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Sales Versus Customer Oriented Websites
Should Generating Revenue From A Website Be The Prime Motivator?
A pure sales site has only one purpose... to generate as much revenue as possible at any cost. In other words, your experience--good or bad--is inconsequential to the ultimate goal of the site and may well sacrifice customer satisfaction to make a sale.
How many times have you gone back to buy from a website you've had a lousy experience with? My guess is not very often. I know I don't. How many times have you gone back to buy from a website you've had a great experience with? What was the difference between the two experiences? Do you think the website you had the great experience with was a customer oriented site? And, might it be the other website you had the bad experience with was a sales oriented website?
A business can't survive very long if it's prime motivator is purely focused on sales and revenue. Sure, it may last for a while, but not long-term.
As webmasters and marketers, we must strive to create a long-term business relationship between ourselves and our customers so that they will continue to buy from us for as long as they have a need or desire for our products or services.
No One Does It Better Than Amazon.com
Arguably, http://Amazon.com is one of the largest customer oriented and successful website businesses on the planet. They're proof that "build a customer oriented website and they will come." They go out of their way to personalize the shopping experience for every single person.
When I visit Amazon.com, I see a very different selection of products than Linda, my wife, sees when she goes shopping. They know what I've purchased in the past and understand my buying habits. They also understand that my buying habits are different than Linda's and are different than yours. So, they tailor the individual experience for each of us. It makes us feel like the site has been designed around our specific desires.
Amazon.com has gone to a tremendous amount of effort to individualize our experiences. Why? Customers are their prime motivator. Would it have been easier and cheaper to build a strictly sales oriented, sales motivated website? Sure. Would they be the most successful website on the planet if they had done that? Do I really need to answer that?
Customer Oriented, Customer Motivated Website
Okay, so you get the drift of where I'm going with this. You may not be out to kick Amazon.com from the top of the ladder, but the principles are applicable to any website whether you're selling one product or millions of products.
With that in mind, you've decided that your website is going to be customer oriented whereby customers are the prime motivator and your business will revolve around their satisfaction.
You already know from your past experiences that customers will go back to websites where their experiences have been positive. You also understand that the web's a finicky place and it's a "one strike and you're out" business environment. Therefore, you're going to develop your website using your own experiences as a customer as your guide.
What did or didn't you like about the websites you've done business with in the past? What brings you back to the ones you've had good experiences with time after time?
Give Your Customers What They Want
Customer oriented websites will win out over sales oriented sites every time and for the long haul. Develop your customer oriented website to ensure them a satisfying experience and they will tell their friends about you and so the word gets around. Pretty soon your site will be flooded with friends of friends of friends who will all become life-time customers. Lots of happy, satisfied and paying customers means a long-term, profitable and prosperous business. Enough said?
Author Bio:
John Wright is the co-founder and vice president of Your Site Solutions (http://www.YourSiteSolutions.net) and has many years in the Internet industry. John's experience covers website development, copy writing, deployment and marketing.
Your Site Solutions is a single source provider of e-commerce software, hosting, products and services to meet the needs of tomorrow's Internet businesses.
How To Choose A Website Designer
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Custom Website Design - 7 Steps to a More Professional Website
If you are trying to sell a product or service on your website, then it is important to make your site as professional as possible. You might think designing that your own website to look like a professional did so is a rather difficult proposition, however there are many tools online that will help you achieve professional looking design.
Differences between XP Icons and MAC Icons
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Having A User Friendly Website
Let's look at what your user wants to see at your website.
Hiring a Graphic Designer
You've come up with a great product. You've got the sales letter written for your website. Now you need the graphic design to complement your product and the text that describes it. Not being artistically inclined or adept at the technicalities of computer graphics, you decide you need some help.
Sell Yourself First...Your Key To More Sales
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Dos and Donts in Web Design - part 1 (design)
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Effective Website Design
In this era of ultra-sophisticated internet marketing and web design, there is no excuse for an e-business to suffer with an ineffective website. Whether your goal is to present a basic business website that briefly introduces and describes your company and product, or you endeavor to develop a fully-functioning cash-cow storefront, there is a wide array of design choices to cater to all of your needs. Your website should fit your business like a well-tailored Armani suit. It should reflect exactly who you are and at the same time, instill confidence in the potential buyer that your business is solid, stable and reliable.
Web-Safe Fonts for Your Site
Choosing the right typeface for your website copy is important, since it will affect the way your readers perceive your page (serious and formal, or friendly and casual). Aside from this, there are also important usability concerns. For example, some font types are more easily readable than others, and some are more widely available.
Browser Compatibility
Internet Explorer, created by microsoft has been the most popular web browser for many years. But the gap is shrinking with the release of Mozilla Firefox, by an open source community.
Design vs Content: Who is KING?
Well it is not Elvis, that's for sure.
14 Ways to Add Content to Your Web Site - Part 2
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How to Use Sliced Graphics to Layout Your Web Site
The problem with designing your site as a graphic, is that it would take too long to load. Your visitors would leave your site immediately and move to your competitors web site. How can you resolve this?
Why Do Images Disappear from a Webpage?
In learning webpage design, I encountered many problems that took lots of practice to resolve. Although, I was building web pages using Microsoft Frontpage on my home computer, I used to face lots of issues after uploading the webpage to my website.
10 Tips for Killer Website Design
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Bad Design Characteristics For A Website
Making a poorly designed website is one of the easiest things you can do as a webmaster! You barely need to try! If you want to run a successful high traffic website there are many different elements of design that you need to implement, and ones you need to avoid.
Flash Web Design - The Wave of the Future?
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Power of Squeeze Pages for Realtors
Squeeze pages are a very hot topic in the internet marketing scene. What a squeeze page is is a page that is built to get someone to take an action. You have a newsletter but visitors to your site are not subscribing to it enough for your liking so what you do is on each page of your site you offer some kind of freebie, lets say on your buyers page you can offer to send the kind of listings that the person is looking for (if your MLS offers the service this may be very very easy to do) or maybe on a page for sellers you could offer a free download of a "Make more money be properly preparing your home to sell".
One-Product Sales Sites: Avoid These Top Blunders
One product, one long web page: this kind of web site is sometimes called a sales letter site or mini-site, and it focuses on one and only one goal, as many sales of that one product as possible. With a one-product sales site, no distractions, no subsidiary goals, such as newsletter signups, are allowed to interfere with that goal. So let's look at some common mistakes and omissions for a sales letter site.
Leave Those Links Blue!
Don't mess with those links! When you're designing your site, you should leave your text links in their natural state--blue and underlined. We all want to be creative and not do the bland, expected, normal thing. We want to change our links to red, green, yellow, even black--anything but blue. And we have the urge to take off those underlines.