The modern business landscape is such that it would be next to impossible to run a profitable business without a website.

By definition, it may just be a virtual storefront; however, a robust website that delivers an impeccable customer experience acts as a chief revenue driver for most businesses.

That said, quite a few business owners seem oblivious to the fact that building a website that actually contributes to their bottom-line demands attention, resources, and meticulous process planning. Failure to realize this will most likely mutate into the painful financial and operational cost.

What a well-performing website can do for your business

1. It is your gateway to your clients and prospects: One of the most important advantages of a website is that it grants your potential customers an “easy and immediate” access to your business. This allows them to get up close and personal with your business and lowers emotional and psychological barriers. This exponentially improves the ease of doing business with your brand, and gives the opportunity to generate leads, and allow people to get in touch to find out more about your products and services.
2. Higher revenues: “You make more money”. Regardless of anything else, these 4 words should be enough to convince you on why a high performing website is an absolute must. It acts as round the clock salesperson, who delivers without the restriction of a conventional brick and mortar store. Depending on your niche, having a website can bring about a 20-50% uptick in revenues.
3. A wider reach: A robust website grants you access to a platform – the internet, which allows you to reach customers in literally every corner of the world.
4. An efficient business model: A website is devoid of any financial and human costs that a traditional storefront may incur.
5. key principles that can help your website perform better
1. Put yourself in your user’s shoes: Assessing your website from your visitors’ perspective is by far the important factor. An effective way to ensure that your website is customer friendly is to ask others to experience the entire funnel, take their candid feedback and then implement the key learnings.
2. Learn from your competition: While it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of how and what you intend to achieve from your business website; but it would be a mistake to ignore how your competition goes about it. Observing your competition’s website experience and their customer journey may give you crucial insights that you may have otherwise missed.
3. Intimate understanding of your audience: Your website should be able to effortlessly connect your customers’ core pain points to your business’s ability to solve them. How? You must create a clear sketch of your customer i.e. you find about their gender, income, motivations, problems, the issues that matter to them and the values they hold dear. A thorough understanding of these factors will allow you to craft a compelling proposition and a brand image for your core audience.
4. Minimise clicks: It’s crucial to resist the temptation to build a “perfect” website. Such an approach blinds you to what your customer actually wants when s/he visits your website. Although you do want your visitors to spend time on your website, however, it would defeat the purpose if they have to sift through unnecessary pages in order to find what they’re looking for. Your goal should be to design your website in such a way that minimizes the time it takes your visitors to find relevant information.
5. Track your customer journey and assess the site map: Equally important is to take an operational stock of your website i.e. you should have a clear idea about what sections or pages account for most of your victors’ time. The sections that do not come up to the performance benchmarks should either be optimized or discarded.

For more tips on how you can build a website that consistently delivers a robust ROI, please click HERE to download a FREE eBook with an in-depth analysis of 20 ways to create a winning website.

We look forward to hearing from you. We’d love to explain how we can help your brand break through functional and business plateaus. For an in-depth strategy session, call us at +44 (0) 1455 557766.