Welcome to the September 2006 issue of ZooNews, brought to you by Montreal professional Web site design company Zoonini Web Services.

So your Web site looks fabulous and is packed full of amazing product and service information. Ask yourself a basic – but sadly, often overlooked – question: have you provided visitors with a reliable method of contacting you to make a sale, ask a question, or provide feedback?

As a consumer, have you ever sent an email inquiry to a company about something you were interested in buying – and never even got a response? How quickly did you cross that company off your list of anyone you'd do business with?

Always be sure that any email addresses in use throughout your site are valid, and that you check those accounts often – and provide a reply within one or two business days.

If you have any Web forms on your site, be sure they work (testing them periodically is always a good idea), sending the contents of the inquiry to the right email address. Also check that the form results don't get trapped in your spam filters.

Apart from providing electronic means of getting in touch with you, always try to include a contact phone number as well. Some potential customers prefer the phone and having a telephone number displayed – and a toll-free number if you want to do business outside your local area – also looks professional and reliable.

In a nutshell, make it easy for visitors to communicate with you!

A cautionary tale: I recently had an extremely frustrating experience when trying to inform Amazon.com of a terrible goof on their Web site. Finding no contact email address anywhere on their site, I sent my note via one of the customer service forms provided. While I received a reply promptly – that was the good part – unfortunately the customer service person replying completely misunderstood what I was trying to bring to their attention, and told me to contact Amazon France! When I replied to the message clarifying the issue – even going to the trouble of including a screenshot – I was sent an auto-reply indicating that the email address to which I was replying could not receive messages. How's that for frustrating your visitors – offer one-way communication only! Of course there are always situations that call for "no-reply" email addresses; customer service, however, is not one of them!

Days after returning to Montreal from a month-long trip to Australia (my much-needed first real vacation in eight years!) I was still having sleepless nights while adjusting to the 14-hour time difference. Still up at 3:00 AM one night, my night-owl husband informed me he'd been hearing online speculation that Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin had died in an underwater accident. Though not very familiar with Irwin, I had certainly heard of him, and on my flight into Sydney I'd just seen a video of him explaining Australia's strict quarantine rules.

Could this rumour really be true? My first thought was to check his Wikipedia entry. Indeed, just hours after his death off the coast of northern Queensland in Australia, Irwin's page (now much expanded since that day) already included information about his fatal stringray attack on the Great Barrier Reef – strangely, at almost the exact spot where I'd been snorkeling a mere week earlier.

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

A new, bilingual Web site we built for Cream Hill Estates launched last month and is bringing in a steady stream of orders for the Montreal-based company's pure oat products, suitable for those with wheat sensitivities and allergies. Based on a design by our colleagues at Phil Communications, the site is packed with useful information, including an array of healthy oat recipes, a celiac disease FAQ, and details on the labelling of oat-based food products in both Canada and the U.S.

Zoonini will be featured in an upcoming Marketing Times article called "The best freebies I've ever seen (and why)" by Ilise Benun, coach, author and "Marketing Mentor." Ilise was impressed with the Zoonini mousepad I gave away last spring to mailing-list subscribers to celebrate the first birthday of ZooNews and in her article, she shares the Zoonini story with an international audience as an example of an effective marketing tool.

I still have a few mouspads left, so if you didn't get one the first time around, email me your postal address and I'll send one to the first five people to make the request.

And please consider adding your full address to the ZooNews mailing list by clicking on the "update preferences" link at the bottom of this message – you never know what exciting goodies may find their way into your mailbox in the future!

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner