Did you know that a homepage redesign spiked revenues for ESPN.com by 35%?
What this translates into is that people still indulge in judging the book by its cover. And every website is subjected to this extreme sense of millisecond judgment. What it ends up doing is having an impact on business perception and its credibility.
Given the scenario where there are surplus options for customers to take their business to a competitor online retailer, the level of tolerance for badly optimized online businesses is non-existent. Plus, a poorly optimized online store does not provide an optimal user experience.
Gomez’s report published in 2010 states that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
It may be a struggle to turn your under-optimized site and drive it towards online business growth, but it can be done.
The attention span of your audience will last for 0.05 seconds. Therefore, whatever needs to be done, has to be accomplished within this millisecond timeline. Otherwise, they are as good as gone.
Optimization may feel like a massive undertaking, but it will help address some of the core issues that are probably major credibility killers.
But before that’ let’s first understand the relationship between optimization tools and online business growth.
Explode Your Online Business Growth with These Optimization Tools
What does online marketing tools mean in the context of optimization?
Online marketing tools can be a way of achieving optimization. If you do not want to go overboard with more expensive strategies, then investing in some effective marketing tools can get you out of the weeds.
Here is a list of the best marketing tools for small businesses that help kickstart your optimization process.
1. Website Optimization
Simply put, website optimization can be defined as the systematic process of enhancing your website, such as an online store, and achieve the required performance levels that will aid in meeting your organizational goals. Be it increasing prospective leads, achieving more online sales conversations, minimizing customer tickets, website optimization plays a key role in helping businesses to meet these core objectives.
The fundamental of optimizing your website is an ongoing process. What it aims to do is to transform your website into an effective platform to generate revenue and become a valuable asset in the long run.
What’s more, if you have a WordPress website and want to optimize it for better visibility, the CMS platform itself gives many plugin options to its users. Just in case you have a WordPress website and would like to take a look at some of the top WordPress Plugins best suited for growth online business optimization, then here they are:
- WP-Rocket: If you are looking for a premium cache WordPress Plugin, then your search ends with WP-Rocket. As far as caching tools are concerned, this is as high-end as it gets. Power-packed with a range of automatic optimization features, WP-Rocket is a great plugin to invest in if your goal is to improve site speed, page load times, and overall website performance.
- W3 Total Cache: Possibly one of the fastest WordPress performance optimization plugins, W3 Total Cache works on enhancing the overall user experience of your online business. Application of optimization best practices and leveraging core functions like the Content Delivery Network integration, W3 Total Cache minimizes page load times and is trusted by millions of publishers around the globe.
- Autoptimize: This is a simple WordPress plugin that works in a niche area of website optimization, minifying certain assets of your site, like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. Autoptimize can be tailored to meet your business requirements for your online store. If performance improvement is what you are after, Autoptimize is a keeper for sure.
2. Project/Client Management
According to PMI, “strategic project management” is defined as the alignment of business processes, resources, initiatives, and technologies with overall company-wide strategy and vision. That said, companies today are in the midst of shifting their focus on the key aspect that’s driving business – customers.
By concentrating on good communication, addressing loopholes in service delivery, aligning intended outcomes and implementing collaboration tools and software signals to project management done well to strengthen the customer-brand relationship.
Here is a list of marketing tools and techniques that can fasten the optimization process for online businesses.
- Teamwork: As a project management software, Teamwork has some die-hard fans as it has been around since 2007. Being cloud-based, Teamwork Projects offers a user-friendly interface having key must-have features like Gantt charts, time tracking, task scheduling suited to handle projects of all sizes.
- Zoho Desk: If you are looking to try a free version of a project management software, give Zoho Desk a shot. Being a fully-featured project management application with impressive functions, collaborative and bug tracking tools, Zoho Desk provides the fastest way to plan, and convert your customer tickets in Desk into issues in Projects.
- ProProfs Project: Looking for a simple project management software? Try ProProps Projects, an online collaboration platform that is ideal for businesses, organizations, and institutions of all sizes. Being a responsive application, ProProfs Projects simplifies work segregation budget allocation, task management, milestone visualization, and more.
3. Customer Support
There are many challenges to offer exemplary customer support to clients. The probabilities of you missing out on timely customer responses, resolving issues, providing information are heavily stacked against you.
But fear not as you are in good company with having access to some of the best optimization tools that can streamline your online business workflows. Take a look at these live chat and help desk software for business solutions that will make your work go a whole lot faster.
- Help Desk Software
Your help desk ticketing system is a core pillar of your suite of optimization tools. By making the customer experience as seamless as possible through processes of automation and reporting, implementing the help desk ensures that the customer support department runs smoothly, saving time, energy and ends on a note of delighting customers.
Some of the noticeable help desk service providers include:
- ProProfs Help Desk: Faster ticket resolution, shared inboxes, seamless collaborations, and much more aptly describe ProProfs Help Desk, a ticketing software that caters to the ever-evolving needs of growing industries. The internal employee processes can also be fast-tracked by enabling instant documentation, guides, manuals, and tips that result in agents offering intelligent responses and resolutions.
- Freshservice: Searching for a help desk tool to manage incidents, assets, and more? Refreshingly simple to use, Freshdesk is the newest kid on the block. It is a core customer support platform at heart that also focussed on building its capabilities as a full-fledged Service Desk that has made help desking fun by introducing gamification features.
- Zendesk: Built with support agents in mind, Zendesk offers multi-channel IT help desk software that is cloud-based and offers customizable tools to develop a customer service portal, knowledge base, and online communities. Zendesk takes a marketing-oriented approach to helpdesk integrate its offerings with a larger suite aimed at providing superior customer experience management.
4. Live Chat Software
Live chat is considered as one of the biggest software developments as it helps businesses offer instant solutions to their customers effectively. This is effective because in today’s fast-paced world, people do not want to hang around for ages to get a response from a business. So, if optimizing your online business growth by increasing leads is your objective, then implementing a live chat tool is an absolute must.
You can take your pick from a list of these top live chat service providers:
- LiveAgent: For small and medium-sized businesses, LiveAgent is the perfect live chat solution that triggers instantaneous engagement between brand and prospects or customers. With real-time access, LiveAgent live chat support has proven to be a key customer acquisition strategy for many business enterprises.
- ProProfs Live Chat: With over 10000+ businesses already using ProProfs Live Chat support, the tool is best suited to connect, assist, interact, engage, and convert customers in real-time. It is a SaaS-based, centralized platform that is equipped with core features like visitor monitoring, sending proactive chat invites, and resolving client queries instantly.
- Olark: Olark adds that human touch to your live chat support that can win over customers to drive sales. Olark is a leading live chat provider in the US today with a quick and seamless installation process. In fact, the software has been designed to directly integrate with key third-party applications, which results in the business offering a more well-rounded and wholesome customer experience.
Final Thoughts
Well done! You have managed to go past the 0.05 seconds of doom by aligning your online business expansion with optimization tools.
But you are not completely in the safe zone yet. The slightest of snag can be fatal to your chances of turning the user into a lead.
With the colossal impact that these optimization tools can have on the perceived credibility and quality along with the growth of your online business, the entire exercise has to be an ongoing process.
Remember that customers judge swiftly and ruthlessly.
So, what’s next?
When it comes to investing and implementing these tools for your online business growth, it is a simple matter of choice and economics.
Even the best books can be cast away halfway through. So, you must ensure that your online business is optimized to the fullest, right from start to finish.
There are no second chances, and that’s the moral of the story.
