Taking Full Advantage of the Web

Is your site visible, interactive? How's the infrastructure? Are your mailings personalized? What about tracking and consistency? In order to get the most out of your website all of
these items are important.

By following these tips, you can build a sense of community for your web site. This in turn can build a loyal following for both your site and your business.

To make your site visible; be sure you prominently feature your URL (i.e., your Internet address) on your business cards, correspondence as well as any advertising you do - newspaper,
magazine, broadcast and direct mail.

To be interactive your site must invite visitors to subscribe to e-mail "hot lists" that specialize in the categories that are of interest to them along with specially-priced merchandise they're interested in.

You want to be sure your site has a good infrastructure. If it does, it will allow you to quickly and easily send carefully-targeted e-mail bulletins to customers interested in specific
categories of merchandise, so you can quickly and easily inform them of new products and specially-priced merchandise. And this is one of the main reasons you have a site, isn't it!

Personalization is key today. With all the products out there which allow you to do this, there is no reason your mailings shouldn't make the recipient feel "special".

The interactivity of your site isn't doing you any good if you are not sending targeted emails. So be sure to broadcast targeted e-mails to your core market at least twice a month.

All of the above mentioned tips allow you to grow and expand. However, be sure that you have a tracking system in place. This will allow you to track the results of your advertising, so you
can see which media generates the most subscriptions to your hot-lists and which lists produce the most profits. This will help you to streamline your site and get rid of products and parts of your site that are not getting the results

by Sue and Chuck Defiore