Thursday, July 17, 2008

How Do I Reach You?

If you are in business, I'm going to guess you want folks to be able to reach you. So, make it easy for folks to find you.

Just today, I wanted to email someone. I went to her website. I did not see an "email me" button. So, then I found her profile hoping I'd be able to find a way to reach her there. Nope, she had her email address hidden. It just wasn't important enough for me to keep trying to reach her.

Just so you know, the person I was trying to reach is in business and does have something for sale. While I was not trying to email her about a purchase, my not being able to reach made establishing a relationship not an option. Having a visible email address leads to communication. Communication leads to relationships. Relationships lead to sales.

Look at your website. Look at your blog. Look at your profiles. Are you easy to reach? If someone wanted to email you, how much effort would it be on their part?

Audrey :)
http://mytupperware.com/audreyoka

2 comments:

Karen said...

Hi Audrey - I agree with you that contact info needs to be obvious but I do know that displaying your email address leads to spam - lots of it. When I had mine out there in the open I was getting 500 or more spam emails a day. So now I simply have a contact form and also a karen(at)funfelt.com email address where I tell them to change the (at) to an @ or something like that on my sites. One thing I do also recommend is putting a phone number on your websites. So many people prefer calling and if for some reason you don't get their email they can go back and call you to follow up.

I just wanted to make sure you realize why people hide their email addresses, it was probably just to prevent spam but she should have provided a few other ways to contact her instead.

Karen Clark
Story Time Felts
http://www.funfelt.com

Lindsay said...

Ohhh, okay. I'm not selling anything on my site, so I don't think you're talking about me, but you guilted me into adding an email link. :P

That was coming in the new design (whenever I get around to that), but hey, ya never know when some big publishing house will come along and want to offer you a six-figure book deal, right?

Thanks!

~Lindsay