Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Dear vmartins,

The first thing to consider is to brief everyone in your company to make sure everyone knows what you've done, where you've done it, how the changes impact them as staff and as ambassadors of the company.

The purpose of this is to ensure that everyone—EVERYONE—(I don't care who they are or who they THINK they are!) understands how the changes alter customer experience issues.

What I mean by a customer experience issue is changes in things such as warranties, guarantees, refunds, and returns, response times to respond to e-mails and telephone calls, the lengths of "on hold" times, the way people answer the phone (to everyone, internal calls and external!) and the scripts to use, and to ensure that anyone dealing with any customer, anywhere, at any time, knows who to go to or where to look for answers to questions.

Trust me on this: internal buy in now will save a world of pain.
The other thing to do here is to make sure that everyone connected with the website and your ordering process is familiar with all the back end controls, systems, passwords, and so on.

Similarly, the people doing the live chatting and the telephone support work? They must be given permission to deal with refunds, returns, and changes in customer orders up to a certain price point. If these people have to pass every tiny request on to a higher power your supervisors will be flooded with insane questions and be asked to clear every tiny amount or payment.

Give live chat people permission to make judgements on the fly
if those calls will cost you less than a sum that you need to figure out, say, $150, or whatever it is. And the more you can direct people to FAQ pages where many of the same questions will come up again and again, the better.

Skip this step and you'll regret it, I can guarantee it.

Then you beta test the living daylights out of things, with the
site live and kicking but ONLY to a select group of clients and customers and you ask them to kick the tyres and take the site
for a spin.

Reward people for their time and trouble and they'll thank you.
Set the site up untested, and on an unsuspecting clientele and you run the risk again of creating lots of negative impressions if things are not running quite as you'd like them to.

If you unleash the full, untested site on the entire world and things go horribly wrong, you run the risk of painting all kinds of not too pretty pictures in people's minds.

Based on THIS feedback, then you make tweaks and changes, you announce the launch to your main list, and to your niche related press sources, and you switch things on and rinse and repeat:
present, test, evaluate, refine, relaunch and so on until everything's purring along like a fine Swiss watch!

Make life easy for your customer, and they'll reward you with
their business, with their referrals, and with their repeat visits and purchases. Make life at all unpleasant or unfulfilling for your customers and—CLICK!—they'll be gone and you will be toast.

But that's just one opinion. Take the advice from as many people here as are willing to chip in and then YOU decide what's the best thing for you, and ultimately, for your customers.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on www.twitter.com @GaryBloomer

Lots of answers to questions you didn't ask. I'll try to answer the questions you asked:

First, yes you need 3 different letters. Each should be written with the perspective of the recipient in mind. For your internal team you may need 2 letters, one for sales and one for customer service, or you may be able to combine them into a single letter if the goals and duties are similar.

Write from the idea of what your target for each letter wants. For sales, it's how they can sell more, for customers it's how they will find what they need and get answers quicker.

Ignore the technology, nobody cares what makes it work, everyone cares about "what's in it for me."

Don't just copy and paste, and don't go looking for a boiler plate letter anywhere. Start with a list of the 5 things your new website will improve for each target group. Then cut that list down to the 3 top things, and write about them. Tell a story of how it will make things better.

Do the other stuff the others here suggest, test the site, soft launch it, etc. But consider the letters to be fairly important, because they will be read by internal and external audiences.

Chris Kieff, CEO 1 Good Reason.com
Online Marketing Consulting
Follow me on Twitter: https://www.Twitter.com/ckieff

Dear vmartins,

In your letters (one to each audience, and in an appropriate tone of voice for each specific audience), talk to your readers about the benefits and values you'll gain.

Yes, you need one for your internal staff as an announcement, one to your customers, and one to the online world about what's important for each.

As much as it might pain you, AVOID templates in this case light the plague: if your recipient suspects a formulaic approach you'll lose impact and lose respect.

Concentrate on what's of interest to specific audiences.

Avoid the temptation to talk about yourself: you do not matter; you are largely irrelevant—focus on what matters to your readers.

Tips to make your letter easier to read: Use short sentences. Use short paragraphs. Use lines of white space between paragraphs. Start with an attention gaining headline in bold. Use sub heads that read in sequence down the page.

These tips will help your readers understand your key points: some of your readers will read the whole thing, others will only read the subheads. Keep it simple.

If you're going to use photographs or illustrations, pictures tend
to out pull illustrations. But if you're going to use either, always use a caption, and preferably one that tells a story or that telegraphs one of your primary benefits.

And under your sign off, include a P.S. and a P.P.S. in which you repeat main benefits and calls to action.

Business sales letters like this are usually read in the following order:

1. Headline. 2. Photo captions/P.S. 3. Sub heads. 4. First sentence/ paragraph.

Not always, but usually. So make these areas tell your story and they'll help pull your reader into the main body of your message.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on www.twitter.com @GaryBloomer