By presenting a professional front to your small business you are more likely to get repeat customers by using proper themes, exceptional customer service, and an easy to use website that customers can navigate with ease.
The Stakes
There is nothing more important than establishing a professional relationship between yourself and clients. If you do not, it could mean the end of your small business before it even takes off. It can be hard to differentiate how to be professional online versus in person. Professionalism can be shown in hundreds of ways, in this article we will go over the ways to be professional over your WordPress website.
Word Choice
Choosing the right words for your website are a sure way to showcase your professionalism online. Just as you would face to face it is important to pick words, you would say to another professional. It is a huge turn off to clients when someone in a professional standpoint uses words that are considered casual.
This may speak for itself but lingo is not something you want to use often if at all. There’s a big difference between saying something like ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ and ‘omg’. Using texting lingo should never be used with new customers when having a conversation and not used in blog posts or anywhere else on your site.
There are exceptions to every rule of course, if you are a very casual business or trying to appeal to certain generations then this may be a good thing. We will go over how to talk to a client in more detail under the customer service section.
Themes
Using the right theme is perhaps one of the easiest ways to present your website in a professional manner, there are hundreds of WordPress Themes out there to pick from. Many of which will demonstrate their usefulness for a professional website, picking carefully will present the right front to your business.
Depending on the type of business and if you are working with eCommerce will affect your theme choice, but it is important to keep everything on your site to a certain standard. Some suggested ways to do this are do not have typos, proof read your site constantly. Do not over clutter your pages, there should not be to many things on one page, you do not want to overwhelm those visiting your site.
Be organized, make things easy to find; add a search bar or index to your site so they have everything they need. Supply important information, have a FAQ page and an About Us, make sure they have a way to contact someone in case they need assistance.
A general rule of thumb, make sure they have everything they would have at a location based business and more!
Customer Service
This section may not affect some WordPress sites but any working with a decent size business or in the eCommerce industry should understand that customer service is vital for any company. There is nothing a customer hates more than bad customer service!
If you have a ‘contact us’ of any kind on your site, be ready to be contacted. Be sure to have anyone responding back properly trained in a customer service environment. If they are responding over a chat/text based platform keep one important thing in mind. The customer reads in their voice, and inflection can easily be the wrong one.
Be sure to use proper grammar, full words (information not info) and a heavy professional tone. Though you do not want to be mistaken for a robot so some personality in your writing is a good thing, adding a smile to the end of your sentence could help!
Always keep calm, sometimes people get upset but as someone responding to a customer even if it is your business and you feel slighted, approach the situation professionally and calmly when addressing issues.
Easy Accessibility
Customers adore convenience, and they are harsh critics on what that means. Studies show that businesses lose 18 billion dollars a year just because they have complex checkouts, don’t lose customers because your website is too complex.
Everything needs to be easy to find, you do not want too many pop ups or demands of your customers right away. Chances are if a customer wants to join your newsletter they’ll go searching for a way to do so! Throwing large pop-ups is a sure fire way to get people backing right out to a different site.
There are billions of choices out there on where to shop from, make it easy and cater to your target audience’s needs.
A Successful Website
In total if you follow the basic rules of professional standards for a small business website you are more likely to get people coming back to reuse your site which is a great thing. Repeat customers bring in billions of dollars for businesses every year. If you present a profession front, excellent customer service, and make things simple to use; there’s no way you can fail!