I was recently reminded of a TV advert promoting a travel company. In the ad a character was wandering about a wilderness calling out “Is there anybody there?”. The idea of the ad was that everyone had gone off on cheap holidays bought from the travel company.

OK, so what’s the point?

I was reminded of this while searching the web for joint venture partners for an extremely lucrative deal I wanted to offer them. I was more than a little surprised at what I found; or what I didn’t find more like.

I couldn’t believe how difficult it was on a lot of websites to find an email address I could use to contact the webmaster or someone at the company. Granted, some had one of those featureless online message forms. I don’t know about you, but I find them very impersonal, somewhat akin to posting a message in a bottle, tossing it in the sea and hoping sometime someone will answer.

I much prefer a proper bona fide email address that I can enter in the “To:” box of my email, and a name of a real person to converse with. I’m sure I’m not alone. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of your potential customers jumping up with a hand in the air at this point, shouting “Me to! Me to!”

The upshot of this is that some webmasters and companies somewhere lost out on the opportunity of making a tidy sum all because of a missing contact email address.

The moral of the story is don’t make the same mistake on your website. Include your full contact details, make it blindingly obvious where they’re located, and above all make it easy for people to contact you.

Don’t worry, you won’t have a queue of clients forming outside your front door, or ringing you up at all hours of the day and night. What you probably will have, is more trusting clients, safe in the knowledge that they know where you live and can ’send the boys round’ to knee cap you if you ’stiff’ them. No, sorry! Got a little carried away there.

Including your full contact details on your website, i.e. name, position, email, telephone and fax numbers, and mailing address, will help your clients to have a little more trust in you. By identifying yourself, they can hopefully see that your not some ‘fly by night’ who’s going to do a ‘moonlit flit’ before they get their goods. You’re not are you?

Also, on an even more positive note, next time someone like me comes along ready to offer you a stonking great joint venture deal that’s going to make us loads and loads of ‘wonga’, they’ll be able to find you won’t they?

Be successful.

Technorati Tags: communication, contact, customers

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