Intel wants to be a force in the mobile computing world — a fact that it made clear when it announced plans to acquire chip maker Infineon and McAfee McAfee – Intel Corporation – Infineon Technologies – Intel – IPhone – Intel Aims to Be a Powerhouse in Mobile Computing
Because of the available analytics tools today, it is now very possible to track virtually your visitor’s behavior. Having easy access to detailed data, marketers have become used to the thought of tracking consumer attitude in other aspects of marketing. For example, the information they can obtain from email marketing campaigns, can be really helpful.
But it is important to take note that there is actually no benchmark for the email click-through rate (CTR). This is because CTR depends on a variety of factors including the industry you’re in, frequency of sending, the opt-in process, and the relevance of your message to the audience. Additional factors include how effective your system is in getting around “spam filters”. These software programs can send your message into the garbage folder even if the subscribers signed-up to receive your offer.
Aside from that, companies also calculate email click-through rates differently. Companies can calculate CTR differently (ie. unique clicks vs. total clicks). Subscribers will usually click on one or more links which means that CTR that is based on the total would be twice higher than those based on unique clicks. It may even be significantly higher. With that being said, there are certain industry averages you should take note of depending on the industry (based on unique clicks):
B2B Email Marketing – email click-through rate can range from 5 to 15%. The audience is highly targeted and trust is usually already established between the company and clients in a B2B business. So if your CTR falls below this level, then there’s something that you have to improve in your campaign. The problem may lie on the email’s content or your message may simply not be getting through.
B2C Email Marketing – in this type of business, the click-through is usually between 2 to 12%. Most businesses would be somewhere in between. 12% would be on the higher end and it is the result of trust between the business and customers. If your email click-though rate falls below 2%, something needs to be done. Either you have to improve your mailing list by targeting more relevant customers or the title/content of your emails should be changed.
Highly Segmented Market – if the industry you’re in is more personalized, expect a higher CTR. It should be in the 10-20% range. Meanwhile, trend-type newsletters usually receive 10-15% even if the list is “unsegmented” because of the general interest in the content.
Apart from the email click-through rate, the actual sales conversion should also be considered. After all, at the end of the day, improving sales is still the main reason why email marketing campaigns are conducted.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
There are many ways to deal with customer support at your website. Which method you choose will depend on how large your company is, what your customers want, and what you feel most comfortable with.
One of the classic ways of handling customer service and support is via telephone. This is often the preferred methods for customers, because they can usually get their problems resolved much faster than they might using other methods.
Unfortunately, providing telephone support probably isn’t realistic unless you have the staff to handle it and your product or service is selling at a price that covers the often huge additional cost of staffing an inbound call center. If you’re a solo operation, phone support may well be out of the question. So what other options are available to you?
The two major alternatives are e-mail and support ticket systems.
Email support lets you answer support requests in your own time, but it may upset some of your more impatient customers. There will always be people who will fly into a rage if their email isn’t answered within 5 minutes, even at 3am on Sunday morning!
The other problem with e-mail support is spam. If you make an e-mail address available for support it won’t be long before you’re starting to receive significant qualities of spam and ultimately the e-mail address can become completely unusable. Even with spam filters installed it’s difficult, even bordering on impossible, to stop at least some spam coming through. The last thing you want is to have to spend more time deleting spam than helping your valued customers and that’s exactly what can happen if you’re not careful.
On the plus side, e-mail is easy to handle for both the sender and yourself. It’s easy to set up standard replies for commonly asked questions and it’s also possible to reroute e-mails to different addresses should the need arise (e.g. when someone hasn’t received a shipment and you need to bring this to the attention of your shippers).
An alternative to e-mail that is well worth considering is a support ticket system.
More and more people are starting to turn to support ticket systems, or help desk software as it is often known, to handle their support requests. Although this is generally one of the best methods for the companies that use them, they can be troublesome to the customer.
Many help desks require the user to register in order to submit a request. This takes time out of the customer’s busy schedule, and may annoy them further if they’re already upset about something related to your product.
Some of them even require the user to verify their email address before they can log in to submit a request. This could be particularly upsetting if your server happens to take longer than a minute or two to send out the confirmation request.
Customers can be very impatient, especially if they haven’t received something they paid for or if they have a problem with something they did receive. Once people reach their maximum tolerance level, the hassle will usually no longer be worth it, and they’ll ask for a refund and that’s obviously something you don’t want to happen.
Support ticket systems do have some advantages and these can easily outweigh the downsides.
Ticket systems are an excellent way of managing the support work-flow. They keep everything in one place and make it very easy to see all the previous messages relating to any support issue. This is useful for both the customer and yourself as it saves having to search through old e-mails (some of which may well have been deleted) to find previous correspondence.
Ticket systems can also help you to get a real handle on what the major issues are. In an e-mail support system it’s easy for this to be hidden in the deluge of e-mails whereas in a ticket system it is usually possible to categorize incoming tickets so that matters pertaining to a specific subject can easily be monitored.
Ticket systems also usually offer far more robust reporting than a standard e-mail system. This makes it easy to see how many tickets are opened/closed each day and who dealt with them.
Another benefit to ticket systems is that they can avoid the issue of non-delivered e-mails. The problem of valid e-mails not arriving at their destination is one that all companies face on an increasingly frequent basis. By providing a ticket system that people can view whenever they like means you don’t have to rely solely upon e-mails getting through.
No matter which method you choose, it’s important to respond to requests as soon as possible. Due to the very nature of the Internet, people expect immediate gratification. Since the Internet is available 24/7 in most places, people tend to think Internet businesses are also open 24/7 and that is rarely the case, even with very large companies such as Microsoft and Apple.
These expectations may be unrealistic, but that is the reality you face as an Internet marketer. Some people will expect you to be available at all hours of the day, even on weekends or holidays. You can’t alleviate this problem completely, but by dealing with incoming support requests as promptly and efficiently as possible you will go a long way to satisfying the needs of the vast majority of your customers, and that is what’s important.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
