How To Use Your Website To Make Your Company More Profitable – Part 1

If you own a business, your website is the single most powerful tool you have at your disposal to make your company more profitable. In this article, we will begin to explore specific ways you can use your site to reduce the amount of money going out and increase the amount coming in.

Regardless of the type of business you are in, our advice to our clients is the same: Make your website the center of your company. Some of our clients initially resist this concept; most do not even want a website, much less a change in the way they do business – until we explain why.

Efficiency Using Lean:

At Blue Sky Online we follow the lean production process pioneered by Toyota between 1948 and 1975. Its central principle is to reduce waste in every way possible. Toyota does not over-produce. According to the Toyota Production System, only one product should be produced for every one order. Mass production can be wasteful – excess products eat profits every moment they have to be manufactured, transported, stored, secured, cleaned and maintained.

Additionally, lean dictates that the product should be delivered to the customer in the most direct path possible. Any departments or bureaucracy that impede the delivery of the product to the end-customer should be eliminated. Toyota’s unprecedented success has led to the application of their philosophies across countless industries, and we are simply taking them online.

The End-User:

First, it is vital to identify your end-customer. In our business, for example, our clients (business owners) pay us to build their websites and manage their online business strategies. But in doing so, we are careful to remember our responsibility to serving our client’s customers. This approach helps us and our clients maintain a focus on what really matters – serving the needs of the end-user in the most direct and efficient way possible. We understand that our client’s success is determined by the experience their customers have with their services and products, and that this experience often begins on the internet.

So for your own business, first identify your end-user.  Second, list the 2-3 most common reasons your end-user may access your website. And third, make sure your online presence addresses these reasons and limits anything that does not.

If a customer is on your website and wants to know how to get to your location, how late you are open or whether you have a product in stock and they have to call you to get this information, you have created waste. In addition to wasting their time, you have an employee answering a question that can be answered on your website instead of helping a customer in the store. That scenario also assumes that the customer seeking the information took the time to contact you instead of just going to another site, which is actually much more probable.

Your products and services should include clear, accurate pricing, availability and a depictions whenever possible. If you own a clothing company, the print of the shirt should be displayed in a large graphic and on a model wearing the shirt. Next to the product description there should be a link explaining how your sizes fit, the materials used and cleaning instructions. Empower your customers to make the best purchasing decision by providing useful information and answering common, often redundant questions directly on your website.

Users should not only be able to see whether the product is in stock, but if it is available at the retail location closest to them. If it is out stock, they should be able to sign up for email and text messages notifying them when their item is back in stock. Instead of making your customers repeatedly call your store to check, imagine if they could sign up for notifications on your website and the day their item was back in stock, you called them. Using your site effectively can allow you to make one phone call to provide excellent customer service rather than fielding 4 from a frustrated customer – or worse, lose that customer to a competitor. The difference is all in how you use your site.

Your Site’s Functionality:

Your site can be configured to keep an accurate tally of your inventory by location, and can even send notifications about specified transactions. It’s all up to you! Keep yourself, your buyer, manufacturer and staff on the floor in sync and informed. Use your site to track a customer’s buying habits, overall sales trends, price points and then coordinate your marketing efforts and manufacturing orders.

Have your developer set up the functionality needed to allow users to recommend products to friends. Configure your site so that if a product is emailed to an email address and then an account is created using that email address, the two accounts, the referring account and the new account will be linked as friends. Reward the referring account and automatically send an email to the new account welcoming them.

In the store, encourage your customers to visit your website by offering exclusive items, information and discounts on your website. Again, your goal is to create a central location for your business online. Use technology to oversee your entire business and interact with your customers in a way you cannot in person.

Communication:

The effectiveness in which you communicate, both with your customers and with your employees will greatly determine how profitable your company is. Communication is the key to great customer service and a cohesive team. Have your programmer build a password-protected section of your site for employees where they can find information about changes in products or services, their schedules, company holidays, incentives and so on. The technology a website can employ lends itself to the management of information, whether it’s consolidating, documenting, sharing, searching or updating it.

Create a system where employees check into the website for up to date information and use it to communicate with one another and log anything of significance. Once they are part of the process and trust that they can rely on one centralized source to provide them with tools to do their jobs better, they will use your system and the benefit it has to the customer will only intensify.

An effective website requires a project manager who understands your business and your goals and can coordinate with a team of designers, developers and Internet marketers on your behalf. But all of their advice is given in vain if you do not understand the potential your site possesses even if it only conceptual.

Our hope is that this publication helps to spur the imagination about the different functions a website can perform. We welcome any questions you may have and now offer a report that identifies technology you can take advantage of to make your business more efficient through your website. Please contact us for more information.

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