Some people rightly think of their website as their online office, but in fact your website can be even smarter than that: it can be your best negotiator, or your employee of the month!
Like all negotiators, your website needs to be responsive and impressive, and must develop a meaningful rapport with potential vendors, landlords or house-hunters by managing them well. This means responding appropriately to what a visitor does as they move around your website, understanding their actions and building up a profile of them that you can use later when speaking to them directly.
A well designed website with powerful functionality can help you achieve this:
- It encourages registration throughout the website in ways that aren’t intrusive, and always appear helpful
- It reflects your branch personality through staff profiles and allows the staff characters to shine through, including integrating your social media profiles
- It asks people to register with you after sending an enquiry
- It asks visitors whether they’d like a search alert, after they send an initial enquiry, so you can proactively communicate with them, and always uses appropriate wording to encourage sign-ups
- It then keeps in touch with them with an automatic email alert system
- It creates good impressions with courteous messages at all times, like “thank you”, and suggesting sensible next steps in the user’s pathway around the site
- It suggests similar properties that may be of interest, based on a growing understanding of the site visitor
- It prompts visitors to tell you if they’d like a viewing, for example with response forms on the property pages, to improve conversion
As your website is often the first contact point that many potential new vendors or landlords will ever have with you, it’s crucial that your website works to support your business in a consistent, courteous and proactive way – just like your best negotiator!
