When setting up a business, you have a lot to think about. How are you going to market your services? Who will buy your products? How will you get enough money together to start hiring people? These are all critical questions.
But when it comes to your ability to communicate with the rest of the world, your website is critical. It’s like your digital storefront – the thing you need to attract users and convert them.
Modern websites need more than pretty page designs. They also require helpful features that provide customers with the experiences they want.
But this then begs the question: what features should your website have?
Read on to find out more.
CRM Integration
Integrating your CRM with your website sounds like a hassle – and it is. But it’s also totally worth it.
The reason for this is simple: when you integrate the two, you can better serve the needs of customers and save on administration.
Imagine the following scenario. Suppose a user arrives at your site, fills out your contact form, and sends you a question. Regular businesses don’t have any CRM integration, so the email correspondence gets lost under a mountain of other communications. But when you connect it to your CRM, you suddenly have way more leverage. You now know the user’s name and email address. And you can use this data to market to them, even if they contacted you to complain.
Simple ECommerce Functionality
Because implementing e-commerce functionality is now so easy, many companies are including it on their sites as standard, even if they aren’t online retailers. You see this all the time. Magazines will often have a “shop” section where you can buy subscriptions, brand-related items, and even entire courses. And accounting practices will offer books, stationery, and branded calculators for sale, just in case you happen to be interested.
Chat Features
Sometimes, your site can confuse users a little. That’s why it helps to implement chat features, allowing them to ask questions as they browse your site.
Let’s say, for instance, you run a software company and you have a page explaining your new product. Some users will understand the features immediately, without requiring any additional information. But, unfortunately, many will not. And these are precisely the people that chat features benefit. Users can ask questions when they get stuck and find out more about what you actually offer.
Information regarding chat integration is easy to find if you know where to look. And with the right tools, it’s also unbelievably simple to set up. Most of the time, it just means cutting and pasting some code into your website builder or downloading a plug-in.
Media Library Folders
Most brands, especially those in the knowledge industry, offer their audiences helpful content. Usually, this takes the form of videos or blogs. But it can also be white papers, ebooks, and infographics.
Knowing where everything is, however, can be a challenge. Your marketing team can often get buried under the mountain of content that you create, making it hard to find everything.
Using media library folders, however, is a great way to declutter and sort everything out. These tidy away everything into neat little folders within your media library, allowing you to sort and organize your content much more easily. You simply tag your content with labels and your media library will do the rest for you. Tidying it up means fewer headaches and less time spent on admin.
Cloud-Backups
The internet is a dangerous place for modern brands. While the opportunities to market to new audiences are tremendous, the risk of hacking is high. Every year, brands spend hundreds of millions of dollars paying ransom to hackers to regain access to their site data.
The solution here is to use secure off-site cloud backups. These automatically store all of your site data on third-party servers, allowing you to access it if your primary servers go down for any reason.
Remember, disaster can strike at any time. Yes, hackers are a threat, but there are many other causes of data loss. These include:
- Local server failures
- Miscommunication between team members
- Downtime and errors
Having a backup protects against these scenarios and helps you keep your uptime high.
Headers And Footers
Controlling headers and footers isn’t the easiest task in the world. Usually, your website builder’s theme sets them, only allowing you to customize them in minor ways (such as changing the color or font).
However, sometimes businesses need to customize their headers and footers. For instance, you might want to add your email address and telephone number above your navigation bar to allow people to get in touch with you instantly. The trick here is to use a theme, like Divi, that allows you to make whatever changes you like. When you have 100 percent control, you’re able to build far more compelling sales funnels and homepages.
AMP
AMP is a technology that allows you to improve your SEO by leaps and bound – extremely helpful for struggling startups. AMP just stands for accelerated mobile pages and is a set of instructions Google wants webmasters to implement to improve page loading speed. The idea is to create pages minimalistically, only including features that will directly benefit users.
Implementing AMP can produce some wildly effective results. You can improve impressions and clicks on your site. And because your site is loading faster, Google is more inclined to push it up the rankings. According to Search Engine Journal, for instance, AMP not only improves ranking but also gives organic search results in their own news carousel, increasing SERPs real estate. So you can attract more clicks as well.
Wrapping Up
In light of the above discussion, startups need to recognize that their websites are their primary tools for communicating with customers. For that reason, they need to pack in as many helpful features as possible, while eliminating anything unnecessary. In practice, this means integrating e-commerce functionality, adding in-browser chat options, and improving website speed. Only then will customers want to be loyal.
