet contacts can be established is, of course, via electronic mail. According to a recent study reported on News.com, e-mail has emerged as the number one method of customer-vendor contact and many suppliers are practically drowning under the ever-increasing tide of e-mail.
At any rate, the real likelihood is that, sooner or later, you are going to need to improve your ability to efficiently respond to e-mailed information requests. Here at PC ., as you might imagine, we get an awful lot of e-mail, so we've had to deal with these issues. Some of the ways we've found for managing requests for information include having "bots" that automatically provide information on certain topics. You could, for example, set up a "bot" to automatically send a price-list or a product specification sheet to a request sent to an e-mail address like "info@yourcompany.com." For maximum efficiency, provide several e-mail addresses on your Web site, where visitors can categorize their response, depending on, for example, the relation to sales, info, technical help or a problem with the Web site.
You can use a "bot" to thank people for writing, to let them know that their letter has been received and that it will be read. (At Canada Computer Paper Inc., we use the FirstClass Intranet Server from Markham, Ont.-based SoftArc as our primary e-mail system, although similar capabilities are available in a wide array of other products.) Remember, however, that a "bot" is no substitute for a personal reply. Although the bot provides an immediate response to let people know their message made it through and that it is appreciated, such missives ring hollow unless you then follow up with a real human reply.
Automatically generated e-mail has its dangers, of course. Send too much, send it more than once, or send it to the wrong parties, and you may be accused - or guilty - of spamming. In general, we'd recommend providing a pre-checked checkbox on your request-for-information Web page that allows the people who use it to decide whether they would like to receive future product information on updates or promotional offers from you. If they agree, their names can be added to a mailing list, electronic or otherwise.
Walking The Line
Sometimes, the line between promotion and spam gets just a little too fine, as Apple Computer Inc. discovered after the release of its QuickTime 3.0 software for Macs and 32-bit Windows PCs. QuickTime 3.0, you see, carried with it a license agreement that stipulated a way for developers who include QuickTime with their products to avoid a hefty US$1 per copy licensing fee. The catch was, developers that wanted to avoid this onerous fee were required to call an API that copied a promotional movie to the end-user's desktop every time he or she used the product. In other words, it was futile to delete this virus-like file - it reappeared next time you ran the program unless the user paid US$30 to upgrade to "QuickTime Pro." This "desktop spam" concept, while clever, understandably raised the ire of developers and users alike. Apple's original QT3 license agreement had another unfortunate aspect, too. Developers weren't allowed to ship old versions of QuickTime anymore. In fact, Apple received such overwhelmingly negative feedback on these "features" that it announced a revised licensing agreement at the WWDC conference in May 1998, in which these issues were addressed. Macintouch has details at www.macintouch.com/qt3newlic.html.
Can you imagine what a garish mess (not to mention the tech support nightmares) we'd have if everybody started doing this? Just think of the heat Microsoft would take if it pulled a stunt like this.
For more info on QuickTime 4 and its capabilities, see the article at thetechnozone.com/videobuyersguide/software/QuickTime4.html
Fishing For Hits
Another popular way to draw business to your Web site is via the inclusion of what are known as "meta tags" embedded into the HTML code that defines the page. Some of today's more sophisticated Web-authoring tools are database-driven and these tools can generate these lists of meta tags automatically. Even if you add the tags manually, you are increasing the likelihood that a customer looking for the product or service you offer will find your page near the top of the list of results displayed by a search engine.
There are dangers here too. For example, as is probably pretty obvious, sex-related sites often stuff thousands of meta tags on a wide array of naughty words into their meta tag lists (and, in a disturbing trend, a growing number stuff porn-lists with unrelated words that happen to be common generalized search topics, as well). However, you shouldn't go appropriating the trademarks of others in your meta tag lists. Playboy Enterprises is suing one such porn-site, which was fishing for hits with tags like "Playmate," "Playboy" and so on. If in doubt, we'd recommend legal advice.
Search engines were discussed in depth in a recent article appearing in PC Buyer's Guide. Read Smart Surfing: Using Search Engines Effectively.
There is an alternative to search engines that can bring visitors to your site - and usually the right kind of visitors, too. It's called a webring. Find out more at http://webring.org/.
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