How can a website improve earnings for your business?
The graphical internet has been around for almost 15 years now and almost from the beginnng business owners saw the opportunity presented to them to drive product sales higher using this new fantastic graphical environment that so many potential customers were ‘logging’ onto. However, for most small businesses the internet, and how it can help their bottom-line, is still fuzzy.
Many of the SMEs that come to me for a website or consultancy still only envision their product brochures on a web site, what’s known as brochureware. However your web site can be, and should be, so much more than that.
For a start, a product brochure is usually designed within certain limitations like size, number of colours, weight of paper etc. Ask any marketer how difficult it can be to get product benefits across to a reader when fighting for space with company branding and a call-to-action like a phone number.
A web site, on the other hand, has none of these limitations. It can be as big or small as required, sporting as many graphics and colours needed to support the sales message and numerous types of calls-to-action from ‘Buy now’ buttons for the immediate sale to ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ for long-term-relationship building. It can be static or dynamic, i.e. displaying content stored in an on line database, depending on the frequency of new content. It could have advertising thereby creating a new revenue channel for your business. Using smart search-engine-optimisation techniques, thousands of visitors can be driven to your product pages resulting in numerous sales.
This article only scratches the surface of how effective a web site can be to improve earnings for your business. Stay tuned as I look at 2 different web sites and how they could improve.
