Is your company using its website to its full potential? Is your website a dynamic business-building tool? Maximising your web presence is essential in today’s tough business world. There are two major ways in which you can have your website work for you. You can use it to drive sales and marketing of your business. Secondly, you can use it to cut costs and actually do work for your company.

Improve Image, Increase sales
You should use your website to drive sales, to assist marketing and to increase the overall image of your business. Many customers will make their buying decision based on their impression of your company’s website. In the past it was enough to simply have a web site. Today users are much more inclined to do business with companies that have a very professional image on the Internet.

Cut Costs by Maximising Use of Your Website - replace printed materials with electronic ones
Many companies send out printed materials to their customers for a variety of reasons. These materials may include catalogues, information packets and even applications. A corporate website can be adapted to help cut the costs of these mailings.

An example: a group customer approached us to develop their new corporate web site. Like many businesses, they wanted to keep costs to a minimum. Their instructions were to create a simple two- or three-page website giving customers basic information.

As we talked to them and learnt more about their company, we found that they are required by law to send each of their customers a pack of information periodically. A form has to be completed and sent back. They average sending out 125 per month. When they calculated the costs for printing and posting they realised it was costing approximately £650 per month.

After showing them how they could put the same materials into PDF format and let their customers download the information from their website, they were going to end up saving about £7800 per year by having and fully utilising a company web site. They were initially worried about spending too much money, when in reality by not having a web site and using it properly, they were spending £7800 more per year. The additional cost for this feature was money well spent.

Use your suppliers’ expensive website information on your website
Corporate websites can be set up to use information and graphics from high profile supplier websites. For example, a car dealership could have Toyota materials on their website. These website materials are usually of very high quality and typically not very affordable if you have custom graphics done. Incorporating this high quality information on you own website will promote your supplier’s products and provide a more professional look to your site.

Make customer job status available online
A separate login restricted area can provide your customers access to information on their projects in real time. Providing this information on your website is beneficial to you and to your customer. Your office staff will be freed up to do other things besides giving project updates over the phone.

Accept online payments/provide e-commerce
Open new avenues for money to come in to your business. Allowing your customers to purchase your products directly from your website can boost sales. Your products will also be available to a much wider audience.

Recent research by Datamonitor (commissioned by PayPal) suggests that the growth of online sales will continue. they are predicting that £18.5 million worth of spending will shirt to Internet retailers by 2010 and within 4 years 6% of UK consumer spending will be done online. Can you afford not to be part of this?

Wayne