A few years back, it would have sounded ridiculous if someone say that they are going to start a global business by sitting in his home. But, thanks to the development and revolution of web technology, it has become a reality now.
So, this article will tell you how to make your business effective and thereby get business with the help of the website.
DO MARKET RESEARCH:
First, do a small market survey to find out the opinions of the potential customers as that would help you to modify and plan the website accordingly. You can do the research by making the visitors of the site fill a survey and that should be done by the web developer using ASP, PHP or CGI survey tools. To make sure that you get good responses, you can lure the viewers with a gift to one lucky survey filler.
REFRESH YOUR CONTENT:
Keeping the same content will not attract the customer to come back again to your website. Hence it should be updated continuously and should always try to exceed the expectations. This can be done by using content management system (CMS). A technical writer should be appointed to keep updating the content and also include the new trends of the business along with the recent technology and businesses.
BE CLEAR AND TRANSPARENT:
Be transparent to the customer and that will help as it would increase the trust factor about you and your business. You need not divulge the trade secrets but you can share quality standards, how you develop the product or service and your policies and goals. You can also explain what they can expect from you and announce offers etc. You can finally ask for the customer’s feedback and it should be incorporated if needed. This will help the customer to have a sense of belonging to your business.
IMPROVE NAVIGATION:
Clear navigation helps a long way in the success of the website. Clumsy websites will not attract the customer no matter how good the product is. The customer first sees the site and then the product and hence it is better to have a good first impression. Clear hyper linking and cross linking will take the website a long way.
TESTING AT DIFFERENT SPEEDS AND BROWSERS:
Once the navigation is taken care of, testing should not be neglected. Especially, the loading time. Customers will not have the patience to wait many minutes for your webpage to open. They would rather close it and look for alternatives. One thing which will help with the speed of the website is to use limited amount of graphics and videos. Also, before launching the website,your web designershould test it in different browsers.
SELL BENEFITS RATHER THAN FEATURES:
Though the final aim of your website is to sell the products and services, it should appear to the user as if you are selling the benefits and not the features of the product. The same sentence can be written in a way for the customer to perceive better. Instead of saying “The laptop has ultra powerful battery made in the US using platinum encoded…. “, it is better to say “Up to 10 hours of battery life.” which is the benefit to the customer.
Apart from the product, it is always advisable to add value to the visitor. Allow the user to get a lot of information about the product, articles on the latest technologies related to the product. This would not just make the user spend lot of time on your website but also improves the ranking in search engines.
SITE PROMOTION:
Making a good website is the first part of the story. The next part is equally important and that is to promote the website. You can set up links or affiliates to announce your website on the global map and also you can make sure that you do small things right by keeping the website in your email signature, business cards etc. One more important way to promote your website is to submit to various search engines and send emails to the potential customers with the link to website.
ANALYSIS:
There are lots of site analysis tools; some of them are even free. Add one of the tools so that you will know which page of the website is viewed the most and hence you can modify it accordingly. You can also get the information of the visitors which you can use to convert them into a potential customer etc.
