7 measurable ways to reduce company costs with your Web site (pt.1 of 2)

Last article, we looked at 7 measurable ways to increase company revenue with your Web site. By the way, how's that new promotion and bonus working out?Continuing our educational journey and ultimately replacing "information only" Web sites with profitable business applications, we'll look at 7 cost-reducing objectives to help further your career with stock options, a company car, and a life-size bronze statue displayed in your conference room.Let's get you there...1. Reduce customer and lead acquisition costsEvery Web site visitor represents an opportunity to sell your products, services, and brand. Attracting Web site visitors also has a cost. Thinking like a retail store manager, your objective is to maximize the amount of purchases per wave of walk-ins measured against promotional cost.For example, if your Web site normally encourages 5 inquiries for every 1,000 visitors and the cost to attract those visitors is $500, your cost per lead equals $100 ($500/5). However, if your Web site can encourage 50 inquiries for every 1,000 visitors and the traffic building cost is constant, your cost per lead will reduce to $10 ($500/50). This is by far the most profitable way to improve traffic building ROI and reduce company costs.2. Reduce Web site maintenance costsOn a basic level, managers publish new content and make Web site changes one of two ways: They publish themselves or rely on a third party. Each method has a cost. Those who outsource might pay up to $100 per change or commit to a monthly maintenance agreement. At any rate, a company could spend several thousands of dollars per year to receive minimal support. That's not very profitable. On the flip side, companies will take maintenance in-house and use Front Page or other HTML editors to make changes. This is a daunting task for non-technical managers and often creates new problems and programming errors. Aside from the cost of error correction, visitor dissatisfaction and lost acquisition opportunities, simple changes may take a non-techie several hours to complete and cost thousands per year in learning curves, salary, and lost time.Instead of mastering the art of "do nothing," your objective should be to reduce the costs involved with maintaining your Web site. Investigate content management solutions. They will help streamline the publishing process and empower non-technical managers to add, delete and modify pages more accurately and in less time. A little more difficult to precisely quantify, but these solutions have definitely helped non-technical managers save time, money and sanity.3. Reduce prospecting costsDirect mail, telemarketing, email list renting, tradeshows, networking, television, radio and display advertising all have salary and other hard dollar costs. Additionally, each channel is a crapshoot.Marketers expect only a 1-3% return rate because they know not all recipients during release will be in the market to buy. They increase spending on new campaigns, broaden reach and increase frequency in hopes of pulling more into their buying cycle.Is this a waste of money? No, but there's a much more economical way to achieve similar results.Your Web site objective should be to reduce traditional prospecting costs through search engine optimization. Optimize individual Web pages around relevant and targeted search phrases commonly used by your potential customers.For example, if someone uses the phrase, "dentists in Chicago," there's a near 100% chance that that someone is in the market to purchase dental services and most likely lives near Chicago. Can you ask for anything more timely and targeted? Remember, your Web site must then present a compelling case to convert that visitor into a qualified sales lead.That's all for now...In part two, we'll look at using your Web site to reduce call center volume, sales cycle time, obsolete and excess inventory, and time to market.