Just One Little Mistake

In yesterday’s post I discussed that the different customer groups a small business serves, seem to influence whether or not it has a website.

If it’s a tourist business or one that hopes to attract visitors, that business is more likely to have a website or blog. If their business focuses on local customers, they are far less likely to have their own site or to keep it up-to-date.

And if a business serves and attracts both local and out-of-town customers, well, it can be downright confusing.

Last January I needed to find some nearby bed and breakfasts that were open during the Winter so I could recommend them to our out-of-town customers. I remembered meeting a nice woman at a local event but could only recall the name of her B&B, not her name. Not to worry. I found her website right away and sent an email inquiry to confirm that she was open during January. But my email was returned as undeliverable. Supposedly her email address didn’t exist. 

I went back to her website and verified that I had indeed typed the email address listed onscreen correctly. So I called the telephone number listed on the site instead, which did work. When her spouse answered the phone and I told him about my difficulty in emailing them, his response was actually shocking. 

He said, “Everybody knows not to use that email address. It’s not good anymore.”

So here we go again. Everybody Knows.

But in this case who is everybody? It’s one thing for friends and family to be told an email address is no longer ‘good’, and to use another. But how in the world would potential customers - out of town visitors who found their website and wanted more information - know they should not use the email address posted on their site, and that they should call and get another one instead? 

I tried several times to help the B&B owner understand that he was asking potential customers to jump through many hoops just to find out information about staying with him. But he seemed to think it was just one little mistake. And he found me more frustrating and more of a problem than the customers he was losing.

Later I also spoke to his wife, to make sure she understood the seriousness of the problem. She acted appropriately concerned, saying that the email address had been changed the previous year, and their web designer was supposed to make the change on their website. She acted shocked that her email address hadn’t been changed, and said she’d contact her web designer right away.

When I got an earful about how expensive web designers were, and how long it took them to make site changes, I made sure to stress that correcting her email address was a five minute fix. I even offered to stop by and make the change myself on her computer, so she could see how it was done.

When I saw the B&B owner recently, a full year later, she told me what a horrible year she’d had in 2008. During one month they’d actually rented only four room nights. But she knew it wasn’t just her business, because the economy was bad all over.

And I had to agree that, yes, it is pretty bad all over. But for this small business owner, it was much worse than it had to be. Because guess what? Even after I brought the situation to her attention last year, she never corrected the email address on her website. I came home and checked. The bad email address is still posted as the one and only email address that potential guests should use if they want more information about the B&B.

It’s been that way for at least two years now. The phone number is correct, but the email address wrong. It’s just one little mistake, but here’s the deal.

It’s one thing for an out-of-date website to be ineffective and do you and your business no good.

But it’s quite another for your website to be so out-of-date that it actually publishes wrong information about you, literally sabatoging your efforts to be profitable or even stay in business.

If your business has multiple customer groups (like local residents and out-of-town visitors who need more direction to even find you), your website will need to be organized clearly in its site structure so that each group can find the information they need. How many customer groups do you serve?

And be sure to check your website for incorrect phone numbers, email addresses, wrong directions, old store locations, or prices that are no longer valid. Maybe your website isn’t going to help you, but be sure it isn’t hurting you.

Put yourself in the shoes of a tourist planning an out-of-town trip, researching possible places to stay. When you’re surfing the web and gathering information, what are you most likely to do? Send a quick email with questions? Or wait until the next day to call on your own dime? And if you do send an email that comes back as undeliverable, what is the impression you have of that business? Are you likely to snail mail them or try to call them? Or do you simply go to the next business on your list?

Tagged as: marketing, small business owner, tourism, website