In a time where everyone keeps telling business owners to go online, get a website and all that. It’s easy to assume that spending a bunch of dollars to get your business a shiny new website is the next best step that will bump your business up in sales and growth.
First, what is a website and why is it needed? A website is a technology innovation that tries to automate or ease the work of manually engaging with your customers one after the other.
Let’s take Amazon.com for example, see their stat below:
- Each second, Amazon records $4,722.
- Each minute, those sales amount to $283,000.
- And in an hour, that averages more than $17 million.
Now that’s a website that is valuable. To tell you how valuable it is, Amazon lost $15.7 billion in the previous quarter for an average of $120,000 each minute their website was down, source.
But having that website is not all Amazon had to do to grow the value of their website to that point.
Here are things that make your website drive sales for your business.
- Solve The Business Side of Things:
This is what most people neglect. Having a colourful website won’t save you from a terrible business strategy. Do you know who your customers are, do you have the right business model? Do your customers need your product/ service, are there enough people who actually need that product or service.All of these are what a valuable website feeds on. In fact, elements of each of these things will be seen on the website, and most importantly, those things determine the type of website you should build.
- Build a website that cuts into the culture of your customers
Eventually, you are building this for your customer, not for your own self-delight. Most of the beautiful and glamorous websites you see out there don’t actually bring in any sales for the business owner. It’s in fact a liability, they keep renewing domain and hosting, fixing bugs etc.What does the customer want, what makes sense to them? What’s the easiest way they can understand each feature and functionality? Which device do they use, does the website appear great on there?
These are the things you need to think about.
- Be Ready For The Total Cost Before Getting Started
Imagine building a new store with the best of products, accessories and equipment, only to find out that you have no single dollar to do some marketing for your new store?Rather than asking a web designer how much it cost to build a website, you should better ask a business growth and transformation consultant how much it will cost you to build an online sales system.
An online sales system goes beyond just having a website.
You need to
- Do some research to know what type of website works for your audience
- Work on website content (oftentimes website content are a little different in that you need to write the content with the mindset that you are not going to be there to prove your case physically, also that it needs to be search engine friendly)
- Carefully craft out how to layout your product or service to allow easy flow of purchase or (inquiry) bookings
- Design the elements of the website (creatives, media, etc)
- Then design the website
- Set up a lead magnet system to capture the interest and details of visitors who don’t seem ready to buy yet
- Write automated emails that these users will receive to introduce your business
- Install analytics to help you know what’s working and what’s not
- Install marketing trackers to help you retarget drop off customers
- Consider monthly or daily website maintenance so you don’t lose your website to hackers
- Plan a monthly data analysis of the website to help you gather insight about your customers and how they are finding your offers.
- Setting up a proper marketing plan and system [hyperlink the blogpost about marketing] to use the website to drive sales for your business
Let me ask, which of the above didn’t you know you had to plan for to get your website to drive your sales?
If all of this sounds like a big budget to you already, we would always advise you to use any of the free tools that won’t cost you a lot, then you focus most of your budget on marketing for now. See our piece on what makes good marketing here.