Building Websites That Return Your Investment

- October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

  • Why some websites won’t return your investment
  • What a good-looking website can and can’t do
  • The 5 C’s for building productive websites

One of the most common issues I hear from clients is that they built a website but aren’t getting any return on their investment.  The complaint is the same from clients who spent a small fortune at an ad agency to ones who tried to cut a few corners: no ROI.

The problem is so pervasive that many businesses not doing e-commerce think of websites purely as cost centers or online brochures and not as a steady source of leads and revenue.  Companies using this type of conventional wisdom are leaving money on the table.

Why Some Websites Won’t Return Your Investment

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of designing and building of dozens of web ventures, from pioneering online communities at corporations like Oracle and creating interfaces for startups acquired for nine figures, to helping small business owners in Silicon Valley grow their businesses in the face of larger and more established competition.

The majority have one thing in common: the principals funding the site focus on how they want the website to look.

What a Good-Looking Website Can and Can’t Do

It’s natural to focus on the look-and-feel.  People identify your website with your company.  And just like wearing a suit to a job interview is better than wearing sweats and sneakers, a good-looking site will increase your initial credibility with your audience.  But the suit doesn’t earn you the job.

In the same vein, most websites fail to return your investment for one of three reasons:

  1. They aren’t easily found on search engines. According to Nielsen (the same folks who do TV ratings), 70% of consumers use search engines to find local businesses.  The number is 85.3% for B2B purchasers according to Enquiro Research. Unfortunately, some of the techniques used to create great-looking websites actually confuse search engines and require professional review or modification so that the site reaches its highest potential search engine rank.
  2. They don’t encourage immediate action. Most of my clients want and appreciate a good-looking website, but they also want a web presence that helps them achieve their business goals, turning visitors into leads and leads into customers.  This requires immediate calls-to-action that purely artistic sites often don’t incorporate.
  3. They don’t connect strongly enough for visitors to refer the site to their friends and colleagues. From the research above, 54% said they refer the site they found to a friend.  Because there is so much competition for attention, it isn’t enough to get people to visit.  In order to be that referral, your site needs to be compelling enough for someone to make the effort.

The 5 C’s for Building Productive Websites

What’s important to remember is that if you want your website to have a measurable ROI, it has to serve a business purpose beyond branding.  For return on investment, your website’s job is to generate leads and increase your revenue, and there are five imperatives for accomplishing this:

  1. Create. People visit websites because they are looking for content: in our case, information about the products or services that they need.  Your website content needs to be created in a way that helps visitors with their purchasing decisions and ensures search engines will index it for others to find as well.
  2. Compel. When people read the content created for your site, the next step is to compel them to take action.  That action might be signing up for a newsletter, making a phone call, or buying a product.  Whatever it is, the action has to provide value for both your business and the reader.
  3. Collect. One of the most important results of the action you compelled the reader to take is to collect their contact info and their permission to use it.  That way, your call-to-action generates a lead you can follow-up with.  It might be beneficial to collect more information about them and their preferences, but the more information you try to collect, the less likely people are to take action.
  4. Count. It’s critical to know what’s working and what isn’t.  By counting your successes and carefully choosing metrics that accurately measure your success, you can tell which programs are working and which ones need improvement.
  5. Change. Being willing to adapt to changing market conditions will allow your company to stay at least one step ahead of the competition — and using the metrics above, you’ll know which way the wind is blowing.  Designing your website to be adaptable will give you the ability to quickly reposition existing products and services, plus offer new ones that better serve the marketplace.

By using these 5 C’s for building productive websites and understanding the limitations of traditional graphics-based website design, you’ll have a strong foundation for growing your business and generating ROI multiples from your web presence.

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