Archive for April 16th, 2009
Your Website is Your Lobby
If you had 500 potential customers walking into your place of business everyday, wouldn’t you make sure it had everything they needed? You would have fresh coffee, a warm welcome, new magazines, a water cooler, and complimentary products.
Your website is the new lobby and your potential customers are there. Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exists. Make your online experience an enjoyable one, just like you would in-person.
5 Ways to make your website more “lobby-like”:
1) Mention your hours of operation. Sounds silly but I have gone to websites with no hours of operation.
2) Give a reason for your customers to come back. This could be an online appointment scheduling system or offering monthly “web” specials. Check out Giftango, they have an easy-to-use online gift certificate system. (www.giftango.com) Let customers spend money even when you are closed.
3) Capture your web visitors’ email addresses for future marketing initiatives. Perhaps you send them web only promotions.
4) Update your site. No one wants to look at the same content over and over again. Or even worse, outdated content.
5) Drive traffic to your website through radio ads, message machine, window art and business cards. Customers are more likely to take a look at your website and tell their friends about it than drive across the city to check it out.
Some of you may have all the above points checked off. If that is the case you might want to consider integrating social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and even YouTube. The best part is these tools are free. Over 50% of Saskatoon’s population is on Facebook. With those numbers you can’t fight the Internet. And in 2008, over $23 billion went towards online advertising. Think about implementing google ad words and use keywords such as Saskatoon Massage Therapist.
Make it easy and friendly for your customers to connect with you, on and off line.
Katherine Regnier
CEO – Founder – 24hrAssistant
Online Appointment Scheduling
Twitter: 24hrAssistant
Facebook: 24hrAssistant
Web: www.24hrAssistant.com
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