If you were called into a meeting and someone asked you to defend why your firm has a website, what would you say? “So people can find our phone number? So they know what hours we are open?”

That is not much of a defense, is it? Most of your organizations have a website that is nothing more than in information portal—a digital pamphlet. I have not seen a provider or a payer whose website can be considered a corporate asset. The value of the URL may not be any higher than what the company paid for it.

So, what is the difference between the value of a website that lists the time the gift shop opens and one that lets people interact with the entire organization in the same way they would if they were sitting in your lobby?

Here are a few facts I found on blog.invisionapp.com that should startle those whose website value is below several million dollars.

• ESPN.com’s revenues jumped 35% just by incorporating user feedback into their design
• Over the last ten years, investors who had invested in companies that are digital-centric would have received a return 228% higher than those who invested in the S&P
• As an example that trivial decisions about your website are never trivial, Bing’s choice of the hue of blue they chose over other hues was worth an additional $80 million dollars in annual revenue. How many colors are on your website and how much time did your people spend analyzing them? Thought so.
• Every dollar spent on email marketing returned $44.25. Sort of puts billboard advertising to shame.
• 88% percent of site visitors are unlikely to return to the website after a poor user experience. Did you firm even define what constituted a good user experience? Were patients even included in its design?
• Slow-loading websites resulted in $2.6 billion in lost revenues last year—and that only accounts for speed, not functionality
• 75% percent of viewers assess the credibility of an organization based on the aesthetics of the organization’s website
• 94% of first-impressions are design-related
• 85% of adults think a company’s mobile website should be as good or better than their desktop website. That feature, the ability of your website to be just as easy to use on a five-inch phone as it is on a thirty-inch monitor is called responsive design

Planning your digital presence ought to be a key component of your annual business strategy process, and if your website happened to crash, that crash should have a huge negative impact on your business. It would on Amazon’s. Perhaps the good news though is that if a payer’s or provider’s website went down for a week it wouldn’t cost them a dollar of lost revenue.