At some point, likely next year, these four companies will have a combined market capitalization of over $4 trillion dollars. To put that into perspective, only 3 countries have a higher GDP than that: the US, China, and Japan. Who cares that most people can’t recognize their office building? Well, I bet you can recognize these:
So what’s my point?
Having a nice office is important to the comfort and productivity of your employees. It is of no concern to your customers. Most of us visit these four iconic websites on a daily basis. I have never been, nor do I expect to ever visit, the HQs of either of these companies. I bet they are impressive. No matter what the building has, it would pale when compared to a website that can cause you to visit it every day. In the case of Facebook, adults spend 29.2 minutes each day on the site.
Traffic is not a vanity metric.
When is the last time you looked at your website traffic? There is no better measure of how important you are to customers, than how often they access your site. A better question might bewhy would a customer come to your website every month? A good target would be one visit per customer, per month. If you provide office printing technology, it would seem reasonable that at least one employee from each of your customers would need to order toner, request service, get a driver, and view new/additional products. Here are some metrics.
- If you have 1000 customers, you should target 1000 visits a month.
- Only count visits/sessions that last longer than 1 minute
- 1000 visitors will create 40-50 e-commerce transactions
- Each transaction will average over $500 in sales.
How do I know these numbers? I’ve built over 50 e-commerce websites. Every one of these companies also has a traditional face to face sales model. Every customer had an initial fear that e-commerce would steal business from their sales reps and erode sales.
There are quite a few more ways to increase traffic.
- Write a blog and email it to your customers and prospects.
- Create favorite lists for customers that enable them to buy common products (think: toner and ink!) with one click.
- The next time a customer asks for a price quote, send them a link to the quote on your site.
- Have your sales reps show customers your website’s e-commerce functionality and create special prices and incentives for them to start buying.
The next time you pay a headhunter to find a new sales rep, or pay for a spot at a local trade show, or, invest in a new head office, think about the four most powerful companies on earth. Nobody cares about their office space. They care about your website. Check outthese websites we’ve built for customers.
