You Need These Features on Your Small Business’s Website

A good website is an invaluable tool for today’s small businesses. Your website helps potential customers learn about you and allows you to reach a wider audience than you would with just your brick-and-mortar locations.

For it to be truly effective, your website should have more than just a landing page with a few photos and basic contact information. If you want to elevate your site for maximum impact, these are the features you need to have.

Chat Functions

Many potential customers looking up your business online are likely doing so to learn more about your business before they decide to visit it. Maybe they’re curious about your hours of operation, the services you provide, or what kinds of products you stock. And while they may be able to find the answers to most of these questions on your site, there’s always a possibility that they have more specific questions they need to be answered. 

Including a live chat widget on your site is a great way to help customers get the answers they need. Chat support makes it easy for potential customers to reach out and get immediate answers to any lingering questions they have for your business.

It’s a better solution than e-mail, which can make customers feel like they’re waiting a long time for an answer – time they may use to take their business elsewhere. It’s also a great way to create a personal connection between you and a customer, especially in an age when many people feel uncomfortable talking on the phone and are more likely to prefer using a text-based method of communication. 

If you don’t have the staff on hand to manage live chat in-house, look into a business that offers live chat support. They can help you set up chat windows on your business’s site and provide knowledgeable staff to answer your customers’ questions when your attention is needed for other aspects of your business.

Online Ordering

If your business offers products, having a well-built online ordering system can help significantly increase your profits by allowing busy customers to shop more efficiently at your business.

If you decide to add it to your website, you’ll want to have appropriate stock tracking software; you don’t want to allow customers to place orders that you can’t fulfill. Be sure to offer solutions like store pick-up or delivery, and look into contact methods like order tracking portals and SMS communications that let customers know when their orders are ready for pick-up or have been shipped.

Online Reservations

If your business is service-based rather than product-based, online reservation systems help your potential customers plan for their visit to fit their schedules and guarantee that they receive the service they’re expecting. 

Just like product-based businesses need stock tracking capability to support online ordering, you’ll need to be able to accurately track availability for appointments or reservations to avoid double-bookings that could leave a potential customer with a bad impression.

Allowing customers to automatically add details of their reservation like time, location, and contact information for your business to their online calendars is a great additional feature for any online reservation system.

Analytical Tools

While most features on your website are there to benefit your business’s customers, there is one feature, or rather a collection of features, that serves more to benefit you. These features can help you glean insights into who those customers are, what they’re interested in, and ways you can adjust your business to best meet your customers’ needs 

Website analytical tools help turn visits to your website into useful data, like breakdowns of where people looking at your site are located, how many visits your site is receiving every day, how many of those are unique visits versus repeat visits from the same person, which pages on your site are getting the most attention, and what kind of device visitors are accessing your site from.

Understanding how people are interacting with your site when they’re visiting it can help you make decisions about where to make improvements and focus content. For example, if you find that you’re receiving mostly repeat visitors rather than new ones, it may be time to focus on a marketing push to bring in a wider audience. 

Your website is one of your business’s most important tools for generating and keeping customers. Make sure it’s doing all it can for you by adding features to maximize its effectiveness.