It sometimes baffles me how some businesses will go out of their way to annoy their customers – and potential customers – when customer service should be their primary concern. Let me outline 5 bad practices that are in common use. I am hoping that none of my readers employ any of these practices; however, if you do, it is never too late to repent and change your ways!

Spammy E-Mail

It is amazing how everybody seems to think that only other people send out spam. We all think that our own messages are important and that the recipients are sitting on the edge of their chairs, just waiting to hear from us. Guess what? It doesn’t work that way.

Spam is in the eyes of the beholder. If you are not already engaged in an e-mail conversation with the recipient, and you are initiating a marketing-related message, what you are sending out is an unsolicited e-mail. By definition, that is spam. If your e-mail is carefully crafted and subtle, many people might cut you a break. Want to increase the odds of having your message flagged as spam? Use a compiled list, use ALL CAPS in the subject line or body of your message, use different fonts and colors, or use words like “free”, “not spam”, “please read”, “winner”, “congratulations”, “selected”, “limited time”, “click here”, and “$$$”.

Junk Fax

Although the laws have been watered down in recent years and are rarely enforced, junk faxes are illegal. Nobody purchases a fax machine so they can get the latest offer on a “Funtacular Vacation” or “Ticket to Paradise” involving a trip to Cancun or the Bahamas. They also do not need to be contacted about emergency roof repairs after every heavy rainstorm, and, if they are in need of a small business loan, they are probably not going to arrange for one through a junk faxer. Are you going to pay for the recipients’ telephone line, ink or toner cartridges, paper, and electricity? If you send faxes to anyone who has not specifically requested your fax, get a life and stop it!

Telemarketing Calls

After the average person has already gotten calls on any given day from timeshare scammers and people in a boiler room in Bangalore who pretend to be working with either Google or Microsoft, they are already predisposed against receiving your phone call. I already have solar panels on my roof, so why do I get calls from at least 3 solar sales outfits every day? (Trust me … my solar installation did not originate with a telemarketing call!) The only thing certain about an unsolicited phone call is that the person at the receiving end is in the middle of doing something else that has nothing to do with anticipating your call. Disturbing people is not really the best marketing approach. Think of it like eating wild mushrooms. Unless you really know what you are doing, the experience is probably not going to end as well as you had hoped.

Unmonitored E-Mail

If you send somebody an e-mail message, particularly if it is a response to any type of consumer contact form, always ensure that the recipient can reply to your message. It amazes me how often I will contact a business (or a local politician, for that matter), only to get a canned response from an e-mail address that beings with “noreply” or “DoNotReply”. A few months ago, I sent a consumer inquiry to a major supermarket chain where I am a frequent customer. The response, with a “noreply” sender address, was addressed to “Dear Customer”, and continued, “The mailbox you attempted to send your e-mail to is not monitored. However, we do want to hear from you! For questions and comments, please contact us by calling: Consumer Affairs.” If your consumer affairs department has a contact form, and I have taken the time to initiate an e-mail conversation, why is your only response to tell me to call you on the phone – and probably get put on hold for several minutes?

Spell Your Customer’s Name Wrong

Finally, I remember about 10 or 15 years ago when I bought two season’s passes to a nearby summer theatre. I probably spent two or three hundred dollars for the tickets, but from that day forward, the theatre company started sending me mail addressed to “Paul Pillard”. Do you think that I ever renewed my subscription for another season, or even bought tickets for an individual production? No way! The supermarket that addressed me in their e-mail as “Dear Customer” was far better off than the theatre company that continually addressed me by the wrong name.

Speaking of names, never presume the use of a nickname or abbreviated name, and know how to pronounce a person’s name before speaking it. My name is Peter, and I am already predisposed against incoming telemarketing calls. Want to really call the wrong number? Be a total stranger who addresses me as “Pete”, or struggle with the pronunciation of my last name when you call me. If you catch me in a particularly good mood, you will not get an earful!

Okay, now that I have gotten these marketing pet peeves off my chest, I can go enjoy a pleasant dinner … until it gets interrupted by a telemarketing call.

The biggest mistake that many small business owners might make would be to build and maintain their own website. Sure, companies like GoDaddy, Wix, Weebly, and Vistaprint make it look like an easy task that anybody can handle, but do you simply want a website or do you want a website that can effectively compete online? Whether you insist on building your own site, or whether you simply want to keep an eye on your webmaster (particularly if that webmaster is a family member or that “nice kid who knows a lot about computers” down the road), there are a few common mistakes that you will want to avoid.

Usually these mistakes are errors of omission, but they can also be reflections of careless work habits. Just this week, my company took over the hosting of a campground website that had been built by another company. In the process of fixing a few things that were broken, we noticed that no Google Analytics tracking code was installed on the site – even though the client insisted that he was accessing his Google Analytics data on a regular basis. It turned out that we were correct. Google Analytics was not installed on his site, but the site-specific tracking code had been mistakenly installed on one of his secondary websites, giving him the impression that the data that he had been digesting for over a year was based upon traffic to the main site.

1. Google Analytics: Yes, let me make that #1 on the list. One of the biggest mistakes that can be made is to have a website without the advantage of running Google Analytics. It is a free tool, it is easy to install, and it provides a wealth of extremely valuable information regarding the visitors to your site, traffic sources, and much more.
2. Flash: Leisure suits were really popular for a brief period of time in the late 1970’s, but even John Travolta would not be caught dead wearing one today. The same with Flash. It was “really cool” for a while … until support for Flash was dropped by iOS and the latest Android devices. There are new ways of presenting rich content, but steer clear of Flash.
3. Orphans: I am not talking about Mickey Rooney and Boys Town. I am talking about pages on a website that fail to link back to the other pages of the site. Sort of like a dead end in a corn maze or a hall of mirrors, orphan pages are very frustrating to site visitors.
4. Broken Links: Formula 409 is a well-known cleaning and degreasing product that has been around since the 1950’s, but 404 error messages on a website are about as popular as a “door-buster” item at Wal-Mart that is out of stock the moment the store opens and the sale begins. People see these frustrating messages when they click on a broken link, typically because a page has been deleted without updating its incoming links.
5. Unencrypted E-Mail Links: You would not display your credit card number on a poster in Times Square, and you would certainly not hand out keys to your home or automobile to total strangers, so why would you display an unencrypted e-mail address on your website? Without encryption, the message to e-mail address harvesting spam robots is “Here I am. Come get me!”
6. Broken Graphics: One of the telltale signs of a beginning webmaster are broken graphics. If graphics are linked to files on a local computer, they will appear normally, but only on that computer. Anybody accessing the page from any other device anywhere in the world will see a broken graphic link.
7. Slow Loading Images: Have you ever visited a website, only to watch images slowly loading, as if they were being slowly painted onto your screen? Almost inevitably, it is because the person maintaining the site has placed enormous photos onto the page, then has those images being scaled down to size by the browsers of end users. The enormous file is being needlessly downloaded, then resized, when a properly sized image would have loaded immediately.
8. Ignoring Mobile Devices: All the talk these days is about mobile-friendliness and the fact that over 50% of the traffic to most websites is coming from people using smartphones and tablets. If your site is not mobile-friendly, you are turning away a tremendous portion of your market. Do not be deceived by the fact that almost any website may be viewed on a smartphone. There is a big difference between being able to view a site and actually engaging in a non-frustrating experience. Is your content scaling down to the size of the display, does the navigation work with pudgy fingers, and can users tap a phone number displayed on your site to initiate a phone call?
9. Out of Date Content: You would not buy a gallon of milk that was past its expiration date, would you? Well, why would you expect people to “buy” what you are selling on your website if its content looks like it is way past its “best used by” date? Specifically, rates and schedules should show the current year. I know of another website design company that circumvents this maintenance issue by never including the year on a rates page. That is a big mistake because it fails to offer users the assurance that the content is current. Particularly when it involves pricing, nobody wants to make a buying decision when there is pricing uncertainty.
10. Missing Meta Content: Meta content consists of essential elements written into the code of a website that are not generally visible when the site is viewed by an end user. This basic content is mission-critical for search engine optimization and to influence search engine users to choose to click on your site’s listing over another. This meta content only begins with a proper page title, page description, and “alt” tags that describe photos and graphics. That same site that was missing the Google Analytics tracking code also had a site title tag that read “My Blog | My WordPress Blog”.

These are only 10 common mistakes that webmasters can make. The overall best advice is to avoid working with that webmaster in your mirror (or that clever kid down the road) and to choose one of several professional companies with reputations you can trust. You have better things to do than to look for mistakes on your website … or to deal with the consequences of those mistakes.

One of my clients recently contacted me, concerned that his New Hampshire campground was listed without his prior knowledge or authorization on several websites that purported to be online campground directories. He discovered this when one of the sites contacted him on behalf of a camper who wanted to make a reservation to stay at his park and another contacted him to “claim” his listing. At first glance, these would appear to be good things, wouldn’t they? Any resource that is sending you business is generally welcome to do so. After all, your campground is probably sent online traffic from a variety of referring sites – everything from Go Camping America to your state association website to Good Sam to your local tourism association.

In the instances that my client described, something just didn’t seem right.

Over the years, a number of websites have sprouted up that are essentially directories of local businesses. Many of these have evolved from so-called “yellow pages” companies, and their business model is to persuade gullible business owners to pay for enhanced listings. In my own instance, about a third of these local directories lists my company’s street address correctly, but then locates us in the next town. Another third list our fax number as our phone number. Do I care? Not really, because these sites get close to zero traffic, and they have little if any effect – either positive or negative – upon the SEO of my company’s official website. These websites are working with compiled data, obviously harvested from unreliable sources.

The sites that my client described were an entirely new breed. Also based upon compiled data, their business plans are no longer focused upon selling enhanced listings but in providing reservation services where they collect referral or transaction fees. These can be problematic indeed. My client has gone through a fairly labor-intensive process of getting his business de-listed from several of these sites. The more that I looked into them, the better my understanding of how my client’s instincts were probably right on target.

Campground reservations are accurately perceived as a multi-billion dollar business, and companies that would like a piece of the action are suddenly coming out of the woodwork. Funded with infusions of venture capital, the focus is on generating income from the collection of processing fees on those reservations, either in real-time (with campgrounds that get on board) or with the type of delayed booking that initially caught my client’s attention. One such site posts that it “anticipates” use by 1 million campers per month, even though it does not currently show up as even a blip on the radar at Alexa, the leading provider of comparative website traffic analytics.

What is the problem with these sites? Well, first of all there is a problem with compiled data. How often is the data updated and how accurate is the initial source? (Think back to those local sites that list my business in the wrong town or with our fax number as our primary phone number, where incorrect data tends to perpetuate itself.) On one of these sites that my client called to my attention, I perused the campgrounds listed in my home state of Massachusetts. I am intimately familiar with the industry players in my home state, and I found fictitious listings, listings for municipal parks that have nothing to do with camping, listings for campgrounds that have been out of business for several years, and listings for summer camps.

The second problem is the potential for these sites to compete with your own official website and your own chosen online reservation engine, a situation that can only serve to confuse consumers and that could inflict harm upon your business. I know that I do not want any other company representing my business, and I would be feverishly protective against any threats to my company’s unique online identity. Particularly if pricing (that may or may not be accurate) or reservations enter into the equation, the potential for problems is very real.

Thirdly, if you choose to get on board, be sure to read the fine print. The “Terms of Service” listed on one of these websites, when copied and pasted into a Word document, consisted of over 20,000 words that ran 42 pages in length. That’s a far cry from the old-fashioned handshake agreement of years past and probably reason to proceed with caution.

Keep in mind that any online directories or search engines built upon compiled data (even Google itself!) need businesses like yours as much as you need them. Without listing real businesses that consumers are seeking, they have no product to offer. It is your decision whether or not to get on board with any particular website. Understand the potential risks and benefits, and then make a decision based upon what is best for your business and how it can most effectively meet the needs and expectations of its core clientele.