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October 2006 Newsletter

Help, I can't get my email!

There can be occasions when you cannot get your email or view your web site. This can be an incredible frustration and shows how reliant we have become on the internet.

There can be many reasons why you may not be able to get email on any occasion. If there are problems there is no reason for you to suffer in silence. So, call us! But, before you do make that call there are a number of things you can do to isolate where the problems lies. Here is a checklist you can follow:

• Can I get my web site?
• Can I get any other web site, for example Google?

If the answer is 'no' to both of these questions, the problem will typically lie closer to home. So:

• If you have an external modem, restart the modem and try again
• If you still do not have any luck (or you do not have an external modem), the problem will most likely be with your Internet Services Provider (ISP)

If you can get other web sites (Google, for example), but not your own, then call us directly so we can help you further. There could be two reasons why this might be, our upstream provider is experiencing problems, or our servers are at fault. If our servers are at fault, we should be able to give you some idea of when things will be running normally again.

As always, our aim is to provide you with the best possible service, and ensure that you have a presence on the web 24x7.

Spam!

Whenever I talk to clients about email, one of the first things to come out of the conversation is the curse of spam. Most people are reasonable about receiving the odd unsolicited message (much like the marketing mail received in our letter box), but there are limits!

In the past much of the spam was fairly easy to detect, you could block emails that contained certain words. Now you can't because the spammers deliberately misspell and add spacings within those words. Also, instead of sending a text email, they will send an image that looks like text.

In the past couple of weeks Hyperlink has implemented two further strategies for combating spam. Now, when an external mail server connects to our mail server (to deliver email) a check is done to determine if that server is a known spam server. If it is, the message is rejected. If the message is accepted, another check is done on the incoming email to determine if there are any known spam URLs (web addresses) contained in the message. If there is, the spam rating is then increased. If it reaches a personally defined threshold, it is deleted.

Using your web mail control panel (http://mail.hyperlink.net.nz), you can manage your spam settings. Based on your spam rating you can choose to hold, bounce or vanish a message before you even see it.

Are shipping charges costing you sales?

It is a hard enough job to get people to your web site, but to lose them at the check-out just makes you want to cry!

Selling online presents the merchant with many challenges. The first challenge is to create a sense of legitimacy and confidence with the buyer. Once you have earned that legitimacy you next have to be able to get them to purchase online and give you their personal details.

However, visitors to your site can still abort a purchase once they come to the check-out. Often, this is because the shipping charges, invisible until now, can come as a shock. The best way to avoid that shock is to have the shipping charges visible on each page of your shopping cart so the purchaser is aware of the shipping component and has a good idea of the total cost.

There is, however, a more fundamental question all e-commerce site owners should be asking. This question is, "why should anyone purchase from your site?" The answer to this question is very straightforward, it is you value proposition. What are you offering that is special, or even unique to you. If you know your value proposition, and can leverage that, then people will purchase from you. Your value proposition does not have to be anything exotic. It could be your level of service, your guarantee of quality, right of return or money back guarantee.

Once you have got your value proposition clearly defined you may then be able to even increase the cost of your products and be able to offer either free shipping or a single charge, regardless of the volume purchased.

Time saving email communication

If you are in business maintaining the relationship with customers is important. It is said the cost of maintaining that relationship is significantly less than the cost of acquiring a new customer. The email newsletter is often adopted because it is the most direct, immediate and cost effective form of communication.

But managing a newsletter can be a labour intensive and error prone exercise when we chose to do it all ourselves. Not only do you have to manually manage the subscriptions to ensure the email database is accurate, you also have to manage all the bounce-backs when you send your newsletter out. All of this can take unnecessary hours or your time. It's the hard way!

The easy way is with messageMaker. messageMaker will allow you to maintain and strengthen your relationship with customers and clients.

Using messageMaker you will no longer have to spend hours managing your subscription database. All subscriptions and changes are managed through your web site, ensuring your database is always accurate. Your subscribers can quickly change their details or unsubscribe without you being involved. You will no longer have to deal with email bounces.

All you have to do is develop the content of your newsletter, select the recipients and send. messageMaker does the rest!

For more information download our messageMaker brochure and then call us to make the change - it will save hours of your time each month so you can do the things that really matter.

New staff

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Lloyd Weehuizen to Hyperlink. Lloyd works part-time, taking on the role of Systems Administrator and Programmer. Lloyd has a solid track record in systems administration and management, having worked for a large Internet Service Provider and an interactive game development company. With the growth of our hosting and serving capacity we want to ensure we have someone dedicated to this significant part of our business. Welcome aboard!

Taupo cycle challenge

Just on a personal note, all things being equal, I will be doing the full Taupo cycle challenge on 25 November this year. It seems a distant future, but in reality it is only about 8 weeks away. 160 kilometres is a long ride, so as a consequence my training has already started so I can pass muster at the finish line.