Newsflash: Your Business is an eBusiness.

Any customer that results in revenue for your company, that came to you via your website, is considered eBusiness. So why wouldn’t you have an eBusiness team or department to manage this business?

At our conference in Breckenridge we held a session entitled “Developing an eBusiness Strategy” to help our Enterprise Members see the benefits and necessity for creating an eBusiness Team as well as learn how to start one.

The first step – You cannot consider eBusiness the same as Relocation. I can’t stress this enough. Forget about Relocation. Instead eBusiness is a mix of IT management and lead management. The eBusiness Team has four major responsibilities with your online presence:

1. Attract traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Online Listing Syndication, Social Communities, Pay per Clicks and Organic Clicks (Link Love)
2. Engage the visitors through reasonable response times, personalized responses and secondary marketing
3. Cultivate visitors by providing immediate, useful information and providing compatible matching
4. Convert the visitors into leads through providing a positive nurturing relationship

Generating eBusiness encompasses your web presence in total. This includes your website, your blogs and your social site affiliations as well. For a brokerage, eBusiness is taking a visitor of your website and nurturing them through the sales process where they become a satisfied customer. It might look something like this:

Visitor = Inquiry = Prospect = Lead = Assignment = Closed Transaction

This process can be quiet daunting if you do not have a team of people to address these potential customers. A single agent would spend too many hours for just one customer. The idea of the eBusiness Team is to streamline this process and provide leads to agents that have been screened and are ready to head into that Closed Transaction step. Creating an eBusiness Team has many benefits beyond saving time on the agent’s part.

Benefits of the eBusiness Team:

• Strong Web Presence - this is vital in an era where customers are continuously relying on websites as their first point of contact for service and product information. 

• Cost Effective - cutting out many of the expensive print marketing costs and traditional telephone communication costs can save your brokerage a bundle.

• Reach New Markets - now your website and web presence will be know by people all over the globe. Your marketing is no longer limited to areas that you can afford to advertise within.

• Streamline - don’t waste the agent’s time on inquiries that are not headed to closing. Trust the eBusiness Team to nurture them until they are ready.

If you’ve never considered the idea of an eBusiness Team this may seem daunting at first glance but if you’re not considering it now, you need to. Managing your eBusiness correctly will result in more customers and better customers.

How do you set up an eBusiness Department? In our next article we’ll discuss best practices. Keep reading!