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During the day to day running of your business, you will always be looking for ways to make improvements. It is vitally important that you do the same with your website. This article outlines some of the ways that you can make your website work for you. Assessing your website Your website must be visually appealing, with one primary font for the text and a simple color scheme. It is important to have an easy-to-navigate layout, and readily identifiable buttons to link to other pages in the site. Your content should focus on the problems of your visitors and how your product or service can help solve their problems. Rather than listing the features of your product or service, detail the benefits they'll gain from purchasing your product or service. When it comes to writing content, don't depend on your website designer to write this for you. You are the best person for that job as you know your business better than anyone. Make sure that the information is correct, and be sure to have your content checked for spelling and grammatical errors. Present a clear call to action that is clearly shown on every page of your site. In an online business, your primary call to action should be getting the visitor's name and email address by asking him subscribe to your email newsletter. Lastly, provide a fair quantity of readily available information to demonstrate your expertise (articles, blog posts, free downloads, giveaways, contests). Your website visitor will always be asking "what's in it for me?" so make your website about your visitor, not about you. Marketing your website It is important that businesses market their websites through both online media, and the traditional offline media. Your website address should appear in all communications produced by your business; that means everything from print and broadcast advertisements, letterheads, email signatures and business cards. Your URL should be included in all white and yellow page listings. If your product has packaging - put it on your package. If you print brochures, put it on those. If you have pens branded with your company logo, be sure to include the website address. Put your website address on everything you can get your hands on. In addition to this offline advertising, you will need some online marketing, which turns out to be just as cost-effective for smaller businesses as for the big name brands. Research has discovered that opt-in e-mail programs are hugely effective in helping smaller businesses reach a targeted customer base that can be directed to their website. Note that we are not endorsing email spam, or unsolicited commercial email, which more often that not will repel potential customers. You must have gathered the email addresses of the intented recipients in a manner that suggests that the recipients should be expecting to hear from you, and can easily unsubscribe from your email service. Once the visitors arrive at your site, appropriate website technology can offer personalized service, take product orders and perform other vital tasks. If you provide good personalized customer service, particularly following-up to ensure customers got what they wanted, you will eventually build a valuable customer base and will start to see repeat purchases. Measuring the results One of the reasons the internet works so well for direct marketing, is that almost everything can be measured automatically. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you will will realise how difficult it can be to measure your marketing results. Website marketing is quite different– everything is recorded and reported on automatically. So, what do you need to measure? Within any business there are a number of factors that determine your performance: Leads - the number of potential customers that enquire about your product/service. Conversion Rate - the percentage of people that end up purchasing products or services from you after their initial enquiry. Average Sale - represents how much your customers usually spend. Margin - the percentage of every sale that is profit.
If you can increase any of these factors then your business will make more money. The measurements that you record in these areas will help you to determine your future marketing strategy.
So as you can see, there are a number of small changes that you can do that can make a huge improvement on the effectiveness of your website. In a relatively short amount of time, you will start to see that your website becomes your most efficient and cost effective marketing tool.
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