We spend a lot of money making our websites look great. All the latest design trends, the right imagery, the coolest animations and other effects. We spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars on this. After all - it is the digital business card of your company, right? Wrong! Or to phrase it in a better way, that is only part of the story, a very small part! Imagine walking past a spectacular store front - you decide to take a look inside, and there are only photos of the products, with unhelpful generic descriptions. There is no sales person in the store to assist you. Nor is there a way to buy a product, or even register your interest. Now imagine this store is located off the main shopping area - so in order to get some foot traffic, the owner invests into advertisement. Would you run a store like this? Not for very long! Yet, when it comes to websites, this is what the majority of small business owners are sold is great business practice!
Is your website relevant to your customers, or does it just look good?
The question if your site is relevant depends on what your customers want to do on your site, and what you would like them to do. For example, if your customers want to educate themselves, and you wish them to buy - content that allows a purchase but does not inform is not relevant to your customer. If you only have content that is relevant to your customer, but not to you, then your website is a public service, and it does not enable your business.
Lead nurturing journeys are the secret sauce of relevance to you AND your customers
Customers visit your site many times before committing to a purchase - not only that, the overall average number of touch points before purchase is increasing - where it used to be seven touch points, now it is about 20 touch points before money is spent. Using Lead Magnets, and setting a journey on your website is a combination of your website technology and your marketing suite - Zoho One customers have this integration built in with Zoho Sites and Zoho MarketingHub - built to work together.
Capturing information
Something as simple as capturing contact information can be a cumbersome task. One of my earlier prospects was exceptionally pleased with a "contact us" form on the website that simply generated an email with the contact information. It only cost $10.000 to build that functionality (you could argue the ethics of selling such functionality at such price!). When you capture information on your site, you want it to go directly where it needs to be - either in your CRM leads, your helpdesk tickets, or your mailing list sign-up - with the appropriate workflow to boot! No pesky emails that just tell you to enter the data - simply find the data in your systems (with or without a notification that it is there - your choice), and the automated process kicks in (i.e. workflow to make a call, send an email, or have a more complex auto-responder configured) - automate to the limits of your comfort, not the limits of your website technology. Using Zoho One applications like CRM, Desk, and Campaigns, you can make effective use of your web visitor's efforts to leave their contact details.
Ultimate engagement - interact!
How do you get your customers to engage? Well, chat is one option. But you don't want to be monitoring your chat system every minute of every day. Outsourcing your chat is the next option - which will give you more coverage. Or, you could invest in a chatbot. Regardless of your chats being handled by an agent or a bot, you want to capture the right information to follow up. Zoho SalesIQ integrates seamlessly to Zoho Sites, and is able to integrate directly into Zoho CRM and/or Zoho Desk (for sales and support respectively).
Responsive and Secure
Responsive sites adapt themselves to the form factor of the device used by the visitor. In other words, it looks good on the desktop computer, laptop, tablet, and the mobile phone - and you do not need to do anything special for that. You design and build your site once (via very simple point and click interface), and Zoho sites will take care of the rest. Zoho Sites offers previews of your site in Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile mode - so there are no surprises when you publish your site.
As for security - there is no need to worry about WordPress plugins that may be a security risk (some from the start, others if unpatched). Zoho Sites is designed to be secure out of the box, and you do not need to rely on third party add-ons. Since Zoho also hosts your site built with Zoho Sites (yes, that is included in the Zoho One price), Zoho provides the SSL Certificate for you. That means your site will have the green lock symbol next to the address in Chrome or Firefox - it also means it does not get penalised by search engines or browsers for not being a secure site. What does this security mean? Technically it means that the communication between the browser and the web-server are encrypted - so your visitors can feel confident transacting on your website.
So, how easy is it to build a site?
Is it as easy as writing a document in your favourite word-processor? Not quite, but it is pretty close! First of all, you need ZERO, NO, NADA, NONE programming expience - don't speak HTML, JSCRIPT, VBSCRIPT, and other (totally un)familiar acronyms that spell doom - nope, just point your mouse, select an element from the toolbar, and start typing or loading an image. Drag elements across the page. Don't like the theme? Select a new one, and Zoho Sites will retain your content, but paint a new theme over it.
Start your Zoho One Trial today, and start building a functional, relevant website
Zoho Sites is part of Zoho One - not only that, so is Zoho CRM, Zoho SalesIQ, Zoho MarketingHub, Zoho Campaigns, and many more applications that are functional as stand-alone applications, but are also designed to work together. You can run your entire business with an integrated suite of products for less than $ 50 per month - and the integrations are working out of the box - you just turn on the application and see the magic happen. Click the link below to start your trial today!