The business world thrives online. This has been a reality for well over a decade now. Yet, there are still those who only set up the barest bones of a website when it comes to their business. You could be missing the opportunity to help along with consumers through every stage of the sales funnel if you were only willing to invest in your site and take it seriously. If you’re not sure just how to do that, here are a few of the features you should look more closely at.
The right steps to sell
Every page should make available a few things: a clear description of your business and a call to action to encourage your visitors to reach the next stage of the consumer lifecycle. You can go further, still, by making sure that you have landing pages for each of the products or services that you advertise off-site, too.
A blog
Helping your business succeed is about more than just selling your products and services, it’s about selling your expertise, too. Blogging is essential to business growth nowadays in a lot of ways. Firstly, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate that you do know what you’re talking about, to answer questions, and to solve problems that are relevant to your market. This can help more people find you and associate your business with solutions. What’s more, calls to action and recommendations of your services and products as the answer to the questions your blog posts can drive sales, too.
Responsive design
There is no excuse for having a business site that doesn’t look good on mobile devices, nowadays. There are just as many people using devices like smartphones and tablets to look up businesses as they do desktops or laptops. Responsive design allows you to make sure that your website provides a great user experience regardless of the device by adapting to the specifics of the device the user is using.
Online payment options
This might seem like it’s only relevant to e-commerce businesses, but you should consider whether or not offering your services online could help you more easily reach a much wider market. If the answer is a “yes” or even a “maybe” then you owe it to yourself to at least look closely at options like payment integrations for your site. Making your services and products that much more accessible could change the entire model of your business for the better.
On-site support
Your customer’s experience is only as good as their problems allow it to be. No matter how simple your site or its purpose, customers are going to run into issues and they are going to need help when they do. Tools like on-site live chat can help you respond much more quickly to those problems and to help your customer complete their journey satisfactorily.
Not every single business is going to need every one of these features. But you should consider carefully if yours does and, if it’s applicable, make sure that you’re not missing it.