Marketing Outsourcing Danger #2
Is their sales terminology
misleading?
"We promise 99% website
uptime?" That sounds pretty good, right? Yet that
one percent allows your host to be down 432 minutes or 7.2
hours every month and still stay within their contractual
terms. And of course since you aren't monitoring your
website every minute of every day, chances are that they could be
down 10 times that amount and you'd never be able to account for
all the downtime.
Email Guarantees
Email newsletter providers often
state a 99% email delivery rate, even though most newsletters fall
victim to at least 25% of the list being undeliverable due to
changing email addresses and being kicked out with spam
filters. Smaller hosts that don't keep up with the latest
technology are often less efficient than that. So what's up
with that 99% thing?
In most cases, they are
redefining delivery rate as that rate after those bounces occur.
Search Engine Guarantees
Search engine optimization
companies often guarantee you a certain ranking on a number of
terms. However, what they fail to tell you is that first,
they cannot guarantee anything on a search engine they don't own,
and second, you don't get to pick the term. Imagine any
company actually promising that a small insurance agent in Dubuque
Iowa would compete on Google page one for "insurance"
and beat Allstate, State Farm, Prudential, Geico, Progressive,
Nationwide, and about 100 other such similar companies. It's
not going to happen.
The fact is that no search engine
is actually obligated to you to provide you with a listing at
all. Obviously, no SEO company can provide you with a
guarantee for such services.
When you hear the word guarantee,
listen closely, ask questions, but mostly, get ready to
run.
