Is Your Website a Good Employee?

Article by David Johnstone

The purpose of a website is to help a business get more clients or sell more products. It's the same purpose with employees. More specifically, the Sales team...to bring more clients or help sell more products. It’s an ongoing function to keep the business running and growing.

While your human employees can’t be expected to work 24x7, your website can. Systems and automation
can work side by side with your website to handle:

• Introducing your products or services
• Request demonstrations or trials, if applicable
• Book face to face meetings or video conferences
• Collect prospect contact details
• Follow up with prospects and entice them to take the next step
• Easily accept payments or initiate an invoice
• Create work orders, if applicable
• Ship or deliver the purchased item(s)
• Follow up to check on the quality of the purchased item and ask for a testimonial
• Follow up regularly to entice the buyer to come back and purchase again.

When you have an employee who isn't performing as expected, or not helping to meet company goals, that employee could find themselves without a job. Unless they get some quality training to improve their results. Websites that also aren't contributing, should be treated the same; fired or fixed. In the case where a where a website's purpose is to help bring clients, we simply need to work on what leads a prospect to becoming a paid client. It’s the initial conversation, sometimes called a discovery session. This is a necessary step to uncover what the client needs, to show them you have the right solution to help, to answer their questions and finally to help them signup. For that conversation to happen, there is something that needs to happen first. A booked appointment. There are several ways a website can help get booked appointments. The most
obvious, and used method is to provide a phone number at the top of every page.

The most obvious, and used method is to provide a phone number at the top of every page. But not everyone
wants a phone call to be the way they make first contact. These days people would rather do ANYTHING
else, besides make a phone call. Even if a phone call is the quickest and easiest way to get a booked
appointment, most people still prefer something else. There are several really good options other than
calling:

1. Offer a "book now" button so people can see your open availability and book a day / time themselves.
Website visitors love the ability to handle the scheduling themselves. It’s usually the business owner that has
difficulty giving up their schedule to someone else.

2. Use a contact form where people can propose some possible days and times to meet.

3. Allow someone to text you with possible meeting times. Yes, a website CAN allow people to text you. If
you want to try a demo, go here to my page at https://FlashForwardSites.com/... ... go to this page on
your phone, as we will be using the text messaging app in your phone. Once you are on the page, scroll
down and touch the button labeled "DEMO to send a text message". You will see that I can pre-fill a
message. A similar message could help guide people to ask for a quote, ask questions, or book an
appointment.

4. Add online chat functionality to your website. If you are online, you can work out a time to meet.
Additionally, you can ask or answer some preliminary questions.

Which one should you choose? This isn’t a case where you only implement one of them on your website.
You want ALL of them, so your visitor can choose which is better for them. Good employees receive a great
performance review. Maybe it’s annual review or one that happens every 6 months. For a website
performance results can be obtained must faster. A good place to look is in your data, in google analytics.
Or which ever tracking tools you prefer to use.

Make sure you watch your basic numbers:

• How many page views are happening each month and are you
trending upwards?

• Which pages or content are bringing the most page views? And
do more like them.

• Where is most of your traffic (visitors) coming from? Do more
with those top sites to bring even more traffic.

• Track and count how many bookings and actual sales result from
website visitors. Are your bookings and sales trending higher
every month?

All this data helps to prove your website is being a good employee. Your numbers will also reveal WHERE improvements can be made to grow more of whatever you are wanting from your website. So, for you… Is your website being a good employee? If not, what’s the next step - fire it or fix it? I am available to help, if you
don’t want to tackle this yourself. 

Reach out at David@FlashForwardSites.com