Using Your Website To Save On Labor Costs

Determining a budget for a business or organizational website is a simple question of return on investment. Most of our clients understand this. They ask questions like, "Will I sell enough products, rent enough houses, or generate enough new business to make my money back in a reasonable amount of time?" They also ask "How will the website expand my business into new markets?"

Often, they want to access a new type of customer. They want to market to early adopters, young people who make most of their purchasing decisions on the web, and to other companies whose decision makers have internalized the idea that the future is online.

I think this approach, while an important part of the budget process, misses one of the biggest financial rewards that can come from a website. Clients think of their websites either as slick Corvette sports cars to romance their clients and donors, or as ice cream trucks, ring a bell around the neighborhood to drum up sales.

What they need most, though, is that a good ol' farm tractor to get a lot of work done.

I tell clients to ask another question: "What daily tasks do I perform, or have my employees perform, that can be automated, shortened, or made easier by a website?"

Every company and organization who comes to us for consultation has one thing in common. The economy is forcing them, even more than usual, to accomplish more tasks with fewer people. Almost everyone has more to do than can reasonably be done in a work day. Often, the website is the province of an IT person who is also responsible for e-mail, networking, and the physical upkeep of their computers. We help them identify human hours that are spent doing things their web application could do for them.

A case in point. I recently met with a successful real estate group that wanted to upgrade their web presence. They were right to think about expenditures on the website as marketing expenditures, just like print ads or mailers. But that is only part of its value. As we talked, I discovered that their mass e-mails and print fliers had to be generated by hand. The person who answers the phones and keeps the office organized was spending an enormous amount of time each week doing tasks that amount to duplicating their website content in another form and sending it to other realtors.

If your web consultant plans well, small expenditures to have the web application generate these fliers and automate mass mailings could save hundreds of labor hours per year. In fact, if we built them a new site and it didn't bring in a single extra dollar, they would be several thousand dollars in the black due to the labor cost of this task alone.

In many cases, giving the ability (and responsibility) for editing staff profiles to staff members in an organization can save hundreds in IT costs. Automating activity reports, sales reports, contact and customer reports, and customer mailings can turn the distribution of information within your organization from a week-consuming, quarterly nightmare into something you do before lunch the day the reports are due. Spending a little more money at the planning and consultation stage can literally cause your new web application to pay for itself.

In almost every situation where we are asked to consult, we find ways to save money with the website that have nothing to do with marketing budgets, advertising, or sales. Your website can make your organization visible, but it can also free up your staff to do the jobs that make your organization successful.