Your Business Website - the Most Cost Effective Way to Publish

Maybe you are trying to figure out the ROI on your business website. If you sell products on the site, it's easy to look at how much you spent on the site versus how much you sold. If your site is a lead-generator, you know how much those leads brought in to your company. But what if you neither sell nor can measure leads coming from your site - it's a "brochure" site that establishes your brand and credibility. How can you measure your ROI then?

Here's a method you can use to measure your website costs in comparison to a print advertising campaign. This method has worth even if your site's main purpose is eCommerce or lead generation. You do know how many site visits you got last year from humans (not including search engine spider visits), right?

In case you don't know the answer to that question, let's go along with some of my numbers. My clients are small businesses and professionals. For the past 12 months, a representative sample received anywhere from about 4000 to 55,000 site visits from humans. The median number is about 7,500^*visits. That is the number of people - not including search engines - who actually viewed at least one page on their site. Whether or not they followed through and contacted the client is not part of this measurement. For this exercise we are just looking at the people who viewed it.

If you were going to generate a print advertising campaign - let's say direct mail - then the national average of opens is 75%. In order to be fairly certain that you are going to get 7,000 of your pieces opened, and therefore viewed, you will need to send out 10,000 pieces. You might be familiar with the online print vendor, Vista Print. We'll use their sale price for 10,000 flyers - as of this writing, that's $920.

Now you'll want to add in postage. Let's assume you have some way of getting bulk mailing pricing of 22 cents per piece, since you are not blanketing everyone on the postal carrier's route, but instead you are sending to a list. Postage for the 10,000 flyers will cost you $2200. (Add the cost of your bulk mailing license.) Depending on what type of list you need, 10,000 business addresses will cost you $3300 or more. We also need envelopes for mailing. You want to make them attractive, matching your branding, to achieve the 75% open rate? Add another $1440 at Vista Print. How are you planning to address the envelopes? A mail merge service that prints only the envelopes (because labels are going to decrease your open rate) will cost you at least $300. Note as well that design costs have been excluded in each scenario. So we're up to at least $8160, just to get your print piece looked at by 7500 people, who may or may not act on it.

Compare that with what you spent last year on your website. If your site was new last year, your costs should be greatly reduced this year, since we would expect the initial design cost to exceed your normal maintenance and hosting costs. So next year, if you want to reach that same number of people, your website will cost you significantly less. But the print campaign will probably cost more, as printing and postage costs increase. Keep in mind that the print costs outlined here are for a low end, do-it-yourself campaign. If you hire professionals and use high quality paper, you'll pay much more.

And did I mention that your website contains many different "flyers" since you have a homepage and any number of interior pages? The cost for the advertising campaign only includes one design. You want to send out another design? It's going to cost you more. And consider this: one visit to a website can include many page views, so the web visitors are already seeing multiple designs. Since the pages being viewed are self-selected, we aren't wasting print money on A/B testing, either.

I certainly don't mean to imply that print is going away any time soon. But for the most cost-effective way to publish any information about your business, your website wins, hands down.

^*"Your mileage may vary." I chose to look at 7,500 site visits because the print campaign comparison number, 10 thousand, is the largest amount that Vista Print quotes on their website. Printing costs are not linear: the more you have printed, the less it costs per piece. I didn't want to make guesses, or use any numbers that you as a reader could not immediately verify. But because most of my clients see at least 7,500 visits annually, I felt that a fair number to use as a baseline.