Guides

Asset, Not Expense

Your website is an asset, not an expense. You’ve probably been thinking of it as an annoying but necessary marketing expense. But it’s more like your factory, assembly center, distribution center, or corporate office. It’s a revenue-generating asset that has its own measurable metrics of value. This guide will help you evaluate and attach a score to your website as a revenue-generating asset.

Scale Revenue

At the most fundamental level, your website should be a tool to help you scale revenue. It not only should help reduce costs of new customer acquisition and reduce costs of order fulfillment and support, but it should also help you steadily increase revenue over time.

Reduce Friction

Your website’s ability to positively affect revenue is based on its ability to reduce friction in the flow of revenue. It does this by reducing friction in as many of your business processes as possible. It should reduce sales friction. It should reduce customer service friction. It should reduce back-office process friction. It should reduce product education friction.

Measure, Maintain, Improve

Your website, as any other working asset, requires ongoing maintenance, support, and investment to achieve the above goals.

What is measured, improves. - Peter F. Drucker

As you seek to treat your website more as a revenue-generating asset than as a tedious marketing expense, you must first learn to score and evaluate its performance. Solspace offers a website scoring and assessment system to help you improve the value of this business-critical asset continually over time.

The Scoring Criteria

In. Through. Out.

At its essence, a website should bring customers into a digital experience with low friction. It should help them move through the digital experience with low friction. And it should help them complete their task and exit the website with low friction. In. Through. Out.

The Scoring Scale

Each scoring category below is graded on a 0-100 scale. Those scores are then averaged to get a total score for each of the in, through, and out categories as well as an overall score. Most scoring categories can be objectively scored. However, a few, for obvious reasons, require a subjective assessment component.

In: What A Website Can Do To Draw Customers In

There are of course many ways that a digital marketing team can drive traffic to a website. When I’m referring to the ‘in’ part of my paradigm I am focussing on the aspects of a website that support customers finding the site and being initially drawn into a digital experience.

Technical SEO

Does your site show up appropriately in Google searches where your products and services are relevant to the search? This is search engine optimization. Although there are many strategies to improve SEO, some shady and some legit, there are also objective strategies and measures of improving what we call technical SEO.

Technical SEO refers to the proper structuring of the HTML of a page as well as the proper structuring of a website’s content architecture to optimize other more subjective SEO efforts. Improving your website’s technical SEO ensures that Google will rank your website as highly in its algorithm as possible.

Technical SEO is objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Accessibility

For those among us with disabilities, is your website’s information and value still accessible? As Google ranks your website in its algorithm it factors in this question.

New legislation is being developed in parts of the U.S. as well as the E.U. to ensure that people with disabilities can access the Internet. There will be legal implications as well. Is your website ready for what’s coming?

Accessibility is objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Page Speed

One of the most all-around important factors in reducing friction on a website is improving page load speed. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, web pages should load within one second or less. Anything longer than one second risks creating friction and losing customers.

Page load speed is objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Mobile Friendly

More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website is not responsive to users visiting on different screen sizes, you are creating an important point of friction. Frameworks and techniques to render websites in a response manner are readily available to web designers and web developers. It is no longer challenging to achieve mobile responsiveness. It’s also essential in order to meet your customers where they are.

Mobile responsiveness is objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Scalability

Can your website scale with increased traffic? Can it handle a traffic spike? Is there a tipping point after which your website will no longer respond when under heavy load?

There is an array of readily available and inexpensive tools that you can bring to bear on supporting your website’s ability to scale. A professional web development team uses these tools all the time and has them ready to hand. There is no better example of website friction than a website that just does not load at all.

Scalability is objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service and we expand on it in our advanced assessment services.

Security

Why would someone actively choose to hack your website? Do any hackers really care about your company? Isn’t it a lot of effort for them?

These days hacking attempts and security vulnerability probing are easy and automated. Hackers unleash simple bots to explore the web for websites that have known security vulnerabilities. Why would they care? How can they make money from hacking your simple business website? Hackers love to take over a web server and use it to send email spam. They love to take over a server and use up its processing power for whatever they want to do. Some even like to take over a website and hold it for ransom.

The tools and best practices needed to prevent the vast majority of hacking attempts are readily available and easy to use by web professionals. Improving a website’s security directly reduces future friction in your business.

Scalability is objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service and we expand on it in our advanced assessment services.

Return Visitors

An important part of bringing customers ‘in’ to your website is giving them a reason to return. Your website can be a tremendous resource in reducing customer service friction. If your company offers support for the products and services it sells, a web-based support ticket system can be a great friction reducer. These systems also bring your customers back to your website and leverage it as an ongoing sales and marketing portal. Order tracking capabilities on a website are excellent friction reducers as you seek to serve your customers more and more efficiently. These too bring customers back to your world where they can be further educated about your offerings and capabilities.

The best customer is not a new customer, but one who has bought from you before.

The presence and effectiveness of customer web portals are objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service and we expand on it in our advanced assessment services.

Email

Email isn’t going anywhere. That’s because it’s an excellent tool for the right kinds of jobs. What better way to reduce friction for your customers and in your business processes than to make effective use of email as a marketing and customer service tool?

There are known best practices on websites for effectively capturing customer emails and saving these into a CRM or other email marketing tool. Your web developer will make sure that this core business tool is properly set up.

Effective email capture is objectively measurable. We include it as part of the first stage of our Website Assessment Service and we expand on it in our advanced assessment services.

Through: What A Website Can Do To Guide Customers Through A Digital Experience

Your web developer should constantly be bringing you new ideas and proven best practices on reducing the friction your customers experience moving through the digital experience you have created for them. Every time you meet, hopefully weekly, you and your web agency ask the question, “How can we reduce friction?” You then take meaningful, well-planned, disciplined steps to address that question.

Here are the core activities you can focus on in an ongoing manner.

Navigation

Does your website’s navigation nurture the sale? Does it increase or decrease the friction on your customer's understanding of how you help them and how they can get that help from you?

Many do not realize that effective website navigation operates on several levels. First, your navigation communicates much about your business and your positioning at a glance. Good site navigation does more to sell your business in a split second than a pithy well-worded summarizing phrase. Second, your site’s navigation should be educational. A good customer is a well-informed and educated customer. Your website’s navigation gives your customers the big picture overview of your business in an easily absorbable way. Third, good site navigation exposes the purchasable thing or things that your company offers. For example, if you manufacture a set of products, your top-level navigation better have ‘products’ as an item within the top three items.

Effective navigation is partially objective but partially subjective. It can be validated with a combination of the application of best practices and customer research. We include it as part of the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Trust Index

Websites do at least 25% of their work for you on the subconscious level. Your website does most of the first impression work of establishing trust (or failing to do so). We call this the trust index. Here are some of the website trust index questions:

Does your website look professional? How can anyone say what ‘professional’ design looks like? In the abstract, it’s a threatening problem to solve. But when you work with web design professionals, all of a sudden solving the problem becomes easy. Professional website design is low friction design in the sense that it communicates your company’s mastery and expertise at a subconscious level.

Is your website design current? Closely related to the idea of ‘professional’ design is the idea of ‘current’. Does your website look out of date? Does it look like you have neglected an important business asset for a while? Your customer is wondering what other aspects of your business you have also neglected.

This assessment of ‘current’ is a constantly moving target. We can’t protect any client from the reality that websites must be refreshed or redesigned at least every 3 years. The concept of what a professional and current website looks like shifts with trends and industry dynamics over time. Constantly updating, testing, and optimizing is just a reality for a website owner. Remember, an asset, not an expense.

Does your website look compatible with the price point your customers expect? This is part of building your trust index. Take a look at the difference between the websites for NetJets and easyJet. Both sites speak to their target customer and their budget expectations. When there is a mismatch in this relationship, friction is created in the form of confusion and cognitive dissonance.

Establishing a trust index is partially objective and partially subjective. It can be validated through best practices assessment. We include this in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Problem And Solution Fit

Does your site establish your positioning? Does it connect your solutions to your customer’s pain points? Fundamentally, among its many other functions, your website as a business asset tells your marketing story. Your marketing story is one where you identify your customer, the journey they are on, the challenges they are facing on their journey, and how your business is the guide to help them through their journey.

Establishing problem/solution fit is partially objective and partially subjective. It can be validated through best practices assessment. We include this in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Specification Exploration

Does your site allow customers to explore your products and configurations? How hard must your customer work to determine whether your widgets will fit into their manufacturing process?

Some websites provide customers only with PDF spec sheets. Spec sheets are an artifact of a previous era of sales in the industrial manufacturing space. Digitizing them and offering them as downloads from a website is better than offering nothing. But it is not that difficult on the modern web to provide your customers with a more interactive experience of exploring product configuration and fit.

Some of the best industrial manufacturing websites offer configurators that offload much of the repetitive work that sales teams currently handle. This reduces friction and streamlines the sales process.

Your level of specification exploration is partially objective and partially subjective. We include this in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Website Control And Access

Do you control your site? Do you have the keys?

You own a domain name that is the home of your website. Do you know who controls the DNS records for this domain? Are you in control? Do you control and own the hosting account for your website? Can you log in as an administrator and revoke permissions to users?

Are you being held hostage by your current or previous web developer or designer? If you need to quickly make a content change on the website, can you do it?

Website control and access are objectively measurable. We include this in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Is It Stressful To Make Website Changes?

Can you deploy new features and capabilities to your website safely and reliably or does your website break every time you touch it?

A modern tech stack maintained by a professional web developer will include a code repository like Github. It will also include staging, production, and development servers all isolated from one another. There will be a documented process to push new code to these environments and you will be able to review changes before they go live on production.

If your tech stack lacks any of the above, you’re suffering needlessly.

A modern tech stack will also include the capability to roll a website back to a previous state in the event of a failure at launch. You can also count on there being editorial workflow capabilities in such a modern tech stack.

Tech stack best practices are objectively measurable. We include this in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Up-To-Date Software?

A modern website will be made up of many different components, integrations, and dependencies. This is all software and it all gets versioned, patched, and improved over time. You might save money in the short term by neglecting software updates, but you create a larger long-term problem the longer you wait.

Software currency is objectively measurable and is included in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Unnecessary Complexity?

Your website is complex, but is it necessarily so? The more complex a website, the harder it is to maintain over time. Professional web developers have the discipline to revisit website architecture and keep things efficient and maintainable.

Website complexity is in part objectively measurable and in part subjectively measurable. This is included in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Documentation

A professional web developer is an experienced web developer. In their career, they will have taken over websites from others and they will have had the experience of wading into a system that is overly complex and wholly undocumented. The presence of system documentation is a signal of the overall health of your website and the professionalism with which it has been maintained.

Website complexity is objectively measurable. This assessment is included in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Error Capture

A complex system like a website will have error conditions. Bad things will happen. A professionally maintained website will have effective error logging to allow a web developer to troubleshoot and remediate ongoing issues.

Error capture is objectively measurable. This assessment is included in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Out: Does Your Website Effectively Capture Leads And Route Them Correctly?

You’ve done so much work to bring customers to your website. You put so much effort into making sure they could make it through your digital buying experience with the least possible friction. Now you need to close the deal. You need to effectively capture these incoming leads and route them into the right sales system to support your sales teams’ efforts.

Contact Form

Your contact form is absolutely critical. Remember, this is not a business expense. This is a critical revenue-generating asset. Neglecting your contact form is as bad as having no lights or rusty tools.

Your contact form or forms should be reliable. They should have spam prevention measures but always in service of low friction customer flow.

There are hundreds of ways that a contact form can silently fail. Unless you have monitoring measures in place, you may not realize that your contact form has gone offline or has developed a bug. So vigilance in this area is essential. A good web developer can help you mitigate risk in this area.

A good contact form strategy makes sure that these forms are contextual. The best forms are completely embedded in the flow of specific product discovery and configuration actions.

Make it easy for your customer to ask you for more information right when they have the impulse. Don’t make them work to contact you. Reduce that friction.

A good contact form strategy also includes inferences about what the customer was interested in leading up to their contact form submission. A simple capture of the web pages that your customer visited prior to submitting the form yields very useful information and conversation material for your sales team when they follow up with the customer.

Reliable and frictionless contact forms are objectively measurable. These are assessed in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Back Office Integrations

The more you integrate your website with your other back-office systems, the more you can reduce overall friction in your revenue pipeline. Establishing these useful integrations requires real web development effort and expertise, but the resulting business asset easily pays for itself.

CRM

Integrations with CRMs (Customer Relationship Managers) like Salesforce and HubSpot are the highest priority friction-reducing integrations. Your customers can interact with your website, navigate to pages of interest, submit a contact form, and have all that useful data instantly available in your CRM. Effective strategies include lead scoring and routing once a customer lands in the CRM.

Some CRM integrations are bidirectional. Not only will customer data flow into the CRM, but data from the CRM will flow into the website. In many cases, product and SKU inventory data will populate the website using the CRM as the source of truth. These bidirectional CRM integrations hold great potential to reduce business process friction.

ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning software is a category of digital tool that encompasses a broader scope than CRM. An ERP system can be involved in order fulfillment, customer management, accounting, inventory management, etc. Arguably, the category is conspicuously broad, but what matters is if you are using an ERP system, you can increase efficiencies and reduce friction by progressively integrating your ERP with your website.

Examples of useful ERP to website integrations include the creation of a customer portal to allow customers to see order fulfillment status. You could also tie your website into inventory stored in an ERP. You could integrate invoicing processes from our ERP into your website, streamlining how your customers review and pay their bills with you directly from your primary website.

The reliability of website integrations is objectively measurable. These are assessed in the second stage of our Website Assessment Service.

Ecommerce

The holy grail of reducing friction in the flow of revenue for your business is ecommerce. An effective ecommerce store is always on. Whenever your customers are ready to buy, they can. An effective ecommerce store guides customers to the solution to their problem and stays out of the way of them obtaining it.

Low-friction ecommerce often requires that you change your product and service offerings so that some or all of what you sell can more easily be sold in an ecommerce setting. This fact is the single biggest limiting factor for industrial manufacturers to adopt ecommerce as a revenue stream. Reducing friction for your customer often means aggressively confronting friction in your own business model. Full team commitment to streamlining revenue flow through ecommerce is difficult to achieve, but well worth the dividends.

One of the best things going for ecommerce is the fact that a business can adopt it gradually. Even if a business has to change what it sells and how it sells it, those changes can be contained to a subset of the full business offering. In fact, taking a progressive approach to adopting ecommerce is one of the most effective long-term ways to build up such a business asset.

Ecommerce friction is objectively measurable. This assessment is part of the second stage of the Website Assessment Service.