Your shop doesn’t have a shopkeeper

Can you imagine having a brick-and-mortar business and leaving it open but unattended? Day in and day out customers walking in and evaluating your merchandise. Some buy and others don’t.

Can you even fathom the viability of such business model? A professional consulting engagement brings the rigor needed to translate this kind of complexity into a clear execution plan.

No one would open a shop, stock it with merchandise, advertise and market it, and then leave the doors open and walk away. Could that ever work? In rare cases, such as an automatic car wash, it could. Yet it is not a viable model for most SMBs, and a website left without guidance works exactly this way.

Think about your website. What happens when a visitor arrives at your virtual “shop”? The visitor is left to their own devices.

Most businesses have tried streamlining and experimenting with ways to get visitors to act, from A/B testing to a wide range of other measures. The real question is whether that is all a business can do.

So now what?

Take a step back and think about B.G. (Before Google). Your shop was open, and sales people were ready to help customers with product knowledge and guide their selection.

Then the Internet arrived and the B.G. era ended. Businesses suddenly forgot what had worked for a very long time, just because this was a “virtual world.”

People got busy with needing and wanting a website, then needed it optimized for search engines, bought PPC, started email marketing, and so on. All are good things that most businesses should do. Then came the push to capitalize on every visitor through tracking and re-targeting, opt-in emails, and big data analysis. Along the way, few stopped to ask whether the working concepts of business had disappeared, or what happened to the SOPs that already worked.

Back to the basics?

Those actions all have value. Each of these processes has its place and succeeds if implemented properly and evaluated on a continuous basis. They belong in the lead generation portion of a plan. Converting a visitor by giving sound advice while that visitor is on your site is mission critical, since traffic is of little use without action.

Human Intelligence

The second part of the plan should include rigorous data collection and evaluation. Most savvy business people have used data for a long time, but web visitor data concentrates on actions taken: clicks, funnels, and behavior. That data has its place in decisions about design parameters, content marketing, and more. What it cannot capture is the human factor.

Did a visitor buy because of an event that click data cannot explain? Did a comparison shopper leave for a competitor on price alone, without realizing that the overall cost of your product is lower in the long run? Testing can address some of these questions, but it cannot fully stand in for live human interaction.

Now imagine being able to access and analyze that human intelligence. What would such a data set be worth to your business? What would you know after a few months that you cannot know today?

This is not theoretical in nature. It is just a simple evolution toward a more inclusive IOT. You are already able to interact with your smart house, smart phone, smart watch, and many other daily tools.

Isn’t it time for your website to become a “smart website?”