The main sign of a successful business website

What is the main purpose of any business? A business can have a beautiful mission statement talking about social responsibility, serving customers, protecting environment, empowering employees, and so on. And it may all be true. However, the primary purpose of any business is to generate revenue.

A business website is an extension of a business,  a business investment, an important marketing tool, and as such it should not only pay for itself, it should generate additional revenue for the business. The higher the website’s ROI (return-on-investment), the more successful it is.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that a website has to literally sell something. There are many ways for a website to generate revenue. For example the website can have an attractive presentation or an irresistible offer to entice a potential customer to become a patron of the business. But in any case the website should be the source of additional revenue for the business.

A business website that doesn’t generate additional revenue for the business is a waste of money and efforts.

Additional metrics of a successful website

There are also  additional metrics that equally apply to any successful website – not just the business one:

1. Doesn’t matter how simple or complex it is, a successful website looks attractive and professional. That is, it doesn’t look like it was thrown together by a middle-school student who just learned some HTML.
2. A successful website is easy to use, with intuitive navigation and clear structure. If a visitor gets lost on a website and wonders “How do I get to… ?”, it’s a bad sign.
3. A successful website loads quickly, so its visitors don’t have a chance to get impatient and move onto another website.
4. Texts on a successful website are clearly readable without straining one’s eyes and easily scrollable. At times it seems as if some websites were designed with eagles in mind instead of humans. Why else would they have texts formatted with cute tiny fonts?
5. And finally, a successful website looks correctly in all popular browsers and doesn’t have any broken things on it: links lead to appropriate destinations, videos play, pictures show, menus work, HTML is free of errors, and plugins/scripts operate as intended.

With CMS / CRM you have 2 different options – web based systems and software that runs on your computer.

The web-based systems are rather comprehensive and oriented toward sales force, marketing and customer support teams, and are usually a groupware. They are a good choice if you’d like to gather, synchronize and analyze team efforts and data in one central location.

But the web-based systems may be unnecessarily bulky and complex if you’re just looking for some notes on your customers, and maybe also order tracking and invoicing – all done by a one-person-team. In this case you might be better off with a less feature-rich but easier to operate software for your computer.

There are plenty of choices for both types of software — free as well as commercial ones. But if you’re just starting with CMS / CRM, I would suggest you to try one or two of the free options and then decide you you want or need to upgrade to a paid one.

Well-rated free CMS / CRM software:

• E-Z Contact Book – the easiest one to use, very intuitive
  
• Open Contacts – has more features, but less intuitive
  
• Vtiger – feature-rich, is a groupware and is as comprehensive as web-based systems. If all you need is easy-to-use contact management, you would be better off using one of the other choices.

Web-based well-rated free CRM’s:

• FreeCRM
• ZohoCRM
• SalesPush

For example, it could be an e-mail address where you receive your professional/business newsletters or you can use it as a registration e-mail for professional or business-related forums, blogs, social networks, conferences. You can also give this e-mail address to your suppliers.

It’s not Ok to post this e-mail on your business website, print it on your business cards, brochures, other marketing materials or give it to your customers and investors at your first meeting because:

1. It doesn’t look professional. At this point it doesn’t really matter whether you’re using free e-mail service or your ISP as your primary contact. Printed on your business card endlessmarketing@comcast.com looks just as bad as endlessmarketing@hotmail.com.
2. Con-men and spammers use free e-mail services to do their bad deeds. A business using a free e-mail address doesn’t look trustworthy.

Instead you should purchase a domain name for your business, if you don’t have one already, and create an e-mail address at that domain.

For example, contact@endlessmarketing.com is a good e-mail address for a marketing company or a marketing professional. But mark.bernel@endlessmarketing.com would look even better on the Mark Bernel’ s business cards.

One exception to the above rule of not using free e-mail addresses as your primary business e-mail might be a Gmail address. Computer and Internet-savvy professionals tend to love and use Gmail because it packed with handy features. Also, Gmail accounts are connected to many Google tools that webmasters and businesses use (such as Google Analytics, AdSense, Google Apps, etc). On the other hand, spammers and con-men don’t use Gmail because to register an account there they would need to give away their cell phone# – a clear disadvantage for those who try to stay under the radar.

Still, if you expect your audience to be on a conservative side, you should probably avoid giving them your Gmail address as the primary business address and instead use an email at your own domain as your business contact.