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Jonathan James Aston asked:


Why You Need A Website …

Even the most negative anti-internet people out there even believe that a huge portion of business revenue is be derived from online transactions, or offline transactions as a result of seeing the product or service online beforehand.

Sometimes I wonder why people even hesitate about creating an online presence, why? nowadays the cost of setting up a website from scratch is extremely, and I mean extremely cheap.

Don’t be quick to dismiss your product or service as one that doesn’t lend itself to the online environment, people all over the world are selling all kinds of goods online, the product doesn’t even have to be tangible, it could be selling an e-book on how to make hats!

I know of many local businesses who don’t put all their efforts into selling over the internet but they do have some kind of online presence, whether it’s a small brochure website which simply contains an inviting homepage, about us and contact page, this type of website is great for small local companies who offer a local service, for example a ‘local car valeting service’.

The point here is to have something on the web so you can be found by potential customers or even partners etc; even if your website simply contains your contact detail with a brief description you can still generate leads and business.

Below are a few more reasons why you need a website

1. Build Customer Relationships

A website is a great place to build customer relationships – this can be done extremely effectively using email. Once you have a consumers name and e-mail address they could be a customer for life if they are treated well.

2. Lead Generation

Let’s face it we all want to make money online, and the sole intention of many online organisations is to make money, and turn visitors into customers into loyal customer who use their products or services again and again.

Creating a website, attracting visitors and funnelling this traffic are a great lead generation technique. A local organisation I worked with on a website visitor conversion campaign found they increased lead generation by 800% by effectively utilizing the powers of creating an effective online presence and marketing their website through a variety of channels.

3. To compete against your competitors

Without having an online presence could mean you are missing out on a lot of potential business – meaning your competitors have a distinct advantage just by having an online presence. Effectively leverage the power of the internet and get ahead of competitors by learning by their mistakes and doing what they do better.

4. To provide business information

A huge proportion of internet users use the internet to find local businesses or a product or service in general. Using the web to do this, is a lot cheaper than directory enquiries and a hell of a lot quicker than using a telephone book or directory.

A website containing your business information is available 24 hours a day, this can be printed and can be bookmarked to return to later. Furthermore potential customers can contact you using the desired communication channel you display.

5. Global Reach

Ok, a lot of people use the advantage of having a global reach to say things like “you can sell your products to people overseas” and “people like to buy the latest and best products”, yes of course you can but you already know that. Having a global reach means that people from all over the world can buy your products, however again it doesn’t have to be a tangible product it could be an e-book or a series of videos.

6. Open 24/7 365 days/year

Your shop is always open so to speak. Visitors can enter your shop any time of the day – before 9am and after 5pm – because out of these hours are when people tend to surf the internet, a perfect reason why you should have an online presence

7. Cost Effective Advertising

Offline advertising generally has an extremely low conversion rate. Leaflets and brochures can be quote costly and once these have been printed and distributed and more often that not thrown away this communication channel is dead.

However using a website as a communication will always be online; this cannot be thrown away or discarded. Offline Marketing could be looked upon as a ‘push’ marketing mechanism, however having a website uses a ‘pull’ mechanism, and customers search for your services and find your website.

Think of a website as a full colour interactive brochure which you can add to whenever you like. Reduce advertising costs by using just one effective call to action / message and promoting your website address e.g. learn more about this product on our website, for more information visit http://www.domain-name.co.uk.

And finally on this one alteration to your website can be done quickly and free, this is a completely different story with marketing literature such as posters or flyers.

8. To Project a professional image – not @hotmail.co.uk

Lots of very small business nowadays has some kind of online presence. Nothing looks more unprofessional than when a company refers to one of their points of contact being your-name@hotmail.co.uk or your-name@yahoo.co.uk. This says too many consumers that the business either couldn’t afford or wasn’t bothered about investing in their company brand image, would it to be nicer to use a more user friendly and professional email such as support@your-domain.co.uk or contact@your-domain.co.uk, this gives the consumers the feeling they are dealing with a successful organisation and that their query or contact is being deal with a customer support / care team.

9. Your website can make you money – sell your products and services

Firstly before I go into this one I would like to tell you two things, I recently attended a Search Engine Optimisation seminar in London and In one of the exhibition hall I engaged in a conversation with a middle aged woman from Scotland, after discussing the topic of the seminar we were about to watch she revealed to me that she found her online success selling, get ready for it, selling books on how to make straw hats, she uncovered that she was able to quite her full time job 3 years ago to peruse her online career selling books full time, but without the full time 9 – 5 or later house, she found she could happily sit back and work 1 – 2 hours per day checking email and performing general maintenance on her website.

I think this goes to show that you need to be a retail outlet selling top brand labels in clothing to become and entrepreneur online.

A website can be a great tool in not only promoting your products but selling them to, your shop cannot be available 24 hours a day but your website can, and its probably worth mentioning again that people do tend to surf the internet most when they return from work, so why not reinforce your brand online as well as offline.

Having a website is a great way of automating your business, whilst you are having an evening off or even sleeping you website can be generating brand awareness, generating leads but more importantly generating sales and revenue for your company.

10. Word of mouth advertising

With the growing online community and social networking going on nowadays it has never been easier to like minded people to communicated, but more importantly communicate your website address or even drop it into an email. Its very common nowadays that a website address could be posted up onto a website discussion forum by a happy customer and you could expect to receive hundreds even thousand of visitors to your website from that one forum post or conversation about your company and the products and services you offer.

11. Effectively reach new markets

An overwhelming amount of people now have access to the internet whether it is through their mobile phone, pc, laptop or game console. You really can’t afford to miss out on all these potential customers. It may be that someone didn’t mean or intend to land on your website but people surf the internet in many different ways, more often than not people often refine their searches on search engine again and again until they get to the website they want, they may begin searching for “car wax” and throughout their journey they may find that they done actually want “car wax” anymore what they want now is a “car valeting service”, this is common with website users in that they do end up on a website looking at products or services they didn’t intend to look at in the first place.

12. Test the market

Many organisations at some point would like to know how their target marketing are going to react to their new product or service but are afraid of investing large amount of money into creating the product and then be disappointed by the lack of interest or enthusiasm for it. A great way to “test the market” is to expose this new product or service on your website. A typical idea of this would be if a training consultancy wished to offer a new training programme, by adding a small paragraph on the homepage of your website detailing a brief introduction into the course followed by a “click here for more information” or “contact us to register your interest”, by tracking the number of click through or page views or even email enquiries can tell you how your market has reacted to your new offering, this can then determine whether the launch of this new product is feasible. You can even go a step further and test your new found marketing on piloting product prices etc.

13. Customer Support

Provide a support area or knowledge based for your customers. This can become a hub for all your customers’ queries and questions, assistance on products, provide a variety of ways to be contacted, alternatively use a frequently asked questions to answer the most popular questions or queries – all of this can be done without using staff time, employing new resources or without even answering a phone.

14. Advertising Seasonal Offers / Special Offers

A website and having the right data capture in place is a great way to tunnel traffic into an email list. Effectively collecting customers email addresses gives you the power to contact them when you want to tell them something. You may have a seasonal offer that you wish to communicate, effective email marketing is a great way to build relationships, generate leads (by offering a free report or discount voucher in exchange for their email address, and more importantly convert leads into customers through the use tailored email that meet the demands of your customers.

Building up an intelligent database can have a massive impact on consumer retention and loyalty, knowing that Mrs Smith loves to buy books by a certain author gives you an opportunity to up sell and cross sell other books by that author / similar authors and also attempt to sell items that other people have purchased – hence giving the consumer exactly what they want, when they want it a step on from this is to build an incentivised loyalty program e.g. buy this book and get another book for half price, all of this is possible.

Every one of your customers can be alerted about this special offer at the click of a button, and compared to the cost of offline marketing this is extremely low cost with a higher conversion rate and an even higher return on investment.



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