NZS.com Newsletter March 2009

The year is flying by, we're already into the third month of 2009 and the web world isn't slowing down.

This month, we take a look at why you should be regularly communicating with your customers, cost cutting with VoIP calling, optimising the administration side of your website, and we look at where your online text ads should be landing.

Contents:

• Top Ten Sites
• Keep In Touch - And Get More Sales
• Cost Cutting without Compromise with VoIP
• Designation Optimisation
• Where Are Your Ads Landing?

With March bringing the first month of autumn, many of us are starting to think of cooler weather exercise alternatives. To keep yourself active, build muscle and loose weight, why not join a gym this season? Check out NZS.com's top ten websites last month from our Fitness Centres category:

Rank	Site Name	URL
1.	CLM Health & Fitness	www.clmfitness.co.nz
2.	Contours	www.contours.co.nz
3.	Curves	www.curvesinternational.com
4.	Fitness New Zealand	www.fitnessnz.co.nz
5.	Exodus Health and Fitness Club	www.exodusclub.co.nz
6.	Queen Elizabeth II Park	www.qeiipark.org.nz
7.	Sparta Health Club	www.sparta.co.nz
8.	Les Mills	www.lesmills.co.nz
9.	Powerhouse Gym	www.powerhousegym.co.nz
10.	Habit	www.habit.co.nz

If you have an online shopping website, there's now even more reason to send out a regular newsletter and promotional e-mails to your customers. A recent US study has shown that 57% of consumers have positive opinions about companies that send them regular e-mails, and half of them say those e-mails increase company visibility and their likeliness to buy (when they are permission-based, opted in e-mails).

When making purchases at a company's website, 71% of respondents remembered email communications from them, and 50% said they are more likely to buy from companies which send them emails than from companies who do not (whether their purchases are online or offline). Two thirds of respondents said they were more likely to click on a link to a company's website via an e-mail over typing in their URL.

Even in a world where spam is a part of our daily lives, consumers appear to be becoming more accustomed to e-mail offers, especially from companies they trust, and appreciate the feeling of an ongoing relationship. 84% of respondents in the study said they enjoy receiving e-mails from companies with whom they register, because even if they don't read the e-mail at the time, they like knowing the offer is there when they want it.

There are many web companies in New Zealand which can offer great email marketing solutions, making sending offers out to your customers so much easier than with standard e-mail programs.

Are you working in the IT industry and still picking up the phone to call your colleagues in other offices throughout the country, or contacts in Australia or further overseas? If so, your company's phone bills are probably extremely high, and this needn't be the case.

With cost cutting the theme of the year for many businesses, we're all looking for ways to make essential expenses cheaper, without compromising on quality or convenience of our services. Looking for a solution to save money on everyday expenditure? Switching your phone call service to VoIP might be the solution for your business. Voice over Internet Protocol essentially, is the ability to make phone calls over an internet connection, rather than a phone connection.

Making calls via VoIP costs next to nothing, meaning your business can save on phone line connection fees and expensive toll call rates. VoIP goes much further than simply using popular internet calling programs like Skype. Most Skype users keep their existing landline and simply use the program to call other Skype users, or make just international calls. Recent internet regulations have allowed network companies to give customers 'naked DSL', which enables you to have a broadband connection without the need for a landline as well. This means all of your calling; from down the street to across the globe, can be done for just a few cents per minute.

Your computer can be given a unique identification number on the internet, with which VoIP uses to attach a particular phone number to that anyone can call from a traditional phone line. Services such as call forwarding, caller ID and conferencing are also available on VoIP connections, all of which can cost you up to $10 each per month with a standard phone line.

VoIP can work over both corded and cordless handsets, making it for all operational purposes, the same as a standard phone. If you're looking for an easy way to save money for your business voice communications - VoIP could be the right solution for you and your business.

We're in our last year of the 2000s and are heading into the 2010s. There are some websites out there however, which still look like they belong in the 1990s. Many companies see their websites as a supplementary marketing tool which requires little upkeep. Numerous people invested in websites years ago and have seen reasonable success with them, but have unknowingly been hindering search engine optimisation because they were made with old technology and haven't been updated.

If you want some easy ways to bring the administration side of your website up to the date, check out these tips:

• Use header or "H" tags on each page, and make sure these tags use supporting keywords to the page title and are relevant to the content on the page. Search engine spiders give a lot of weight to these tags.
• Write unique page titles and meta descriptions (remember not to repeat these between pages to avoid duplicate content titling).
• Use text navigation instead of Javascript, which makes your content easier for search engines to follow and allows the deepest indexing of your website.
• Use hyphens between words in URLs, not underscores, they're much easier to index.
• Use keywords in image alt text. Adding keyword value to images won't be done by many of your competitors, giving you a little additive that can give you an advantage over those with the standard 'image1' file names.
• Use Flash sparingly: it has the 'cool factor' going for it, however search engine spiders can't easily index the Flash content on your site.
• Use breadcrumbs if necessary, with keywords rather than "home > page 1 > page 2". Choose just the most relevant keyword for breadcrumb titling to the corresponding page.
• Create a 404 error page with a link to your sitemap so users can still find the page they are after in case they type in an incomplete URL. This will ensure they can still get to you in some way, rather than seeing the dreaded 'Page Cannot Be Displayed' screen.
• Clean up your HTML, using only the most basic content. There's a high chance you have a lot of wasted code in your HTML files which make indexing all the more difficult.

If you're advertising on other websites online, it's important to land the traffic you are receiving from your advertising activity to the page they are expecting to find. You want to lead people to your site via your ads to best serve the needs of that searcher. Many ads lead to just a homepage, which searchers then have to hunt for what they thought they would arrive at with just one click.

For example, if you clicked on a banner which promoted 'Cheap Flights to Brisbane', think how disappointed you'd be if you then arrived at a homepage and had to search for that promotion yourself, unless there was an obvious link to it right in front of your face.

Make sure any online advertising you do leads searchers to the place they expect to go to by choosing your click through destinations wisely. Remember that when we are using the internet we have very short attention spans - and because of the high amount of spam out there we're accustomed to click the back button if we don't immediately arrive in the destination we think we're going. Unlike casual visits by users, ad-clicking searchers arrive on landing page with a directed goal in mind. Therefore, the first thing you have to do is immediately show relevance to help visitors attain that goal.

On the landing page that you are using as your click-through advertising destination, make sure you give users the most information you can, with as little marketing-speak as possible. You've already asked them to click once for more information, so leading them somewhere that only gives them more advertising slogans and requests another click is likely to see them loose interest. The key message on your landing page needs to be consistent with the key message in your ad text. You need to show the user that they have clicked on the right place to find the brand, product, information or deal that the headlining ad text indicates, as this is essential in obtaining their custom.

We're interested in your opinion, if you have anything you'd like to hear about in the newsletter, let us know.

Images from Flickr: Newsletters, VoIP Phone, HTML, Finger and Thumb.