e-biz Blog for Small Business

Setting goals. Maybe you love it, maybe you hate it. The fact is that without setting certain targets to hit either personally or in business, you will never know if you’re making progress or not. You could be making money with your site but it may be under achieving.

How do I set a goal for my website?

First determine what your site does that brings your small business value. For example it’s easy to say “getting customers to buy something”. Of course if you have an e-commerce site that’s everyone’s top goal. But is that only goal that brings your business value? Not necessarily. For example, newsletter subscribers, is there some value worth tracking there? Sure is. Newsletter subscribers could become steady repeat customers. They may be potential customers that want to learn more about your company or service before they decide to purchase. So you want it to be extremely easy for customers to subscribe to your newsletter. As a small business owner you know the importance of customer leads and follow up.

So what are some goals you can set for your website?

Goals for your website

New customer sign ups

Customer Leads

Social Media activity – does your tweets bring traffic to the site?

Specials & Promotions

Customers sharing information to others

White Paper Downloads

Product Videos Viewed

Customer Reviews

The list goes on and on.

How can you track your goals?

Google Analytics makes it easy for tracking goals. You can define what a goal is and what the dollar value it brings to your business. You can also a path that a user would likely follow to complete a goal. This allows you to see clearly where customers drop off in the process.

So evaluate what value your website provides your small business. Set goals in Google Analytics and start tracking.

Technology moves so fast and it’s so easy to get caught up in the “having to get to market” approach without really thinking through exactly what you need the website to do or what impact the site might have on other areas of your business.

It’s just like building a home. You don’t just say to a builder “here is the land I purchased, build me house”. You first need design plans. So what do you do? You go to an architect. Again, you can just say to the architect “give me plans for a house”. They would need to know more than that.

Is a two story house or one story?
What is the best way to orient the house on the property for the best view?
Do you want 3 bedrooms or 5?

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered before they can start the design drawings.
The same is true with building a website or web application. Even though we may have other sites we can look at as examples, it’s not exactly what you need. Looking at a competitors site may provide ideas but it doesn’t give you the full depth of knowledge. You can’t really see how it works behind the scenes.

How does it store data for reporting?
How does it interact with other business processes?
How does it differ from our business process?

These questions really are unique to your business. So that is really why it’s important to invest the time in documenting detailed specifications of what you want so that can build the site to meet those requirements. Planning your website project is really an investment that will lead to future success.

It has become so easy to manage email marketing campaigns in the last few years with companies like Constant Contact and MailChimp providing a robust tool set. The challenge really becomes “ How do I build a list?” Both Constant Contact and MailChimp provide code that can be pasted into your site to capture subscribers. This is a must for any website. Many osCommerce clients forget that built into osCommerce is a option to indicate that you want to receive updates and newsletters. While this is a great option in and of itself, it becomes a potential problem when you don’t realize or investigate if customers have chosen this option. When a customer selects this option while creating or updating their account this information is not in any way connected to your email marketing account. So your email marketing account has so idea that John Smith now wants to receive your newsletter.

There are a couple of options to solve this problem. One, setting up an administrative procedure to allow you to export these customers into a .csv file that you can then import into your email marketing program. The second option is more of a seamless integration that allows your site to automatically, behind the scenes, add or remove customers from your list. Both MailChimp and Constant Contact provide an API to make this interaction possible. It’s certainly worth the investigation. You could possibly have hundreds of customers who have agreed to receive your email marketing just sitting there. Find those hidden subscribers!

Learn more about MailChimp Integration