Website Long Term Savings

RichMobile Websites, RV Park Web Design, RV Park Website Development, Website Design Leave a Comment

In our experience, we’ve found that well designed and thought out websites can generate real tangible long term savings.  Yes, getting a good design group to come in and help you re-brand your Internet presence is going to cost you in the short term.  But over time the savings can be immense.  We’ve got some great examples from recent clients, so let’s go ahead and talk about them now.

End the paper chase

Print costs can pile up quickly!

Print costs can pile up quickly!

Over the course of 2015 we’ve worked with a large number of clients who weren’t fully utilizing their websites.  And in many cases we found that leveraging their websites more would lead to long term savings for them in other aspects of their business.  One simple example for several RV Resorts we worked with were printing costs.

In the case of the RV resorts, they were blowing thousands of dollars per year on printed materials for their guests.  No, we’re not talking about park maps and “welcome to our resort” documents.  Those will never go away.  We’re talking about newsletters and events calendars.  And as we dug deeper into what our clients were spending we knew their updated websites had the potential to save them some serious cash.

In the case of a single resort, Sundance 1 RV Resort, their winter population was close to 700 units.  That’s RV sites and Park Model home sites.  And every month they created a monthly newsletter and monthly events calendar.  Speaking with one of the managers at the resort we learned that all of that paper cost around $700 per month.  Their “snow bird” season normally runs about 6 months.  So some simple math lands us with……?

Prints Created Monthly
0
Prints Created In a Season
0
Seasonal Printing Cost
$0

Re-directing resort guests to their new website has the potential to save the resort somewhere around $4200 per year.  That’s not an insubstantial number.  And that’s only for one year.  Project that out 5 to 7 years and the new website not only pays for itself, but it also ends up leaving the resort with a nice savings buffer.  And let’s not forget, the website’s primary job is attracting new guests which is a revenue generating proposition.

Trim out the failed advertising

Seattle went after the Yellow Pages 4 years ago!

Seattle went after the Yellow Pages 4 years ago!

Many of our clients also utilize other advertising mediums.  Directory listings (RV Guide books, Yellow Pages), Newspapers, Magazines, Local Radio, & Local TV advertising.  Often times, one or more of these mediums fail to be cost effective, and cutting a few out due to the success of your website could offer even more savings.  Let’s take another example.

Point of Rocks RV Park in Prescott utilized several other marketing plans.  One plan was to use a tried and true RV Park Directory Service.  The cost of the service per year?  $6,500 (more than their website redesign cost).  That’s quite a large figure, especially given that the directory service was failing to deliver.  And how did we know the service was failing to deliver?  Simply by asking guests how they found out about the park.  Also, the directory service has an online version as well, and the referrals were painfully small.

At present, the new website design (deployed in January of 2015) has had 24,610 unique visitors to the website.  Those visitors have read over 108,000 pages.  The online version of the directory service has sent them 1,700 referrals.  Let’s pretend those referrals are all unique viewers, just to error on their side.  If we do that, we’re saying that about 7% of the website visitors were directed by that service.  7% is pretty pathetic for the price they’re paying.  It’s even more pathetic when you discover that Point of Rocks website comes up number one on a Goggle search for RV Parks in Prescott, and the directory service comes out 7th.

Basically, Point of Rocks website is out performing the folks they paid to advertise them.  Bottom line?  Who needs that?

Just for fun, let’s do one more math problem.  1,700 referrals cost $6500.  That’s a cost of $3.82 per referral.  Other search engines and RV Review sites are sending them free referrals, while the under performing directory is sending them potential guests to the tune of nearly $4.00 each.

New customers, lowered expenses?

Bottom line?  A well designed and planned website can do more than just reach new clients.  Yes, we want to reach new clients.  They mean new revenue streams.  But in addition to new revenue, a planned out website design can lead to unexpected long term savings.

Many of our clients have dropped old advertising media as they’ve seen what their sites are doing for them.  If you’re ready to increase your revenues, and decrease your expenditures, get in touch with us today!

 

 

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