Your website is your best sales tool. It works for you 24/7, can be seen by everyone on the planet, and is totally controlled by you. Also, it doesn’t have to be expensive to build or maintain. However, some businesses have neglected or abandoned their websites altogether. Some never built one. Some business owners think that social media platforms are all they need to market their business successfully. But not having a fast website that is full of marketing materials and ways to engage with your customers is a big mistake. In this article, learn 5 reasons why your website is your best sales tool.
1. Your Website is your Best Way to Connect with Customers
Live Chat
Websites are your best platform for customer engagement. Live chat is the most popular form of customer engagement. Customers love it because questions and follow-up questions are answered quickly. Superoffice is a cloud-based CRM solutions company based in Norway. They cite a recent study that shows live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel. Here is a chart of their findings:
| Customer Response Method | |||
| Live Chat | 73% | ||
| Email Response | 61% | ||
| Phone Call | 44% |
Another great thing about live chat is that it easily installs on most websites. It can even be set up to work coinciding with your office hours. Additionally, many chat software platforms offer social media integrations.
FAQ Pages
An FAQ page is another popular website tool for customer engagement. A page dedicated to answering the most popular questions about your business is a critical part of customer satisfaction. Content is quickly assembled from your customer interactions. The page can also be updated quickly as current business conditions change. We manage an e-commerce website that uses an FAQ page to keep customers updated with shipping schedules. We updated the shipping schedule every week during the height of the Covid Pandemic. And while customers didn’t like longer delivery times, they appreciated the timely information and rewarded us in their website reviews. Another great thing about FAQ pages is a dedicated schema mark-up for the FAQ page. That means FAQ pages qualify for rich results on search engine results pages.
Support Links
Support links in the website’s footer are another way customers can quickly find ways to connect. These customer engagement tools improve the user experience. And a great user experience will keep visitors coming back. Best of all, they will also keep buying your products and services.
2. Your Website is the Best Place to Showcase your Products
Simply put, there is no better place to showcase your products than your website. No other platform can effectively display your complete line of goods and services. You control every aspect of how your products are presented, including descriptions and image quality. Nowhere else can you provide comparisons between products, services, or pricing plans.
Your website is also the best place for new product announcements. And most websites can fully integrate email software like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. That makes marketing your new products to your current customers quick and easy.
Sand Key Ventures uses text blasts to announce new product listings to current and potential customers for one of our clients. Text messages are affordable and typically read by most recipients within hours of delivery. Plus, our messages always contain a link back to the website and a strong call to action. The ROI on these test blasts is incredible. And we get very few opt-outs, usually less than 1% of the total number of recipients.
Finally, your website is the only place that gives customers the immediate purchase option. According to Forbes Magazine, e-commerce revenue in the U.S. was $469.2 billion in 2021, an increase from $431.6 billion in 2020. Fully integrated e-commerce platforms provide everything needed to manage a digital store. A digital store can be labor-intensive, but the revenue it can generate is significant.
3. Your Website Establishes your Credibility and Reputation
Certifications and professional association badges are effective tools that establish credibility. These should be visible on the most actively viewed pages on your website. This is the best place to create the foundation for your reputation.
Testimonials, on the other hand, can be tricky. The problem with testimonials appearing on websites and landing pages is a matter of trust. Unbounce is an internet marketing firm based in Vancouver. According to them, roughly 90 percent of people assume that testimonials inside marketing messages are “made up.” Most customers don’t trust testimonials. However, there are ways to instill a little trust into testimonials on your website.
One way Sand Key Ventures has successfully put trust into testimonials is by working with a 3rd party company called CusRev. It’s a customer reviews portal that collects reviews and publishes them to an independent website. It also integrates into the website to send review requests to customers. Then it collects the reviews and publishes them. The good and bad reviews get published. And because website owners have no control over which reviews get published, website visitors can read reviews with confidence and trust. Here is a screenshot of how we display the reviews:
Of course, business owners must follow through on every aspect of the customer experience. Otherwise, their reputation will suffer. And no amount of website chest-thumping will make up for it.
4. Powerful Analytics Provide the Best Customer Insights
There are many free and paid tools on the market to provide website visitor analytics. The most popular is Google Analytics. All website owners should watch their website’s visitor statistics to gauge important metrics. These metrics include everything from usage patterns, content popularity, and conversion rates. No other platform provides anything close to the data Google does. Digital and traditional media can provide assumptions, but the data from your website is concrete. With the launch of Google’s new analytics format, G4, there are better customization options. These customization options help focus the data on what matters most to each website.
For e-commerce sites, there are tools available that show how customers interact with the site. Most importantly, the customer’s path to a successful transaction. Consumers take many different paths to their journey to the checkout page. Spotting trends in the data can help make each path more direct and easier for the customer.
5. Content on Your Website is the Gift that Keeps on Giving
You can repurpose content you create for your website on other platforms. That means you can create one piece of content and use it, or part of it, on other marketing channels. A blog post, for instance, can turn into three social media posts. Post a video to your YouTube channel. And email new product listings to your customer base.
Repurposing content saves time and money. It puts your messaging on several marketing platforms and maintains the consistency of messaging. It’s the reason why it’s among the five reasons why your website is your best sales tool.
Your business will grow when you invest resources in your website. There are more than just these five reasons why your website is your best sales tool. And we can cover some of them in a future blog post. But for now, today’s five reasons:
should be enough reasons to focus on your website’s user experience and SEO activity.
Sand Key Ventures
Sand Key Ventures is a website company that creates websites and digital content for all sizes of businesses. We test each web page, article, and blog post for readability and we optimize everything for SEO. We conduct extensive keyword research, provide technical SEO services and maintain websites to produce the best user experience possible. For a free website audit, send an email to michael@sandkeyventures.com. Thanks for your time but now we’ve gotta run. We have websites to build, blogs to write, ebooks to create, e-commerce to manage, and photos to edit. Until next time, take care.