‹ Blog / E-commerce

Are you getting the most out of your website?

Aug 20th 2020

Consider this; you’ve spent time and money on building a website to attract potential customers, but what about you and your Business? Here are 5 ways which using your website can be useful and help you be better at what you do day to day...

Consider this; you’ve spent time, resources and money on building a website so that you can build presence online, encourage sales, increase your credibility and a whole host of other customer facing activities.

Your website isn’t really yours, it should be your potential customer’s website.
Don’t let us put you off this school of thinking, it’s exactly right, but…is it completely for your potential customer, or could it actually be yours too?

Websites are designed to help people find out about you, they should be useful for your customer, but they can be useful to you (the Website owner too).

Here are 5 ways which using your website can help you be better at what you do day to day and become not just a shop or a brochure but a useful business tool too.

1) Live Chat
If you’re reading this article right now, you might have noticed the Live chat at the bottom of the page. Live Chat is a relatively low cost tool that can help you manage and talk to your clients, track what your visitors are doing, provide genuine real-time assistance to your visitors and a whole host of other useful features.

You can probably tell, we’re big fans, this article tells you much more, or why not sign up for a Free trial?

2) News Letter Sign up
Email Marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your existing contacts and customers, and it’s relatively in expensive too.

You can read more about the merits of Email Marketing, but keeping your contact list up to date can be a challenge. The good news is that most Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Email Marketing packages offer something called a Web Form or a Web-To-Lead Form integration.

These integrations make it easy to add a simple form to your website that when used will automatically add the contact straight in to your mailing list. This is often much quicker than manually logging in yourself each time, and is also a quick way for you to add the people you speak to in to your Mailing list saving you time too!

3) Write useful content
This is where Blogs are great.
Useful content in your blog and website is not only useful for your reader, but can save you time. Imagine if instead of having to write wordy emails and have long conversation advising your clients on the same things over and over again, you started moving this advice in to short articles that when asked you could send to your clients instead.

Your Blog can quickly become a useful Knowledge base and not only build your reputation but save you time and help you sell what you do. Here’s a thought, your online Blog can help you Build your business offline too.

4) Store and Track useful documents
Ok, maybe this is a little geeky, but this is something we do a lot of, and clients of ours that we’ve got doing the same have all come to love the idea too. Why not use your site as an online document repository?

All of our terms, process documents and even proposals are tucked away on our website on hidden pages, where although not publicly accessible, can be sent as links to our clients when needed.

How about if you want to take that idea a step further?
Twitter users will already be familiar with tools that shorten URLs such as bit.ly.
Why not use these tools to link and send out important documents too such as Terms and Conditions, Contracts, Proposals and Questionnaires, then you can track if they’ve been read, when and where.

5) Power your Social Media campaigns
If you use Social Media and have a blog, or even if you’re thinking of blogging, many people don’t realise you can automate posting your blog posts out to the key Social Platforms.

Your blog can make a powerful engine where your Social media activity can start from, meaning you blog once and all the posting is done for you without spending valuable time logging in and out of each Social Platform.

Tools like Twitterfeed and dlvr.it are worth checking out for this.

6) Start selling stuff!

Not getting as much business through the door as you used to? That’s not surprising considering the pandemic and lock down ramifications. But that doesn’t mean you can’t sell at all. Whether its products or services you can use your website as a sales tool, and with plugins like Woocommerce you can turn your bricks and morter into virtual sales – and the best thing about it is that you can maintain it yourself.. adding or updating products, taking payments through the site, etc. It’s all just a click away.