Here are five tips that can help you create a newsletter that is fresh and appealing to your customers.

1. Try not to highlight more than one or two new features in a newsletter. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to tell your customers everything that is going on, but this can quickly overwhelm your customers. By limiting the number of features in a newsletter, you can focus on what is most important and make sure your readers take that information with them.
2. Consider selecting a general theme for a newsletter. It’s easier to bring various articles together when there’s an overarching theme. Themes such as holidays or seasons are really easy ones to start with. As you become more ambitious and your messages become more targeted, company initiatives, product roll-outs and industry trends are all great themes to create a newsletter around.
3. Don’t over-do it, but be consistent. Send a newsletter whenever you have enough compelling information to warrant one. For most small businesses this is every one or two months. Some larger businesses find themselves sending out campaigns every week. Remember, if you don’t have anything interesting to report, your customers won’t read it. By the same token, you want to stay on the top of their minds.
4. It doesn’t always have to be about you. As a business owner, you’re not just an expert on your business, you’re also supposed to be an expert on your industry. Consider highlighting your customer’s success, or influential trends in your industry that can get people thinking about your products and how they use them. Educating your customers can drive sales and conversion as much as a promotion.
5. Offer Discounts and Promotions Judiciously. This isn’t an advertisement. Resist the urge to offer a coupon, promotion, or discount in a newsletter unless there is truly a good reason or a special occasion. Offering too many discounts can not only devalue the message of your newsletter, it can also send mixed messages about the quality of your products and your business.

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We’re confused though.

This move doesn’t really mesh with recent comments from Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman in a New York Times article (May 19th, 2008) where he said: “We [Yelp] put the community first, the consumer second and the business third.”  True to form, according to the Newsday piece, Yelp’s business service doesn’t have an option for posting general messages to allow businesses to defend themselves against overly negative or inaccurate reviews.  In fact, the article states that the only way a business can defend itself on Yelp is by becoming advertisers, which Newsday claims costs at least $150 a month.

The most disturbing part of the article is a quote from an owner of a hair salon in New York, “…it [Yelp] has little or no regard for business owners…Yes you can e-mail reviewers…But most people use fake names and fake e-mail addresses.”  In the Newsday article, Stoppleman claimed that giving the ability to e-mail reviewers would “encourage productive dialogue,” but how is this possible when a reviewer chooses not to respond, is a competitor who is maliciously attacking the business, or is simply not a real person?

We’ve talked to several businesses dealing with their negative reviews on Yelp, submitted by people using fake identities who post outlandish comments, or even worse are competitors trying to bash their business. These fake reviews will remain a problem to businesses on Yelp, especially when studies show that customers continue to trust online reviews and the popularity of them has reached a point where any review, no matter how inaccurate, can really effect the bottom line.

In the end, it seems that Yelp is trying to have the best of both worlds.  However, we all know that Yelp caters to their community first, and sadly, they’re more than willing to take advantage of businesses while stuffing their wallets in the process.

• E-Mail Campaign Wizard - To simplify the process for setting up a campaign, we’ve introduced a new wizard based system which will take you step-by-step through  each step of building an e-mail campaign.
• Campaign Scheduling - If you create a newsletter or mailing that is time-sensitive and would be more convenient to send at a particular time or day, RatePoint now provides you the ability to schedule that mailing. Just tell RatePoint the day and time, and your queue will begin sending when it is needed.
• New Import Options - For those of you using your own HTML and templates, we’ve added a couple of additional ways for you to import your HTML. You can now define a URL where you host your newsletter, or upload the HTML file directly. Once you import. RatePoint will grab the appropriate file, set up the tracking and unsubscribes, and away you go.

Thanks to everyone who continue to send comments and suggestions regarding our features. As always if you have feedback, feel free to send it our way!

Once uploaded, RatePoint will identify the links in your HTML and track them appropriately and add the proper unsubscribe links within your e-mail. In addition, you’ll be able to edit your HTML after the fact within your Business Center, making it easy to make quick changes without having to re-upload your code multiple times.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be enhancing the custom HTML feature further. Keep a look out for updates and as always feel free to leave us a comment or drop us an e-mail with thoughts and suggestions!

RatePoint Enterprise Features Include:

• Enhanced user administration capabilities. Create administrators, multiple users and delegate responsibility for feedback.
• Support for multiple business units. If you have large departments, multiple locations, or outlets, you can place them under one umbrella. Great for large organizations and franchises.
• Advanced reporting tools to track multiple categories and units.
• RatePoint Enterprise customers also receive additional e-mail marketing quotas, allowing you to connect with your growing customer base and proactively collect customer feedback.

RatePoint Enterprise is now available for current members as an upgrade through the Business Center, and for new customers here. Pricing starts as low as $49.95/mo.

The RatePoint Address Book has now been enhanced in several ways. First, the user interface is much cleaner and easier for you to use, allowing you to organize your contacts much more effectively. We’ve added group functionality into the address book, which allows you to add contacts to multiple mailing lists. For example you may have a newsletters group and a promotions group that you divide contacts into for different purposes.

We’ve also enhanced the contact import features of the address book which will now accept any standard CSV file. Once you’ve imported your e-mail addresses, you’ll be able to map the appropriate fields in the address book and be set to send e-mails.

Per popular request,  an e-mail subscription widget is now available that allows you to collect e-mail addresses directly from your website. Once collected the e-mails are added directly into your RatePoint address book. Once in the address book you can use our e-mail marketing services to send review requests, newsletters, promotions, or whatever your heart desires. The widget is customizable allowing you to set the color, title text, and the group that you would like to add the e-mails to in your address book.

We hope you enjoy the latest additions to your RatePoint membership and as always your comments are appreciated!

Business owners act flabbergasted when they receive a negative review regarding their business. Some of them immediately enter a state resembling the  five-stages of grief, complete with denial and anger, getting all the way down to acceptance. What they don’t understand is many times they bring these negative reviews upon themselves.

Below are eleven common ways to get negative reviews for your business. If you find yourself noticing that your business or employees do any of these things, you could be setting yourself up for trouble!

1. You don’t proactively ask for reviews. When you ask for reviews, they’ll generally be positive, and if there’s an issue, you’ll nail it before it becomes worthy of a negative review. A sign or note posted somewhere is not enough, you much reach out multiple ways including verbally and through e-mail. RatePoint’s Review Request Tool (or simple e-mail tool) is an easy way to accomplish this.
2. You argue with customers. Strong arming a customer or telling them “they’re wrong” will not only guarantee they won’t purchase from you again, it’ll guarantee they’ll be on a mission to make sure everyone knows about it. This can also be defined as “being a jerk.”
3. You’re not courteous. If you treat customers indifferently or as a number, they may see it as a sign of disrespect. Customers have a hard time being mad at someone who is always nice.
4. Promoting products that you don’t have in stock. This is self-explanatory, why are you selling something you don’t have? This happens often to small businesses that don’t have great online-inventory updates.
5. Not quickly alerting a customer to an issue with an order. This is a solid follow-up to #4. With express shipping, people expect to receive an order placed online within a couple of days. Receiving an e-mail a week later that the product is back-ordered probably not only ruined someone’s day, but somebody’s birthday as well. Giving your customer an opportunity to find a different product on your site or elsewhere will save you a customer and a negative review.
6. Confusing policies. Keep it simple. Complex policies can only lead to mis-communication, especially in regards to shipping and refunds. A good policy is one that makes things run smoothly for the business and is fair to the customers. Many business owners ignore the latter, creating policies that make it difficult on the consumer.
7. Ignoring e-mails and phone calls. One good way to get a negative review is to keep ducking the customer. Not only are you missing an opportunity to fix a problem, you’re looking shadier by the minute. For large companies, add “long on-hold time” to this. The problem will not just “go away.”
8. Not being organized. Call it “unintentional ignoring” but if you’re a small business owner, and you’re not organized, stuff ends up slipping through the cracks. Perhaps using Hotmail for your 2,000 e-mails wasn’t the best way to ensure every customer support request was answered.
9. Inconsistency. Do your hours change constantly? Even worse is your business not open when it should be? Does your business run better at different times of the year? When you build customer expectations and don’t meet them, you can expect a negative review.
10. You contact customers in an untimely manner. If there is a problem throughout your business, you should reach-out and explain it as quickly and simply as possible so that you tell them about the problem before they find out on their own. Also, asking for a review or feedback over a year after the fact is guaranteed to hit you with negatives because they’re likely more passionate about their experience.
11. You treat customers differently after they’ve made a purchase. The worse case scenario here is that once someone has paid, you ignore them. Paying customers aren’t necessarily customers for life, in fact they may be more negative in a review because of your change in heart. This especially applies to businesses where you have a monthly payment.

If you find yourself doing several of these things, consider taking a step back and identifying the underlying causes of these issues within your business. By fixing these issues, not only will your customers be more satsified, you’ll retain them, and ultimately boost sales.

The latest update to the RatePoint Business Center features a significant addition which is sure to help you more effectively manage your account and track your progress as you utilize your RatePoint Membership.

This new feature allows you to check the status of your business and your RatePoint account at a glance. The dashboard provides you with useful graphs, critical data such as your overall RatePoint scores (both before and after dispute resolution), how your business is performing over time, and your site seal activity. In addition you’ll be able to quickly see if there are reviews that need to be approved or disputes that need to be resolved.

For new members, these reports and data will become available in your Business Center as soon as you start collecting reviews and/or post your RatePoint site seal.

In addition, you’ll be able to get the latest news, updates and articles from the RatePoint Blog conveniently located on the right side of the dashboard. If you didn’t know our blog existed, you do now.

We hope you enjoy this latest addition to you RatePoint membership, and as always if you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail us or leave a comment below!