Huge iPhone Data Bills If (science articles) You Cancel Your International Plan
No commentsBy Thana
One iPhone Atlas reader writes:
After receiving a huge international data roaming bill for my iPhone account even though I had added a sufficiently large International Data Roaming Plan before my trip I was informed by an AT&T service rep that AT&T had charged me the exorbitant per KB rate for international data usage because I had cancelled my International Data Roaming plan after I returned to the United States.
The plan is available on a month-to-month basis, so canceling it when I got home seemed like an obvious thing for me to have done, since I have no plans to go overseas again in the foreseeable future. But the service rep said that AT&Ts policy (unwritten, so far as I can tell) is that one needs to leave the roaming plan in place for 90 extra days, so that it is still in place when the foreign carrier finally reports the subscribers roaming back to AT&T. If the plan is not in place when the foreign data usage gets reported to AT&T, then AT&Ts billing system which was fully capable of charging me for the International Data Roaming service when it was in place is incapable of recognizing that I had an international data roaming plan in place on the dates that the foreign carrier says I used its data connection
AT&Ts 100MB iPhone plan costs an additional monthly fee of $119.99, while the 200MB plan runs an additional $199.99 a month. During the plans rollout, AT&T stated that both could be added or dropped from users existing plans at any time, without penalty.
Three Ways to Increase Newsletter Signups on Your Winery Website
By Mitch Tarr
There is no question that having a longer list of email addresses in your newsletter list should be a top goal of any direct to consumer marketing initiative.
I’ve noticed one mistake that is common on most winery websites. That is, they don’t make much of an effort to invite people to sign up for their newsletter list.
You may not know it but making it easy for your website visitors to do something can have a 2, 4, or 10 times effect.
Many winery websites feel that if they have a contact page or a dedicated newsletter signup page that may be enough to get people to join the list. The assumption is that if they want to join up badly enough, they’ll find a way. If you make it super easy for them to sign up, it stands to reason that more of them will do so. Signing up for a newsletter is more of an impulse and as such is a bit more unpredictable as to when that impulse will strike. One thing is for certain, if you don’t sign them up on this visit, you probably won’t see them again on your website.
Right now you might be collecting one newsletter signup per day–works out to 365 new subscribers per year–all done automatically by your software.
However if you were to increase that number to 10 per day, (which I have done) you are talking about 3,650 per year. It doesn’t take too long before you have a formidable list to send out offers to join your club, buy your wine, or visit your tasting room.
Here are three things you can immediately do to accelerate your subscriber list growth.
1. Put a signup form on your home page. Many wineries don’t offer a chance to sign up for the newsletter on the home page. And by sign up, I mean place a form requesting First Name and Email Address right on the page. More people will take you up on your offer because it is convenient for them. Most of your traffic is through your home page anyway isn’t it?
2. Put a ‘Newsletter Signup’ link in your navigation bar. In addition to having a signup form on the home page, put a link in your navigation bar to a signup page. Make sure this link is on every page in your site. Just because your visitor didn’t sign up on your home page doesn’t mean they won’t if they are somewhere else in your site reading about your wine.
3. Add in a hover ad. A hover ad is a box that appears on your screen at some point between 5 and 60 seconds after a visitor arrives on your webpage. Many people don’t like to use a hover ad on their site and in fact I have only seen one after reviewing over 1,000 winery websites. The argument is that the hover ad annoys visitors and sends the wrong impression. In actual fact this effect is so small as not to exist. But I have seen hover ads increase signups by a factor of 10 times!
Finally, it doesn’t hurt to make more of an effort than to say ‘Newsletter’. One of the strongest offers I saw on a winery site stated ‘Please Join Our Mailing List and Receive a $25 Coupon!’ You can be sure that small incentive encouraged more people to join the list (and generated a few extra orders too!)
So take some time to evaluate your website and ensure you are building your list as aggressively as possible.
Mitch Tarr is an email marketing guru and CEO of ZinMarketing Inc. Learn how to use email to cement winery-client relationships and create a buzz that sells wine and supports winery brands. For information and free reports visit Mitch’s exclusive website - http://www.zinmarketing.com
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Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 2:55 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
