How to let prospects contact you
Monday 04 April 2011 at 12:48 pm.
Some websites have an interesting behavior when you click on the email button. Your outlook or outlook express program opens up with the address to which the email shall be sent already filled in. Big whoop. I will call this an old way of doing things, and perhaps also a dead end. Many home PC users no longer use the email clients, they go directly to yahoo or gmail in a browser to do their e-mail. They have never configured the pop settings for the email client program, much less the smtp. This means that for many prospects, you e-mail contact method will fail.
Form mail is the preferred and professional way to allow prospects to request contact. They will be required to enter their name, comments, and email address. Everything is done within the browser window, which is generally Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera. Within the displayed web page is a 'submit' button, which may be named something else. No outside program opens up, nothing to surprise the user like a jscript box.
In the early days that Microsoft pushed their IIS, weak email smtp support required them to do things the average Microsoft way. But the dominance of Apache Server program has lead a revolution toward leaner and more friendly contact web forms. Most any web hosting plan these days includes email form support.
Ideally, I like to use Apache and Php for email forms. We also like to add logic to verify return domains. But there is another way. Some companies might consider creating an email address, such as info@mansup.biz or customerservice@markthemover.com and assigning the receptionist to comb through the mailbox looking for relevant prospects. The trouble with this, is that the spammers love to send their spam. So expect to get a lot of spam by publishing your email address. But even Form Mail leads to some spam.
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