Caboose Cut Loose

What is the purpose of your website? In business, we all tend to think our websites are for attracting customers, facilitating sales, as a large portion of our marketing strategies, and for collecting consumer data…

A successful website isn’t just a sales tool - it should be a service.

There are various statistics floating around the web stating facts like “the average person spends just 30 seconds on your website”. So how do you get these people to stay a bit longer, to recommend their friends to visit, and furthermore, to return themselves? It comes down to the old “what’s in it for me?”.

I recently spoke to a very switched on lady by the name of Tracey Voyce, from a company called Bloomtools. Bloomtools isn’t just an ordinary web design company, they specialise in optimising your website for your clients. So how can our websites make people return?

1. Give away something for free. No I’m not crazy, and I’m not joking. If you are a doctor - post free articles on staying healthy this flu season. If you are a marketing agency *cough cough*, give away some tips on how to optimise your marketing budget. The reason being? It gives you credibility. If they can see from your website before even speaking to you, that you know your stuff… they will be more likely to spend money with you. It also makes people think “if this is the stuff they give away free, the stuff you pay for must be fantastic!”. The best example of this I have seen in a long time is Ogilvy. Ogilvy has set up a satellite website providing all sorts of information for businesses to survive the recession. All information is free when you give them your details.

2. Keep a blog. Blogs are in vouge at the moment, but similar to the first point, they can often help to establish credibility, and provide clients with free insight into your business and the industry. Blogs don’t suit every kind of business though, and before you set up a blog, be sure that a) you can write reasonably well and confidently, and b) you are able to keep it updated, at least once or twice a week. Blogs can also help with your search engine rankings by providing more keywords linking to your site.

3. Newsletters. Give people the option of subscribing to your newsletter. Remember, a newsletter for a business is not like the ones you had at school, where they tell you who won awards and what’s happening in the school. Your newsletter should be more for your client, than a medium to blow your own horn. Corporate newsletters should contain articles, and again provide insights into your industry, highlighting trends and providing free tips. Sure, if you have won a major award - let them know, but the majority of the newletter needs to be for the client.

4. SMS alerts. SMS alerts are fantastic for a number of businesses, particularly those who either sell goods online, or involve an appointment with a client (such as a hairdresser or doctor). You can use these alerts to tell customers when there is a sale happening online - perhaps a VIP 8 hour sale. SMS reminders are fantastic for managing appointments. How much time could you save if instead of calling to confirm appointments, you just clicked a button?

5. Free tools. Can you provide free tools on your website to help your clients? Banks often provide tools like mortgage calculators, or tools to manage your budget, or compare credit cards or loans. This gives the client a reason to keep coming back to your site - and in the process, they see all your updates.

6. Customer login. Can your site give tailored services to a client based on information? Or, can it recommend products based on pages within your site they have previous looked at? Amazon.com is known for giving suggestions of books you may be interested in based on past purchases and pages observed.

7. Can you provide case studies of clients you’ve helped in the past? The more information you can give, including price points (if you are able to divulge) really gives clients an idea of what to expect - by way of relationship, results and fees.

8. Can you hold a competition to encourage more traffic to your website? So many contests now days involve “25 words or less why…” - but how many of these answers do you get to see? People actually enjoy reading this things, so why not post them as well as award the winner?

9. Can you conduct some kind of poll or survey on your website? Something that people are interested in participating in, and interesting in seeing the results of?

10. Could you have a forum? If people are discussing your product anyway, why not let them do it in a place you can listen in? If you sell house paint for example, why not have a home renovators forum where people can give advice on DIY jobs? Maybe you could even get experts in the field to contribute and answer questions?

These are just 10 very simple ways your website can go from being a shopfront to a service, which in turn, makes it a more successful website. So have a think about your website, and think about how you can best use it to serve clients, instead of just selling to them.

Get your website working for you and your clients.

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