The Five Cornerstones of Successful Websites

There are five critical elements every website must have to get results. We call them the Five Cornerstones of a Successful Website. If your website is missing any one of these, then it is significantly under performing. Go ahead...test your website and see how it scores.

The five:

1. Brand - Brand is not about having a cool logo and memorable tagline or even a jingle (you don't see many jingles on the web). When LevelTen talks brand, we mean the Total Customer Experience. Graphics are an important part, particularly graphics that are emotionally targeted to the personalities of your core audience. The Total Customer Experience, however, is much more; usability, accessibility, site architecture, content, tone, and multimedia all play a role in connecting your visitors to what they need, in the way that they want to consume it. It is also important to keep in mind that your online brand is not just your website but every web page that links to you or talks about you. Expand The Brand!
2. Traffic - Marketers have said for decades that it is not just enough to build a better mouse trap, you have to market your mouse trap. Despite this age old adage, the vast majority of website owners ignore it. A very small percentage of websites are proactive about driving traffic to their site. The search engines are the greatest direct marketing mechanism ever devised - they bring you customers eager to buy very late in the buying cycle. But don't just stop with the search engines. There are scores of other highly effective ways to generate targeted customers. If you are not making maximum use of all available online marketing channels you are missing out on valuable visitors.
3. Conversion - Visitors are nice, but customers pay the bills. Conversion is the act of turning a visitor into a customer. Do you have defined conversion paths in your site, such as a call to action, online purchasing, contact forms, etc? Salespeople are taught to ask for the sale. While it may sound simple, many sites fail to properly ask for the conversion. Don't repeat their mistake.
4. Retention - If you are in sales or marketing, then you have undoubtedly heard a statistic something like you are five times more likely to get a sale from a repeat customer than a new one.It makes perfect sense; you asked for the sale and got a positive response, so why not ask again and again and again? Customer touch programs, regularly reaching out and communicating with a database of customers and potentials customers, can be immensely powerful. He who has the biggest database (and uses it wisely) wins.
5. Process - The goal here is efficiency. It is great to have a website that sells, but maximizing efficiency is the key to maximizing profits. The web has unrivaled power to make your company more efficient from online ordering and customer service automation to knowledge management and business process improvement. Make sure your site is doing everything possible to not just increase revenue but maximize bottom line profitability.

So how did your site score? Take heart if it didn't do all that well; precious few websites excel at all the cornerstones. Now that you know them, the competition will be easier to dominate. I'll bet a LevelTen account manager would be happy to talk to you about some enhancements for your site, 214-887-8586. (See -- you have to ask for the sale.)