CMS is a Content Management System that links to the actual website, also known as an admin area. They allow you to continually change certain aspects of your site, like content, headlines, etc. in real time. In particular, it allows content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. Zenuity builds websites for a living. We make anything from simple static sites that act almost like online business cards all the way up to complex e commerce sites, with shopping carts and CMS systems. Often clients will ask, "do we need CMS for our site?" Well that depends on what your trying to achieve with your website. If your site is only there to give you an online presence and a sense of legitimacy or is simply used as online brochure or business card with little changes to be made, then there's probably not really a point.
However, if you believe that you can generate a significant volume of sales online or the online mix will become a major part of your business in the future, you should definitely consider CMS. Even in times like these, online businesses have seen rapid growth, far beyond any growth of an offline only business. I will talk you through some of the reasons I think they can be so important.
Content Management System
Keep your content fresh
If you walked into to your local store and they had a poster up advertising a promotion that finished a year ago, would you take them seriously? Probably not. Then why do we still see so many websites that don't keep their content up to date, while they wonder why they have low sales? If they had CMS, they could make content changes in real time. Keywords are particularly important when it comes to content. Search engines will pick up the most relevant pages with relevant keywords to show to their users. You may be able to predict which keywords will bring you the most traffic before building a site. But it will takes months of data to see which keywords are converting into sales. Once you have this info, you may want to change headlines and the keywords within your page content.
Another reason to update content is for promotions. You can run a sale on an e commerce website immediately with CMS instead of contracting a developer to do it for you. You could simply log into a CMS set a % decrease across a range of products or services, then add some extra content onto the homepage, taking only a few minutes of your time.
Automation
Some of the most compelling reasons that led me from offline to online businesses were the lower start up costs, lack of needing to commit to rent, shop fitting etc. The level of automation you can do online can drastically reduce your weekly business costs. One great example of this is an certain e commerce company that sent out automated birthday emails to all of its users three days before their birthday. It would send an personalized email template with an auto generated voucher code to the customer. The customer could then enter the code upon checkout to receive their birthday discount. This had a direct effect on sales, with customers also gaving very positive feedback on the campaign.
Automation not only reduces human error, but reduced the amount of labor hours needed to handle day to day running of the business. An automated system would never forget to send a customer a reply or miss a vital piece of data that you need.
Can be built to work with other third party systems
Any savvy business owner knows not to keep too much inventory. Even if your stock is not perishable like food, there's still a good chance that you will end up losing money. Fashions go out of style, new technology replaces old. The CMS can effectively talk to a suppliers system, making sure that any products discontinued or out of stock will be removed from your site immediately. If you have quick delivery times, you can also keep low amounts of stock and order more only when you need it. With a good CMS, you can even get the system to place automated orders for the products that you're running short of.
If you can think, we can probably build it
The whole point is with a custom built CMS system you can do just about anything on your own. Need a reporting system or want it to help you with your tax returns? No problem. Need a system to auto generate promotional codes to send out to users? It can be done. By you!
No comments:
Post a Comment