Implementing Website Tools to Help Startups

Wikipedia define a Startup as an entrepreneurial venture typically describing newly emerged, fast-growing business. Definition of the startup usually refers to a company, a partnership or an organization designed to rapidly develop scalable business model.

Often, startup companies deploy advanced technologies, such as Internet, communication, robotics, etc. These companies are generally involved in the design and implementation of the innovative processes of the development, validation and research for target markets. The term became internationally widespread during the dot-com bubble when a great number of dot-com companies were founded.

Whilst Startup companies are surrounded by advanced technology, if their website reflects the dark ages a visitor will have a negative first impression. A website is the shop front for the business and a badly dressed window will not encourage visitors to stay. The website tools available can enable businesses to analyse customer behaviour, assist the customer to contact the company with ease and leave feedback, all of which helps businesses amend their website to suit their audience requirements and deliver the best possible customer service to increase leads.

Whilst employees will sigh and groan if a tool doesn’t work 100% correctly, they will continue to use it. Visitors are another kettle of fish! If a reCAPTCHA authentication check doesn’t submit properly or a live chat window takes a while to load, they can become frustrated and leave the site. Visitors always have other options, namely your competitors! They potentially have a larger budget to invest in their website, or greater amount of staff to research and test the best tools.

Here are a few of the best website tools, that won’t break the bank or leave your visitors irritated:

Using a small piece of script within the website, a heatmap can focus on a webpage and report how far down the page visitors have scrolled, or where visitors are clicking. This helps businesses analyse their visitors behaviour and manipulate web page formats, to streamline the visitor journey or encourage a particular path.

Heatmaps are very easy to set up, just enter the URL your business wants to track, an identifiable name for that report, and decide the time period to analyse. That’s all there is to it! The heatmap will start collecting data and send out daily updates.

Founded in 2006, Crazy Egg is one of the best heatmap providers, owned by American entrepreneur and startup advisor Hiten Shah and one of the top 10 online marketers Neil Patel. Crazy Egg shows exactly what visitors are doing on the website with Scrollmaps, Confetti, Overlay and List reports all available.

The pricing ranges based on your business budget and how much data you wish to collect, starting from $108/year to $1188/year. There is also a free month trial to get started.

Contact forms prompt the visitor to fill in their information that most commonly includes:

• Name
  
• Email Address
  
• Subject
  
• Message
  

In B2B environments, the contact form is also likely to ask for company information:

• Company name
  
• Position
  
• Website
  
• Phone number
  

On completion the form is sent to the allocated business email address and visitors can request a copy to their email address.

Live chat instantly connects a website visitor to a business representative, through text based communication. This enables a visitor to have all their questions answered, resulting in lead generation or a new customer. Support teams can advise existing customers on their enquires, walking them through each step to ensure their question has been resolved.

Once an account has been set up with a chosen provider, a small piece of html script needs to be added to the webpage, this will then display a button enabling the visitor to click to begin a chat.

A business can add their own customer testimonials to their website, and whilst this gives some credit to the business, there is always some doubt that the company may have edited them. Using a review plugin on the site means that customers have entered their feedback through a third party company and both the good and the bad reviews will be shown, there are no biased opinions.

Once a provider has been chosen, a company profile will need to be set up; this will generate a link that can be shared with customers to request feedback or a testimonial. The plugin can then be embedded into the business website showing the most recent posts.