Introduction
You’ve been pining over a new electric skateboard, and decide it’s time to pull the trigger and buy one. You get it home and you’re instantly in love. You’re dreaming of all the ways it’s going to bring you happiness.
Then life goes on. You’re working overtime, you’re tired, time-poor, and overcommitted. Suddenly, your shiny new toy is under the bed, collecting dust. What happened?
You were supposed to be cruising the streets, exploring new locations, and creating fantastic experiences with the wind flowing gloriously through your hair, happy and free. Instead, your latest purchase is generating limited to no return on your investment (ROI) of a better life.
This can also happen with your new business website. You’ve invested your time and money into a stunning site, with so much potential to directly affect your company’s revenue and growth. But if you aren’t using that website to your advantage, you might not get the ROI you deserve.
And given that great websites are considerably more expensive than electric skateboards, it’s important to get the most from your site. The difference between one that looks nice, and one that looks nice, and takes advantage of every integration and functionality to drive conversions and sales, could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars’ difference to your business.
In this article, we talk specifically about one of the most popular website platforms – WordPress. We cover why it’s one of your best choices to actively attract, nurture, and convert website visitors into customers.
We will uncover exactly why WordPress is perfect for many businesses, and how to use it to maximise your ROI and directly contribute to your bottom-line.
If you’re ready to improve the performance of your WordPress website and increase your leads and sales, keep reading.
WordPress is a fantastic platform that can truly elevate how your business presents itself and interacts with potential customers, but it needs to be set up to maximise this. This is when partnering with a specialist WordPress web design agency can make a world of difference. Read exactly how we can help build you an easy-to-manage, stunning website designed to deliver positive ROI here.
What’s The Problem?
If your website is not driving business growth, it is likely due to one of these key reasons:
- Choosing an inferior website content management system (CMS).
- Not using your WordPress website to its full potential.
Problems from choosing an inferior CMS
There are many different platforms you can use to design and develop websites. Like everything in life, there are good ones, and bad ones. While there are exceptions for specific companies and their objectives, WordPress is globally recognised as one of the best website content management systems to select. If you don’t choose WordPress, your problems can include:
- limited customisation, which can hamper conversions and brand perception
- reduced SEO abilities, which impact your ability to rank highly in search engines for target keywords, giving up valuable market share and revenue to your competitors
- fewer integrations with third-party systems, such as Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) and email marketing platforms, meaning increased time and expense in manual actions.
While these may not appear to be your primary concern at first, as your business grows, they may stop it from reaching its full potential. You only option is to spend considerable money either developing a new website, or hacking ineffective changes to your current website.
Choosing WordPress allows you to start on the right foot. In most cases, it suits your initial requirements, and can grow as your business does.
Problems from not using WordPress to its maximum potential
If you do have a WordPress website that you aren’t using to its full potential, it will reduce your ROI. You will be getting less conversions from the website, compared with the investment you’ve made. You will also be losing the opportunities that come from a website that could be generating you more traffic, more leads, more sales, and more revenue.
Why does it matter?
Choosing the right CMS is more crucial than you think, particularly if you are focusing on growth and success. Your CMS is the foundation of your website and, thus, your online presence.
The design and content pushes visitors through your buying funnel to take action with your brand. While, in the back-end, it integrates with other sales, marketing, and business systems to undertake more sophisticated and automated lead-nurturing activities.
Choosing the wrong CMS can have drastic consequences. It can negatively affect your website’s ability to rank organically in search engines for key terms, as well as limit the ability to improve user experience and your overall conversion rate. All this leads to an underperforming website, and visitors leaving your site before they become customers.
What’s the solution?
The solution is twofold:
- Choose WordPress.
- Choose the right WordPress agency to maximise your website’s potential.
How To Use WordPress To Deliver Positive ROI
There are a number of reasons that WordPress is the #1 CMS for companies.
Below we’ve outlined the 8 key benefits and how to use them to directly improve your ROI, bottom-line, and ultimately generate the online success you desire.
1. It’s The Most Widely Used CMS So Take Advantage Of Its Popularity
Just because others are doing something, it doesn’t always mean you have to do it or that it is right for you. There are many reasons why over 455 million business owners currently have websites powered by WordPress.
In fact, WordPress makes up over 60% of the total CMSs available – more than all other platforms combined.
You can use this popularity to your advantage. For starters, if you get in any technical difficulties, you probably won’t be the first person to encounter that problem.
This means you’re not sinking time and money into pioneering a new CMS platform. WordPress’s dedicated support groups and developers are readily available both online and locally. You’ll never be left in the dark for long.
Every minute your website is broken, and you need to spend time and money fixing it or finding an alternative solution, could mean losing both sales and the confidence of potential buyers.
What this means for your business: WordPress reduces lost profit and time because there are solutions to any website problem.
2. Extended Functionality Means More Chances to Generate Revenue
When people think of WordPress and its functionality, they think plugins, plugins and more plugins.
You can compare plugins to smartphone apps that increase the functionality your phone.
The same way there’s an app for everything, there’s essentially a plugin for everything.
- Managing contact forms
- Integrating forms and shopping carts with CRMs and other online marketing platforms
- Creating club memberships and online portals
- Helping keep your website secure
- Blocking spam
- Improving SEO
- Expanding eCommerce functionalities, including upsells, cross-sells, and promotions
- Improving customer experience through live chats and chatbots
And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. With over 57,000 free plugins, and countless paid ones, you will find the right plugin to improve your website’s performance, and connect it with other business functions, such as marketing, sales, finance, and more.
This extended functionality is a huge win for your bottom-line and ROI. You devote less time and money investigating unique solutions for your website. While you may need to pay for a premium version of a plugin, it will cost you a lot less over your website’s lifetime than if you try and create that same functionality from scratch.
What this means for your business: WordPress gives you more ways to generate revenue, while saving you time and money.
3. A Focus On Security Means Less Financial Liabilities
No website is entirely immune from security vulnerability. WordPress, however, gives you a host of options to lock down your site.
Like all CMS platforms, WordPress has been accused of security faults in the past. But with the right systems and processes in place, it’s relatively simple to make your site inherently safe. Scheduling regular backups and updating your plugins, coupled with good system administration and credential management, will all help keep hackers at bay.
Website security is paramount to the daily operations of your business. If you don’t prioritise it, you may see devastating effects on your bottom-line. Security breaches can heavily damage your brand and customer loyalty. Even smaller issues can cause problems.
- Current or potential customers may be unwilling to visit or take action on your site if they believe their security will be jeopardised
- Hackers can access your website code and sneakily insert hundreds of links to spammy and suspicious websites, often without you being able to see this. Google sees your website as participating in untrustworthy behaviour and punishes you by banishing you from search engines. And if nobody can find you on Google, how can they become a paying customer?
- If your site has key conversion points compromised, or goes down completely due to a hack, it constrains your site’s ability to process contact form submissions or customer orders – losing you revenue.
Worst-case you can also open yourself up to legal ramifications. If user data is exposed, and you’re held liable, you may end up having to pay excessive settlements for not adhering to secure website practices.
What this means for your business: WordPress security helps you avoid costly financial liabilities and missed revenue.
4. Easily Customisable And User-Friendly, Reducing External Management Costs
WordPress is an open-source platform. Any developer should be able to use, change, and study the code of your website without having to create it from scratch. The open-source nature of WordPress gives you endless opportunities for your site as a developer can build and modify it freely.
This is particularly beneficial when your brand direction or marketing changes. You can easily refresh your site without having to rebuild everything. From a bottom-line standpoint, it also means you can make bigger changes at a cost-effective price.
Being able to easily customise WordPress is great for conversion rate optimisation. You can test and implement changes quickly to generate more business from current website visitors.
Don’t underestimate how the ability to easily add, remove, or change elements of your site can generate more sales or leads. Sometimes, the most minor updates can mean a world of difference. WordPress lets you make these changes in a timely fashion.
This contributes to the platform’s long-term stability. WordPress website owners can be confident that the investment they make will be long-standing. WordPress websites are testament to the adage ‘you get what you pay for’. When executed well, you get a website that remains relevant on a platform that won’t be rendered unusable.
And it’s not just developers than can easily modify WordPress. When developed correctly, it’s simple for your own staff to edit sections and even make certain design changes quickly.
“Whether it’s extending your site’s functionality, customising design, publishing content or managing eCommerce, with WordPress everything is easily accessible and super responsive.”
Most of your staff will just need a brief training session with an accompanying user manual.
This is much better than having a website where even a simple word change had to be sent to an experienced developer, for a fee. And it could take days or weeks to get this change made.
With staff able to do this within minutes, you don’t waste time or money.
The user-friendly appeal of WordPress can vastly improve your ROI and bottom-line.
- Forget wrestling with a clunky CMS platform that doesn’t make your life easier. Spend your money on marketing, advertising, business development, or literally anything else instead of trying to fix or edit your website.
- Using an intuitive platform like WordPress means less wasted time and money trying to do simple tasks.
- If you are working with a digital marketing agency, they should be able to readily make any required changes to improve conversion rates and marketing performance. Your budget will stretch that much further, so you can allocate more towards generating leads and sales.
What this means for your business: Build and modify your WordPress website easily. Save development costs and increase conversions and revenue flowing from your site.
5. eCommerce Features Designed To Increase Sales
WooCommerce is the incontestable leader of eCommerce platforms. It occupies 32% of the global market share. It’s also the eCommerce extension of WordPress, the most popular CMS. Notice a recurring theme here?
WooCommerce leads the pack not only because it’s a WordPress affiliate, but because it has powerful features, great adaptability, and it’s easy to manage for everyone. The WordPress plugin lets you add unlimited products and product attributes, for free, giving you more money in your pocket to spend on marketing your products and generating revenue.
Simplified dashboards also mean you don’t need to spend excessive time training your staff to use it. Most solutions are only a few clicks away – a lifesaver when you’re operating a business. You don’t need any coding skills, and everything is right where it should be.
Between WordPress and WooCommerce, you can also lose that “same-same” look of many other eCommerce platforms. With more chances to customise, you get a more unique façade to showcase your business and products. Ultimately this means more sales as your website reflects exactly who you are.
But that’s not all. There are many extra plugins and integrations that can turn a normal eCommerce website into a revenue-generating machine:
- Increase the average order value through upselling and cross-selling plugins.
“Upselling increases revenue by 10-30% on average, with upsells 68% more affordable than acquiring new customers.”
- Retrieve otherwise-lost sales and revenue through abandoned cart emails and remarketing through integrations with email platforms, CRMss and digital marketing platforms.
“With average cart abandonment at 70%, the eCommerce industry loses $18 Billion per year in sales.”
- Increase the number of transactions by sending personalised content, including through dynamic remarketing, to past website users and shoppers based on their past purchases and commonly viewed products.
“Personalised remarketing ads can result in ROIs over 1,300%!”
- Boost the average customer lifetime value (ACLV) with the strategic implementation of loyalty programs and other strategies to nurture your most valuable customers.
“Customers with a relationship to a brand have a 306% higher ACLV.”
- Drive sales by creating urgency and taking advantage of FOMO (fear of missing out) through website pop-ups and features such as flash sale count-down timers, and ‘limited stock remaining’ text.
“60% of customers make purchases based on their FOMO, usually within 1 day.”
- Reduce overwhelm and simplify the buying process, gaining more new customers, by using features such as “top sellers” and “most popular”.
“Reducing product overwhelm can boost revenue by up to 40% and cut costs by 35% – Bain”
- Simplify the purchase process and reduce checkout drop-off rates by easily integrating multiple payment options such as credit cards, PayPal, and ‘buy now, pay later’ instalment funding companies such as AfterPay and ZipPay.
“Buy now, pay later companies see a 58% increase in average order value and a 30% increase in checkout conversion rates.”
What this means for your business: WordPress, with WooCommerce, generates more revenue for less through increased average order value, increased transactions, and increased repeat customers.
6. Highly Responsive Websites To Capture Mobile Conversions
Responsive websites function well across a variety of devices and screen sizes, which is exactly what WordPress websites are designed to do. In fact, WordPress websites embody responsive design.
Having a responsive website is no longer an option – it’s a necessity. People are using different, and multiple, devices to browse the web – tablets, smart phones, laptops, and desktops. It is naïve to assume that because something works for you on your device, it works for everyone else too.
WordPress offers an extensive range of responsive themes to give your website better readability and usability across the board, particularly on smaller smartphones screens, which account for about half of the web traffic worldwide.
“By 2021, mobile eCommerce is expected to make up 54% of all online transactions and as mobile consistently accounts for more than 50% of all web traffic, you risk losing out on a significant revenue by not adopting responsive web design”
Simply put, a highly responsive website theme benefits your bottom line and ROI immensely.
Choosing a WordPress theme that naturally adapts to a variety of different platforms means you don’t need to spend money on developing separate websites for separate devices. This can also be a massive time sink as you have to make any changes across several sites instead of just the one.
If website visitors enjoy smooth adjustments using different devices and browsers to view your website, it will create an overall better user experience for them. And a better user experience often leads to an increased conversion rate. It can also generate loyal customers who return to your website because of how flawless the experience is. No one wants to go to a website that makes it difficult to contact a business or purchase a product.
By not embracing responsive web design you’re doing your brand and business a disservice. Start generating more revenue with responsive WordPress design.
What this means for your business: Save money and time with responsive WordPress themes that ensure designs appear flawless across every device.
7. Advanced SEO Capabilities Increase Traffic & ROI
Your website needs to be optimised for search engines so that potential customers can find and visit it.
There are a number of SEO factors that Google takes into consideration when determining where to rank a site in their search engine for specific search queries. This includes:
- using keywords across content, meta data, images, and URLs
- optimising products and category pages
- visibility and how your website appears to Google bots
- optimal user experience and navigation
- correct use of robots.txt, xml sitemaps, and canonical tags
- fast-loading, mobile friendly pages.
WordPress is widely considered one of the most SEO-friendly systems available. Other platforms may have limited abilities when it comes to ensuring your website meets all of Google technical SEO best practices, while WordPress and the wide variety of plugins readily allows this optimisation.
Yoast SEO, for example, is a plugin that can quickly help propel your WordPress SEO efforts. It’s the most complete WordPress SEO plugin and is widely revered as the best in the space. The best part is it’s free, so it’s a no brainer.
If you have some role in managing your WordPress website, there is a huge advantage is being able to access tools that greatly simplify the SEO process. You can create and edit title tags, meta descriptions, canonicals, page indexing, and see how SEO-friendly your content is for selected keywords.
Ultimately the more visibility your site has from search engines like Google or Bing, the more likely you are to attract new site users and the more sales you’ll be able to convert.
Website visibility is critical for business success. Reference: 10 Stats About Inbound Marketing That Will Make Your Jaw Drop
Organic search traffic from SEO not only boosts your overall traffic and your ability to generate leads, it means you will need to invest less in marketing spend, giving you a far higher ROI and lower Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
SEO is key for any business that wants to live online. Working with a CMS platform like WordPress makes increasing your site’s visibility is that much easier in contrast to alternatives.
What this means for your business: WordPress gives you more organic search traffic and more leads, with a higher ROI and lower CPA.
8. Increase The Amount Of Sales For Business Websites
WordPress is highly effective at increasing the amount of leads for your website. It allows you to easily setup specific buyer funnels, designed to nurture and convert.
Take, for example, when a user fills out a form on your website. Traditionally, these form submissions will end up in your inbox and you have to manually organise and follow them up. WordPress’s integrations and extended functionality, however, automates every aspect of a customer’s journey with you.
Your WordPress website could have a form plugin, such as Gravity Forms, integrated with an email marketing provider such as Mailchimp, as well as a CRM such as Salesforce.
When a user submits a contact form on the website, they automatically get added to an automated email series in Mailchimp. Over the course of days or weeks, they can automatically receive emails designed to nurture, remain top of mind, and encourage them to continue taking some form of action with your business. Users are now moving deeper into your sales funnel until they are ready to become a paying customer.
This user is also added to Salesforce where your sales team has full visibility into how that user has interacted with your business, the specific actions they’ve taken on the site, and even any personal details provided on the form, such as name, email, and phone number.
This allows your business to deliver specific value to users based on what they were looking for rather than generic content.
You can even assign tags based on certain criteria, so the user may appear as a “hot prospect” assigned to Sales Person #1 to follow up immediately.
Having access to these integrations not only allows you to automate your sales funnel but also create more sophisticated funnels and lead nurturing opportunities that may not have been available on other website builders, or at least would be much more difficult to set up.
By having such an attentive and automated process in place that perfectly marries up the sales and marketing sections of your business, you save time from manual processes. You also limit the chances of error or of potential prospects getting missed, with their revenue disappearing along them.
“You will find that the use of automations as a key component of your company’s marketing and sales strategy is often the difference between an OK business, and a successful one.”
What this means for your business: WordPress websites convert more leads by remaining front of mind for prospects and having better systems and processes for the sales follow-up.
Conclusion
Whether you’re just beginning to build your website or already have an existing site, WordPress can have an incredible impact on your revenue, customer acquisition, bottom-line, and ROI – when you know how to harness its powers.
It provides a solid foundation to articulate your business without restricting you when it comes time to grow.
While WordPress will help maximise your website ROI, you also need to know how to navigate and leverage it to make sure you can capitalise on the success it can bring your business
Your website is more than simply a place for prospects to find information about you. It’s the face of your business online. If you want to start using it as a powerhouse vehicle to reach your business goals, get in touch with our talented team of WordPress web developers to help catapult you to success.
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