Is Your Website Nice or Effective?

by Willy Lim
(Co-Founder, NetProfitQuest)

Original article appears in September 2010 issue of SME & Entrepreneurship Magazine

The Internet has come a long way since my varsity days. I can remember the day in 1994 when I first got onto the internet and waited five minutes for "Mosaic" web browser (the grandfather of Netscape, Internet Explorer and Firefox) to load a website. A year later in 1995, two companies will forever transform the way business is to be done in the future and become the founding fathers of modern day e-commerce: Amazon and eBay.

Today, fast forward 15 years later, e-Commerce is common amongst many businesses including SMEs. However, despite many SMEs having their own e-commerce enabled websites and with many more jumping onto the bandwagon, more than 99% of all websites in the world have less than 20 visitors a day.

Ouch. Reality hurts. So what went wrong?

Doing Business Offline vs Doing Business Online

Let's start by bringing everyone to the same starting point by highlighting the similarities (and differences) between doing business offline and doing business online.

1. Offline, you have signage to give directions to the location of your shop. Online, you need search engine optimization so that people can find your website when they search for your products & services in your business location.

2. Offline, you have interior designers and contractors to renovate your retail shop. Online, you have web designers to design websites.

3. Offline, you have vendors to provide Point-Of-Sales system to handle customer transactions. Online, you have e-commerce integrators to install e-commerce payment gateways like Paypal to receive payments.

4. Offline, you get an advertising & marketing agency to promote and drive visitors to your shop. Online, you need e-marketing to drive visitors to your website.

Getting the Right Person to do the Job

With the above understanding of online and offline businesses, let me draw the following analogies to show you where the problem of SMEs trying to get online today is.

1. If you put your business in the hands of SEO Consultant, that's like asking the SIGNAGE CONTRACTOR to be in charge of Marketing.

2. If you put your business in the hands of Web Designer, that?s like asking the INTERIOR DESIGNER to be in charge of Marketing.

3. If you put your business in the hands of e-Commerce Integrator, that's like asking the POS SYSTEM VENDOR to be in charge of Marketing.

Now we can clearly see where the problem is. Not that the SEO consultant, Web Designer and e-Commerce Integrator are not important, but for the past 15 years of e-commerce equipping, SMEs have left out the most important part of doing business online: the job of getting visitors!

This is the job of the e-marketer, someone who specializes in getting visitors to your website, somewhat an online equivalent of a marketing agency. Most SME owners don?t realize this and that is why they end up with NICE-LOOKING websites that have no visitors and no business, simply because these websites are not EFFECTIVE in terms of marketing online (i.e. getting online visitors). It is NO WONDER so many e-Commerce websites have NO COMMERCE.

The Truth about Doing Business Online

The figure shows the modern marketing funnel.

1. Your potential customers search for you online (in Google or other online platforms like Facebook) by typing words that are related to your products or services.

2. They will then choose which search result to click on.

3. Next, they arrive on your website, check out whether information is useful and decide whether to leave an enquiry, buy online immediately or leave.

4. Lastly, your sales people contact the enquiry and close the sale, or the sale is processed online via e-commerce payment gateways.

Unless you are planning on giving out name cards with your website printed on it as the only way to get visitors to your website, it isn't hard to see that if your website has no visibility on Google (i.e. people can?t find you in Google), you will not get any visitors. No visitors implies no enquiries, and no enquiries implies no sales.

Worse still, when people search for your products and services, they find your competitors' offerings instead of yours. Not only will you lose potential customers, you will also lose branding and mindshare online because people will associate your range of products and services with your competitor's brand rather than your brand.

Getting your business online is a step-by-step process. A process that needs to be strategized, planned and crafted even before the website is built. A process that is not within the job scopes of the SEO Consultant, Web Designer & e-Commerce Integrator.

So the point to take away if you are an SME owner thinking of getting online is: stop using "NICE" to describe website and start asking how "EFFECTIVE" is the website. For all you know, an ugly site may get more visitors and business than a nice-looking site with lots of flash animations that has no visitors and no business. Take a look at Amazon.com or eBay.com, these are plain looking sites that are BILLION DOLLAR businesses. How NICE a website looks has little or nothing to do with its marketing EFFECTIVENESS online. I would choose to have an effective website over a nice looking one any day.