How Website Design Can Save Your Business Money
When business owners think of website design, they are usually focused on how it can help them to make money in selling their products or services, but smart website design can actually help you save money in operating your business.
The major way a website design can save your business money is by allowing your company to be operated completely online. An Internet business can be run from anywhere in the world; it does not need a physical location although many brick and mortar stores use online presence as an extension of their physical businesses. There are many features you can incorporate into website design to take advantage of its ability to automate certain functions and procedures.
Many online businesses rely on direct response methods to build subscriber list for newsletters, product announcements and sales promotions. You can automate this function through a subscription management software program installed on your website. With the different formats available you can customize them according to the type of information you need from the subscriber and the way you want to respond to them with the delivery of information.
You can also automate some of the features in your customer service response system. By installing an application on your website that allows visitors to submit feedback forms and then generates a response to notify them when their request will be attended to. Creating an FAQ or frequently asked questions knowledge base can also assist you to identify areas that may need to be refined or revamped. For instance when a visitor asked the specific question and the answer is provided there is software that allows them to give feedback on whether or not the answer was helpful.
An interactive chat application in your website design is another feature that can be used to save you money with customer service. These allow visitors to interact with representatives in real time to receive answers to their questions immediately. This can save your business time because the response is immediate; the visitor receives information they need to support a product or as a pre-sales query about a product or service. By installing the interactive chat application on your website to handle customer request immediately you extend the potential of your website to emulate an in-store experience-without the overhead.
Auto responders have been successfully used to deliver information to customers and prospects on a schedule automatically for the past several years, but now RSS newsfeeds are slowly replacing them to provide up-to-the-minute information that the customer subscribes to and receives on demand . Creating your own RSS news feed is a good way to distribute information over a broad network inexpensively in a short period of time. There is a large distribution network that caters specifically to news feeds that you can use to generate new prospects. This links your website to people as "breaking news" rather than using a search engine query.
In addition RSS feeds can be used to link to other documents such as press releases, white papers and special articles that will lead visitors to your website. Using this strategy you can effectively put your Internet marketing in overdrive with a few simple techniques.
Effective website design can save you money when you employ the full potential of the electronic environment to the maximum. Utilizing automated features through software applications on your website saves you hours of manual labor and employee costs. Instead of having 10 people organizing a mailing to your subscriber list you can use a software program that can handle the scheduling and distribution through the efforts of one person.