Michelle Martello, digital strategist and web designer at Minima Designs, reminded me today of phone calls I have occasionally received from panicked clients. “My contact form isn’t working! I’m not getting any emails. What to do?” Here are her suggestions …
1. Go test your contact form right now.
When was the last time you tested your contact form? The settings and services running your site can change – and you will never know until someone tells you that you failed to respond to their message.
Two of my favorite WordPress plugins for contact forms (Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7) have undergone various changes in the last few months so you may need to update your settings to make sure you’re getting your messages. The biggest issue? Trying to send your contact form to a gmail address instead of a domain related address (such as me @ gmail.com instead of me @ mysite.com).
The Test: Send yourself a message through your website contact form and have a friend try this as well.
The Fix: If you aren’t getting the message, change the email address that the form is sent to. Still having issues? Test another form plugin. Caldera Forms is another great option. If you’re still having issues, get in touch with your web host and see if they’ve made any mail server changes.
2. Have you added your site to Google Search Console?
Most business owners with a website are aware of Google Analytics and what that tool provides them – all the traffic that comes to their website is tracked, graphed and charted in Google Analytics.
But have you added your site to Google Search Console (formally known as Google Webmaster Tools?) This “sister” tool to Google Analytics opens up a banquet of useful information about your site (such as the detailed search terms people are using to get to your site).
Google Search Console lets you learn a great deal of information about your website and the people who visit it. You can use it to find out things like how many people are visiting your site and how they are finding it, whether more people are visiting your site on a mobile device or desktop computer, and which pages on your site are the most popular.
I like to find out the terms people are using to find my site to help me with tweaking content on a regular basis. If you have any questions about all this, please get in touch.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia @ 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign
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How To Speed Up Your Website
Here are some great optimization tips from Blue Host that will help you improve your site’s speed, user retention, and SEO rankings.
How to Optimize Your Site
The #1 optimization tip: Reduce and compress your images.
Images are the largest part of webpage content, so it’s critically important for web developers to take control of their image sizes and quality to deliver a fast loading, responsive site for their users.
For your images to load as quickly as possible, it is important to resize them before uploading them to your website. Don’t upload images larger than what you actually need to display. Scaling images in the HTML code might display them as desired, but it won’t reduce its original file size. For example, a JPG image that is 800×800 pixels with a 100kb file size will take just as long to load when coded to display at a 200×200 size as it would if you displayed it at full size. If you optimize the JPG to only 200×200 before you upload it, you might be able to get it down to 20kb and reduce the load time significantly.
The PNG image format is actually the best choice as it allows you to store high quality images with a high level of compression. Unfortunately, PNG files are usually large due to the simple fact that they are not compressed.
To compress PNG images, you can use TinyPNG.org, a free online tool that allows you to compress PNG files without losing quality while preserving alpha transparency.
What’s worse is that users have to pay to download your website. While bigger pages hurt performance for desktop users, too, the biggest victims of page bloat are mobile users.
Did you know that Google says site speed plays an important role in their ranking factors. Now you do!
Resources:
10 Steps to Speed up Your WordPress Website or Blog
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia @ 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign
4 Ways to Win With Mobile Marketing Automation
There’s only so much of you to go around, and when everything in your business seems to demand your attention, it’s easy to get downright exhausted. What if there was a way to set your advertising strategy on auto-pilot, just like one of those new fancy self-driving cars or adorable robot vacuum cleaners, if only for a little while?
Mobile marketing automation (MMA) gives you all the conversion of a typical consumer-friendly ad campaign without the hands-on approach that might well drive you and your marketing team crazy. Here’s how you can use it to win the hearts of your consumers and make some sales, too:
Remind, Nudge, Encourage, Prod, Prompt
People have busy lives, and with work, family, and the occasional bit of leisure time all vying for consumers’ attention, it’s not surprising that your email about a new product or service might get lost in the shuffle. You can use mobile marketing automation to send an SMS reminder to email subscribers who haven’t opened your latest message (an excellent example of cross-channel automation), confirm the purchase of movie tickets, or to distribute QR codes and check-in information that will help make your next convention a hassle-free success.
Customize Your Customer’s Experience
Part of providing a superior experience for your customers is customizing how they interact with your website, app, and other mobile marketing materials. By using mobile marketing automation to send out a survey or questionnaire that’s triggered by a consumer’s booking, purchase, or even game play, you’re getting the benefit of that user’s immediate feedback. Unlike old-school print surveys or standardized email forms, automated texts, pop-ups, and ever-effective emails can be customized to reflect the product purchased, the resort or hotel booked, or the level of the game your customer just completed. Personalization is important to consumers – 73 percent say they prefer to do business with brands that will customize a shopping experience based on consumer preferences – and this is a smart way to deliver just that.
Location-Specific Messaging
How cool would it be to walk into your favorite store and get a notice about a sale that very store had on some of your favorite products? There are apps that are now working to do just that, and it’s something you can incorporate into your marketing strategy, too. Local SEO is already proving its value, and this is another way to give your costumers what they want and need right when they can use it most.
Geo-marketing, as it’s being called, has tons of potential applications: restaurants can advertise a last-minute fish of the day special to hungry diners already shopping nearby, salons having a slow day can fill afternoon seats with a geo-targeted walk-in deal, and stores that alert local shoppers to deep-discounted merchandise are reimagining what it means to make an impulse buy.
Give Consumers What They Want
For decades, advertising gurus have longed to get a glimpse into the minds of consumers. Even before Don Draper was smoking cigarettes and ruminating on the buying patterns of the purchasing public, marketers have wondered how to better focus their campaigns on the people who want to participate in them most.
Today, we have new insight in the form of so-called “cookies” that track users’ visits to and activities on your website, eventually delivering information to you that details with remarkable precision exactly what those users are in. You can then use that information to send out automated marketing material targeted to the specific products, services, or product categories that caught each user’s attention.
Have you ever shopped for, say, a new set of dishes and then switched over to Facebook only to find ads for dishes and the online retailer you had been browsing now following you as you scroll through social media? That’s mobile marketing automation at work.
In 2015 mobile marketing automation was set to double in size, and as more and more businesses realize the potential for this hands-off yet remarkably efficient approach, it would be unsurprising to see those numbers continue to soar. As it stands, MMA has only penetrated some 1.5 percent of the market, and already giants like Walgreens, Starbucks, and ESPN are using it with phenomenal results.
What could your business achieve when you’re not even looking? Perhaps, given all the exciting information above, it’s time to find out.
Author Biography
Sophorn Chhay
Sophorn is an inbound marketer specializing in attracting targeted visitors and generating sales qualified leads. Through Trumpia’s SMS marketing automation solution, he helps businesses and organizations communicate effectively with their customers or members. Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.