by Michael Wong

Email is a powerful marketing tool
Email is an inexpensive and quick means of communication. It can be used to advertise your business and to build relationships with your customers.

Addresses
Commonly advertised email addresses which you should advertise on your website for visitors to make contact with the company are:

• sales@yourdomain.com: for sales inquiries.
• info@yourdomain.com: for requests of information.
• help@yourdomain.com: for general inquiries.
• comments@yourdomain.com: for visitors to send comments and suggestions about your website.
• webmaster@yourdomain.com: for visitors to send reports of bugs, missing links, etc.
• president@yourdomain.com: for visitors who would like to contact the Chairman, Managing Director or President of the company. People always like to see a company where everyone up to the Chairman/President is approachable.

Autoresponders
Use autoresponders to automatically reply to visitors' emails. Autoresponders are a wondering time saving tool. People have come to expect pretty quick responses to their emails. Of course, most businesses can not afford to have staff on standby to answer customers' email inquiries. 24 hours a day. This is where autoresponders come can help. They are used to automatically respond to emails sent to your domain server, hence the name.

This can be a simple "email received" message to let the sender know that you have received their email and that you will reply to it as soon as possible. It is also often used to send information requested by the sender. This could be a price list or some other information not displayed on your website.

Autoresponders are usually offered as a free service by your website hosting company. If your hosting company does not offer the service then there are companies out there who can offer this service for a small fee or even "free". Third party companies who offer the service free often require you to attach an advert to the email.

Signatures
Signatures attached to end of email messages are like business cards. This can include your name, company, contact details, and short message.

Do you want a standardized signature?
An email signature should be part of every email sent out by your business. Customers and prospects will see your signature file again and again, which will only help to keep you in the minds of the recipients. You will need to decide if you want a standardized signature for everyone in the business to follow, or if you will allow everyone to be creative and come up with their own, within some guidelines of course.

Guidelines for signatures

• Length: Ideally it should be short, 4-6 lines is the norm.
• Width: It should be no more than 60-70 characters wide, as some email systems will cut off any line longer than 80 characters and some even less.
• Content: Your business name, your name, email address, other contact details; such as your phone and fax number, postal address, and what you do.
• Message: A short message about your company , product or service you offer.