The Savvy Business Method

Episode 017: Important Traffic Metrics for Your Ecommerce Website   Episode Summary:  A high average order value can make it easier to run your online business. In this episode, Julie walks you through the benefits of a high AOV and specific strategies for increasing your website's AOV.   Episode Links: https://analytics.google.com/ https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:   Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place? Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello and welcome to Episode 17 of the Savvy Business Method podcast where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Okay, before we start today, a quick reminder. If you have not come over and joined me on Facebook, please do so. I am hosting a couple times a day on there, I have links to videos, these podcasts, other really cool resources I find are on the Internet. Or, you know, if you want to ask me a question, that can be a great place to do it, as well. I am at Savvy Business Method on Facebook.   Alright, let's dive into today's topic, which is important traffic metrics for your website and what they mean. Now today everything I'm going to talk about in terms of the numbers that we need to be keeping an eye on as small business owners, all the things today I'm talking about, are going to be available in Google Analytics. I am hopeful that if you have Google Analytics already installed on your website and are tracking your website information.   If you don't, I have a great video on YouTube you should check out about why it is so important to put a Google Pixel on your website, even potentially before you launch your website so it can be ready to go and collect all that information.   So if you don't have that right now, real quick, Google Analytics is a free tracking system. It gives you an enormous amount of information about people who visit your website and what they do while they're there. And to get Google Analytics on your website you need to create a Google Analytics account. And weirdly enough you can Google that. You'll also probably need a Gmail account, it's a good time to reserve your business' name, like I have savvybusinessmethod@gmail.com. Don't email me there, it won't go anywhere, but I own that email address. You'll also need to prove that the website is yours and then they're going to give you some code to put on your website so that things can be tracked.   Now, Google is limited to tracking the website you own, right? And it does start tracking right away, but you aren't going to be able to install tracking code like on your Facebook Page or your YouTube Channel or anything like that. Google is limited to the website that you own. But, that is hopefully where most of your business is occurring and let's talk through the three sets of metrics that could be really helpful for identifying problems with your website, seeing what's working and then coming up with ideas for ways to improve.   Okay, so those three sets of metrics are who is visiting your site? What they're doing while they're there? And how they're leaving? Okay? So let's dive in. Alright, first up, we want to know as much as possible about the people who are visiting our website. So, one of the metrics that I look at regularly for my websites are the number of visits, okay? So that ideally the number of people coming to our websites each day should be going up, right? Like, that's what we want now, granted, we do want quality visits. So just because we got more visits on a certain day doesn't necessarily mean that those visits were possibly going to buy anything and I'll talk about that in a minute when we talk about sources.   But this number is helpful because although we definitely want to see it trending upward, sharp moves in either direction can be a sign of a problem. If your website suddenly one day has a ton of traffic, for example, you need to identify where that traffic's coming from and make sure it is at least legitimate traffic and not say, some sort of denial service attack on your website, okay? A sharp downturn in that number could signal that you're having a problem. It could mean that something about your website isn't working properly anymore, so maybe your website is not as ranked as well on Google. It could mean that one of your major traffic sources is no longer sending you traffic. Maybe your Facebook ad stopped working, or something like that.   So, keeping an eye on that number can be a good clue, both when things are going well for you, but also maybe even more importantly, when they're not. Now, a sharp downturn may not be something you have to fix. It could be, I'm just throwing this out there, it could be a legitimate reason, something predictable, right? It could be if you have a very seasonal-type business, you'll probably see a pretty sharp downturn at the end of your season.   So, this is where you have to take all that other information that you know about your business when you're looking at this number. This number does not necessarily tell you anything in and of itself, it is a clue for what else you need to look at.   Next up, you want to look at the sources of your traffic, okay? So this can help you figure out where your efforts need to be put in terms of driving traffic to your website. And it also can help you see what is quality traffic for you and not, because you're able to actually segment in Google the source traffic comes from and then what they do. So, how quickly they leave your site, or, you know, whether or not they buy anything, something like that.   Now, something you'll commonly see as a website owner, if you've been doing this longer than maybe three months, you're going to end up having a day where you suddenly have way more traffic than you should and it's all coming from like maybe social media and you go frantically drilling down into your reports, trying to figure it out. And it turns out it's coming from a site like Stumble Upon. And those people did not stick around, they didn't buy anything. So it's just kind of a blip on your traffic radar, right? So that's something to think about. The source information can be really useful.   The other thing I like to look at with my sources is I, as a website owner, because I tend to be a very risk-adverse person to begin with, I do not like risky adventures. I like to be seeing in my traffic numbers a good spread across various sources. So, yeah, I want some of my traffic coming from organic traffic from search engines like Google. I want some of my traffic coming from Facebook or some other social media sites. I want some of my traffic coming from email. I do not, as a website owner, want all of my traffic coming from one place because something can always happen to any of my sources.   You know, Google could have some sort of algorithm change in the middle of the night. The rules that they have in place on what websites are number one versus number 10 on their search results, that can suddenly change. There are a lot of website owners out there who are still upset over some of the algorithm changes over the last couple of years. And so I don't ever want all of my traffic coming from one place because what if that goes away in the middle of the night, okay? Because that can happen. So I really like to look at my sources of my traffic so that I can not only see where people are coming from and maybe where I need to beef up my efforts but to make sure that I'm maintaining kind of a spread across various sources and so that my business is more stable.   Alright, also in terms of who's visiting my site, I like to look at the entry pages. What are the landing pages that people are coming in on? And this can help me kind of understand what pages are bringing in the most traffic and kind of recognize that, oh, I have that article out there and I've been putting it out to various bloggers or out on social media and look, now that page is a landing page. People are coming in to the site via that page.   Now, for established websites with strong category pages, strong product pages, good content marketing strategy going on, one thing you'll start to notice is that your home page becomes less and less important as a driver of traffic for you, which is so counterintuitive if you're just getting started. So you'll just have to take my word for this. You know, home pages are great, they can be very keyword heavy. They're obviously a good entrance into your site, but from a search engine's perspective in particular, something like a category page or a product page or a really good content article might be fulfilling the needs of the searcher more than your home page. And the Google and being in all the other search engines, their algorithms are constantly trying to find the best place to route people. And so your home page may not always be that and as you get more established, as you get better at managing your website, you're likely to see your home page drop in popularity as a landing page for your website.   Alright, so let's move on to what your visitors are doing once they're there. This is another set of metrics that we really want to look at. One thing I like to look at is the average pages per visit. This is the average number of pages that someone views before they leave the website. This can be an indicator of a couple of things. The big ones are the quality of the visitor. So someone who is potentially interested in the information you have is probably going to surf more pages than someone who is not. This could also indicate to how well your site is internally linked. So let's say you have a category page or an article that comes up and ranks really well with the search engines and someone, a lot of people tend to come into via that page. That's the first page that they see when they get on your website. If you have a good linking strategy, and there are links on that page to other related pages, you'll have a better chance of keeping them on the site for a second page and a third page and so on and so forth.   If you have a ton of your traffic only visiting one page on your website, it might be worth taking a look at whether you have a good path for them to follow, right? Among your pages if your pages are well-linked. So, average pages per visit, again, is one of those clues, right? It helps us understand maybe where we need to look to possibly improve our websites. Alright, related to that is the page path that people generally follow. So what I mean by that is what is the first page they look at and then what page do they go to after that and what page do they commonly go to after that? This can give us, as website owners, a lot of information about how people are using our website. So again, we can make tweaks, right?   In what links we want to direct people to and what best information for them to see next. You know, the good example of this is if you look at Google Analytics and you see that the page path that people are following is not really conducive to the sales process, you might need to change out the way that your pages are linking together or your menus or something to try to get people to click on a better page next, right? A page that will move them down the sales funnel so they go from being maybe aware of your product to being interested in learning more to being interested in possibly purchasing it to getting them to that purchase process. And so this is kind of a way to double check that we're funneling people through our website in a logical manner and if we see that we're not, then we need to go back and play detective and figure out why it is that they're not moving along that path successfully.   Alright, next up are two metrics in terms of customer behavior on the website that we all should love and adore. One is our conversion rate, that's the number of people who place an order during their visit to the website and the other is their average order value. Now, we talked quite a bit about average order value in the last episode, in Episode 16. If you haven't heard that one yet, please be sure to go listen to that. But, the conversion rate and the average order value are kind of our best case scenario, right? This is what we want people to be doing on an E-commerce website. I mean sure, we put the articles in there, we put lots of information, we want them to feel good about making a purchase, but in the end, we need them to make a purchase That's really important. And so we need this conversion rate to constantly be going up. It could be a big indicator of how our site is doing. It can also be, like a traffic number, an early sign if there is a problem. If we start to see our conversion rate going down, we need to dig in hard to the rest of our metrics to figure out why that is happening.   And then in terms of AOV, I'm just going to say briefly, because I just talked about this in the last episode. I'd really encourage you to go listen to that. You know, your site's AOV can make a huge difference, it's the Average Order Value, a huge difference in how difficult it is to run a profitable site and to have the cash necessary to grow. So again, that's a metric we always want to see going up when we're checking on our metrics each day.   Alright, third set of metrics we need to be looking at. The how are they leaving metrics? How are our customers leaving our website? Now the first metric you should look at in this category is called the bounce rate. Now, if you haven't heard the bounce rate before, the bounce rate is the number of people who land on a page on our website and then immediately leave without visiting a second page. They're bouncing, right? Like a ball, they hit the ground and they go right back out.   Now every website has a bounce rate. If it does not have a bounce rate, and you'll see people claim they don't, generally they're doing something with like a click bait situation where they're getting someone to click something while they're on the website and then basically they don't have a bounce rate, right? Because everybody clicks whatever it is. So a bounce rate, I just want to assure you, especially as an E-commerce website, a bounce rate is perfectly normal thing to have.   Having one does not indicate a problem. This is actually kind of a strange metric because even having sometimes a high bounce rate, you know, in the 70s and 80s, it might not indicate a problem, okay? So think about this from the search engine's perspective. A company like Google, as a search engine, cares that people who search on their search engine platform are getting the information they need from your website. So if they're going to put your website at number one in the ranking, they want to be pretty darn sure that that person's going to get exactly what they need by clicking on that link, okay?   So, sometimes, let's say you have a really great article on your website about how to pick the perfect camera for you and you might actually have a very high bounce rate on that article because people come in, they look at the article, they find the information they need and they leave, okay?   So in and of itself, a bounce rate isn't necessarily bad, okay, but here's kind of the thing about bounce rates. From Google's perspective, a high bounce rate isn't bad as long as people are getting what they need. From your perspective as website owner, a high bounce rate means they didn't buy anything, right? It's impossible to buy something without visiting more than one page on your website. Even if you have like a Check Out Now button on your product page, they're still going to have to go to the product page and the checkout page, right? And then the thank you page, hopefully, when they press that Place Order button. And so for us as website owners, we need to keep an eye on this bounce rate and generally we do need it to be going down, okay?   If we were running a blog, it could be a different situation, but if you're running an E-commerce website, yes, reading information is good, but we need them to be buying. And so we can look at this bounce rate and kind of look at, and this is along with that page path that I was talking about a few minutes ago, kind of see, you know, where are we failing here? Do we need to get better links on these pages that people are bouncing on? Do we need to lay out the information differently so that people kind of get into that path of moving towards checkout?   Alright, in addition to the bounce rate, you also want to look at the exit pages. These are the pages that people leave from. Okay, so let's say somebody comes into your website and they land on a category page and then they move to a product page and then they move to the cart and then they leave. Okay, the exit page would be the cart page. It's the last page they visited on their journey through your website. Now in a perfect world, we would want most of our exits to be on our thank you page, right? The thank you page they see after they've hit the Place Order button, their order's been placed, this is where we want people to leave our website. But, that's not always the case, right? And if you have a significant number of exits from other pages, this is, again, a place you need to look to see if you need to make improvements to your pages. Why are people leaving? You're not going to be able to prevent everyone from leaving, but again, how do we get them into that sales funnel instead of clicking up in their browser window and taking off? Thankfully, Google Analytics breaks out your exit pages by page. So you're going to be able to see where people are leaving so you can get really granular in trying to figure out how you can possibly improve those pages and get people back into your sales funnel.   Alright, so if you're not currently watching your metrics, I realize this sounds like a lot of things to keep track off. These are a lot of potentially new terms and new places to go look. I promise you, though, that if you start doing this every day or every few days, it will quickly become automatic. I can get into Google Analytics and glance at all of these things in under two minutes a day. I've been doing it for 10 years, believe me, it just gets to be part of what you do with your day, every day.   Okay, so if you have Google Analytics installed and you aren't tracking your metrics, well, you know, at least the data's in there, right? So you need to start today, get in there, start looking at these numbers. If you are getting in there and looking at these numbers, good for you. Hopefully today's discussion has given you a little bit more insight into what each of those numbers mean. If you are wondering what some other numbers mean, you know, feel free to reach out to me. Remember, savvybusinessmethod.com is my website. You can reach out, tell me what it is you want me to talk about on a future podcast. I can totally do that.   But, in the end, I do want to be clear the numbers in Google Analytics are cool, they're fun to look at, they're a great source of information we can use to help inform the decisions we make. But they are not an end all. None of those numbers give us the whole story about anything. They can give us clues, though, to areas we need to work on improving and they can also help us track the consequences of changes we make or things we try. So if we change up the shipping offer, if we suddenly start offering free shipping, we can get some clues from these numbers about how that effect our customer's behavior. If we start changing up the way our site is linked from one page to another. We can get some clues watching these numbers to how that effect our customer's behavior. But in the end, this is one piece of information and you need to take the rest of the knowledge you have about your website and numbers from other sources to make informed decisions.   Alright, well that's it for today. I will be back in your feed in a few days. In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me. I hope this information will help you make excellent decisions for your own business. And hopefully inspire you to get digging in there, right? On how well your website is performing and the areas you need to target for improvement. We all have places for improvement, trust me. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you know, like you want to know what some of these other numbers mean, you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. And I will talk to you soon.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch ya next time.       Episode 017: Important Traffic Metrics for Your Ecommerce Website

Episode 016: Increasing Average Order Value (and how to get one)   Episode Summary:  A high average order value can make it easier to run your online business. In this episode, Julie walks you through the benefits of a high AOV and specific strategies for increasing your website's AOV.   Episode Links: https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:     Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello and welcome to episode 16 of The Savvy Business Method Podcast where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family.   Today's topic is how to increase the average order value on your website this is such an important topic we all need to be working towards an increasingly higher average order value right? Because having a high AOV has a couple of advantages. You know one is that we have to self view our products to pay for our fixed expenses for our business right? Because every month you have to pay for your marketing systems and your website maintenance and maybe you have to have staff on hand for customer service or for shipping orders and all those expenses have to be paid whether you ship a 100 orders or whether you ship 10 thousand orders. And so having a higher average order value means more money is coming in with every order which means there is more money available to pay those expenses.   There's also more money available to spend on advertising cost, or budget for those customer acquisition costs and so the money it costs us to go out and bring customers to our website and get them to purchase something. Having more revenue coming in also can lead to the ability to pay better wages right? Which means we can pay benefits and so we can possibly attract better people who can help us continue to grow our business and of course in the end higher average order value generally means that our business will be more profitable right and more stable and have more cash available to grow which is so important.   Now if you're listening to this podcast and you're trying to figure out how to first start your business and may not have picked your products yet let me go ahead and just put it out there that it is really worth considering targeting higher priced products where you're going to have a higher average order value because honestly your path to successful Ecommerce is going to be smoother if you have to sell less things in order to pay your expenses and to generate a profit. Okay but that being said most of you listening and you know myself included already have our products right? We already have things we're trying to sell and now this becomes about trying to get the highest average order value we can with the products and the websites that we have. So let's start talking about ways that we can increase the AOV on our websites.   All right first up a fairly reliable way to increase the average order value on your website is to actively recommend best-selling products, trending products or complementary products. Okay so what we're doing here is we're trying to convince customers that there are other products they should also put in their shopping cart. Okay so there's a couple of ways to do this one is to really dive in and work on your product recommendations. Okay so depending on the Ecommerce platform you're using, depending on the plugins maybe especially if you're working with something like Shopify that tends to have a lot of apps and plugins, or if you're working with a more custom built site having good product recommendations might be built into your system but most likely you're going to need to go out and find a plugin or potentially have some development work done to get those product recommendations working properly.   Now product recommendations can work two different ways. The simple way, the inexpensive way that you can generally get a good plugin for or some fairly simple development work is to do manual product recommendations and so this is where let's say you have product A and you know from experience as the website owner that product A generally sells well with products D and E, okay or maybe you have a report or something but you know that if you recommend products D and E with product A that those are complementary products and the customer will recognize that and are more likely to buy those additional products.   Okay so that's one way to do it, another way to do it is to use a system that works on an algorithm and this is so powerful. The systems that work on an algorithm tend to be much more costly and involved but generally you set up basically recipes and you say I want the product recommendations being shown to be based on what the computer knows people also buy when they buy this product, or that people who also look at this product also buy these other products. So a good example of this in action is Amazon so if you go to any Amazon's sales page and you scroll down there's always that section about people who bought this also bought that, right? And so having those dynamic product recommendations can be really powerful for getting people to add more items to their cart which that means a value of their order is larger.   Okay so couple things about product recommendations to keep in mind, you generally want to put them on the product pages right where people are shopping just like Amazon does, you can also think about putting them on the cart page okay? The shopping cart itself and this is something that you can test to kind of see how that works. Now go back to episode six if you haven't listened to episode six yet where I talk about the goals of each of the major pages that any Ecommerce site has and one of the things I talked about in that episode is that we don't want to put things on the checkout page that might distract people. The cart page we can do a little distraction we can try to get the top sell them a little bit but we don't want to put like products recommendation on the checkout page because once someone gets to the checkout page the only goal is for that to hit that place order button and nothing should be distracting them, okay?   Now product recommendations can also be shown in the form of up sells so you can have like a pop-up on the way to the cart page or on the way potentially to checkout where it says do you want to add this additional item, possibly do you want to add this additional item for a discount is even a way to do that, and there are generally plugins for the major Ecommerce platforms out there that will allow you to do that.   Another way to actively recommend your best selling products, trending products, complementary products is to use a live chat system. So if you have a chat system set up on your website check and see if it allows you to see what's in people's carts or what people are browsing on currently, this is going to be generally the higher end of chat systems just tell you it's not going to be the free chat systems but your staff if you have a customer service team when they have time available they can see what people are looking at or have in their carts and then they can pop-up with the chat box and make active suggestions and engage that customer in conversation.   So on one hand this seems kind of creepy right? Because we're used to browsing anonymously online but in reality this isn't much different than standing in a cell phone store and looking at a particular cell phone and having the sales person come up and talk to you about that phones features and how okay well now if you want to buy that phone you need to get a case, you need to get a screen protector all that sort of thing, okay so it's the same general concept. This will work great for some Ecommerce sites who have a certain type of customer and this will be disastrous for other Ecommerce sites with another type of customers so this is just something to think about if this sounds like something that your customers would find helpful it might be worth looking into.   All right but if you're going to do it two things you need to check out okay. So one is like I mentioned not all live chat systems are going to be able to do this so check that out first, there are higher end systems out there and there are lower end systems with less functionality. Also you might want to look at automating this if you're checking out functionality see how much of this can be automated because it can be really time consuming and yeah it's one thing if your customer service people have timed like in between calls or emails or chats to do this but you're not going to catch every customer that way so if there's any automation or kind of a bot system built into any of these chat systems that might be something to think about as well.   All right so as much as it can work well to make recommendations for customers and try to get them to put more items in their cart in the end we're dependent on them putting more items in their cart right? So the other way we can tackle this is to increase the value of the items that they do put in their cart okay so what do I mean by that? Now one thing that companies can use really strategically is to create product bundles so instead of having say a small product that cost $10 or $15 you could that product together with all the accessories and all of a sudden buying that product is a $50 purchase.   Okay so you think about you can have a kit to make something instead of just buying an ingredient you can have the kit to make something I've done that myself, or if you're offering cell phones or cameras or a piece of electronics equipment you could bundle that product together with the accessories and that would increase the size of that order without having to depend on the customer to see the product recommendations and make the decision to put those additional items in their cart, okay? So that could be a really good strategy.   Another strategy is to use deals to increase the average order value. Okay so this is where we give customers a very clear incentive to buy more. Now one way to do this is to use either shipping costs like some sort of shipping cost incentive or some sort of discount incentive are the two that I see most often. Okay so let's do some examples. You could for example offer free or discounted shipping for orders over a certain amount this is really popular on the internet right now with the Ecommerce company so for example you could say we have free shipping for orders over $50, or we have you get 20% off the shipping with orders over a certain amount something like that or flat rate shipping with orders over a certain amount.   You can also look at doing free gifts I have tried this on one of the sites that I had we had a free gift for orders over a certain amount and so we figured out what our normal average order value was and then we said I think you know let's say your average order value is $50 and you offer a free gift then for any order maybe over $60 or $55. So when I'm saying free gift I'm talking about something that's very inexpensive to you but it's meaningful to your customer so you can get them maybe to put just a little bit more in their cart to get their free gift.   I've also seen a lot of Ecommerce sites do discounts for a higher order value so you can advertise $20 off an order of $100 or more something like that that could really incentivize people to get to that higher mark and these types of deals tend to work even better if you make them time sensitive so if there's a limited time only. Some websites can even get away with putting like a countdown timer on their website that is not going to work for every brand or for every website but for websites whose customers are incentivized by that countdown timer that could be really really powerful.   All right now let's just launch into some random ideas if none of those or if you've done all the things that I've already talked about here are a few extra ideas for you as well. Some companies have really good luck getting their average order value up when they put a loyalty program in place and so if your customers know that they're going to be earning points for buying with you they might be tempted to buy more right? Because they know they're going to get points towards a future purchase or a discount or something like that, those loyalty programs can be really powerful and they're common enough now that not only does the software exist at an affordable price to get one put in place customers know what they are so I mean I feel bad for the people who first did loyalty programs way back when and had to explain to every customer what it is, we're in a much better position now as companies we can put a program in place and have the basic details and customers get it, right, they know what they're doing.   Another system that is available now just in the last couple of years is to offer payment options. Okay so payment options sound really scary as a website owner don't they? You don't really want to be taking the risk as a website owner about whether someone's going to pay you or not but there are some systems out there PayPal Credit is one of them where you get your money upfront and the risk is actually taken by PayPal or at least that's how it worked the last time I checked into it. Those systems tend to work really well if you have higher end items, okay of you can nudge your average order value up over their minimum and I think PayPal's minimum is like $100 or right around there. So if you're sitting at like an $80 $75 or $80 average order value now and you're trying to nudge that up closer to $100 having that systems available might be what you need to help get customers to purchase just a little bit more from you.   Okay now remember in the last episode when I talked about how important it is to choose an email service provider who had the functionality that your specific business needed? Okay well here's an example of where you can use this to your advantage. If you look at your average order value across your customers and you start actually making a list of all of your orders and all the value you may find that they fall into very distinct buckets. So let me give you an example. Let's say your average order value is $40 you may find out if you line up all your orders into like a statistics table right? That 75% of your orders are actually $25 an average order value $25 and 25% of your values are actually an average order value of $100 you may have that kind of really deep spread which then gives you you know maybe an average order value of something like $40, okay?   If you know that information then you can go into your email system if your email system is properly hooked up to your Ecommerce platform it should be able in theory to segment out the people who had the larger orders and then you can start directly marketing to them and in that email campaigns that directly look to bring them back to the site right? Instead of marketing the same sale to everyone you can start to segment your list. It is also potentially possible to do this with Facebook and it's going to depend a lot on technology and what Facebook decides to change next week about what they allow and don't allow but it is something to look into, so if you find that you have very clear spreads in terms of order value buckets I'd really encourage you to start breaking out those higher end customers and start designing campaigns specifically for them so that you can bring in those larger orders. Pretty cool ha? This is why you want to go to email marketing system and know how to use your other marketing systems really well because you can get this segmentation going on and it can be really powerful.   Okay so I've given you a lot of ideas to mull over but before you run out and start trying different ways of getting your average order value up here are two things I want you to think about, all right? First, before you do anything you need to make sure you know what your average order value really is. So like I just talked about in the example of targeting your higher end customers it could be that you have very distinct groups within your customers and you actually have several or average order values out there depending on the different groups. You'll be far more likely to have success with getting that average order value up if you are marketing to individual groups rather than trying to come up with a one size fits all approach.   Okay second, if you do know for sure that you have a single average order value out there across the board so let's say it's $35 then you need to be reasonable about your goals. So it's unlikely to do you a ton of good to say offer free shipping for orders over $60 when your average order value is $35. The difference between $35 and $60 is pretty big right? Most customers aren't going to suddenly start spending that much more even for the promise of free shipping but if you do free shipping maybe over $40 you might even be able to try free shipping over $45 you're more likely to nudge that AOV up you'll get more customers taking advantage of that offer you know and then once you've got customers doing that successfully maybe a few months later you can try to nudge it up just a little bit again. So just be thoughtful about this think about it from the customers perspective, don't get greedy right? Don't do too much too fast we're really talking about nudging up that average order value not making really drastic changes so that might turn our customers off.   All right so getting your average order value up can make a huge different for your small business right? So it gives you significantly more wiggle room so you can invest and grow your company and so for all of us regardless of what it is we're selling in our Ecommerce websites this needs to be something we continually work on.   Okay so that's it for today if you have feedback or ideas for future shows you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube, also please be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitches so you don't miss an episode and of course I would greatly appreciate if you can rate and review this podcast in iTunes. I love reading your reviews, I really appreciate the feedback. I will be back in your feed in a few days and until then, bye for now.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode please leave a review and subscribe and for more great content and to stay up to date visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.       Episode 016: Increasing Average Order Value      

Episode 015: Choosing an Email Service Provider   Episode Summary:  Email marketing is typically one of the best returns on investment for most ecommerce websites. In this episode, Julie talks through the factors you need to consider when choosing an email service provider including your goals and budget as well as your functionality and level of service needs.   Episode Links: https://mailchimp.com/ https://www.constantcontact.com/ https://www.klaviyo.com/ https://www.activecampaign.com/ https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:     Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 15 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family.   Today we're going to talk about email marketing, and we've done a few episodes talking about email. And one of the reasons I like to talk about email is because email marketing tends to have a higher rate of return for small business owners with websites, ecommerce websites, than a lot of other types of marketing. And so this is something that I feel really strongly that ecommerce website owners need to have in place and need to do well so that they can get the best rate of return on their investment and grow their business.   So today I want to walk you through choosing an email service provider. Now, before we get into the factors you need to consider, I want to clarify that an email service provider is the service you're using to send out both your automated and manual email marketing campaigns to your mailing list, so like your sales emails and your abandoned cart emails. This is different from who hosts your business e-mailbox. So I have an email address through my website, SavvyBusinessMethod.com. That email address is hosted and managed by a different service than what I use to send out the emails for Savvy Business Method. So hopefully that makes sense. That's just a point of confusion occasionally, and I want to make sure we clear that up in advance. All right, well, there are a number of good options out there for an email service provider, or an ESP. I'll probably use ESP throughout this so I don't have to keep saying email service provider.   Now, a couple of them you've probably heard of. If you've been around ecommerce at all for a while, companies like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Klaviyo are really popular with small website owners. And so we're going to be talking about companies like that today. And really the company that you choose or the company that's the best fit for your business is going to be dependent on a number of factors, including how large your email list is, your budget, and the features and the level of service that you specifically need. So let's walk through each of these and really dig into how you can figure out which service will best meet the needs of your specific business.   All right, first off, I would recommend that you think about the goals that you have for your email marketing. Now, are you looking, for example, to just send out periodic emails to your email list, to maybe announce a sale or a new product or just remind them your business exists? Or are you looking maybe to do more triggered marketing? These are the automated campaigns, things like a shopping cart abandonment campaign, when somebody abandons their shopping cart, or a welcome series that starts sending out emails to them as soon as they sign up for your email list, or a post-purchase series that follows up with them after that sale, to support that sale, maybe get a product review, and also try to get them to make that second, third, fourth sale, et cetera. So those are some different types of campaigns that you could be considering running.   Now, those are typical ecommerce campaigns. But if you are selling an item that requires a great deal of education or thought by the consumer, they really have to consider this purchase, or maybe it's a very high dollar value item, you may also need to run a sales funnel. So that's sort of a different type of campaign, right, where you're catching them at various points in the sales process and kind of funneling them through to the sales process. And so knowing your goals in advance can really help you understand the level of functionality that you're going to need from an email service provider.   All right, on top of the type of email marketing specifically you're looking to do, you do need to also give some thought to what are your goals for growing your email list? Is your email list growing very quickly? Is it likely to get very large? Do you need specific tools built into your email service provider to help you grow that list and capture email addresses? Or are you using a separate system or something like that? Email is either a small part of your marketing for some businesses, or it's a very big part of it. And knowing that in advance can be really useful before you go out and try to choose a company.   All right, next up, you need to know the types of features that are available in each system that you look at, okay? So let's talk first about automation and the functionality of the automation system within any given email service provider. Now, knowing what kinds of campaigns you want to run is really helpful, right? So then you want to look in the system at what kinds of campaigns can be automated.   Now, let's talk, for example, about shopping cart abandonment, because generally most decent email service providers are going to have support for an abandoned shopping cart campaign, because that's a very common need for an ecommerce website. So if you're looking at an SCA campaign, are there campaign templates in the system that you're looking at to get you started? Are you going to have to come up with the code for the emails by yourself? Are you going to have to come up with the sequencing and the delays all by yourself?   Now, there are some trade offs here, right? So if you're just getting started with your business or you're not particularly tech savvy or you don't have a particularly large budget to do a lot of custom coding, having an email service provider that has a drag-and-drop system or has some example campaigns already set up, where you're just plugging in your logo and the colors and the time delay you want between the emails, that can be fabulous, especially when you're first getting started.   But as you grow, one thing you need to be looking at with automation functionality in any of these email service providers is whether there is flexibility long-term. So I have great faith in you. I know that as you go on in your ecommerce journey that you become more savvy in how you run your business, and you start noticing some trends with your email marketing, you are going to be in a position to be a little bit more strategic about how you lay out your emails and how you lay out your sequences. And having the ability in a system to then go in and be flexible and set up your own campaigns with these custom layouts or custom timing can be really important. So this is just thinking ahead, right? So as you become better at this, are you going to have the flexibility in the automation system to do the campaign that you want to do? All right, also with the animated, or automated, excuse me, automated campaigns, if you could do animated campaigns, that'd be cool, too, but with the automated campaigns, you want to be asking the email service provider about the level of service they're providing here, right? So are they building the campaigns out for you, or is that something you do? And if it's something you do, be sure to get a demo or a trial period so that you can make sure that your level of technical skill meshes nicely with the complexity of the system that you're looking at. There are systems out there that are so ridiculously easy, drag-and-drop systems, they're great. There are systems out there that require a lot more tech skill, and they also tend to have a lot more functionality long-term. So those trade offs are there. Just be thoughtful before you sign any agreements or sign up for a year plan or something like that, that you're picking something that you are going to be able to work with and get those automation sequences set up well.   All right, next up, I would encourage you to look at the tracking and reporting that is available through the system that you're considering. This may not seem like a big thing. And to be honest, it isn't a really big thing when you're first getting started. But again, as you grow, as your email list is bigger, as you're generating more revenue, and as you get more savvy as an ecommerce marketer, you're going to want to see more and more metrics of how your email is doing.   And there can be major differences between the tracking and reporting in different systems. So for example, most systems will track things like clicks and opens and how many people purchase something after reading the email. But if you're planning on running more complex campaigns from the get-go, you might want to think through what information you would want about those campaigns, and then verify that those metrics are available in the system you're looking at. Also, as you start running more and more campaigns and more complex campaigns, it's really useful to be able to download your statistics into a spreadsheet program like Excel so that you can analyze the statistics. So just double check that you have that ability in whatever system you're looking at, too. So again, thinking ahead, right, we just want to make sure we can grow, and as we become better at this, that we have the information available, and it's not going to be this huge pain to pull the information out of the system.   All right, when you're looking at a system, I'd also recommend you look carefully at their template options. Now, templates are the pre-built emails that are available that, in theory, you're just going to drop your logo in and change the colors and maybe tweak the layout just a little bit. But basically, it's a plug-and-play system, right? You plug your information in, and you're able to send emails that look reasonably professional.   Templates are amazing, I mean, especially when you're first getting started or you don't have the tech skills or you don't have the budget for something custom. They can just be the best thing ever. But it's important to look and make sure that the company that you're looking to work with has templates, if you're going to use a template, that they have templates that are going to be able to be adjusted enough to match your branding so that your emails are recognizable to your customers, because you're going to have a much easier time using email for marketing if your customers recognize the email is coming from you and it's reinforcing whatever branding and messaging that your site has going on.   All right, so in order to look at templates, you need to think through a few things. Most of this is about thinking through the types of emails you'll be sending out. When we think about batch and blast emails, those newsletter or sale emails that we send out manually to our lists, having a big image, that hero image at the top is pretty common. But then you need to think through, are you just going to be sending out emails with that one image and maybe some text? Are you planning on sending supporting articles or recipes or guides or something else further down the email that you're going to need space to drop in? Maybe you're planning on doing product highlights, or you want to have multiple product recommendations in your emails.   All of that are things that you should be considering when you're looking at templates, because you don't want to mess with those templates too much unless you are some sort of coding expert, because those templates are really finicky, because they're meant to work both on a desktop and on a tablet and on a mobile device, which is great. It used to be that we didn't have that functionality, even a few years ago. But now it's standard. But it also means you can't mess with the template like you used to be able to.   All right, so let's say that you're not finding any templates that work well for you. You need very specific branding, or you need a specific layout. What are your options? Most companies, especially the higher-end email service providers, and believe me, there are some high-end email service providers out there, and they are fabulous. I miss them dearly. They often offer a service where you can draw out what you want for an email, have a designer draw it out, and then there are people who will build that template for you. And that service generally runs anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 in my experience. So that's just something to think about. That is a chunk of money. So if that's something that's in your marketing budget, great. You can have a really nice, well-branded email. But if it's not, you're going to need to figure out how to work with the templates that are already in the system.   All right, next up, this won't matter to everybody, but if you work a lot from your phone or mobile device, you may want to check and see if whatever email service provider you're considering has some sort of mobile app so that you can log in to the system on the go. This requirement, if this is really important to you, I'm going to tell you up front this is going to limit your options, because a lot of the email service providers do not have apps. And the ones that do have very low functionality apps, from what I can find. But just something to think about. If you're used to having constant access to systems from your cell phone, then you need to take that into account when you're picking somebody, and decide how important that's going to be, if that's going to be a hill you want to die on or not.   All right, next up, you need to make sure that whatever system you choose can be fully integrated with both your ecommerce platform, so this is where you sell things, right, like Shopify or Magento or BigCommerce or CoreCommerce or whoever you're using, as well as any other systems that are critical for operating your business, okay? So these are things like if you have a customer relationship management system, if you're doing more sales focus, you might have a CRM. Your ecommerce platform has to, or excuse me, your email service provider has to interface with your CRM. If you're using a landing page system like Leadpages, you need to make sure that that is interfacing with your email service provider. If you are using a separate system for email capture and you've got your popups and your static banners and all of that on your site through another system, you need to make sure all of these systems can talk to one another.   It does not work for you to be manually downloading email addresses out of one system and putting them in another. Don't get stuck in that idea. That doesn't work because part of the effectiveness of email is when someone signs up that they are immediately getting whatever follow up you promised them. Otherwise you're going to end up with a lot more spam complaints. So don't get into this idea of downloading automatically. If someone signs up on Facebook, it needs to feed directly to your email service provider. If they sign up on a popup, it has to feed directly. People place an order on your ecommerce site, it has to feed directly into your email service provider.   So this is a big thing to worry about. The nice thing is, thanks to Google, this can be really simple. You're just normally typing in the name of your ecommerce platform and the name of your email service provider. So you can type in Shopify integration ActiveCampaign, or something like that, and see if those two systems talk. That information is usually very readily available. All right, you also need to be concerned about deliverability. So what does deliverability mean? This means the number of emails that actually make it into your customer's inbox and on the way are not marked as spam, okay? So we're talking about the issue of, when you send an email, does that email get marked as spam? Does it get put in their spam box, their junk folder? We need our emails making it to our customers' email boxes. Now, granted, if our customer has Gmail, we're probably making into the promotion box. That is a very different thing than getting marked as spam and ending up in a junk folder, right? At least there's a chance they're going to see our email, and it doesn't have this big spam label on it.   Okay, so deliverability really matters. And this is a tough thing, because there are a decent number of companies out there that maybe don't have the best deliverability rates, to put it nicely. So this is something you need to ask about. And you really are looking for 98% or higher deliverability. It's also helpful if the company has a dedicated deliverability team. These are people who have working relationships with the big email providers, like Gmail and Microsoft, for Outlook and that sort of thing, or Yahoo Mail, where if there's an issue, that they're able to talk to those companies directly and say, hey, why did all of our email going to customers with your email address get marked as spam, something like that.   So this is actually really important, because you are working hard, right, to build your email list. And building an email list is not a free thing. You're putting effort into it. You might be paying for lead ads, something like that. And then to be sending emails and not having them get to people, that is a huge problem. Now, something to keep in mind, companies do not have high deliverability rates on accident. Yeah, they've got good systems if they're going to have a high deliverability rate. They probably have dedicated deliverability teams. But the other thing they do to ensure that their deliverability rates are high is they do not tolerate bad behavior from their customers. Okay?   So if you have an email service provider who's just letting you sign anyone up, import any list, send any email, that is a bad sign, okay? You're probably going to have really low deliverability rates, because a company like Gmail or Yahoo Mail is going to see emails coming from that provider and be like, oh, yeah, these are the people who send a lot of spam. So this is just something to be thinking about. You actually do want it to be a little bit difficult to send your email, okay? Just like you don't want to go to a college that gives As to everybody, okay? It becomes a meaningless grade, right? If it is so easy to send email, if no one ever asks a single question about where you got your lists or what you're putting in your emails or where you got an email address, then you need to be suspicious and ask more questions, okay? That's all I'm saying.   So I'll give you an example. I recently switched to a new email company because I needed to shift the type of emails that I was sending for one of my companies. And I went to send my first email with them. And I checked them out. They have a great reputation. I was actually quite happy with them. And instead of my email going out at 11 a.m., I got an email from their deliverability team saying, hey, we are holding your email until you give us some more information. And they needed a very detailed, documented list of where I had gotten every single one of the email addresses for my company, which fine, because I did obtain them all perfectly legitimately. But I had to basically swear that I had done this legally, and it was fine. I mean, the whole process took like 15 minutes. My email went out 15 minutes later. It was fine. This is a good thing. I mean, yeah, it was a pain in the moment, but that's a good thing. That tells me that they care and that odds are good that my emails will continue to go out and not be marked as spam going forward, okay? So that's a good thing.   Another thing to look at in terms of this whole deliverability question, something you can kind of investigate without having to ask too many questions up front is look at who their other clients are. Email service providers are really good, generally, at letting you know if they have big companies that use them for their email. So that's just another thing. You can look and say, oh, they're working with larger companies. They probably have a little bit higher quality service going on. I mean, you're not going to get the same service as a big client, don't get me wrong. Your $25 a month is not going to get you the same service as maybe a company like Costco gets. But nonetheless, generally that'll be a more reputable company, right?   All right, so along with deliverability, you also want to look at their customer service, okay? And this is things like how quickly will you get help if you need it? Do you have different ways to contact them? If you're on a very inexpensive plan, then you're probably only going to have like an email contact information going on or maybe live chat during Monday through Friday, eight to five, type thing. If you have a more costly plan, I would sincerely hope that you would have the ability to contact them 24-7. So when I had a huge email list with one of my companies, it was over 300,000 people, we were paying a pretty significant amount of money for our email every month. And the company we were working with was a very high end company. And they were fabulous. But I had a phone number. If something went wrong on a Saturday at 9:00 p.m, I had a way to get a hold of the main line, and I actually also had my account rep's cell phone number, as well. So there were things I could do. If I had some massive catastrophe, there were people I could call. But you're not going to get that level of service as a really small business.   Next up, you want to look at how extensive is their help, okay? So is this more of a self-service system, where they give you a bunch of articles and they expect you to figure it out? Or will they get in there and do things for you? And again, that's probably going to be a function of how much you're paying. Setup is also a factor you want to think about, if you need to be setting this up on your own, or are they going to do initial setup for you and kind of get you all set up and ready to go, and then kind of turn you loose on it? So that's just questions to ask.   If you are paying more or if you have a larger list and are paying more, you may be assigned an account rep. And so a good question to ask if you're kind of working in that system is what would your account rep be doing for you? Will they be meeting with you regularly? Will they be making active suggestions, getting to know your business, helping educate you on how to do email marketing better? Or are they just your contact person if something goes wrong, okay? So that's just going to vary depending on the company and the type of plan you're on and how large your list is, things like that. All account reps are not created equal, let me tell you. But there are some amazing ones out there.   All right, last up for factors you need to think about is, of course, the money factor, right? I've kind of been alluding to this with all of these other things I've been talking about. But your budget, in the end, is going to drive a lot of this decision for you. All right, so what is your budget? That can be a little bit hard of a question, right? You have a marketing budget hopefully worked out, and you may have some ideas about how much you can potentially spend on email lists.   But let me give you a few things to think about when you're planning your budget. One is how big is your list? Now, if you are coming into this with a fairly large list, like I did very little email marketing until I had about 80,000 people on my email list. And this is just me not knowing how powerful it could be. And so I was using a very slimmed-down provider. I was sending out like one email every other week. I think I had just started sending out one email every week, when I contracted with a fairly big, fairly high-end email provider, and I got a great account rep, and I was able to just take my email and run with it. But if you have a very small list, you are going to be looking at different options than if you're coming in with 80, 100, 200, 300,000 people on your email list.   Now, don't be intimidated, okay, because there are actually even free plans out there. I would not recommend a free plan because free plans usually come with a lot of strings attached. Maybe we can talk about those in another episode. But the low priced plans, where you don't have all the restrictions, for a lot of these service providers, generally start about $25 a month. So they are super affordable. But you can easily spend many thousands of dollars a month, depending on how big your list is and how much functionality you need, how much support you need. So there is a range. But that's good, right? Because that means there is something there for everyone.   All right, next up, when you're talking about your budget, you need to be thinking about how much money you could reasonably make by putting a solid email marketing program in place. And this'll be a little bit easier to judge if you're already doing some email marketing and you kind of have a feel for how your customers respond to email. But if you have no system in place at all, it can be much harder to understand what the potential is, okay? And there's so many factors that go into this. There's no way we can cover all of them today. But let me just give you a general rule of thumb.   Most companies will generally see a 5x to 10X return on their investment for email marketing. And that is a very general rule of thumb, okay? Some companies will see more, some will see less. But that would mean for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you're looking to get five to $10 back. I mean, that's part of the reason email marketing can be so powerful. But to get those kind of returns, you need to be careful what system you're using. You need to do your email marketing well. There are a lot of factors there, right? So that's just a general rule of thumb.   All right, and then finally, in terms of your budget, you need to be thinking about, can you balance being affordable now with the ability of the system to grow with you? I mean, the perfect email marketing system would have a very inexpensive plan at like $25, but they would be able to grow, regardless of your email list gets to half a million people, right? That's going to be a hard thing to find, just to put it nicely. But still, you want to look for something that's affordable now but does have some potential to grow, because ROI, as I said, or your return on investment can be really hard to predict. It could be that you have this amazing email list that just worked correctly with the right sequences of emails, is going to generate an amazing return for you. Or it could be your email list, you know, just doesn't buy that much stuff off email. And that could be a little bit hard to predict when you're first getting started. And so finding something that's affordable but can scale and even maybe unlocking more complex or really cool features that you can use for some functionality can be really awesome.   Also, just a warning up front that moving systems is a huge pain. I actually just did it, and it's no fun at all. One of the main problems with moving systems, besides having to get your list into a new system and prove that it's a legitimate list, that you didn't go out in the internet and buy it or something, is that you lose a lot of your tracking and your tagging, normally, when you move systems. So you don't have the easy ability after you move systems to go back and say, well, these were people who purchased something, or these are people who spent more than $100. So a lot of your ability to segment goes away. And we'll talk about segmenting in a future podcast, but just something to keep in mind. Don't make this decision willy-nilly. You do not want to move, okay?   But that being said, picking carefully is important, but it is better to pick a company and start sending email and start making money off your email list than it is to get stuck in any sort of cycle of indecision. And I realize that with all the things I've given you today, it's really easy to be overwhelmed and say, you know, maybe I'll just not worry about this right now. And please, please don't do that. Go back through the show notes. There is a full transcript there so that you can take your time to go through the different things that I've talked about. And think through them and make a list of the factors that you need to be considering, because no system is perfect, right? That doesn't exist. But it's better to have an imperfect system reliably collecting email addresses and sending out email regularly than it is to have nothing at all, all right?   Okay, so that's it. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll be back in your feed in a few days. But in the meantime, I'd love to hear from you. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Be sure, please, to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes or Stitcher. That way you don't miss any episodes. We're doing episodes on Mondays and Thursdays now. I don't want you to miss anything. Also, rating and reviewing this podcast, I really appreciate when you guys do that. I love reading the reviews, and that helps it move up in the ranking so people find it when they search. And that's helpful for everyone else. So I appreciate anything you can do for me on that, and I will see you next time.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method, with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com, Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 015: Choosing an Email Service Provider

Episode 014: Tackling High Abandoned Cart Rates   Episode Summary:  A high rate of abandoned shopping carts on an ecommerce website is so frustrating! In this episode, Julie walks through how to get the abandoned cart rate down as well as strategies for getting customers who abandoned their cart to return and make a purchase.   Episode Links: https://www.adroll.com/ https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:   Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 14 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family.   Okay, quick reminder, there is a full transcript of the show in the show notes, along with any links for any resources I talk about. I want to be sure that you are in a good position to go back and quickly and easily find what you need, because this is an important topic today.   Today we're going to talk about how to tackle high abandoned cart rates. Now, abandoned shopping carts are probably one of the most frustrating issues we deal with as ecommerce website owners. This is where people add items to their shopping cart, and then they don't complete the checkout process. And I think it's really frustrating because we've managed to get traffic to our website, we've managed to get them to add something to their shopping cart, but for some reason they're not making it to that last important step of actually purchasing the item. That's a terrible place to be failing, right?   So let's dive in by first asking ourselves if we actually have a problem. Okay, so that might seem like an odd thing to say, and I get it. Anyone abandoning their shopping cart is a problem. Even after all these years, I go in every couple days to my ecommerce system and look specifically at how many people have abandoned carts on my website. And the number always makes me cringe. So here's the thing. Running a successful ecommerce website means that we all have a lot of competing priorities, right? So one of our biggest challenges is to prioritize the things we need to work on. And so this idea of abandoned shopping carts becomes a prime example because while the number makes all of us cringe, and we would definitely like to have our abandoned cart rate be zero or near zero, that isn't realistic.   So here's the deal. The average ecommerce site has about a 75% abandoned cart rate. Seriously, out of every 100 customers who place something in their shopping cart, on average only 25% of them are going to complete that purchase. The other 75 are going to walk away. I mean, how frustrating is that? But I wanted to start off this discussion today by giving you some perspective, and especially if you're new to ecommerce, so that you can be thoughtful about what you're getting upset over and what you're deciding to put time and resources into.   So here's the deal. As a general rule, if your website's abandoned cart rate is higher than 75%, then I would absolutely agree that you need to work on that ASAP. You're leaving money on the table, and it's going to be a matter of figuring out what is going wrong and why that rate is so high. But if your site's abandoned cart rate is lower than 75%, I'm not telling you not to work on it, of course you should always try to improve that number. But I would encourage you to consider if that's the best use of your time right now. So if your rate's under 75%, your odds of improving it significantly honestly are probably not that great. You can probably nudge it down a little bit, but you're not going to get, make some huge impact on it.   So this is when we need to kinda step back and think about a few things. If you aren't happy with your sales numbers right now and your abandoned cart rate is at 75% or lower, honestly your time is probably better spent working on getting more traffic to your website than it is trying to make a dent in that abandoned cart rate. Hopefully that makes sense. So this is about how we spend our time and understanding what is normal and where we need to stop and take a deep breath and understand that our time is spent better elsewhere.   Now, don't get me wrong. Once you have better traffic numbers and your traffic numbers are closer to what would be your goal or your ideal, you can absolutely circle back around and start nudging that abandoned cart rate down. But you need to be thoughtful about whether you actually have a problem and whether it's something you need to prioritize.   Okay, so let's assume that you have gone into your ecommerce platform, you looked at your abandoned shopping cart rate, and it's higher than 75%. And so this means that your priority does need to be bringing that down. Let's dive in and talk through specifically how you do that. All right, first step, you need to thoroughly evaluate your cart and your checkout process, since this seems to be the part of your website that's hanging people up or is causing people to stop this process. If they were abandoning on the product page, we would go to the product page and look. But they're abandoning on the cart or the checkout page. And so going through both of those with a fine-toothed comb is really important. And yes, you should go through them with a fine-toothed comb. But I'm going to tell you, really you need to get three or five people to do the same, ideally people who can give you some honest feedback. So if you have experienced ecommerce entrepreneurs in your life, that would be a good person to ask. I would also suggest you ask maybe some friends who are not in the ecommerce business but who shop online, and ask them if anything makes them nervous or causes them pause.   The goal with both your cart and your checkout is to have a super slick process where the customer doesn't stop to reconsider their purchase. We want them just to slide on through to checkout. Now, we had a pretty thorough discussion about this back a couple episodes ago where we talked about the 11 pages every ecommerce site needs, and I talked about the different parts of a cart page and a checkout page and how we have to be really careful that we're keeping those slick, that we're not creating distractions. We want people to slide right to the end and press the place order button.   Okay, so as you're going through and looking, there are some things that you specifically should be looking at. Number one, is something in the process too complicated or just too much? Okay, what do I mean by too much? All right, so things to ask yourself, is it simple for the customer to see what they're ordering, like how many they're ordering, the price, the discounts that are applied, the shipping, et cetera? If people can't see clearly what they're getting and what they're going to pay for it, that's a really big reason to start being mistrustful and to walk away from a website.   Another thing to consider is whether you are potentially asking for too much information. It's really important to keep the checkout process quick, and so you only want to ask for information you absolutely need. So for example, you need their name, their email address, and where you're shipping this thing, right? You don't need to ask them their birthday. So just going through and double checking that you don't have any extra questions in there that might be causing people to take longer to go through the process, giving them more time to potentially change their mind.   All right, another thing to consider is whether there are too many choices in either your cart or your checkout process. So yes, in the cart we often want to do upsells or try to push complementary items. But if those are getting to be too distracting, you might need to tone them down or remove them to see if you can improve the number of people who are making it all the way to the end of the checkout process. Also, look at how many shipping choices you have or how many payment options you have. It's easy to think, oh, I'll present my customers with as many options I possibly can. But we do know from research that there's that paralysis of choice, right? When we're presented with too many options, it is easy to stop and not make the decision at all. So sometimes having two or three payment or shipping options can actually be superior to having four, five, six, okay? Just something to think about.   Finally, if you have any customization in your product process, that can throw a massive uncertainty wrench into your checkout process and create doubt in people's minds. So just again, something to think about. All of these choices, payment, shipping, customization, it can just get to be too much for people.   All right, next step, you need to ask yourself if your customers are facing any shipping surprises when they get to the cart or the checkout page. Now, what do I mean by that? Nobody likes to be surprised that they're either going to have to pay for shipping when they didn't expect to or that the shipping charges are going to be higher than they expected to pay. And this is tricky, right, for website owners. I'm actually going to do an episode a few podcasts from now specifically about the challenges around pricing our shipping, what the deal is with free shipping, that sort of thing. But in the meantime, this is just something you need to think through. In a perfect world, you really need to have, say, free shipping or flat rate shipping that's clear on the site prior to them getting to checkout so there's no question. They know for sure that if they order more than $40 in product, they're going to get free shipping. So there's no surprise at checkout. Maybe you have a banner or something on your website. Or they know that the flat rate shipping option is 2.99 or something like that, right? So it's not surprising them and causing them to change their mind once they get to the cart or the checkout page.   Now, if that, having free or flat rate shipping isn't an option for whatever reason, you do need to start thinking about how your shipping needs to be perceived as being reasonable to your customer. And this could mean, if your shipping's too high, you're going to need to figure out a way to bring it down. It could be adding maybe some slower shipping options that people can choose or working part of the price of the shipping into the product itself. Another thing you need to look at with shipping, and we can talk more about this in a couple episodes, but if you are adding surcharges to your shipping, you may need to get rid of those, as well.   All right, almost as annoying to customers as shipping surprises are probably payment issues. Be sure when you are going through your checkout carefully that you are running test orders for each of your payment options and making sure that each is working perfectly. When people are putting their credit cards into a website is the wrong time to have any glitches or odd behavior. Also make sure you're testing realistic scenarios. So you're putting items in your cart, you're removing them, you're adding a coupon code, so on and so forth. Think of all of the really ridiculous things that someone might try on your website, and then try running those scenarios through with each of your payment providers. And again, if you have friends who could do this, have them do it. Just obviously cancel and refund those orders. But have them go through the payment process, because this can be a place that we have a lot of hidden problems that can cause heartburn for our customers.   All right, so going through this process of evaluating your cart and your checkout and making them as slick as possible and making sure there are no hangups or odd behavior or anything going on that can trip up a customer is ultimately how we bring our abandoned cart rate down to an average level, hopefully to right around that 75%. Okay, so that's the goal. This is where we're bringing it down.   Now, having said that, as I talked about earlier, everyone has an abandoned cart rate. And it's generally 75%, maybe a little more or a little less, depending on your industry. All right, so let's shift the discussion, then, to talking about how we take these people who abandon the shopping carts and get them back on our website to purchase these products, because this is something anyone with any shopping cart abandonment rate should be using, the strategy of getting people back on the website. And the reason we want to put effort into this is because people who made it all the way to the shopping cart, I mean, they liked an item enough to put it in their shopping cart, these are are warmest leads, right? They're going to be the easiest for us to convert if we can get them back on the next visit. And so you need to have a strategy in place to reach out to them in as many ways as possible and then be providing them an incentive to come back and make that purchase.   Okay, so let's start by talking about the ways that we can reach out to them, and then we'll move on and talk about incentives that you can use, all right? So option number one, all of us with ecommerce sites should be using remarketing. This is where we show ads specifically to people who have visited our website. Now, if you go back to episode three of this podcast, you can check out the remarketing episode. I did kind of a deep dive into what are remarketing systems and how they're set up and all of that. There's also a YouTube video, which is a much shorter summary that you can check out, as well.   Now, with remarketing, you're showing ads to people who visited your website. But specifically when we're talking about abandoned shopping carts, what we want to do is create a segment in our remarketing system, so this is AdRoll, Facebook, something like that, where we are segmenting out people who have abandoned their shopping carts. And then we can run a specific ad campaign to those people. And that allows us to really control that conversation and potentially put some promotions out there for them. So maybe could offer them a coupon or free shipping or a bonus in an ad to help encourage them to return and make that purchase.   Now, the nice thing about remarketing is you can generally run a remarketing campaign to almost anyone who visits your website. People with popup blockers are going to be a little hard to get a hold of. But hey, they're probably on Facebook. So you'll get them there. But even if you don't have someone's email address, even if they didn't sign up for your mailing list, you can still run effective remarketing campaigns. So these are really important to get set up. So go back and listen to episode three if you don't have a remarketing system set up so I can talk you through how to get the pixels set up, how to build your audiences, and how to get those ads up and running.   All right, next up, I would also recommend that you have an abandoned shopping cart email campaign running at all times. So if someone comes to your website and they opt into your email list, so you've got their email, right, and your site will be tracking that, and there'll be that little cookie attached to them that keeps track of what they put in their shopping carts. And then when they abandon the shopping cart, your email system will kick in and send them out an email that lists the products that were in their cart and asks them to come back. Now, abandoned cart email marketing is really effective. But you're always going to be running it in addition to your remarketing campaigns, okay? So it's not you run remarketing or email. You really want to be running both.   Now, in terms of your abandoned cart emails, these should be very simple. Your email service provider probably has an abandoned cart template available. I hope they do, because it's really hard to code one. Use that. This is not the time to do a major sales pitch or to talk about the wonder of your products. These need to be very simple. The products are there, the button to return to your cart. The only thing I would potentially recommend adding is simple messaging around an incentive. So come back and save 10% or get free shipping or something like that. Now, we'll talk about incentives in a few minutes, because incentives, especially in abandoned cart campaign, will work best if they are escalating incentives, okay? So we'll visit that in a moment.   But before that, I want to talk about your third option. Okay, so we've talked about remarketing, we talked about abandoned cart emails. Let's talk briefly about the idea of personalized follow up. And so this would be when you go into your system and you pull down people's information who have been on the site and abandoned a cart. I know, for example, I think you can do this in Shopify, where you are then able to personally, manually email or call the customer, asking them to return to the site and possibly offering them some sort of deal if they do.   Now, I'm going to say up front that this sort of follow up is not going to work well for most ecommerce companies, right, because it's generally not going to work well for a company that's doing a lot of volume. You'd have to be doing a fairly small amount of volume. Also, this would probably work better for items where the customer's expecting a much higher sense of customer service. So having somebody, if you're trying to buy a car, having somebody personally follow up with you makes sense. If you're trying to buy a five-pound bag of organic flour, probably not, right? So this is just something you need to think about. This doesn't necessarily work for every business. But if it would work for your business, if you are selling higher end products, if that personalized service would be perceived positively by your customers, this could be an awesome way, too, especially if you're a new business, to get feedback about why people are abandoning their shopping carts.   All right, but the overarching warning I want to put out here is that don't be creepy, really. If your customer answers the phone or answers their email and goes, oh my goodness, how do they know who I am? You're in trouble, okay? You're creating a sense of foreboding, of suspicion. Don't do that. So just be really thoughtful. If you're going to do personalized follow up, if it makes sense for your business, be thoughtful, don't be creepy. I think that could actually be a slogan for life, right? Be thoughtful, don't be creepy.   Okay, let's circle back to incentives. So whether you're running remarketing campaigns, abandoned cart emails, you're doing personalized follow up, you really need to think in advance about an incentive structure to bring these customers back. And incentives are going to look different depending on your market and your customers. So without, you don't necessarily need to offer a discount. You can. You can also use things like free shipping, bonuses, free gifts. But as I briefly mentioned a few minutes ago, incentives, especially in email, tend to work better if they escalate. So let me give you an example of a cadence I use quite frequently for like an abandoned cart email campaign. So the first email might go out two hours after they abandon their cart. And it might be as simple as just reminding them that they left items in their shopping cart, that they forgot to check out. And then the second email would go out two days later, and maybe that would offer them a discount, like a 10 or 15% discount, or maybe more, depending on your product and your branding. And then five days after they've abandoned their cart, they get a third email. That one would offer them a discount potentially plus free shipping. And then the fourth email goes out seven days after they've abandoned their cart, and that email is offering or letting them know, I should say, a last chance for the discount and free shipping, so creating that urgency. So you see how you're creating better and better offers the longer that they are away from their shopping cart. And then in the end there, you're trying to bring in that urgency factor, as well.   All right, so the good news is that all of these strategies I've talked about today, combing through your shopping cart and your checkout, putting in place remarketing and abandoned cart emails, even a personalized follow up system are actually all pretty easy to implement. Some of these can be pretty tedious, but none of them are particularly difficult or costly. And so there's really no reason you shouldn't be doing this. I will put out there, though, that if you do not have an email system in place that can do shopping cart abandonment or you don't have your remarketing pixel already set up, please take a couple hours this week to do those two things. They can make a really big difference in terms of your revenue numbers.   All right, well, that's it for today. I'll be back in your feed in a few days. And in the meantime, thank you so much for joining me. I hope this information will help you make better decisions for your own business and hopefully get that abandoned cart rate down and get more people who do abandon their carts coming back and making a purchase on that next visit.   If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, I would love to hear from you. You can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Be sure also to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher so that you will be notified each time a new episode comes out. I'm putting them out on Mondays and Thursdays, so lots of good episodes coming up. And of course I would greatly appreciate if you could rate and review this podcast in iTunes because it helps other people find it, and I love reading your reviews. It is so much fun. I will see you next time.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method, with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com, Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 014: Tackling High Abandoned Cart Rates

Episode 013: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 2   Episode Summary:  In this second episode of a two-part series, Julie dives into how to get your customer service team, inventory management, and shipping systems ready to tackle Black Friday and Cyber Monday.   Episode Links: https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:   Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 13 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online, especially during the holiday season. I am Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family.   Are you starting to shift into holiday mode? You know, it's that time of year, and as ecommerce website owners and ecommerce marketers it feels like we have to make this holiday shift so early in the year. But it's really important. We want to take advantage of the revenue available during the holiday season. So if you haven't had a chance yet, be sure to go back and listen to the previous episode that came in your feed on Thursday, November 1st. And that's where I went over in great detail how you need to set up your marketing systems to be ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And if you set your marketing up properly, hopefully you are going to be seeing a lot more traffic to your website, a lot more orders placed, more people contacting customer service. The whole thing just becomes bigger and potentially harder to manage.   And so today, I want to continue the Black Friday and Cyber Monday discussion, but I want to cover a series of topics I don't think I've ever seen anyone else talk about. You know, everyone is so focused on marketing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and marketing is really important. And also, of course, it's honestly like really interesting and even a little sexy, but I have been running ecommerce websites for 10 years, and during that time I have at some point done every single job myself. I've answered customer services emails. I've ordered inventory. I've packed orders. And even once I got to the point where I had an amazing team, on a big sales weekend like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you better believe I was out there with them working alongside them.   So in all those years with all those holiday seasons under my belt, let me tell you, marketing is only part of your responsibilities as a business owner. And there are some really important things you need to get in place in terms of your customer service, your inventory, your shipping systems, to make handling what is hopefully going to be a huge influx of orders a more positive experience for you and your team.   All right, so today's topic is about getting the rest of your business ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now, this long weekend we have coming up, it's such a crucial opportunity to bring in substantial revenue and hopefully gain a lot of new customers you can continue to market to the rest of the year. So the last thing you need is to be getting behind on answering customer's questions, or taking a week or longer to ship out their orders because you know if you take too long to ship out their orders, they're going to call customer service, right? And those interactions are going to cost you money and customers will perceive this as a negative experience. So you really have to not only be on your marketing game during the season, you have to kind of be on your management operations game as well. And so that is what we're going to focus on. What tweaks or changes can you put in place now so that you can be in the best possible position?   All right, well let's start with customer service. Now, whether it's just you doing your customer service, or you have a team, you need to be ready to handle more customer service inquiries. And like I just said, you can't afford to get behind, right? This is the time when you need to stay on top and be getting back to people quickly. All right, so let's talk about your staffing. Now, I will tell you from experience that realistically you probably don't need to increase your staffing. You don't need to go out and hire anybody. You don't need to necessarily bring in temps. I've had good luck over the years with just encouraging everyone to be a little bit more on their game or work a little bit faster than normal. You know, you can't do that to your staff every day of the year, of course, but if you can create the positive environment, the energy, and maybe even some reward systems in place, you can probably get everybody to be a little bit more energized and working a little bit harder and faster than they normally would. They'll be able to do that for a couple of days, right? You've got good people, they'll help you out here.   Now, as a practical matter, there are some things though that you can do with your staffing to make this a little bit easier. Now, one is making sure you have staffing the day after Thanksgiving. A lot of companies like to give people that day after Thanksgiving off, and who doesn't love a four-day weekend, of course? But I have generally found that I at least want to have some staff around the day after Thanksgiving. So on a Friday, typically, with one of my companies, we'd have two or three people working. On the day after Thanksgiving, one person would generally be able to handle it.   And that sounds strange, right? But the thing that we found was that most people shopping online didn't start shopping online till later in the day anyway. They were out standing in line for the sock sale or something first, or to get that big screen TV, and then they ended up shopping online later in the afternoon. But in the end, just make sure you have some coverage on Friday to keep those inboxes cleaned out and to keep them caught up.   Now, the same general idea applies to the weekend. I find that it's generally best to make sure that there is someone, at the very least, logging in every few hours to clean out the inbox. If you can staff your customer service department all weekend so that you can do chat and phone calls and email real time, that's awesome, but if that's not something you can do, see if you can get a volunteer to work some overtime and to clean out that box every few hours so your staff aren't facing a huge onslaught when they come in on Monday. Now, the other reason you want to stay on top of your customer service inquiries over this really important weekend is because if there are problems with your website, or if your coupon codes, your promotion isn't working properly, having staff who see those emails or chats quickly can make a huge difference in how quickly you can get that problem fixed.   All right, next up, when you're thinking about customer service for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you want to give some thought to the promotions that you're running. Now, we talked about promotions on Thursday in the last episode, but in this case, you're going to want to really sit down and think about what is everything that could possibly go wrong with the promotion. Sounds so negative, right? You want to be sure though that your promo or your coupon is working perfectly. This is not a time to be confusing customers. It needs to have a clear spot it goes in the cart in checkout. People need to easily be able to see that the discount that they're expecting is being applied properly.   Now, if it turns out that something does go wrong, and your staff are getting complaints from customers, you want to be sure that there is a system in place so that they can resolve those issues. So this could be making sure, of course, that you're easy to get ahold of, as a business owner. It could also be making sure someone in your customer service department knows how to work your promo system on the backend and can fix any glitches. It also may be that, you should always, of course, have your developer's phone number on hand or a quick way to get ahold of them in case you have a major website issue.   Something else that I have found personally that really works well for reducing the number of customer service inquiries that come in over that Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, is to make whatever promo that I'm running on my websites automatic, so that people don't need to add a coupon code, okay? And there's a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that people will inevitably forget to add the coupon code and then they'll be calling you a couple days later asking you to add it retroactively. And every ecommerce system I know of does not make that easy, and so it's a very manual process. You end up having to do a manual refund. It's a mess, but it's also difficult to turn people down, right? Because then you're creating customer service issues.   So all I'm saying is that if you are letting everybody have the discount automatically, you can save yourself a lot of headaches later. If you decide though you want to use coupon codes and you want to make your customers apply those, be sure you have some scripts, some practicing going on with your customer service staff, some processes in place to handle those inquiries when people forget to apply those coupon codes.   All right, now as we discussed on Thursday, I generally recommend that you make whatever promotion you're running for your Black Friday sale a little bit better or a little wider than what you run for your Monday sale. This will help prevent complaints of customers who bought on Friday and now feel that they would have gotten a better deal if they waited till Monday. So that's just a small thing you can do in the way you set up your promotions and the order you do them in to help reduce those customer service complaints.   Also, make your coupon codes, if you're going to use coupon codes, work for a day or two longer than you advertised them. So let's say that your Cyber Monday coupon code expires the Wednesday after Cyber Monday. I would suggest from the backend of your system that that code actually expire on Friday, because I assure you, people are going to be going through their email later in the week, they're going to find it, they're going to try to take advantage of it, and it's not going to work, and they're going to get upset, and then they're going to call you. And again, those interactions cost you money. It is far better for you to get that sale even at the discount than it is for you to have to pay someone to talk to that person, and then inevitably probably give them some form of compensation or the discount anyway. So just save yourself some time, money, and headaches.   All right, last up in terms of keeping customer service a doable situation for that weekend, be sure you're not making any major changes to your website right before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Trust me, and it's Murphy's Law, right? Something will go wrong. Also, you'll want to double-check that your website can handle extra traffic. If you are using a hosted ecommerce solution, something like Shopify or BigCommerce or CoreCommerce, you probably don't have really any say in where your site is hosted, it's being done by the company for you, but if you are on a platform, something like, we were on Magento for nine years, we had to host our own server, so we had to contract for a server.   So if you're in that situation, double-check with your developer that there's been some testing done, that you're going to be able to handle increased traffic so your site doesn't crash, because that is truly the last thing you need, right? Also, as I mentioned before, make sure you know how to reach your developers is there is an emergency, and that they are going to be around the holiday weekend to be able to help you. So that'll help keep, you know, if your customer service people are getting complaints about the website, just having those things in place allows you to fix problems more quickly.   All right, next up, let's talk about inventory. So inventory, there's just a couple quick tips here over the years that I've learned. One, is make sure you're ordering far enough in advance to allow for problems. It's really easy as small business owners, especially for cash flow, that we'll wait until the last moment to order our inventory because we don't want to spend the money, right? But keep in mind that everyone is bringing in new inventory right now, not just you, and so often it can take a supplier longer to ship your inventory. Freight systems might be backed up a little bit. So allow yourselves at least a couple extra days, preferably an extra week or two, just in case something goes wrong with your shipment. It would be such a shame to not be able to reap the rewards of this holiday weekend because your inventory didn't come in on time. Now, I truly understand that balancing having enough inventory, but not too much because you didn't want to tie up your cash is really hard. I would just encourage you to think about how people shop on your website normally, and then you're just going to have to make some guesses in terms of how much extra you're going to sell. Now, keep in mind, depending on what your promotion is, if you're offering free gifts as part of your promotion, all of that has to be taken into account in advance with your inventory numbers so that you have enough on hand.   And if this is your first year or two of doing Black Friday and Cyber Monday, please rest assured that this does get easier. Years three, four, five, six, and beyond, you'll feel like a pro at this. Yeah, I mean, there's always a little bit of uncertainty. You're never sure until you get to that weekend, how things are going to go, but at least you'll have some data to work with. So do your best, hang tight, it gets easier from here. All right, so if you have done your marketing well, you have met your customers' needs, you have product in stock to sell, with any luck you are going to have a lot of orders coming in, right? That is the goal.   And so let's talk about getting those orders out the door. Now, this is something you really have to give a lot of thought to if you are shipping your own orders. If you're outsourcing that to a third party, congratulations, your life, your weekend's going to be much easier than the rest of us. But for those of us who do our own shipping, let's stop and talk about what this looks like. Now, I would recommend that you sit down the next couple of days and give some thought to what scaling looks like. So let's say you get twice as many orders over Black Friday and Cyber Monday as you normally would over a weekend, okay? What does that look like? That's probably not too big a deal, right? Your system can probably adjust for that. What if you get five times as many orders? Okay, now it gets more complicated, right? You have to start thinking about people and processes a little bit more.   I would really encourage you, you know, obviously you don't want to get your hopes up that you're going to have the greatest weekend ever, hopefully you will, but still, but I would also encourage you not to assume that this is just going to work itself out. Save that attitude for the day that you're on some big cable news show with no notice and you just have to do the best you can to get your orders out. This one you see coming, right? You know this holiday weekend's coming, so take a little bit of time, give it some thought, and start planning out how you can scale your resources.   All right, so specifically let's talk about staffing. A couple of things that have worked really well for me over the years is one, making sure that we go into Friday completely caught up on shipping, okay? Friday morning when your staff come to work, if you have a team, they need to be shipping whatever up to the minute has come in for orders. You want to stay caught up at all times so that when that influx really starts, you're in a good position to keep up with it to the best that you can. I would also suggest talking to your team in advance and double-checking if they would be available to work the weekend, if they could work longer hours during the following week, how much you're going to be able to mess around with their hours when they come in and leave, so that you can flex your current team and get the most productivity out of them.   Unless you're a very large company, I would really avoid hiring anyone new or temps unless you have absolutely no other options, okay? This is not a good time to be bringing people in. If you do have to hire temps, you need to bring them in probably at least a week in advance to get them trained. You're probably going to have to put some extra quality systems in place. An alternative to hiring temps, something that I've used successfully for years, is we had this rule, company-wide, it wasn't just Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but company-wide all year, if there was a large number of orders that needed to be shipped, everyone in the company, including myself, was responsible for being out there and shipping orders, okay?   And not only did that mean that we didn't have to bring in temps for a big weekends, it also really developed a camaraderie and a company culture that I was really proud of, that we all pitched in and worked together. And when I say all, obviously not the customer service staff because they're busy, but if you have anyone working in marketing or accounting or office management, or I have some friends who, their college-age kids would come home every year, and they knew that the entire break, they were going to be working at the warehouse. So use your resources that you know and try to flex those resources first.   All right, so what I'm talking about here is going to be pretty taxing to your team if you have one, or to your family if you don't a team and you're just using your family, be sure to plan in some rewards here. Be kind to these people. Buy them lunch, call out staff who are people who go above and beyond. One year, we handed out movie tickets that I bought at Costco. And that was a huge, people loved that. It wasn't a very expensive gift, but it really meant a lot to people that we had thought in advance about how we could reward them for working hard and putting in that extra effort. So just be thinking about some of those things that you can do.   All right, next up, let's talk about your shipping equipment. You really need to be realistic about how many orders you can process in an hour, even if you managed to find more people to help you. So let me give you an example. For years we had one shipping computer. So we had one computer that was attached to a scale with the label printer that could do the official shipment of the order. And that worked fine, what, 360 days a year? That was fine. But Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we really had to start thinking about okay, that one shipping computer, with the best person in the warehouse to run it, can only ship, I think we could ship 45 to 50 orders an hour. Okay, there's a lag time to getting that label printed. And so then you have to start thinking okay, well, instead of running my computer for three or four hours a day, what happens if I have to run this computer for 10 hours a day, what does that look like?   And so this is where maybe you might flex your staff, for example, or run shifts. Another option is if you happen to be paranoid like I am about your hard drive on your shipping computer blowing up on a random Tuesday, you might have an extra computer that you keep around. This would be a good time to get it hooked up and have it ready to go so that that shipping computer doesn't become a bottleneck.   Now, you also got to keep in mind that it's not just you, right, shipping a lot of order these days. All the other companies in your area and in the country are going to be doing the same thing. So I would recommend making sure that you have cell phone numbers for your shipping reps handy. So if you ship with the Post Office, you should have the cell phone number for your account rep handy. Same thing with UPS and FedEx. Now, on one hand it is your responsibility, absolutely, in advance to make sure that you know how to get an extra pickup schedule, that you have more totes if you're using like those big Post Office totes or something, that you have all of that ready to go.   But if something urgent comes up, you need to be able to get a hold of your rep quickly. So for example, we had years where our driver forgot to pick up our shipments at the end of the day, and it was just he had a full truck. He had been stuffing his truck all day long and he forgot about us. It was just a mistake, but being able to get a hold of your rep and get someone else out to come pick things up is really handy because otherwise you're stuffing it all in your car and driving to the Post Office multiple times or to UPS, and that is no fun.   All right, also in terms of getting your orders shipped, I would encourage you just to take a look at the systems you have in place. Being busier generally means that more mistakes are going to get made, even though your staff are going to be doing their best, they're going to be trying hard, this might be a good time to think about putting in some simply quality checking, if that's not something you already have going on, with a caveat though, okay. Do not make major changes to your process.   Just like I talked about with the customer service, this isn't the time to make major changes to your website, this is also not the time to do like a major upgrade to your shipping system or your inventory system, or change around how you process an order. You want to keep your core systems in place and stable, but maybe you have a double-checking system or something you put in place just for this weekend so that as you're busier, you're making sure you're not ending up with a bunch of orders that are going out incorrectly, okay? All right, so customer service, inventory, getting orders out. All these things need to be coordinated so that you can have a smooth weekend, and frankly, the following week when you're getting all these orders out.   All right, last step. I would really recommend that you do a debrief. Once you've gotten all of the orders out the door, sit down either yourself, or with your family, or with your team, or whoever it is made it through this important time of year with you, you need to sit down and have a very honest discussion about what went right and what went wrong. So buy everybody lunch and get out your notepad and start writing things down. And this is not the time for blame. This is all about learning and improving because busy times are great for finding holes in your larger system.   So I would recommend you divide the list that you make into two parts. One of them is going to be things that went right or improvements that you need to make, that you could make now to benefit your company on a daily basis. So for example, during this process you may have found a more efficient way to ship your orders. Or maybe your customer service people found a better way to handle a customer's issue, or maybe you found a more effective way to market a promotion. All of that could potentially be incorporated into your daily operations and benefit you with this coming year.   Your second list should be improvements that need to be made or things that you did really well that are specific to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And so you want to write those down, get 'em typed up, put 'em in a safe place, and then either put a reminder on your calendar to go check that file, or I have been known to put the entire text of that meeting in an email attached to a calendar reminder in my Outlook for about September 15th of the next year so that you remember to go back and take a look and remember what it was you did right, and what you need to work on this next year.   All right, that was a lot, wasn't it? But here's the thing, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are important, we need to make as much money as possible, and so it really does benefit us to be as prepared as possible. But the good news is that's it for today. I am hopeful though that this has given you some things to work on so that this holiday weekend can go as smoothly as possible for you.   And I'll be back on your feed on Thursday with a new episode. We are going to talk about tackling a very annoying problem, and that is the high rate of abandoned shopping carts that many of us have on our websites. So if this is something that you find frustrating, be sure to tune in, I've got some ideas for you. To get ready for that episode, if you get a minute, get into your ecommerce platform and take a look at how many abandoned shopping carts you have. So how many shopping carts are created and how many people actually place orders, and have that number ready to go. So when you're listening on Thursday, you can get some idea as for how you need to proceed to improve that situation.   All right, in the mean time, I would love to hear from you. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. And please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast so it can help other people find it as well. And I will see you next time.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.     Episode 013: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 2  

Episode 012: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 1   Episode Summary:  As an ecommerce website, you get one chance a year to bring in big revenue numbers on the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. In this first of two episodes, Julie walks you through setting up your ecommerce marketing to bring in as many sales as possible during that holiday weekend.   Episode Links: https://www.adroll.com/https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okghttps://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 12 of the Savvy Business Method Podcast where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. How is it already November 1st? I hope you had a fun Halloween last night. I feel so fortunate we live in a great neighborhood for Halloween. Everybody gets really into decorating and handing out candy and it makes it so much fun. But that fun is short-lived, right? Because as website owners, you and I tend to do Halloween maybe a bit differently. It's ushering in a really critical season for most websites. And so, today I wanted to take some time to talk about planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday because that weekend is a big deal for most websites. Unless you happen to have a really odd seasonality to your particular e-commerce company, you're probably looking to make as much revenue that weekend as you possibly can. As a friend of mine likes to say, people are in the mood to hand over their money at that point, and we should be in the best possible position to take it. So, let's talk today about what a solid Black Friday and Cyber Monday plan looks like. Now, I'm going to put a twist on this. This is actually going to be a two part podcast. We'll do the first part today and the second part on Monday. I'm going to also get a lot more specific than I typically do with this podcast. So, we're going to get really into the weeds and flush out how to get ready for this really important weekend. So, the goal today is to talk you through what you need to do from a marketing perspective so you can have the most successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday possible. On Monday, I will be back in your feed with a new episode where I'll focus on what you need to do to get the rest of your company ready. So, what does it look like for customer service to be prepared, your inventory management, your shipping systems? I trust that most of you knew deep down already that you needed to be thinking about marketing to prepare for such a huge potential revenue-generating weekend, but I also realize things like customer service and shipping can be easy to forget. I think we have this tendency as entrepreneurs to just consider that, oh well, things will work themselves out; I'll just get people to my website; they'll buy and I'll figure out how I'm going to get all these packages out the door later. But I can tell you after 10 years of doing this, there are definitely things you can and should do to prepare in advance. That's going to be a long, rough weekend. You're looking at potentially a long, rough following week for both you and your team if you have people working with you, and I would like to see that 10-day period go way more smoothly for you guys by helping you get prepared and having all your systems in place and everything organized in advance. Alright, let's talk about some reality here for a moment. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a constantly evolving situation, right? They change every year. Historically, Black Friday was huge, and of course, Cyber Monday didn't even exist. I was thinking the other day, back when I was a kid I had this really clear memory of my mom dragging us out of bed at 5:00 a.m. so we could be at Fred Meyer in Portland at 6:00 a.m. for the 50% off sock sale. And there were so many people, and I remember, as a kid, just thinking I was going to be trampled. And if you are older than probably 30, you probably have that memory, right? This was when everything got purchased, on Black Friday. Now with e-commerce became more popular, people would shop online the following Monday when they returned to work, and they had internet access, which again, I realize if you're under 30, probably sounds really strange. Let me assure you, most of us did not have internet access for at least part of our adult life outside of work; I mean, that was normal. And so this is where this whole idea came from, but clearly some things are changing. Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday become less concentrated, right? So, there are less people who are really focusing their shopping on that, what is that, four, four, five day period, okay? So, some things are changing and companies, though, have gotten really addicted to this idea of being able to generate a bunch of revenue in a couple day period, and so you often see some really outlandish behavior between Black Friday and Cyber Monday by various companies trying to attract sales that weekend. You know I've got to tell you, honestly, this is my favorite day of the year to be online watching the emails and the ads. If you are an e-commerce marketing geek, this is the best because you could get all sorts of ideas for things you can incorporate into your marketing for the rest of the year. So that's another reason to do your planning work now, get your whole situation set up so you've got some bandwidth that weekend to sit and look at what everybody else is doing. Alright, so let's start talking about planning our marketing for what is, ultimately, potentially a big weekend for your company. Sure, in the end, it's gray November and December, and lots of people will spread their purchases out, but for most businesses, you're going to see a significant jump during that weekend so you want to have all your marketing set up and ready to go. Alright, the first thing you've got to do is plan your promotions, okay? These are the sales that you're going to run, and I'm saying sales as in multiple sales. You actually need to run two different sales, one for Black Friday, and generally, I like to run that sale Friday through Sunday, and then one for Cyber Monday, and of course, that starts Monday and I personally recommend you look at running it through Tuesday and possibly Wednesday. And in a few minutes I'll get into why you should do that. Alright, so, with two sales let's talk about why we're running two sales and not just one sale, right, this seems like it's making our lives more complicated, as well as why I think this is the cadence you should be using. Email is going to play a big role in your marketing strategy during these days, and really, the same principles I'm going to talk about with email is going to apply to things like social media, too. Okay, so, step back for a minute and think about other sales that you run during the year. What are your best sale days? So if you send out, let's say emails or social media marketing for a sale for, say, Labor Day, you'll generally see that your biggest days revenue-wise are going to be the day the sale's announced, the day you tell them there's one day left, and the day it ends, you know, last chance, save now, right? Those are your big sale days. If you run one sale over that four, five day period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you get potentially three big revenue days based on that cycle. If you have two sales, you can almost squeeze a big day out of every day by creating that sense of excitement and urgency because you're running through that cycle twice, announcing the sale, limited time left, last chance, and you're doing that twice. So you're able to squeeze potentially more revenue out. I have done this both ways over the years, and absolutely, no question, the two sales strategy generates far more revenue. Alright, so let's talk about this idea of timing. Like I said, I tend to run my Black Friday sales Friday through Sunday. That gives me a day to announce the sale, a day to tell them to hurry, that's Saturday, and then a day to tell them they're almost out of time on Sunday, so the sale ends on Sunday. Now I'm just going to interject here that there is a big trend to start sales on Thanksgiving Day. I am sure you have noticed it. I find it so funny that like part of people's Thanksgiving traditions is starting to be to eat dinner and then go to a store, and start their shopping. Now, there is a huge debate over whether this is a good trend; I mean, obviously, there's a social debate going on; there's also debate in marketing and e-commerce circles. Most email experts agree, though, that, at the least, you should be sending an email wishing your American customers a happy holiday. Alright, so, why would you do that? This is generally about goodwill. We're there with you; we're happy you're celebrating. We're happy, you're happy kind of thing, and then maybe a few people will see that email and go, oh, yeah, I wanted to go to that website and buy something, and I really want my aunt to stop talking to me, so I'm going to go hide on my phone over in the corner and shop. So, you'll get a few of those people, too, if you send out an email. Now, the other strategy is to start your sale on Thanksgiving, and it's common to see an email, like a VIP early access type thing. So, you send out maybe Thanksgiving afternoon or Thanksgiving evening saying, hey, for our email subscribers, you're our VIPs; we're going to give you, the sale starts now, and we're going to give you 20% off or whatever it is. So, that's a strategy that a lot of companies are starting to use. Now, whether or not you just send a goodwill email, whether or not you send a sales email, whether you just leave your customers alone that day is entirely up to you, alright? Part of this is your own comfort level. What does your gut tell you about whether this is a right or wrong thing to do, and I'm going to just throw in there, I would suggest you consider how easily offended your market is, okay? If your customer base tends to be older or more conservative, you probably should think twice about sending any marketing emails at all on a holiday that's considered fairly sacred in American culture, okay? If your audience tends to be more of the young, more liberal type, then you might be able to get away with this and actually benefit from it. So that's just something for you to think about. Alright, so, in a normal cadence, you're going to send your big sale email out on Friday. You're going to tell them they only have one day left on Saturday, and then you're going to tell them they're out of time on Sunday. Something else to keep in mind. That Saturday after Thanksgiving is, of course, Small Business Saturday. Honestly, I wish they'd move it to the next weekend, but it is what it is. Now, this is something that you could potentially leverage in your marketing especially if you're easily perceived as being a small business. So, if your customers look at your website and they generally know that you're a small company, you can get out there with your marketing efforts and add in that element of, you know, hey, one more day to shop and support a small business like us, that sort of thing. Now, if you have the kind of website where you may not easily be perceived as a small business, there are some ways you can leverage this, too. Let me give you an example. When I had my health food company, we actually were very much a small business, but most people didn't realize that. We had a pretty slick website, a pretty professional setup in terms of our marketing, and so people didn't necessarily see us as a small business, and so one strategy we could use is to highlight the stores we sold to because we had a wholesale channel where we were working with a lot of small natural food stores. So we could potentially send out an email saying, oh, we're highlighting this company in Cleveland, or this small mom and pop store in Cleveland, so remember it's Small Business Saturday, support small businesses which was a great way to get an email out there to get some goodwill going on, of course, to promote a customer that we cared about. And so, it was a win-win all the way around. So, just don't forget Small Business Saturday, you can kind of work that into your marketing as well. Alright, so moving on to Cyber Monday, you have a couple of options here. It is very common to see businesses have one-day sales, some big blowout, right? I am going to encourage you that you should actually extend that sale beyond Monday, and here's why. On Cyber Monday, you are going to be competing against hundreds and thousands of other companies for someone's business. Now, hopefully your customer aren't subscribed to that many different email lists, but still, they're likely to be getting a lot of email in their in-box. I don't consider myself to be subscribed to a ton of companies. I think I had 150 emails when I woke up on Cyber Monday last year. So, this is just something to think about. It's really hard on Cyber Monday to get through all that noise, but if you run your sale until Tuesday or Wednesday, you can kind of catch those people who are still potentially in shopping mode, but you can be reaching them in their in-box and their social media accounts on days when maybe they're not quite as flooded with promotions. Now, the way to do this is to run your Cyber Monday sale and then on Tuesday morning, send out an email that says, hey, we've extended the sale; you can still get the Cyber Monday deal until tomorrow. And then of course on Wednesday, you're going to run another email that says, this is your absolute last chance to save whatever it is, okay? So, you're kind of milking that sale for a few more days to kind of help you get through the noise of what is normally Cyber Monday. Alright, so if you're taking notes, look back through what I've just said. You've probably noticed I have given you a darn good excuse to send an email every single day, and to be able to actively create that sense of excitement and urgency. You don't have any days in here that aren't exciting and urgent. You just have to be careful about how you present them, right? So, let's move on. We now have talked about the schedule that you're going to use for your sales. Let's just talk, briefly, about the promotions that you're going to run. First off, not surprisingly, it is wise to make sure that your Cyber Monday and Black Friday specials are better than your typical promotion that you would run as a company. So, whatever you ran for Labor Day, you're going to need to kick that up a notch. I'd also recommend that whatever promotion you pick should seem like a big deal, and you want to think about this from your customers' perspective. Can you present this in such a way that it seems like a big sale, that it seems like a big discount? Now, you can get a little creative here, but I'm going to tell you that I really encourage you to remember that noise, right, how much competition you have for your customers' attention during this weekend. So, the sales that you run really do need to be straightforward; it needs to be something they can glance at and instantly understand. Don't try to get too cute with, well, if you buy this item over here and this item over here, you get this third item free, something like that. I wouldn't get too creative here. Also, whatever you decide to do, needs to work so smoothly in your e-commerce platform. The person either needs to get the discount automatically or there needs to be one coupon code and then it needs to be terribly clear in their cart that that discount that they are expecting was applied. If you get creative, or you start going outside what your e-commerce cart can support, so it's not clear to your customer about the discounts they're getting, people are busy these days, they'll move on to the next store. They'll abandon their cart or maybe, if you're lucky, they'll contact customer service to ask, but then that costs you money, right? You don't want a bunch of people contacting you for questions that were generated because you didn't do a good job of setting up your promotions. Alright, so, a pro-tip here, something that I had to learn the hard way over the years that I want to share with you and save you some pain and suffering. Since you're going to run two sales back-to-back, I would strongly recommend that you make your Black Friday sale a little bit better or at least have a little bit wider appeal than your Cyber Monday sale. Okay, and there's a reason for this. Because you're running those sales back-to-back, there is a potential that if someone buys something during your Black Friday sale, and then they get the Cyber Monday email, and the deal is easily perceived to be a little bit better, they're probably not going to be happy, right? They're going to be mad they should've waited for your next sale, how dare you offer a better sale a couple days after they ordered, right? People get pretty easily offended, and this ends up creating bad will for you company. It can end up being very costly in terms of customer service because, I tell you what they do is, they call and they want the better deal applied to the order they did three days ago, and saying no is going cause you some customer service problems. And so, this is just something you can head off at the pass by being careful to offer maybe a little bit better deal on Friday than Monday while still having two awesome deals you're offering. You can potentially save yourself some headaches. And so, let me give you an example of what this looks like. In one of my companies, we had this one product line that was super popular. Probably, I'd say about 90% of people who ordered from us ordered something from that product line in addition to whatever other items they ordered. And so, on Black Friday we would run a 25% off sale on that product line, and then on Cyber Monday, we would run a 20% off sale site-wide. They were both great sales; our customers loved those sales, but it kind of headed off the complaints because if you ordered on Friday, you got that little bit higher discount on that particular product line you were ordering from. So, just something to think in mind, structuring, how we structure our promotions can go a long way to keeping people from contacting customer service, and from abandoning their shopping carts. Alright, next up. I want you to make a list of all your marketing systems that will need to be coordinated because I want you to throw everything you have at this weekend, and do your very best so that you can get the best possible sales numbers. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, if you've never sat down and coordinated all your marketing systems for an event, this is a little bit of work, but this is a good habit to get into because a lot of the strategies I'm going to talk about today, can be applied, not to just Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but any other big sales you have throughout the year. So, to that end, let's go through the typical marketing systems most of you are probably working with, and the changes I would recommend you make. Alright, first up is email. Email is going to play a very important role in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing efforts, assuming you have an email list ready to go. Now, quick side note, if you have a large email list, and by large, I would say anything over 50,000 people, certainly if you're over 100,000, list hygiene matters greatly, and what I mean by that, if this is not something that is applying to you yet, is that the number of people who open your emails, report your emails as spam, those sorts of things can make a difference into whether or not you're allowed to send email on any given day, and because we're going to be using email heavily for our Black Friday/Cyber Monday strategy, then it's really important that we clean up our lists and we make sure the people we're sending to are active members of our list because the last thing you can afford to have happen during this really important weekend, or frankly, the whole holiday season, is to have your account get shut down because of too many spam complaints. So, if you have a big list, talk to your email service provider about cleaning your list in preparation for the holidays. They should know what that means. Alright, more specifically, and applying to everyone, we want to make sure that we have clear strategies for both our batch- and-blast emails, so those are the emails that we specifically send to our list, as well as our trigger emails, the emails that go out based on people's behavior. Okay, so, let's talk first about just our general emails that we blast out to our list. You want to be sure that that hero image at the top of the email is sale focused. So when you're sending out these emails for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the only goal is to get people to come to the site and shop the sale. This is not the time to give them an article about the best camera to buy. This is not the time to give them a recipe for how to use some specialized flour. All that you want them to do is see the sale and be incentivized to come to your website. You want to make sure, then, that all of your links in your email are going to your very best landing pages. Now, you can potentially use some product recommendations, very clear, simple ones in this email further down. So that hero image needs to be all about the sale; you can get some product recommendations further down in the email. Those tend to not distract, and may, in some cases, help, probably not in too many, but they might help you a little bit. The other thing I want you to keep in mind, and just, brace yourself. You're going to be emailing sales promotions every single day, right? From Friday through Tuesday or Wednesday. You might even send an email on Thanksgiving Day, like we talked about. You're going to need to decided if that works for you personally and your market, and then I know this is going to give so many of you heartburn, please know it did for me as well the first time I had to do it. It is really important that you send two emails on Black Friday and two emails on Cyber Monday. I know, I know, that sounds horrible, right? You're going to email your list twice in one day, what am I thinking? Like I said before, the amount of noise that you're going to have to get through to get to your customers is overwhelming. And, if you watch, I promise you, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, watch the big companies, they're sending at least two emails each. So this means you're going to send one really early in the morning, and you're going to send one mid to late afternoon, okay? Alright, so, moving on to your triggered email. So these would be things like your shopping cart abandonment campaigns. If you're running a browse and abandon campaign, where people are getting an email just because they came to your site and browsed, if you have their email address. I would recommend that you change up those emails, potentially, to focus on your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales if this is going to be a big sales day for you. You could also potentially alter your welcome series. So, if you have, hopefully you have a series of emails that's going out when someone's first signing up, if they sign up during those days, it might be worth considering altering the graphics for that series to promote your sale as well. Something to check here is whether your email service provider is limiting the number of campaigns a person can be in. Here's what I'm trying to say, if you have someone come to your site and browse on, let's say Thursday or Friday, and they end up in a shopping cart abandonment email series, if your email service provider is then saying, well, they can only get emails from one series at a time, they may not be getting your big blast-outs about your sale. So this is just something to think about. By reinforcing that information, that way you're catching everyone regardless of whether they're getting an automated series, or whether they're getting the ones you're sending manually. Alright, next up, you need to get your re-marketing ads coordinated with your emails. And so this means that you're re-marketing ads need to reflect your Black Friday sale during the days that it's running and your Cyber Monday sale during the days that that sale is running. If you're using a large system like AdRoll or Facebook, you can probably set up a schedule so that those sales switch automatically and they turn off automatically. And I would recommend you do that. As someone who has stayed up until late at night one night to turn on and off ads, use the automated systems if you can. Now, if you're not sure what I'm talking about, or if you don't have re-marketing set up on your website, you don't have the pixels set up, you don't have your ads set up yet, you need to do that today. There is lead time here; you have to collect data before you can run ads, and so, remember that re-marketing is a really effective way to advertise and it's a very affordable way to advertise in terms of bang for your buck. So, go back to episode three of this podcast. That's a really great episode, diving deep into what is re-marketing and how you get those campaigns set up. If you want just a quick pitch on why this is important, I also have a video on YouTube, a short, two minute video on re-marketing, as well, that you could check out. Alright, next up, social media ads. If you are running Facebook ads, Instagram ads, they all need to be coordinated, again, with your email. So you're going to need to be switching out any paid campaigns you're running. Now, quick note, Black Friday and Cyber Monday tend to be more expensive times to run ads, right? You're probably already, in the last couple weeks, starting to see your ad rates, both for re-marketing as well as social media advertising, going up because there's more and more competition entering the market, but thankfully, once Christmas Day hits, that'll die off, and your ads will become affordable again. So, you really need to make the most of your budget, and you do that by ensuring that on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you are running ads focused on warm audiences. So, a warm audience are people who already know your business, have already interacted with your business or your ads. So, just something to be thoughtful about. These are not the days to run out and try to recruit the general public to shop on your website. You really need to be focused on people who already know who you are. Also, in terms of social media, if you have an organic social media presence, so, you have an Instagram page, a Facebook page, a Twitter page, this is a good time to make sure that, to at least some extent, those organic posts are well-coordinated as well. You don't have to show the exact same ads. You could maybe put a little more fun twist on it, but you still wanna be getting that information out to your customers that you're having a big sale, and this is a great time to shop with you. Alright, you also need to look at your paid ads through the search engines that you're running. So, if you're running Google Ads, Yahoo Ads, Bing Ads, make sure you get in there and switch out the messaging so that it's advertising the sale. Make sure you double check that you are being clear if there's a coupon code, or that the coupon code will be readily available when they land on your site. If you don't do those things, you probably already know that your ads will get kicked and then you'll have a problem trying to get your ads back on there; it's no fun. So, just be careful, but make sure you get that ad text switched out as well. Alright, so let's talk about your website last. You want to be sure that your website graphics are all coordinated, right? So, the hero images with a slider on your homepage needs to be reflecting these holiday sales. If you have a top banner where you typically maybe advertise your shipping rates or something like that, that's a great place to stick the information about the sale. If someone happens to wander onto your page and hasn't seen your advertising, they can see the sale, and hopefully, you'll have a higher checkout rate with them. Along with the graphics on the website, you also maybe want to think about switching out the graphics on your email opt-in. If you have pop-ups on entry and exit, this might be a good time to help remind people about the sale. So, that one's up to you, I tend to like to have those coordinated. I think it looks nice. I think it helps people notice what it is you're putting on sale, and it's just one more opportunity to kind of get in their face so that they remember that they have a way to save money, and that they should shop with you now. Alright, so we could talk about, all day about these promos you're running, but make sure you don't forget your coupon codes. Your coupon codes need to be set up correctly, and I would recommend that you use some wording that is festive, and that is easy to remember. So, your Black Friday coupon code could literally be Black Friday and that's great. Having something like that that people will see and recognize and can quickly type in will save you a bunch of problems with customer service down the road. And I'll also talk on Monday, we're going to talk really extensively about how to get your customer service department ready. Coupon codes are a way that you can either cause a lot of problems for your customer service department or make things go smoothly. So, we'll get into that more Monday when we talk about setting up the rest of the operations in your business. Alright, last but not least, actually really important, Black Friday and Cyber Monday tend to be tiring, right? You're going to get through this weekend. Hopefully, you will have made a lot of revenue. Hopefully your staff or if you have a team, they're not completely burned out. It is a good idea to have whatever promotions you're going to run right after Black Friday and Cyber Monday set up so that all of your marketing systems switch over to that once your sales are over. The last thing you want to be doing in the middle of trying to ship an unusually large amount of orders is sitting in your system at one in the morning trying to go through and upload new banner graphics, new sales graphics, whatever it's going to be. So, just have all of that set up in advance so that it switches as seamlessly as possible, and hopefully saves you some headaches or saves people coming to your site and assuming that your sale is still going on. Let's just keep everybody sane and happy. Alright, so, that's it for today. Like I said, I'll be back in your feed on Monday with a new episode, and I'll be talking about how to get the rest of your business ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Trust me, you are going to want to make some tweaks to how you normally operate so you can help people more efficiently and get those orders shipped out smoothly. Now, don't forget in the meantime, I'd love to hear from you. Black Friday and Cyber Monday is kind of an odd topic since we only experience it once a year. So, even after 10 years of doing this, I've only done 10 Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays. So it can sometimes be hard to be ready for because we don't get to experience it very often. Also, if you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. And, as always, I would really appreciate it if you could hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher. That'll make sure that you receive the Monday episode so you don't miss that, and also, subscribing, rating and reviewing this podcast helps other people find it. Alright, go work on your marketing systems, and I'll see you Monday to talk about operations. Bye for now.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 012: Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Part 1

Episode 011: Developing a Return and Refund Policy for Your Ecommerce Website   Episode Summary:  If you are selling items online, at some point you will need a return and refund policy. In this episode, Julie dives into the different parts of the policy you will need to think through, how to implement a policy, and knowing when to make exceptions.   Episode Links: https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:     Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 11 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Alright, before we start today, a couple of quick notes for you. A reminder that a full transcript is available in the show notes if you need to go back and find a piece of information. That's there for you. You can also find me both on Facebook and YouTube. On YouTube I have a bunch of short videos up if you'd like to check those out. Lots of quick tips for managing an online business. Alright, today's topic is designing a refund and return policy. Now, I realize this does not sound like a good time So before we get too deep into a what your refund and return policy is going to look like, let's stop and talk about why you really need to have policies in place as a website owner. Now, I realize, especially if you're just getting started, there is a lot of temptation to just go with the flow and make it up as you go along. And I'm not saying you can't do that in the very beginning. There is definitely something to be said for getting to know your market, your customers behavior, kinda the nature of the products, and just kinda see how things go. But once you have maybe a few months at the most under your belt, maybe shorter if things don't get off with a bang for you, really important to sit down and start thinking through some of these issues so that you can get a written policy pulled together. Now, why have a written refund and return policy? First and foremost, it's reassuring to customers. Think about your own online behavior. How likely would you be to go purchase something from a website? You're probably gonna know it's a fairly small website, right, you're a pretty savvy online shopper, so you know it's a small website. If there doesn't seem to be any information about what happens if you're not satisfied, that probably lowers your incentive to shop with that website, okay. So that reassurance we can provide our customers by having even a really simple refund and return policy can be huge. It's just that legitimizing factor there. This is a safe place for you to spend your money. Alright, next, having a policy in place keeps you and your staff consistent. Okay, again, if you're just getting started, it may just be you. You may not have a team. But let me tell you something. From years of experience, as well as years of experience, there was a couple years there in the beginning that I didn't have a team. It was just me with my first company. You don't really want to be making all your decisions on the fly. It's exhausting. Having thought through some of these issues in advance can really help streamline your processes, even if you're answering every email. And then really, we always want to preserve our ability to very easily hand off these tasks to a virtual assistant or customer service person in the future. We don't necessarily want to do all of the things in our business ourselves long-term. So having these policies written out can be really useful. I've seen cases where entrepreneurs went for many years without written policies and it just got passed down from one person to another and there was definitely a point in my business where that was happening. And boy, it makes it really hard if you suddenly do need policies, if you need to hire somebody new, or train someone. So just something to think about. Having that consistency by having a written policy can be really helpful and save you a lot of frustration later. Alright, having a policy also really does save some awkward conversations with customers. If a customer can quickly find a policy on your website that let's them know what they need to do if they want to return a product and receive a refund, then you're not constantly having to have that conversation. Those conversations can be tricky, awkward. You really end up walking on eggshells sometimes. So having that written policy in place means at least part of the people that you're going to need to work with this on are not going to actually contact you and have that conversation. So that's a win-win. You're not paying for that customer service interaction, paying someone to do it, or taking away your time, and you're not having to have yet another awkward conversation. Okay, well besides benefits directly to you as a website owner you may have some outside factors too that really drive whether or not you need to have a written policy. One is that a lot of payment providers, especially the higher quality payment providers, we talked a couple episodes ago about credit card processors, some of these processors are going to require you to have a written policy on your website. It is a way for them to help prevent problems with customers. Going forward, it's a way for you to demonstrate that you're a legitimate company to work with and that you have your act together. Also, site verification processors might require it as well. I'm trying to remember, it's been a few years, but I think when we went through the Google verification process that was one of the things they wanted to see. We did have the policy on the site, but the policy was not as very specific as they wanted it to be and didn't include certain terms that they wanted. So that's just something to be aware of too, is when you go through if you apply for any site verification or badges or anything like that, you may need to have a better return policy in place, even if you have one then you might have currently. So that's just something to keep in mind as well. Alright, well hopefully I've convinced you that having a written refund and return policy is important. So let's talk about what that looks like. Grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, depending on the time of day, or not, because I just simply won't judge you, because I truly understand what it's like to run your own business Alright, let's talk about the parts of the policy that you need to develop. First off, let's talk about the actual policy itself. This is the thing that you are going to write down. Those terms that you need to come up with. Now, there's a couple of factors to take into account here. One is the number of days someone has to return an item or apply for a refund. A minimum here is 30 days. You are probably going to run into problems without outside payment providers, the site verification services, if you don't have at least a minimum of 30 days for a return policy. And realistically, 30 days really is considered like an E-commerce minimum. A lot of stores have longer than that. So if you are less than 30 days, that might be a red flag to your customers. Now, you will need to factor in your customers behavior, the prices of the items, what bracket you're in there, your cost of the items. All of those things can play a role into the number of days you actually decide on. If returns are very rare in your industry, or you are in a highly competitive industry where you need to be the most forgiving, awesome website out there, I would really encourage you to be as generous as possible in terms of these number of days. You know, you don't want to get into a bad situation where you're being taken advantage of. I am not advocating that at all. I'm just saying play your cards wisely here. Take into account all of the different factors, like how likely your customers are to actually take advantage of the policy, and if you could have that longer policy, it looks good on your website. It can help people decide to purchase from you versus someone else. Okay, next step you're going to need to give some thoughts to the reasons someone can return an item. Are you going to have any rules about this? So for example, common rules have to do with whether an item's been used or if it's in unused condition, whether it's resellable or not. I would really encourage you to keep this as simple as possible. You may, as a website owner, be in a position to dive into a ridiculous level of nuance on this. Your customers are not. They are going to simply look at it as whether or not you are being difficult. So when you're thinking about these things, you really are thinking about them in terms of hills you want to die on, okay So I would encourage you unless there is a really good reason that you not be putting a lot of restrictions on what can be returned. A good rule to keep in mind is that showing grace can salvage an otherwise bad situation with our customers. We'll talk more in a few minutes about what a bad situation might look like. Next up, whether there will be any fees involved with returning. I'm talking mainly about restocking fees. Restocking fees used to be really common. So if you haven't run into this before, this is where let's say you bought something for $10 and you decide to send it back. The company keeps like 15% to offset their cost of putting that item back in stock. So it used to be really common, not so common anymore. And I'll tell you, I would really encourage you to avoid these like the plague. I used to use them too. I think most E-commerce websites did. But they are now looked as being petty for lack of a better word, and they really tend to make customers who are already not thrilled with the situation angry, and we do not want angry customers. Restocking fees can also make it hard to get through a site verification process, again. So that might be something to think about as having that restocking fee may make it harder for you to do some of the other things that you need to do. Alright, along with restocking fees something to think about is who pays for the return shipping. So if the customer's gonna send this item back to you, who's gonna pay for that shipping? Now, it is general rule of thumb, it is okay to have a customer pay the return shipping if it's the customer's fault they're returning the item. So if it's something like they decided they didn't want it, or they ordered two of something and they should have only ordered one. Something like that. In theory, you're on fairly solid ground by telling them that they need to pay for the return shipping to get it back to you, okay. Now, Amazon, Zappos, some of these other big E-commerce companies are kinda make this more problematic. They've been doing it for a few years where they have these free return shipping situations for a lot of their items. Not everything. I mean, you can return just anything to Amazon and get free return shipping. But especially if you're looking at things like clothing and shoes, generally you can return those items for free. And that, if you're in one of those industries, that can put a lot of pressure on you to do the same. So again, this is something you really need to be thinking about in terms of how often is this actually happening? Can you factor this cost into your margin? All of those things will come into play when you decide whether or not to do this. And along with that who pays shipping, you need to be thinking about whether you're going to be issuing return shipping labels. And there's two ways to do this. If you've ordered clothes online recently, you have probably received a return shipping label in the box with your order. And that's very common because if you aren't in the clothes industry, you may not know that the return rate for clothing is ridiculous. Like, it's a mind-blowing number. Don't, yeah, just be afraid. Now, if you have a high return rate, if you are in one of those businesses, putting those return shipping labels in the box actually might end up saving you a ton of customer service costs. Last time I checked there's a cost to print those return shipping labels. It's like 50 cents a label or something, but check into that. If you're in a high return rate industry, it might be well worth it to just go and put those in the box. Now, even if you're not putting them in the box, and I've never personally been in a situation where that made sense for my company, if someone's gonna send something back, there is an argument to be made that sending them a return shipping label is good customer service. It keeps things simple. It helps control that process of that item coming back to you and helps you be able to track that item. So you're a little bit more in control of that situation. So that's just something to think about as well along with who pays for shipping. Just how that shipping is actually going to occur. Okay, next up and the last thing we need to talk about in terms of just the actual policy itself, these are things you're writing down to put on your website for your customer, how are you going to do refunds? Are you going to do a refund to the payment method they used? Or are you going to issue store credit? I'm gonna tell you upfront the best practice is to issue refunds to the form of payment that they used. So if they used their Chase credit card, then that's what you're going to issue the refund to. Store credit is a little bit of a dangerous game to play, especially if you made them return the item. You might be able to get away with store credit if you let them keep the item. But once they've returned the item, you're in kind of a dangerous situation in terms of chargebacks and things. I'll talk about that in a minute. But your customers have a lot of options to make your life pretty miserable if they decide that they're not happy. So I would encourage you to stay away from store credit if you can. Now, couple things to think about, sometimes you're not going to be able to refund to their credit cared. For example, 90 to 120 days after that purchase, you typically lose the ability to refund that payment. Also, if the credit card's been closed or has expired since that purchase was made, that can happen really quick, then you can have a problem as well refunding the payment. You know, cards expire all the time, of course, and then if somebody has like a fraud issue with their card and has to close their credit card, you won't be able to easily issue them a refund. So just a side note, you'll need to have a process in place potentially for issuing checks to customers for refunds. And that makes no one happy at all. Not you, not them, no one. But you do need to have that process in place, because usually by the time you're having to explain to someone you cannot issue a refund directly to their credit card and no, you can't issue a refund to their other credit card that they didn't use, people tend to be a little bit upset. And so you're gonna need to be able to get a check out to them really quickly. Okay, so now we've gone through all of the things that are gonna go on the policy itself, right. The number of days, the condition the item has to be in, whether they're gonna be fees involved, who's gonna pay for shipping, how those refunds are gonna happen. All that goes into your refund and return policy. Now let's talk about a couple of other factors that kinda come into play as a website owner. Some things we need to be thinking about. The first one is knowing when to make exceptions. Having rules and policies in place is really helpful to efficiently and effectively running our companies. But it's also just as important to know when you need to throw those rules out the window and just do the best you can in a difficult situation. Alright, the first place that you need to be darn sure you are making an exception if something happens is if the return is happening and it's not the customer's fault. So they were shipped the wrong item, the item was not described accurately on your website, the item was broken in transit. I mean, there are so many reasons that someone could get an item and legitimately not be happy with it and it's not their fault as a customer. I would strongly encourage you that you're number one goal in that situation is to make as sure as you possibly can that the customer does not feel penalized. This situation's already a massive inconvenience to them, and so you need to pull out all the stops to try to make this as slick as possible if you're gonna have that item sent back to you, or get them a refund as quickly as possible, or get them the item they did order in the condition they ordered out to them as soon as possible. Alright, the other thing I would really encourage you to think about in terms of exceptions is it is really important as a website owner to have some judgment on this and know when a fight is not worth having. As a general rule of thumb, I would encourage you not to fight with your customers. You will almost never win. And the consequences can be devastating. So there's a couple of reasons that you might want to think about a fight not worth having. You have a customer's contact to do, and you're not able to quickly resolve the situation. Every time that customer contacts you, every time you or your staff have to respond to that customer it is costing you money, right. It's costing you either time that you're paying someone to handle this or it's costing you time that you could be doing something else, hopefully something to make your business money, versus cost your business money. Alright, so there have been points with customers, with one of my past companies in particular, where we didn't have very many problems, but if we had a really difficult situation, we tended to cut our losses pretty early, because the products just weren't that expensive, and the time my customer service people were spending was costing me far more money. So just something to think about. You gotta make that calculation. The other thing you need to think about is that customer who use credit cards to pay for items, and this include PayPal accounts, okay. So PayPal account, credit cards, Amazon accounts, they have a lot of power in terms of getting their money back from their credit card company or PayPal. You know, honestly, they really just have to go to their credit card company and say I don't think I got what I thought I should get. And in almost every case they're gonna get their money back really quickly. And then it is on you as a company to prove that what they were saying in not true. And let me tell you, winning those fights is not only incredibly time consuming and stressful, you almost never will win. You are not the credit card company's customer, right. Their customer who's paying interest on their credit card is their customer. They're the ones they want to keep happy. So you need to be aware in the back of your mind when you're talking to a customer, when you're trying to figure out how to resolve a problem, that that customer has the ability to just go get their money back anyway. So sometimes it's best to say you know what, I see where this is headed and I'm just gonna give them their money back now before this ends up costing me even more money, okay. And of course, we have to be terribly concerned, especially in this age of social media about bad PR. Someone can get out there and trash us so quickly and so effectively. In the last 10 years I've been doing this, I've been very fortunate. I feel like we did a good job of managing situations so that things didn't spin out of control. But I have seen cases where companies made some small mistakes and how they handled a customer and should have been more accommodating, and should have seen where things were going with that customer, and had it end up being devastating for them. That customer would get on social media and start saying this happened and this happened and this happened. And maybe it's not all entirely true, but maybe there's just enough truth there that people pick up on it. I've seen it spread through the blogs as wildfire. It just can be really devastating. So I'm not telling you to be paranoid. I'm not telling you to make all your decisions from a place of fear, but I am encouraging you to be very thoughtful and remember that your customers have options, okay. They have ways to make your life miserable. So you need to be thoughtful and really deal with these interactions with integrity and know when you're fighting for the sake of fighting versus for an important point. As much as it stinks, sometimes you are far better off just letting them keep the item, refund their money, and move on. Don't do that too often, but every once in awhile that's gonna be your best idea. Next up, let's talk about educating customers on the policy. Now, once you have this policy written, a good general rule of thumb is to be upfront and put the policy in places where it's likely to be seen. So this needs, of course, to be on your website, probably on your shipping or ordering information page. Generally, you'll want to see it in your terms and conditions, even if, you know, nobody ever reads those, or hardly anybody ever reads those. I would also encourage you if you have the ability to do it to put your return policy on your packing slip. Now, I realize at first glance that sounds like a terrible idea. Why would we want to encourage our customers to return something by putting the policy on the packing slip? Okay, so here's the thing. Customers don't decide to return something because they see that you'll take it back. If they're about returning something, they're already thinking about returning something. And at that point salvaging that situation is about making that return process as easy as possible. So putting that information on the packing slip isn't about encouraging them to return. It's about intercepting that thought process and making sure that they have the information, that they feel satisfied with the information. Hopefully it also means that you'll get that item back in the way that your hoping to because they had that information early on. Alright, final thing, when you're looking at designing refund and return policies, you need to make some decisions about what you're going to do with returned merchandise. Now, of course, there are going to be times when an item can be resold and can't be resold. So those might be simple decisions. But if you are selling things that are perishable, or are lot controlled, that means things like food, or supplements or something where you're tracking lot numbers so that you can do an effective recall, you're probably not gonna be able to resell those items. So that's something where you potentially need to look at best practices, talk to your regulatory agency, talk to your attorney. But just something to think about. You can't always resell something that comes back. So in the end you probably do need to sit down and think about what your loss here is. You might need to budget in the loss. If you're dealing with items that are very low cost to you, and you have fairly large margins, this may not even be of issue. But if you're dealing with small margin high cost items, then budgeting in for your return rate's gonna be pretty important for keeping your margin from disappearing. Alright, well refund and return policies aren't exactly fun. But they can definitely save you some headaches. And having a good policy can potentially salvage some good will with your customers. And that needs to be your goal, because refunds and returns happen. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll be back in your feed in a few days, and in the meantime take a few minutes to either review your return and refund policy if you have one, or if you're just getting your business started, start sketching one out while this is top of mind. Just take a few minutes to think about what are the factors I've talked about today that apply specifically to your company and your situation. Alright, now don't forget I'd love to hear from you. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher so you don't miss an episode. Also, subscribing, rating and reviewing helps other people find this podcast. This is just a weird world, let me tell you But I'd like to get this information to as many people as possible so that we can all be in a better position to have some flexibility in our lives and support our families by starting our own small businesses online. So I will see you next time.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method of Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 011: Developing a Return and Refund Policy for Your Ecommerce Website

Episode 010: Efficiently Using the Hours in Your Day to Build Your Ecommerce Business   Episode Summary:  Most ecommerce website owners are balancing so many competing demands between work, family, and maybe some self-care. It's the nature of small business! In this episode, Julie discusses practical strategies for using time efficiently and keeping all the balls in the air.   Episode Links: https://www.canva.com/ https://asana.com https://trello.com/ https://basecamp.com/  https://www.lastpass.com/ (password manager) https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:   Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello and welcome to episode 10 of the Savvy Business Method podcast where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Okay before we get started today a couple of quick things. The transcript of the show is in the show notes along with the lengths to the resources I'll talk about today. And I think there's going be a decent number of links. So you'll be able to go back and find those pretty quickly. Also be sure and come on over to Facebook and check us out. I'm posting there a couple times a day and there are videos and links to the podcast. And then just some fun things I find are on the internet to help us all stay focused on this idea of growing our business online. Alright so today's topic is efficiently using the hours in your day. I am getting the distinct impression from those of you I've heard from. That many of you are in the same position that I was when I first started my online business 10 years ago. And to be honest to an extent, the same position I'm in now. And that is being very busy and having to fit your work in around your family, around your other commitments, working from home. This seems to be a really common. A common theme for a lot of you. It's like why don't I take this episode to talk with you about some of the things that I have learned over the last 10 years. In terms of how to better structure my days, my weeks, my months. So that I can be as effective as possible at growing my businesses. While also being able to be there for my family okay. So let's think about this for a moment. Do you ever lay in bed at night and insist that you will do more tomorrow? That you're somehow going to find more hours in your day or you're going to accomplish more tomorrow. I know I do this. I'm guessing a lot of you do this and today's episode is really about making that conversation with yourself more productive. So you can be more efficient and effective with your time and grow your business to reach your goals and take care of all these other responsibilities that you have. You know being ridiculously busy seems to be an inherent part of our culture at this point. And we can probably all agree that this is not a healthy situation. But I would wager that you don't feel like you have much of a choice and neither do I. You know you may have kids, relationships, social commitments. Your house probably should be clean at some point. You have food to cook. Maybe you could throw some self care in there on a good day. You know what is self care? And all of that on top of having one or more businesses that you need to grow and run. Meanwhile our families are depending on us. So it's not like we can just flop down and say I give up. It's a lot and so let's dive in and talk about some of the strategies that are out there for better managing this busy situation that we have. And making the most of the time that we do have. Alright strategy number one is to be honest about the time that you do have. Alright now I have no doubt that if you suddenly had twice as much time during the day. Five times as much time. Ten times as much time that you would find ways to fill that time. And be productive and continue to grow your business. You didn't get to this entrepreneurship thing by accident. That's probably part of who you are. But having huge slots of time isn't a reality for most entrepreneurs. And so we need to be realistic about what time we do have. So for example maybe you are in a position where you get to work during business hours. You're getting to work eight, nine, ten, twelve hours a day on your business. This may be less of an issue for you if you're able to spend that really large concentrated time on your business. You still need to organize your time but still you're in a little bit better position. But for many of you listening I'm guessing based on the feedback I've gotten. That many of you are doing this at night. You do it on weekends. You're doing it during nap time for your kids. And I just want to tell you I really understand. You know my first business my spouse worked full time plus then some. I had two little kids, they were two and under. And I worked in five to fifteen minute bursts while my little kids played. And I've got to tell you my now much older self has absolutely no idea how I did that. Clearly I did and clearly it worked but it is a hard way to live. And I realize now the only reason I was able to develop my business is because I did make the most of those small amount of time that I had available. And so accepting what time we do have instead of constantly wishing for more time and trying to pretend like we have more time. Just owning up to this reality of our situation makes easier to at least make the most of the time that we do have, okay. Strategy number two. It's really helpful if you always know what needs to be accomplished. When it needs to be accomplished and how it needs to be accomplished. Now most things that we do as small business owners and website owners can kind of be divided into two camps. There are things that we are just one off. That task that just need to get done. So maybe you need to put it in order for something or you need to answer a customer service email. But most of the priorities and tasks that you have are going to be what I call dependent task. And that means that there is a series of events that have to take place in more or less a certain order in order for you to get that task done. So I'm going to use an example of this podcast. Okay so in order for you to be listening to this podcast right now. At some point I had to come up with a topic for today. I had to outline it. I had to run through it usually at least twice to look for any holes because I value your time. And I want to make sure that if you're gonna sit down and listen to this or listen to while you are making dinner, that you are getting the best information possible so I don't want to be leaving major things out. I then have to record it which is a small problem because that requires quiet. And I have four children and I do work from home. So I have to plan that carefully. I also edit this, I have to lay it out with the intro and the outro. I have to send it out for some wonderful soul to transcribe it so that you have those show notes. I then have to write up the show notes and the links and then get it posted to the distribution service. And then I have to get it posted on the Savvy Business website. And I had to schedule it on Facebook. Okay, so this is an example of a set of dependent tasks. Like I can't do a whole lot with the order of those. Those have to be done in a specific order. And if you start thinking through the tasks you have as an entrepreneur. You'll probably find that most of your tasks are these types of things. Where you're going to have to line up sub-tasks in a certain order to make them happen. And this has been one of the most important things that I have had to work on. As someone who works from home. As someone who has multiple businesses is making sure that I always know what my tasks are that are out there. And what is the next thing I have to do for each of those tasks. Alright so, even if you sit down and you outline all of these things that you need to do. I'm going to take a guess that it's probably still way too long of a list and way too many things. So next up you're going to need to do some prioritizing. And I would recommend a couple of things to be thinking about as you're prioritizing. One, you want to be thinking about how successful something is likely to be. We as entrepreneurs can come up with so many really cool things we want to try to promote our business, to improve our business. But we have to be honest about what are the things that are concrete good ideas likely to succeed. Likely to be something that we can actually do and pull off? And what are the things that are more. Boy, someday I'd really like to try that. It might work, it might not type of thing right. So that's really important. I'd also encourage you to think about the time that any particular task is going to take. Or the financial investment and what that trade off would be for rewards. There are things we do as small business owners that can be huge for us. For example, I truly did not understand the power of the email marketing. Until I made a major change in my email system. And this was many years ago. But that time I spent at the time it seemed like I was gonna spend a lot of time on it. The amount of financial reward for that decision was huge. And so it's really about trying to identify those things that yes. They may take us some time but the rewards are significant. I'd also prioritize your list based on what has to be done in blocks of time? So if you have a block of time in your schedule. If you have small children. Maybe your spouse comes home and can watch them or while they're sleeping at night or something like that. Maybe if you can get a block of time how do you be more efficient with a certain set of tasks then you might otherwise be? So it's just some things to think about. I've also found it really helpful to organize my tasks by daily, weekly and monthly to do lists. So I actually keep separate to do lists of the things I need to accomplish. I also keep separate lists or I mark on my list things that can be done in quick moments. So for example when I'm tired and I don't have. Maybe at night I'm tired and I don't have the ability to really focus on something. My quality is probably not going to be great if I'm trying to come up with a complete outline for a podcast. Or a brand new marketing campaign for my e-commerce business okay. But I can for example, I often work on improving an outline like when I'm sitting in my car waiting for my kids to get done with some appointment. I can sit there and work on Evernote on my phone and improve my outline and get that done. You know cause those small moments can really add up. So if we always have things on our mind that oh, when I get a free minute and I'm just sitting there. I can quickly that. You can actually get a lot accomplished that way. Alright, strategy number three. Any of you who are parents are going to laugh at me but strategy number three is to find some quiet. And I know that is way easier said then done isn't it. So I just wanted to put out a few ideas here for you. One is to think about getting some noise canceling headphones. Obviously this only works if there's not something you need to hear. Like an emergency or the alarm for dinner going off or something like that. But noise canceling headphones make a great Christmas gift. Ask me how I know. And they could be really helpful if you're working from home. And there's just that noise factor that you're dealing with. Or alternatively you need to be working at a coffee shop or something having noise canceling headphones can be amazing. If quiet space is rarely an option for you. Again, you want to prioritize those tasks that have to be done in that moment. So for example I save all of my podcast recording and my video recording for when my spouse is out running errands with the kids and my house is momentarily quiet. And I'll get a couple of blocks a week like two hours each and that's when all of my recording has to be done. And so that just means that I have to have all those other dependent tasks done first right. So organizing my schedule around when quiet will be available is pretty important. Alright, strategy number four is to get organized. More organized than you already are because having our own businesses is both a blessing and a curse right. So one hand we get to have this scheduling flexibility because we are our own boss. But on the other hand if you're not naturally the kind of person to be very organized and driven about your work. No one is standing there to make sure you do it. And so this was something that. Especially the organization piece is something I really struggled with early on because I was used to having my work come to me. And like I know my spouse was really struggling with us two being self employed. His job was all about people bringing him problems all day and he would solve them. And to suddenly be in a position where you are the one who has to decide what's going to get done and in what order. That is a huge mental shift. So if that's something that you're working on be encouraged. You know being more organized can be really helpful for that. So let's talk about a few things that you could do to kind of get in that mindset. One thing that I personally found really helpful is having a computer set up in a specific place in my house. With a set up that works well for me. So for example for me that's having two different monitors so I could have a bunch of things open at once. And for me that means not having to constantly drag equipment around to try to find a place to work and set up. It also keeps my equipment safer because I have small children including a toddler. So now that doesn't mean, I do of course have a laptop and I can go somewhere else and work. But for me I can be faster and more efficient at my computer that's set up the way that I work best. We talked earlier about having this to do list right. The daily, weekly, monthly to do list. Focus versus non-focus tasks. And I would encourage you to keep your notes and your to do list some place that you could access them from anywhere. I personally really like Evernote. It's inexpensive. It can be on my computer. It can be on my phone. Everything is synced so I can sit in the car and update an outline for a podcast. Or I could be writing up copy for some ads for my commerce business. All of that gets saved and I can access it later. Some people find project management software really helpful especially if you're working on very complex tasks, dependent tasks. Or if you're working with multiple people. I personally have used Asana quite extensively. I have friends though who love Trello. I have someone I know who loves Basecamp. So those are some options for you for project management software. There are often free plans or very inexpensive plans. So if you're working by yourself and you just want something that's going to set everything up where you know it or you have to do stuff. And what date everything is due. Those systems can be really useful. Now remember back in episode five when we talked about data security and I was encouraging you to go make sure all your data is secure. And you're backing up all your systems. So I just want to revisit really quick that having a good password manager like I talked about in episode five is really important. You could be much faster about your work and more efficient with your work if you're not hunting around for your passwords. Also I talked in episode five about getting a scanner. Don't waste your time digging through your paperwork. You should know where everything is at all times. Alright strategy number five I have to tell you is one of my personal favorites. And some days feels like the key to whatever success I am marginally managing to achieve at any given moment. So strategy five is to batch work whenever you can. Okay so what does that mean? So batching work is about bunching up a bunch of similar tasks together and getting them done all at once. Because here's the thing. Those tasks take start up time so once you're in the mode. You can often get more done more quickly by just doing it all then. Okay so what does this look like. These are some of the examples of the ways that I use this. I typically will set up several weekly newsletters at once. Like I'll set up month worth of newsletters at once because by the time I sit down. I log into my email service provider. I pull up my editorial calendar where I keep all my ideas and what I'm planning on doing each week. By the time I do all of that the newsletter itself doesn't take very much time. And so it might take me an hour to put together one newsletter or it might take me two hours to put together four newsletters. Another option is to make multiple rounds of ads at one time. So back in episode four I think it was. I talked about preventing ad fatigue and how you need to have multiple ad sets so that you can switch these out pretty regularly. Don't make one ad set at a time. Sit down, get your system open. I use Canva which I love and I'm dragging and dropping in my graphics and my texts. And I can make four or five rounds of ads in an hour or two. Which is so much more efficient and then I have ads for the next few months. And then I don't have to worry about doing that again. Also you know plan out any social media ad testing you're doing. If you're running Facebook ads you probably have figured out a huge part of that is constantly testing new copy, new images, new offers. You know sitting down and planning out to the next few rounds of that versus suddenly going oh no. My ads are expiring today and I need to come up with something new. It's more efficient to sit down and do that at once. If you're going to be getting on Facebook and scheduling your organic Facebook on your page. Plan out one to four weeks at a time. Facebook has a great scheduling option, use it. You know sit down in front of the TV at night for background noise if that's helpful to you. Grab a glass of wine and plan another month of Facebook. And then if you're doing any sort of audio or video component of your company. Especially if that involves for you doing your hair and makeup. I would really encourage you to make as many videos and podcasts at once as you possibly can because it is way way more efficient. And then you could also batch your editing right and your uploading and you rendering and all that. Alright well our last strategy for today is number six. And that's to be kind to yourself. And I realize that this is probably the hardest thing I have talked about today. Right up there with trying to find quiet right. I can tell you from experience after doing this for 10 years. And during that 10 years I have given birth to 3 babies. I have lost an enormous amount of sleep. I have had a ridiculous amount of stress involved with starting and growing companies. And I can tell you that it takes a really strong toll on you physical and mental health. And both your physical and mental health need to be in good shape. If you're gonna be effective and efficient with this whole building a business idea. And so I wanted to just give you a few things that have really helped me over the years. And just really encourage you to be thoughtful about your work habits. So that you are not burning yourself out. The biggest thing I think has been really helpful to me lately is learning to work in 25 minute cycles with five minute breaks. Now there's research to say that this is really effective and I can say personally that I have found that I am much more efficient if I do this. Now, that's easier said then done because I get in a mode and I don't want to stop. Like I'm recording two podcasts back to back today because I am in a mode and I want to talk to you about these things. And so it's hard for me to remember to take a break. But let's talk about as a practical matter what this looks like. So you can use something like a Tomato Timer. Just Google Tomato Timer. I'll put a link in the notes. There's a little timer on it it's free. It's a little web browser timer that you click when you start working and then it beeps to remind you to take a break. You can use something like Music to Code By. I'll put this link in the show notes too. I love Music to Code By. It is 25 minutes. I don't remember all of the details, it's on their site. But the music is such that it really helps keep your brain calm yet alert. And it's organized in those 25 minutes sequences so that when the music ends you need to get up and take a break. And when I say a break I mean don't look at your computer. Don't look at your phone. You just physically get up, walk around. Stretch, do some squats or some push ups. Go change the laundry. I'll go use the bathroom. Get a drink of water or a snack. Do something that doesn't involve looking at your computer because then when you come back your brain is ready to engage in whatever it is you're doing again. So this is just something that lately has been really helping me. So I wanted to share that with you. Burn out is very very common among entrepreneurs. I know a lot of entrepreneurs. I don't know very many who haven't at some point faced very serious burn out. And just to be honest it happens more to women too than men. So if you're a female entrepreneur just be aware. Surround yourself with other female entrepreneurs who can encourage you and know the signs. And can really help you if you kind of start entering that cycle. That they can be there for you to help prop you up and help you find solutions. Because burn out doesn't serve you. It doesn't serve your family. It doesn't serve your business. So please try to be kind to yourself. Entrepreneurship, you know this whole idea of starting an online business. Growing an online business. It is a marathon. It is not a sprint but I got to tell you some days it feels like a never ending series of sprints. And that could be exciting and fun. It can also be exhausting. So sometimes we need to make those adjustments to make a big difference on how productive we are and how we feel. Alright well that's it for today. I will be back in your feed on Monday for episode 11 where we'll talk about designing return and refund policies for our websites. It's a great way to really think through some of the important issues. So that you can keep any return and refund processes smooth for your customers and also keep your credit card processes happy and all of the people in your life happy. But in the meantime thanks so much for joining me today. I hope this information will help you make excellent decisions for your own business. If you have feedback ideas for future shows you can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Please be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher. I don't want you to miss any episodes and I really do consider it a great favor if you can rate and review this show. It helps other people find it and I really love reading your reviews. So I will see you Monday for episode 11. And in the meantime I hope you have a productive yet restful weekend. Bye for now.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com. And Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 010: Efficiently Using the Hours in Your Day to Build Your Ecommerce Business

Episode 009: What is Content Marketing?   Episode Summary:  Is content marketing a buzz word or is it really something we as ecommerce website owners need to be spending time on? In this episode Julie talks about what content marketing is and is not as well as give an overview of developing a content marketing strategy.   Episode Links:   https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert. Julie Feickert Hello and welcome to episode nine of the Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Now before we get started today, talking about content marketing, I have a few housekeeping things for you. First, I want to remind you that you can find links to resources I talk about in any of these podcasts in the show notes along with a transcript of the show. I realize that most of you are probably multi-tasking right now, right. You're either driving or you're picking up your kids or you're making dinner, or you're trying to organize all of your receipts for your accounting program. And you may need to go back later and find a piece of information so the transcript can really help with that. Next up I wanted to let you know that I have about 30 mini videos right now up on YouTube and I have more coming soon. There all about two to three minutes long and they're just quick tips for running e-commerce websites. They encompass everything from customer service to marketing to running a warehouse and shipping orders so lots of different things up there and if you have any ideas or things you'd like me to talk about in a video going forward, be sure to reach out to me at savvybusinessmethod.com I am also up on Facebook. So I'm posting there a couple of times a day now at Savvy Business Method on Facebook and I'm putting up videos, links to these podcasts, as well as just interesting resources from around the internet too. Be sure to come on over and "like" the page and check that out so that we can connect there as well. All right enough with the announcements let's move on to today's topic, which is content marketing. Now content marketing seems sort of like a buzz word, right? Especially if you're new to the e-commerce sphere. It can sound like something that maybe we talk about at marketing conferences to make ourselves sound cool and customer-focused but I really want to get in today to the nitty gritty of what content marketing looks like and what are the things you need to be thinking about if you decide to use content marketing for your e-commerce website. All right. So there's a lot of confusion about what content marketing is and isn't so I wanna start out with two quick stories of what content marketing looks like in action. Now this first story I don't have a name for this company because this is a story that's been around the internet for a while but I'm going to tell it to you because it is such a good example. There was a swimming pool company that of course didn't have a lot of work during the off season, right. Not very many people putting in pools in January in most of the country. And so they spent their off season writing up answers to every customer question they could imagine and then putting those short articles up on their website. This ended up generating loads of traffic from all over the world. It gave them plenty of customers for that next season and really established their business and with a steady stream of customers in the long run. So it was really important for them in terms of their growth to have all of that content up on their website. All right my next example is personal. I had a health food company for about nine years and we sold ingredients, food ingredients. In the beginning I decided pretty early to start putting up articles, like how to articles and recipes for using these products. Then we expanded to videos eventually which were made in the upstairs of my house. But I gotta tell you that content ended up being really valuable. In the end we ended up with about 2,000 pieces of content on the website which is a ridiculous amount and I'll talk in a little bit later in today's podcast about why you probably don't wanna go that overboard. But that content allowed my website to become well known as the place to go for those products because we had all that information in addition to having the high quality products. So content marketing can be really valuable for establishing your authority in a market. So let's talk about what this looks like from a customer's perspective. Content marketing is about providing valuable information that isn't selling anything. All right. So because you're offering such great information without a direct sales pitch, people tend to become loyal to your brand. They know your name. They see you as being helpful, and an expert in this area. Content marketing from your customer's perspective is also about having an information eco-system around your product. So this can be things like articles or recipes, if you're working in food like I was. It can also be things like polls or quizzes, or videos. In-person events. Apps, e-books, webinars, infographics, there's so many options, right. So many things that you can do to create content that would support your customer's use of your product and make your brand more valuable to them. Because at it's core content marketing is about education and engagement. It's not about direct promotion. Now all that being said, from our perspective as business owners who are selling products online, we actually do need to sell our products, right. This is how we stay in business, this is how we pay our bills. So what does content marketing provide from our perspective as business owners? Well first it elevates the perceived value of our brand. This is good for building that long term value and customer loyalty. Right. It also can set up apart from our competition unless you're lucky enough to be in a market where you have no competition. First off, that's probably a temporary situation, right. So you gotta bulletproof your situation. But you need to be able to show value to your customer that is different from what your competitors are doing and content marketing is a great way to do that. Now I wanna be clear here though that you want to be helpful and even though we as business owners are trying to sell things, we really do need to go into our content strategy with this idea that we wanna be helpful, that we wanna be educational. That we're building a long term relationship with our customers. This is not the time to be sneaky. And be trying constantly sneak in sales pitches. Customers are smart and I gotta tell you especially this younger generation, the millennials that are coming up behind us Gen-X'ers. They are extremely savvy and the generation behind them even more so in terms of identifying when they are being played or their perception of they're being played. If they're reading an educational article and it's clear that you're just trying to sell them something, they're gonna pick up on that really quickly. So get in that mindset if you gonna do content marketing, you gotta get in this mindset that you are being helpful and educational. Okay? Okay. Let's start talking about some guidelines for getting started with a content marketing strategy. The first thing I wanna talk with you about is that content marketing is not a quick fix. Now I know that those two stories I told at the beginning of this episode sound like a quick fix, right. We talked about the pool company that over their off season it ended up building up their business with content marketing. I told you about my health food company where we had the 2,000 articles. This sounds very quick. A lot of the success stories that you will hear about content marketing on the internet, on the wiles of the internet. The fabulous stories are gonna sound like they were a quick fix. And I just wanna be clear about this upfront. A lot of the stories that you're going to hear are going to be from several years ago and by several I mean, 5, 10, 12 years ago. Back when the internet was a great deal less crowded. There were less websites, there were less articles, videos, content in general and so the competition to rank on Google was a lot less stringent. Okay. And so because of that it was easier back in the good ole days, back when I had my first e-commerce website, I'm gonna tell you it was easier to rank on Google for a piece of content. But even with that easier situation that we no longer have, darn it. When I first started putting up content in 2009 there was no magic bullet there. Like truly. It helped people decide to buy from my company but it wasn't sending me a ton traffic. So about four or five years later I have this really clear memory, so that would be what, 2013, 2014. I had come to work. I was sitting at my desk in the corner of our warehouse. E-commerce management is a really glamorous situation, I had no walls but that was my desk. I was looking at Google Analytics which I did pretty much every day and it suddenly hit me. For the first time that Google liked us. Google was actually sending a significant amount of organic traffic to my website via this now, it was probably 1,000 pages, articles at the time. So we were actually starting to get decent traffic numbers. And don't get me wrong, it wasn't like it was an overnight thing, it had been building for the last four or five years but it had finally happened. I just remember being shocked because I had just been putting up that information to be helpful, I knew you were supposed to put information up. After four or five years you kind of start losing hope that is really gonna do something for you. So this is just an example of even you know back in what were the good ole days of e-commerce, it was still a thing. Right. It was not an instant success. You might have some limited success when you do a content marketing strategy. Maybe you'll have a piece of content or two that will get shared out by a number of social media influencers. Or you might have a piece of content that does really well in a newsletter. I remember one night we had this one strange recipe that for some reason everybody opened, it felt like. We suddenly had great traffic to the website. So you just never know but this a long term strategy. It's not something that you should plan on being successful overnight or even in a season or quarter, or even in the next year. This is about building that long term loyalty. All right so now that I burst everyone's bubble that this is not gonna be a quick fix, let's talk more about how you do this. Now the first thing you're gonna wanna do with a content marketing strategy is to look at what your competition is doing and not doing. This is not the time to copy what your competition is doing. You wanna figure out what they're doing in this area and then figure out how you're going to do it better. And on brand. Right. Because this is about building brand loyalty and value. So you wanna look at what they're doing as a guide but you also will need to come up with your own spin on the situation. Along with that is this idea of having a clear idea of what your customer needs. So who is your target customer? What are their different points in the sales funnel? What does it look like when they're first finding out about your product or your company. What does it look like when they're making their sales decision? What does it look like when they purchase, what do they need to make that last push to purchase and then what sort of support do they need of the product they purchased. So that you can engender that loyalty and you can have that repeat purchase behavior that we need for e-commerce. Each piece of content you write really does need to have a clearly defined purpose. You should know who you're targeting. You should know where in the sales cycle they are at. You should know whether this is a piece of content to help someone see the value of your product to help support the product once they've bought it. To help them get other ideas for how to use the product, I mean there's so many options out there. But you don't want to use a shot gun approach here, right. Honestly you don't wanna do what I did. Where we wrote 2,000 pieces of content over the course of about eight years. Then suddenly you have 2,000 pages that don't necessarily have a clearly defined purpose but a couple hundred of them are getting really good traffic. And now that you have so much content you have to hire somebody to manage it all and believe me, you do not want to do that. I am very grateful for the people who managed the content for my health food website, they were amazing, they did a great job but that is another person to employ and a lot of content to manage. And so, I'm just encouraging you to be more strategic than I was about that. You also when you're writing content, you wanna make sure that you're not trying to use any SEO tricks okay. So this is things like thinking you're gonna stuff a bunch of key words or meta tags or something like that. And I think this is less of an issue now than it used to be. People used to do this stuff all the time because frankly at one point it worked okay. But the search engine algorithms are very smart. Smarter than all of us, and you are not going to trick them. The goal here needs to be to produce the most user friendly, highest quality piece of content you can. Do not skimp on quality. Those search engine algorithms are looking for the best piece of content for what the user is looking for when they type a search into the search engine. Okay. So now that you have a clear idea of what your customer wants, that all of your content has a clear purpose, you've written amazing, high quality content. The next step is to make sure that you have a plan for promoting each piece of content. Now a general rule of thumb you'll see often floating around with bloggers, now remember 'cause bloggers are selling their content essentially, right. By selling advertising for their site. So these are great people to follow and to pay attention to the techniques that they use because they are [inaudible 00:14:37] tend to be content masters. One of the rules you'll see in blogging circles is that you should plan to spend at least 2x as much time promoting your content as you did developing and writing it. Now that sounds weird, right? Like wait, wasn't writing that high quality content good enough. But no one's going to beat a path to your door with content that you just throw up on your website. The search engines don't see that as being valuable, people are not going to magically find it. You're gonna need to do some promotion. And so here's what this looks like. You yourself when you put an article up on your website, you need to be interlinking your content together. Like articles get linked together, they all link maybe to the product that they go to, that sort of thing. You're also going to need to spread your content around social media. You might even look at boosting a Facebook post for example. You'll want to use your content in a newsletter. Get that out to your subscribers. You want to get that content out to influencers, social media influencers if you can. And let me tell you that will be a way easier process if you have written amazing content that is truly helpful. You can also take your content and later expand on it. You can create a video, a webinar, a white paper, a podcast, an e-book, something. Right. You can always take your content and continue to expand on it and link to it, which will really help the popularity. All right so even once you have this high quality content and you promote it and it's generating traffic, it's really important to remember that this is not a permanent fix. Even if you have a great bank of quality content and you're generating a ton of traffic and it's bringing you a bunch of sales, it is entirely possible to slide backwards. I have seen this happen and it's tragic when it does. Search engines expect a regular stream of quality content and that your content is staying relevant to real people. Okay. So it's also pretty easy for someone else to come along and do this better. And take your spot as an expert. Again, I've seen it happen and it's just terrible when it does. Think of your content management strategy, or your content marketing strategy like a peri annual garden. Okay. So when we put in annual plants they die at the end of the season, right, we pull them out and put in new annuals at the beginning of the next season. With the peri annual garden these are the plants that come back year after year, right. So when we're planting these pieces of content, we're nurturing them. We're promoting them so that they can produce traffic and sales for our website. And then regularly checking in to tend to them so that they stay healthy long term. Content marketing is not a free thing, right, you're gonna put a lot of time and energy. Blood, sweat, and tears, right, into your content. So make sure that you are nurturing it long term so that it can be a long term source of traffic and revenue for you. All right well hopefully I've taken some of the mystery out of content marketing for you. In the end most e-commerce businesses will benefit from content marketing and this is really about being savvy and making it work best for you and your customers. I would imagine that we will deep dive in future episodes into some of these areas we've talked about and if there are areas that you would like me to talk about either on the podcast or on a YouTube video, reach out to me at savvybusinessmethod.com, I would love to hear from you and hear the ideas that you have and I will try to make as many of them as possible happen. But otherwise that's it for today. I will be back in your feed in a few days. In the meantime thanks so much for joining me today. I really do hope the information in this podcast helps you make excellent decisions for your own business. Be sure to check me out again on Facebook and YouTube and I would really appreciate it if you could rate and review this podcast. I love reading the reviews. They help me make tweaks and find better ways to bring this information to you. So I'll see you next time. Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode please leave a review and subscribe and for more great content and to stay up-to-date visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 009: What is Content Marketing?  

  Episode 008: Choosing a Credit Card Processor for Your Ecommerce Website   Episode Summary:  Feeling overwhelmed choosing a credit card processor? Or maybe not sure you have the right one? Never fear! In this episode, Julie reviews the factors you need to consider so you can choose the right processor for your online business.   Episode Links:   https://stripe.com/ https://www.paypal.com/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert Hello and welcome to episode eight of The Savvy Business Method Podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills, so you can provide a better life for your family. Our topic today is How to Choose a Credit Card Processor. If you are looking at starting a website or you already have one, you may have figured out that there are a ton of companies who would be more than happy to process credit cards for you, so how do you go about choosing which company is best? They all have good marketing. Right? They're all telling us that they're the best provider, most reliable, lowest rates. Yes, some of those are objective factors that we may be able to sit down and make a spreadsheet and compare, but are those really the only things we should be thinking about? Are there other factors that need to be top of mind when we're choosing someone to work with? Let's sit down today and talk through the different things that you need to consider when you're choosing a credit card processor. Now, there are generally three types of credit card processors out there. There are the big companies that have been around for many, many years and I'm talking about companies like Authorize.net. They've been around for many years for good reason. I mean, [they're 00:01:27] tend to be very stable, very reputable companies. There are also what are generally thought of as web payment providers. These are companies like Stripe and its pile of competitors where they are set up primarily for doing business on the internet, so they integrate with different websites and they are mainly targeting website owners like ourselves. There are also payment account providers who also offer credit card processing services. For example, you can process credit cards through PayPal. PayPal is normally thought of as a way to run PayPal accounts on your site, but PayPal is their own merchant credit card processor as well. You can use them to process your credit cards or you can use ... I believe you can use Amazon Payments as well. There are three different pipes of providers that you can be looking at and today I'm mainly going to be talking about the web payment providers, like Stripe, and then the payment account providers, like Amazon and PayPal, since those are generally the more popular options for small business owners who are trying to integrate a credit card system onto their website. Alright, next step let's talk about fees because credit card fees add up quickly and the first thing you want to do when you're choosing a credit card processor is figure out their fee structure. Now, there are generally three types of fees that would be involved. One is a monthly fee and this is just a flat fee that is charged for using their service. Then, there are transaction fees, so every time there's a credit card charge run through the system for your website, you'll get hit with a transaction fee. Those generally tend to be right around 30 cents. That's kind of the going rate right now. Then, there are variable fees and this is the percentage that you pay on each transaction, so you'll get hit with that, you know, say 30 cent transaction fee, and then the variable fees are a percentage. On a $10.00 order, you might pay a 29 or 30 cent transaction fee and then you would pay, let's say it's 2%, you would pay 20 cents for that variable fee. Your total would be like 49, 50 cents for your credit card fees for that order. Now, understanding the fee structure's important because this is part of how you're going to compare between different companies because each one is probably going to have a slightly different structure. Although, I'm happy to report in the last few years most of these companies have all standardized their fees, so you're going to see the same basic rate on multiple companies, which makes it so much easier. No joke, these credit card fees matter. They add up so quickly. Six years ago, I cut my credit card fees in half by switching companies to process my credit cards. I saved over $4,500 a month, I mean, that is an insane amount of money, simply by switching from one company to another. This is really something that you want to be paying attention to. Next up, you want to look at data and how the information from your credit card processor is going to integrate into your accounting system. It is really frustrating to have to enter this data by hand. It's possible, but it's really time consuming, so this is a good time to stop and ask yourself how is your payment processor going to talk to your eCommerce platform and how are both of those pieces of software going to talk to your accounting system? If you can get all of these systems reliably talking to one another, you will save yourself so many headaches and errors and just a ton of time over the years. If it turns out that it is not possible for you to fully integrate the system and you are going to be entering data by hand, make sure you take a good look at how transparent the reporting is from the credit card processor. You really need easy to read reports where your fees are properly broken out, so that you can easily enter this information or give it to your bookkeeper to enter. Another accounting issue you need to be concerned with when you're using a credit card processor is how fees are paid. Now, most of the web processors out there now take their fees off the top. For example, if you have a customer buy something for $10.00 and the fees are 49 cents, then you would have $9.51 deposited into your bank account. Okay, that makes sense, but sometimes credit card companies charge the fees in bulk at the end of the month. I used to have this with one of the processors I used is we would get to the first of the month, first or second of the month, and $8,000-$9,000 would come out of my checking account and that was all of my fees for the month for the credit card transactions. I'm only saying this because if you're going to have a bulk amount come out of your account, you need to be aware of that and if you're not looking at your reports every day, it would be really easy to miss maybe that those fees are not coming out piecemeal, but rather are going to come out in a lump sum later on. Just something to be aware of, so you don't have issues with your cashflow. Alright, next I would suggest that you take a good look at what setup looks like. Now, most credit card processors are going to require a significant amount of information in order to set up a credit card processing account for you. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be worried about. For example, they're going to need to know what your business's name is and how it's registered with the state that you're in. They're going to need to know your tax ID number. This is a federal requirement. They have to send you a 1099-K at the end of the year. I see so many small business owners on my Facebook groups and forums who freak out when they're asked for this information and it's like, okay guys, but they have to send the paperwork to the government at the end of the year and it has to be for your business. Just be aware that these are the types of things that they're going to need. They generally also need to know who you are personally. Again, this is perfectly normal and it has to do ... at least in the United States I believe it has to do with the terrorism prevention acts, so be prepared that you're going to have to part with some of your personal info as well. They'll likely run a credit check on you personally because they want to make sure that you are in a position that you're not going to be tempted to do something nefarious with your credit card account. You'll likely hear entrepreneurs claiming about their money being held by a new processor and this can happen with any type of payment processor, a credit card processor or an account like Amazon or PayPal. There are lots of reasons that a credit card processor or a payment processor of another type might hold your money, but the most common are going to be that you have not provided that important legal information, like if you're withholding your tax ID number, that could be a reason for them to hold your deposits. It can also be that they have a policy. If you aren't someone they know or if you haven't done business with them in the past, they may hold a portion of your money and sometimes a significant portion for a certain period of time to make sure that customers aren't going to be complaining and asking for their money back. This is just something that you need to be aware of. I would definitely plan that you are going to have a portion of your money held for at least several weeks by your payment processors and just plan your cashflow accordingly, but you might be able to ask some questions in advance when you're looking at processors to determine what the likelihood is of that happening and the amount that they're likely to hold, so that you can be prepared. Even beyond their policies, be aware that your behavior as a business owner is going to affect how smooth this relationship is and how quickly you're getting your money from your processor. Here's some things to think about. Processors are going to be easier to work with and generally be less likely to hold your money if they thoroughly check you out first. If you find a credit card processor that will just sign up anyone with very little information, just know there's going to be a catch somewhere and it's likely going to be down the road. They're going to hold your money until they get the information that they need. You also want to identify any best practices that are suggested by the credit card processor and this could be things like entering tracking numbers into their system and then follow those, especially for those first few months when you are establishing a good reputation with them. You'll need to stay on top of your customers and any complaints, too. You want to handle those promptly. If you have somebody who has a charge back where they're asking the credit card company to reverse the charge, you want to stay on top of that situation and be available to provide information. You're not likely going to win that dispute, but you still need to show that you are being a responsible merchant. Also, I would recommend, if at all possible, try to avoid wild swings in either your deposit or your withdrawal habits. This can be a tough one. If you are putting together a business where you are likely to have a really successful launch, first of all, congratulations, wouldn't we all like to do that, but something you need to be aware of is that if you go from collecting no money or very little money on a daily basis and you suddenly are putting through transactions totaling in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, that it looks like very suspicious behavior to a payment company. On the flip side, if you don't do your withdrawals regularly and then you all of a sudden start withdrawing large amounts of money, again, that can trigger their system that that looks like suspicious behavior. You are probably not doing anything wrong, but their system works on algorithms and you just want to be thoughtful about your behavior. If you're going to behave outside the norm and you cannot keep that from happening, then you need to understand that you're probably going to trigger their system and you're probably going to run into some problems. It's going to be frustrating, but be persistent and most likely you can work it out with them. I know that was a lot of information, but hopefully you are now in a better position to evaluate the credit card processors you are either using or look at new processors, so that you can save yourself money and find a situation that works best for you. Thanks so much for joining me today. I hope this information is helpful and if you have ideas or feedback for future shows, you can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com and on Facebook and my YouTube channel. Lots of videos up there. Be sure to head over. I will back in your feed in a few days. If you haven't subscribed yet, please be sure to do so, so that you can be notified when that new episode is available. Of course, I always appreciate fabulous ratings and reviews. We'll see you next time.   Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 008: Choosing a Credit Card Processor for Your Ecommerce Website  

Episode 007: Why Email Marketing is Important   Episode Summary:  As a website owner it can feel daunting to sort through the various marketing options available. In this episode, Julie discusses why email marketing is so critically important and why it tends to have far better returns than most other marketing methods available.   Episode Links:   https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method, with your host Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert Hello and welcome to episode seven of the Savvy Business Method podcast where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Let's dive in today's topic, which is why email marketing is so important. I know you're busy, you're trying to balance managing a website, answering customers' questions, shipping orders, figuring out which forms of marketing are going to work and not leave you broke. So today my goal is to convince you that email marketing is something you really need to be doing. And there's a decent chance it'll end up being less costly and more effective than a lot of the other options you have available for marketing. Now, if you've listened to this podcast for a few episodes, or you've checked out my YouTube channel, you've probably seen that I'm a huge fan of email marketing. And I'm hoping by the end of the podcast today, you will understand why and share my enthusiasm and start working each and every day on continuing to build your email list, so that you can create a sustainable and stable revenue stream for your website. All right, let's dive in. So what is so different about email compared to other marketing methods we have available to us? Well, one of the things that I love about email is assuming you have built your list in a legal manner, right? You didn't go out and buy a list, you have collected these email addresses legitimately, then your email list is an asset that can be used for your business. This is different than, let's say, you build up a social media group like a Facebook group, or YouTube channel subscribers, where you're ultimately building this group of people that you can marketing to on someone else's property. And when you build on someone else's property, you are ultimately having to trust that they are not going to take away your ability to do business there, or change the rules to make it difficult for you to generate a profit. That's a really scary way to do business. I mean sometimes it works out fine, but a lot of people end up getting burned anytime algorithm's changed, rate's changed, rule's changed. But email is really different. Your list belongs to your company. Sure, there can be little changes in the laws, or maybe Gmail changes the way they lay out their email and you end up in a promotion box instead of an inbox. But all of these things can be worked around. Nobody is going to take away your ability to use your email system, or at least I sincerely hope not. Not foreseeing that happening anytime soon. Another thing I really like about email is that growing your email list can be as costly as you want it to be or not. I would actually argue that being persistent is more important for growing an email list than what your budget is. Now, to be faire, if you need to grow your email list very very quickly, and you need it to be very large, then yes, you would probably need a substantial advertising budget so that you can run social media ads, or pay some bloggers, to advertise your company so you can get the traffic, so that you can collect those emails. But email is also something that you can organically collect over time. And you do that by optimizing your website like we talked about a couple episodes ago, where you're optimizing your website to collect as many email addresses as possible from the visitors to your websites. And if you do that consistently and you have decent traffic, your list will just continue to grow over time, and you will long-term have that really great asset that you can use to generate revenue for your company. The second thing I love about email marketing is that compared to most other forms of web marketing, email is really inexpensive. You may have some costs with building your list, right? Like we talked about, if you need to build that list really quickly maybe you have some advertising cost that goes into that. You then will need to use an email service provider to end out your email. That has a monthly cost as well. But here's the thing, when you start calculating how much it costs to actually send those individual emails, we're generally talking fractions of a penny. That's amazing. Where else are you gonna get advertising that inexpensively? So really the hard and potentially expensive part here is getting people on your list. Once they're there, that list costs you very little money a month to maintain, and you get to send generally as many emails as you want, depending on the service you're signed up for. There is no cost generally for like per 1000 impressions like you're gonna pay Facebook, or like you're gonna pay AdRoll, or any of these other services. Instead, you're going to paying for the privilege of sending email, or even if you're paying per email, you're still paying a very tiny amount. Email also has a lot of flexibility in terms of timing built-in. You know when we create an ad online, you're generally submitting that ad for consideration, and the period of time it can take to get your ads approved and running can generally be up to 24 hours. So it makes it really hard to market on a moment-by-moment basis. So let me give you an example. Let's say that a certain couple of states suddenly have major traffic issues, okay? One day, and this is on national news, there's a bunch of construction going on, and a whole bunch of the population decided to stay home from work that day. You could take that information and say, "Well, maybe people are online shopping, let me try to get my products in front of them." You could go put together an ad on AdRoll, or Facebook, or Instagram, or something like that, and submit your ad, and odds are good that there would be a delay, right? Because your ad needs to be approved, that's totally normal. Or you could also throw together an email, and you could probably get that email thrown together and out to those specific people, 'cause you can generally do some geotargeting, get that out to those specific people via email a great deal more quickly. And people get that in their inbox, and they can start shopping. So not a perfect example, but I just wanna get the wheels in your head turning that email is something that you have so much more control over than a lot of the other advertising mediums that are out there. For busy entrepreneurs, email is also probably the most efficient way of doing marketing, because there is so much power in automation. So with email, we can set up different lists and have emails automatically sent to our customers based on their behavior. So let me give you some examples. You can send emails when someone initially signs up for your list. You can use that opportunity to help them get to know your company to provide them with an incentive to come back and purchase, right? 'Cause they're a warm lead, we wanna get them back and purchasing right away. You can help them understand what your social media options are. You can introduce them to your staff, or help establish that brand and rapport with them. When someone comes back and visits your website, you can send them a followup email. And the really cool thing is you can do this based on whether or not something's cart. If something's their cart, you can send them an email reminding them to make a purchase. And if something wasn't in their cart, then you can just follow up and ask them if they had any questions about the products they looked at. You can also send emails to follow up on a purchase. So when someone buys something from you, you have the option of sending a series of emails. You can send an email initially thanking them for their purchase, and then maybe a couple of days later, double-checking that their order arrived safely and that they're happy with it. Maybe a couple weeks after that you could send an email asking for a review. And then once you reach the end of your normal sales cycle, you can go ahead and send them an email reminding them to come back and replace the item or to buy another item. You can also set up groups for customers that you consider to me VIPs. So for example in the past I've had a list that would automatically send a special coupon code to someone 72 hours after they had made their third purchase with us. Just a way of thanking them and acknowledging that their business, or their purchases are an important part of my business. You can also send email to win back customers. So you can set up a list that automatically triggers when it's been a certain period of time, maybe three, four, five, six months since they made their last purchase. You can set up a win-back campaign to strategically bring people back into your purchase cycle. I mean how cool is this. You just set these emails up, you set the rules up, and then they just run, and sure you wanna get in there every once and a while, and make some tweaks and changes, and look at your statistics to make sure everything's performing. But you're not getting in there every day deciding which people are going to get which emails. The system does that for you automatically. This is a massive time savings. And you combine that with the idea that you own your list, and that email itself is pretty inexpensive on a monthly basis, I mean this is powerful. So just in case you weren't taking your email marketing seriously, I hope I have begun to convince you that this is really something that you should be working on every day. We want to be adding emails to our list every day. And then, you know, once a week get in to look at your statistics and start tweaking your email campaigns. The goal here is to get more and more efficient, so we can generate more and more revenue for less cost. Now, if you need some ideas for ways to gather more email addresses, for the most part for free, check out episode one where I talked about six ways to grow your email list by making fairly minor changes to your website. So that's it for today, I'll be back in your feed in a few days, and in the mean time, thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this information will help you make better decisions for your own business. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube, and please be sure to hit that subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher, so you don't miss an episode, and of course I would greatly appreciate if you can rate/review this podcast in iTunes, it really does help others find it. I promise I will be ever with you, and I just love hearing from you guys. Bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 007: Why Email Marketing is Important

Episode 006: The 11 Pages Every Ecommerce Website Needs   Episode Summary:  When you're designing or managing an ecommerce website, it can seem like there are so many pages to keep track of. In this episode, Julie walks you through the 11 pages that every ecommerce site should have and how those pages should be set up to meet their important goals.   Episode Links:   https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? You're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert Hello and welcome to episode six of The Savvy Business Method Podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal as always is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Today's topic is the 11 pages every e-commerce sites should have. Now, whether you're designing a site or you're managing an existing site, there can be a lot of pages to keep track of, but every page on your site should serve a very specific purpose, and sometimes those purposes get overlooked, and so today, I just want to go back to the basics and talk about what purpose each page type serves, and go over some very high-level optimization concepts, so when we think about how we set these pages up, what our goals are and what are the things we really should be thinking about. Alright. Let's dive in and talk about the home page, because of course, every site has a home page. Home pages are really interesting because on one hand, when you're setting up a website, it kind of seems like the most important thing you could possibly do, right? Like this is the page people are going to land on, and they need to immediately know what it is my website's about, and they need to feel reassured that they've come to the right place. I mean, that's a lot of pressure on one page, right? Now, if you already have a website up and running, and you've looked at your website statistics on Google, Google Analytics, then you've probably seen that in all reality, far fewer people land on the home page as their entry point into the site than maybe you would have imagined. Also, people don't tend to hang out on the home page, so our beautiful page that we put so much effort into may not be nearly as important as we were thinking. All right. All that being said, where should you put your time and effort when it comes to the home page? I would encourage you to do a couple of things. First and foremost, of course, your home page should communicate the purpose of your site immediately. It should be very, very clear what you do and why it's important to the average customer, because people will land on the home page, especially if they're coming from like a referral link from another business or something like that, and so it needs to just be terribly clear that they are in the right place, and you can accomplish that through being very careful and concise in your messaging, any texts that you have on that home page, but probably even more important, you need amazing imagery. You need nice pictures. This is not the time to buy the worst-looking stock photos on the planet, right? We need nice pictures, ideally of your products being used in context. That's a perfect situation, but you want to get as close to that as you can. You want your imagery to be inspiring so that people just instantly feel comfortable with where they've landed. I'll also tell you, you need to have some awesome navigation going on on that home page, because people who do land on the home page, don't tend to sit there and scroll. They are going to immediately go to your navigation, and try to figure out where they need to be, so if they're going to buy something or if they're looking for an article, a recipe or whatever it is, they're not hanging out on the home page. They need to be able to navigate off quickly before they get frustrated. Okay. Next up, let's talk about the page that they're most likely to hit right after the home page, and that is a category page. Now, unless you're only selling a few products, you really do need category pages to keep your site well-organized and make sure everyone knows where they're at at all times. Category pages are kind of like their own little, mini home pages for that product category, so again, they need to immediately communicate what can be found in that category and why you are going to be the best place to purchase those items. Category pages are awesome because they tend to do really well in organic search algorithms, so if someone searches on camera equipment, they're more likely to land on a category page than a home page. If we stop for a minute and think about Google's perspective on this, Google wants to send searchers to pages that are likely to immediately fulfill their wishes and desires in life, and so it makes way more sense if someone's looking for cameras to send them directly to the category page where they're going to immediately see products than to send them to a home page where they're going to have to navigate. Okay. This is all the kinds of stuff that's in that very mysterious Google algorithm. Just like your home page, that immediate communication is really important, and you also need to make sure that you are again using beautiful imagery, so you want maybe some beautiful pictures of your products, and very concise text to really communicate what category they're looking at and why they should continue their search on your site here to find the products that are going to meet their needs. Now, if you've done a good job with your category pages, the next page your visitor should flow to is your product page, right? Each product is going to have its own page, and product pages, I got to tell you, I think product pages are some of the more tricky pages to set up on your site, because you have a couple of somewhat competing purposes here. On one hand, your job on the product page is to convince a customer that this item is the right item for their situation, and is of the quality and the value for them, and so to do that, of course, we want to have great imagery, we want to have great product descriptions. We'll generally want to answer any questions that someone could have about this product. We might want to link to supporting information, so someone feels that this product is coming with the support that they might need to use it. Okay. That all sounds great, right? Like that sounds like an awesome product page. Here's the rub, right? With the product page, the goal is ultimately for someone to click that Add to Cart button, and yeah, all of that information for certain customers is going to help that process and get them to say, "Oh, yes. This is the product I need. I'll have the support I need. I'm going to click the Add to Cart button", but for a lot of website visitors, we run into the issue of humans being easily distractible people, right? Let me give you a practical example. One of the websites I used to have had these products that really generated a lot of questions, and so after several years of having this website, we really revamped the product pages and started putting a ton of information on the product pages, and this was really driven by the honest desire to help customers get the information they needed. I didn't want people stopping their product search and adding those items to their cart to contact customer service. Also, if you have a ton of people contacting customer service, asking the same questions over and over, that either takes away your valuable time, or you're paying someone to answer those questions, and so we really started working on making these product pages like the ultimate landing page ever for this type of product. I mean, it sounded so good in theory, and you know what happened? The Add to Cart rate went down. The conversion rate went down. You know why? Because we were distracting the heck out of people. People would start reading and be like, "Oh, this is really cool. This is really cool. Oh, here's a link to a recipe I could use this in." Then, they would be off in recipe land, and their kids would distract them or something would happen, and they wouldn't come back and actually buy the item. That's why I think product pages are honestly some of the hardest pages on our websites to set up, because we really do have to balance these competing objectives, this idea of giving lots of information and having customers feel supported with the idea of keeping them on task, and so this is what you got to remember. When you're doing your product page setup, you need to keep your customers on task. Hitting that Add to Cart button is ultimately the most important thing you are accomplishing with that page. Okay. You got your product pages set up, and you've just pulled off this miraculous balance between helping people feel they have the information they need, and will be supported in their product journey, while not distracting them and they've successfully added the item to their cart. Nice work. Okay. Let's talk about the cart page. When we get to the cart page, there's a couple of things that really matter here. First and foremost, we need to remember that we are funneling our visitors towards checkout, that Place Order button at the very end, and so we've had a home page that really helped them quickly navigate to the category pages, a category page that reassured them and sent them to the appropriate product page, their product page managed not to distract them too much, and now they are on this cart page, and your e-commerce software likely came with a pretty standard cart page out of the box. Yeah, you might be able to do some tweaking here and customization, but I would encourage you not to go real crazy with this page. This page is really a utility page that needs to slickly funnel them to the checkout. Why do we even have cart pages? I mean, that's a legit question, right? Like why wouldn't we just send people directly to the checkout? Now, some sites kind of do that now, but I would argue you still need a cart page for a couple of reasons. The first reason you need a cart page is because they are still very much standard, and they're something that customers expect and will find reassuring. Let's think about big websites like Amazon.com and Walmart.com. I mean, these are huge companies. I can assure you that they do a ridiculously large amount of testing of their site. They hire focus groups. They watch people navigate their site. If they're making changes to their site, then you should probably pay attention because they have the money to figure out whether the changes are [worthwhiled 00:10:04], and these sites still have cart pages. That brings us to the other reason I think you should have a cart page, is because they're useful. They really are. People use their cart to look at the items that are in there, and make sure the quantities are correct before they slide on to checkout. Really, there's not a lot to mess up here, but I'm going to give you two things you need to be worried about. One is creating distractions. Don't create distractions, okay? You need them to slide to checkout, so this is generally not the best time to give them an article to read about camera bodies. Everything in the cart page should help focus their attention on this idea of checking out. For example, link to a recipe, bad idea. A place for them to check the shipping charges, excellent idea, okay, unless it's really clear on your site what shipping's going to be. Maybe you have free shipping or flat rate shipping. If you don't have some exceptionally clear thing saying what shipping's going to be, then you sure as heck better have a way for them to check their shipping cost. You're going to hear people out there argue that you shouldn't, and their argument's going to be, "Oh, once they're already checking out, then they'll just accept whatever shipping cost that you're going to charge them", and you know what? That is so not true, and it's rude, and it's a total turnoff to people on your website, so let's go back to the rule, right? We treat other people the way we want to be treated, which means being transparent with your shipping costs. If your shipping costs are going to be a problem for your customers, then honestly, you're doing something wrong right now as a business owner. You need to figure something out. You need to figure out how to work shipping into the product charges, or you need to figure out some creative solution, because not being willing to tell your customers what their products are going to cost to ship is just kind of dishonest, okay? Just being honest there. Just a little dishonest. Okay. In terms of the cart page, the other thing that you need to be really careful of, is that the cart page is really easy to use. Remember, one of the big purposes this page serves is it allows people to see what is in their cart, so what items and what quantities. You want to make this really easy to edit, and I'm going to tell you why. After years and years of experience, if people have trouble changing what is in their cart, they are going to do one of two things. They're either going to walk away because they're frustrated, so that's bad, or they're just going to place the order anyway, and then freak out later. They're going to call customer service and say, "Oh, I know I placed that order three days ago, but I just realized I ordered too many of something or wanted something else", and you know what? That's now your problem to deal with, and this is going to cost you money, so make that cart work really well. Make that page so easy to navigate, so easy to change quantities so that you can keep customers happy, and keep the cost of having to resolve issues down as far as possible. All right. If your cart page worked well and you funneled your customers properly, they're going to land on the checkout page, and you're almost home free. The checkout page only has a couple of priorities. One, you're of course going to need to gather the information that you need from the customer in order to ship them their products. I'm going to tell you right now, you should not be gathering one iota of more information than you absolutely have to in order to successfully ship that order and follow up with the customer as needed. Okay. This is not a time to ask them for a bunch of extra information like their birthday, or their dog's name, or anything like that. This is not that time, so you want to get minimal amount of information, and again, we're just getting them to click the Complete Order button or Place Order button, right? Okay. No distractions at all on the checkout page. This is the wrong time to make product suggestions, okay? You might be able to do an upsell on like a pop-up maybe in the cart, but you're not doing it at checkout. We just want them to click the button, okay? The flow of your checkout page should also be very intuitive. This needs to be professionally laid out. You should have standard payment options. Do you have questions about that? Go back to episode two, and we'll talk about, where I talked about how to optimize your payment options. You got to have a credit card option. You got to have an alternative option like PayPal, Amazon, Google Pay, Apple Pay, something, and if you have your checkout nice and slick, then with any luck, you will have very few people abandoning that checkout page, right? We just got to get them through to that Place Order button. All right. Hopefully you have lots of people placing orders, so let's pause now and talk about the rest of the pages for today's discussion, and these are all going to be support pages. These pages are not necessarily directly involved in the standard sales funnel, but they are the pages where your customers are going to find important information about your company, and hopefully cut down on the amount of people emailing you, or leaving the site because they can't find the information that they need. Okay. Number one, you need a frequently asked questions page, and there's a bunch of ways to do this. You can have one, sitewide if you have a very tight product selection. If you have a number of different categories, you might want to have a general frequently asked questions page, linking to maybe some category-specific frequently asked questions page, but frequently asked questions pages are awesome because they tend to rank decently in the search engines, and they tend to cut down on the number of people contacting you to ask questions. Okay. Next, you're going to need an order info or a shipping info page. I like to separate this from the frequently asked questions page, because that way, I am able to clearly call this out, because this page, at least in my experience, tends to get more traffic than a general frequently asked questions page, because people who are asking questions, if your site's well-laid out, if your product pages are well-laid out, the main questions people should have are probably going to be around how to place orders, what the shipping situation is, taxes, that sort of thing, and so I like to have the separate ordering info page where I can list how quickly items ship, at which states we charge sales tax in, and any considerations. Also, on this page, this is where your return policy goes, and you want to be really clear on that. You do not ... Even if you're a tiny business getting started, don't skip this. You do actually need a return policy, one, because it's reassuring to customers, and two, because when you go to apply for some of the better payment accounts or you go to get some of the security badges through some of the major providers, I think Google, if I remember correctly, when they do like their Google verified site or something like that, they want to see a return policy clearly on the site, so stick that in your order info or shipping info page. Okay. Next step, you're going to need a contact page. Now, I want to state upfront that a contact page is less about people actually contacting you, and more about the reassurance that they can if they need to, and this is what helps people have confidence in buying from us. Now, that being said, a good contact page is going to have multiple ways for people to get a hold of you. For example, it could be your 800 number that he could give you a call, especially if you are marketing to a little bit older clientele, which could be a great market because remember, people who are a little bit older tend to have more disposable income, so something to think about. You want to of course make sure there's a way for them to email you, and you want to use a Contact Form, and not your email address, okay? If you don't know why that is, then we need to cover that at some point. You don't want a bunch of spam in your email box, so use that Contact Form and make sure it's working before you launch your site. I'd also suggest putting a link on your contact page to your live chat feature. Even if in all reality, you don't have live chat constantly turned on, this can still again be a reassuring thing. It's about giving customers that feedback that you are going to be easily reachable. I also recommend having an About Us page or some sort of page that is going to reinforce your story, your branding, and why someone should do business with you. Not all of your customers are going to look at this page, but the ones that do are likely to be inspired to buy from you if this is set up well. This is where you're going to put things like how you got started, why you're passionate about what you do, what sort of priority you place on your product quality or your customer service, maybe a little bit of personal information too. If you're a family-run business, that could be a compelling idea for people. This is where we just reinforce our brand, and reinforce that we are a trustworthy company to do business with, and it's just kind of that bow on the package for those customers who need that additional reassurance. Alright. Let's do the last two pages, and I will tell you upfront, these are not the most exciting parts of your website, but they're really important from a legal perspective. Number one, you need to have a terms and conditions page. Don't forget to do this. Your terms and conditions really should be crafted by a small business attorney who is familiar with e-commerce, ideally familiar with your industry, and is operating or practicing law in your particular state, because this is going to be a little bit different for every company in terms of industry norms, and state laws, and that sort of thing, so don't really skimp on this, right? You really do need to have a terms and conditions that will be upheld if you ever do have an issue with a customer. All right. Page number 11, the last one is your privacy policy. Privacy policies have been around for a long time, but they are becoming increasingly important as we're seeing more and more law is passed around how we as website owners can gather and use information. This has gone from something that's been just fair to say not very well regulated to, in some parts of the world being highly regulated, and because most of us do business across a country or often across national borders and do international business, we have to be very aware of the laws in different areas. This is again a place where you really want to consult a small business attorney, but keep in mind the types of things on a privacy policy are really about what sort of data you're collecting, how you're using it, and what systems are integrated with, which also maybe collecting and using data from your users, okay? Alright. That was 11 core pages for your website and the general purposes they serve. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at Savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Now, be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher, right? I say this every time, but definitely subscribe, because you don't want to miss a single episode, and of course, I would greatly appreciate if you could rate and review this podcast in iTunes. It really does help other people find it. It helps the rankings, and then people can find it in the big, long list of podcasts. I also promise to read every review. I really enjoy reading your feedback about the show. We'll see you next time.   Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit Savvybusinessmethod.com, and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 006: The 11 Pages Every Ecommerce Website Needs  

Episode 005: Ecommerce Data Storage and System Security   Episode Summary:  As small owners our livelihoods depend on securing our data and protecting critical systems such as access to the backend of our website, email service provider, etc. In this episode Julie discuss the various options available for storing and backing up data as well as issues surrounding securing critical systems.   Episode Links: My scanner: http://a.co/d/fYWAVOs https://www.dropbox.com/ https://www.box.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/ https://www.crashplan.com https://www.lastpass.com/ https://keepass.info/ https://1password.com/ Authenticator App for iOS: goo.gl/i6JDMp  Authenticator App for Android: goo.gl/LiRfRs    Episode Transcript: Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello and welcome to Episode 5 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. A quick reminder that my YouTube Channel is available, and I have a bunch of short videos up there, so if you're looking for some quick tips and tricks head on over to YouTube and be sure to subscribe so you're notified of all the new videos because there are so many more coming. Now, for today's topic we're going to be talking about data storage and protecting systems. Doesn't this sound exciting? This is the episode where you are going to find out that I am a total nerd. But I hope this is useful to you, because as small business owners we need to be really thoughtful about how we store our data and how we protect our systems because it really is a point of potential liability for us. Think about this: Have you ever stopped to consider what would happen if tomorrow you woke up and were missing your order data? So you had no idea who had placed an order on your website. What if your inventory tracking sheet disappeared? Would you have time to go through and recount all of your inventory, and go back through all your reporting and recreate all your projections? Or what about that truly nightmare scenario. What would happen if your site was corrupted and there was no way to recover the data and you had to start all over? What would that look like? How many sales would you lose? How much of your sanity would you lose? As much as being an entrepreneur can be this awesome experience, there are some downsides, right? In a corporation there would be a department that's responsible for data storage and security and there would be people who had gone to school for data security making the decisions. But when you're a small business owner, the decisions fall to you. So I want to talk with you today about the things you need to be concerned about when it comes to data storage and protection. I've been doing this a long time; I've made my share of mistakes, I've seen other people make their share of mistakes and I'd like to save you some pain and suffering. So maybe grab a glass of wine and sit back and let's dive in. Okay, let's start the discussion by talking about what we should be storing and how. Now, I am going to tell you up front that I am a huge fan of keeping copies of keeping copies of pretty much everything related to your business. They're very few exceptions. You should keep every invoice, every form you fill out, every screenshot if you register with online systems, that sort of thing. Everything should be kept, well-filed, and easily accessible. That sounds like so much work, doesn't it? Let me give you a few tips here: I would strongly suggest that you invest is a really good scanner, the type that feeds paper, not the type that lift up that you have to lay a paper down. This thing is going to be your best friend. I will link to the one I have in the show notes but I'll tell you up front it is definitely not the cheapest option, I'm sure there are different ones available. I just happened to have had this one for 7 or 8 years and it has just kept on kicking and done a great job for me so I feel like I should definitely link to it but know that it is definitely one of the more costly ones. It feeds fifty pages at a time; it's just super easy to use. I would suggest that you try to make scanning your paperwork something you do a couple times a week. Once you get in the habit of this, it'll take you a couple of minutes, you'll name all your files, you'll get them into folders, and then when something happens, I guarantee you something will happen on like a Tuesday afternoon at 4:00, where you have to find a piece of paper, and it'll be right there for you. It's so much easier; it takes so much stress of your life to be able to find what you need quickly. Now, having told you you should keep everything, I do need to disclaim something here: When it comes to other people's personal data, and I'm talking about things like birthdays and social security numbers, specifically the types of data you end up having a hold of when you hire people, that information you should not be keeping long term, and you'll want to check with your local small business attorney so you can determine from like a state level what your liability there is, but in general I try to follow the rule that I don't keep people's personal information for longer than 12 months once they've stopped working for me. That just limits your liability in case your data were to be stolen, okay? So I just wanted to throw out that there is that one exception to not keeping everything, but you know like everything else? You've got to keep it. Okay, so where are you keeping all of this data? It's a lot, right? Wait until you start doing videos or podcasts, then you're going to have so much data you're not going to know what to do with it. But, you know, we have to balance a few things as entrepreneurs. One of the biggest priorities when it comes to storing our data ends up being accessibility. How quickly can I get the files that I need so that I can get my work done? Can I get to my files form my cell phone or on my laptop or on my desktop so that I can pull up things quickly and get my work done? Okay, so in terms of storage options, the big ones that I see most small businesses using and I have used myself include DropBox, Box.com, Google for Business. The nice thing about these platforms for storing data is that they're generally accessible form just about everywhere, and so you always have access to your files and you can get your work done from wherever you happen to be. The thing to understand when you're using a system like this that's based on a cloud structure so your information is sitting on servers in some warehouse somewhere is that some third party systems are not generally backed up. That's not part of the service that's being provided. Also be sure to read the fine print. Generally speaking, third party systems don't guarantee your data will be safe. Things like security breaches, and corruption of the data where the data's lost, those are all risks you generally just take using a third party service. But, understand I am not knocking on these services. They are amazing for accessibility. I'm just pointing out that you really need to be thoughtful about backing up your data and backing it up regularly. Now, backing up your data generally means making at least one backup copy that is stored in a different location, personally I do this every day but you can do it a couple of times a week or once a week, It just kind of depends on how much data you're generating. I will tell you that redundant backups are best, this is when you back up from, say, DropBox to a server in your house, and then you back up that server to an off-site backup situation like CrashPlan or something like that, in fact that's the system that we personally use for our companies. Because that way, if something goes wrong, I always have a couple of different copies that I can go back to. Now there are a couple of good backup solutions out there. If you're talking about trying to back up a copy just on a different computer, but in your home or your office, you can use an external hard drive, just use a separate computer, you can use a Network Area Storage device or a server if you want to get a little bit fancier. All those options start at like $80 dollars, so they're not terribly expensive, and if you're going to be generating a lot of information, or as your business is really generating revenue, I'd encourage you to make that investment so that you have this set up and can be all the time. Now, if you want to talk about off-site backups, there's a couple of options available. If you're mainly storing files on your computer you certainly could back up to a third party service, like DropBox, or Google Business, and so if one of those two things fails, you should have another copy availble. I did mention CrashPlan; that's who we personally have used for years. I really like CrashPlan, they're affordable, they have an excellent reputation for not losing data, and that's really important to me. In terms of a potential free option, I have in the past, mainly for personal and stuff, not as much for business, but if you have a friend maybe in another city or state who would be willing to do a nightly exchange of data, we used to send all of our personal stuff to our friend's server in their home, every couple of days, and they would send their stuff to us, and at one point that saved some really important pictures, that would have otherwise been lost. So, that's a free option, maybe not the most secure thing ever, but it is something to consider. Okay, so hopefully you're now getting some ideas on how it is you're going to back up your data regularly and make sure you keep copies of everything. So let's move on and talk more about system security. Now, number one thing in terms of system security because you're going to be running a lot of systems as a small business owner, right? You have your website, you have your Email Service Provider, you have your Google accounts, you have your main email server that's handling like your business email, I mean there's a lot of things that could be potentially be broken into and damaged caused. So, the first thing you need to worry about is having different secure passwords for every single system and I know that sounds so elementary but you would not believe how many people are still working on insecure passwords. So let's just do a quick review. Every single system you have, every single time you are asked for new password, you should be creating a unique password that is long, like at least 12 characters, it should include upper and lower case letters, numbers, symbols, you want a nice combination going on. Now, of course, if this is something that you're new to in creating unique passwords, these long secure unique passwords, you're probably having a panic moment right now, right? Because how are you going to remember all these passwords? I would really encourage you, every small business owner needs to have a subscription to a password manager. Something like LastPass, or 1Password, or Keeper, or KeePass, there's a ton of these out there. They're very secure; you get to basically have a password to log in and you'll want to make a secure password there but hopefully you can remember one secure password on your own, and these systems keep everything secure and they just make it so much easier to have great passwords for everything single one of your systems. They're also really inexpensive; most of the time they're like two or three dollars a month. So this is well worth your time and your money to get this, get a subscription and get it set up. I would just put a warning out to you because we own businesses, right? And we need to make sure if something happens to us that our businesses stay functioning so they can continue to support our families, if you have someone who would be the executor of your estate, you probably want to have some information somewhere so that they can get into your password manager so when in the event something happens to you, and I hate to be fatalistic but we all need to be thinking about that, they'd be able to get access to your systems to keep your business running. Okay, next up let's talk about accessing systems in general. Because even with all of your secure passwords there are still some things you need to be thinking about in terms of how easy your systems are to access. Now, one, you need to make sure all of your devices are also password protected, your laptop, your phone, your tablet. All of these devices should not be easy to break into. Because, I mean, let's face it. We all know someone or maybe we've done it ourselves where we've left, like, our phone in a public restroom, you don't want someone to immediately be able to get access to say, your website, or lock you out, or to get access to your email system and send spam email, something like that. And there are a number of things you can do to prevent that, you can secure your devices with passwords, some brands are obviously better than other for that, you can use what's called Authenticator, which will come up and ask you for a separate authentication, normally it is sending a text to your cell phone with a number so that you have to have that to log in to your systems. I would also put out a warning to you that you want to make sure you are only accessing password-protected systems over secure wireless. This is something that I just cannot overstate; actually I know of a situation where a company lost a whole bunch of money out of their bank account because their bookkeeper was accessing their bank account over an unsecure wireless connection. And, the general rule of thumb here is if you did not secure that wireless connection yourself, or you don't know what you're doing, you need to assume that your wireless connection is not secure. So don't go to Starbucks or any coffee shop, not dissing on Starbucks, but don't go to a coffee shop and access your bank account, okay? That's just not a good plan at all. Also know that if you lose money out of your business bank account, your bank doesn't have to put it back and they won't. So, this is your incentive. Just be careful. Also if you travel a lot, like I used to do a ton of traveling for work for a while there, I had a subscription to a Virtual Private Network. And that's how I accessed systems like in the evening is my hotel room I would go to my Virtual Private Network, and then I could use the hotel's Wi-Fi, and I was able to access my system securely. So there's a bunch of things that you can do. This is just about changing your mindset, and thinking about what would happen if someone was able to get access to my systems. Okay, now at some point odds are good your business is going to grow and you're going to be in a position where you need to give access to secure systems to other people. Whether it's hiring a virtual assistant, or maybe your developer who's working on your website or, maybe you start hiring employees. And so this is going to take some special thought and set up on your part. So, the number one rule I have is do not give employees, contractors, anyone access to administrative accounts. And by administrative account I mean anything where they can get in, and do significant damage and particularly anything they can get into where they could delete you as a user. So you think about if you give access to an employee and they can delete you out of the account, or delete your user out of the account, they can get control over whatever it is you're working on. And, you know, we all want to be able to trust people but the reality is that sometimes, things go sour, and we need to be protecting ourselves and our businesses. You really want to only give employees and contractors and other people as much access as absolutely necessary to accomplish their tasks. Now the good news is this has gotten a lot easier over the last few years because of these password systems that are available now. So for example, I use LastPass to not only secure my personal passwords, and then my husband and I share passwords, because, you know, we ultimately have two companies that we're running, and then I am also able to set up other users so if we have an employee or a contractor, I can give access for them in LastPass, and I can give them a password to access LastPass, and if for some reason I need to take their access away, I am doing that through my LastPass account, okay? So I'm able to, let's say they quit, or I have to terminate their employment, I am able to terminate access to one system, and they no longer have access to any of the systems. It's amazing. I cannot even begin to tell you the difference this makes for a small business owner, it used to be if you let somebody go, you had to sit there and go "Oh man, which systems did they have access to and how do I lock them out of all these systems?" Now it's a matter of changing their access to one system. So definitely make sure you've got these kinds of systems set up before you think about hiring anyone. Okay, well I've given you a lot to chew on today. You know, data protection isn't really that difficult, it's just about getting your systems set up and being thoughtful about doing the basic maintenance and kind of getting into that new mindset. Yeah as I said, I'm human and I've made my share of mistakes as a business owner, I have seen other people make mistakes, and some of which were fairly disastrous but I just don't want to see bad things happen to you or your business. Okay, if you have feedback or ideas for future shows you can find me at savvybusinessmethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Please be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes or Stitcher so you don't miss an episode, and of course, I would greatly appreciate if you could rate and review this podcast in iTunes. It really does help other people find it, and I love reading the reviews. I just get some sweet lovely reviews and I am so thankful for them. I'll be back in your feed in a few days and until then, hey, go secure your data! Bye for now!   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com, and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 005: Ecommerce Data Storage and System Security  

Episode 004: Choosing Shipping Carriers for Your Website   Episode Summary:  The eCommerce customer experience doesn't end when a package leaves our facility. Who we use for shipping carriers can matter greatly from both a customer experience perspective and for our bottom line. In this episode, Julie discusses the factors you should consider when choosing which shipping carriers to use for your website.   Episode Links: https://www.usps.com/ https://www.ups.com/ https://www.fedex.com/ http://www.dhl.com/ https://www.shopify.com/ https://www.shipstation.com/   Episode Transcript: Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello and welcome to Episode 4 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills, so you can provide a better life for your family. Before we start today, a quick reminder that you can find links to resources I talk about here in the show in the show notes, along with the complete transcript of the show. I realize that sometimes you're going to need to go back and find a piece of information and a transcript can be really helpful for that. So let's talk about our topic for today, which is choosing shipping carriers for your website. If you are selling physical products, you're going to need to use someone to get those products to your customers, right? And who you choose ends up mattering for several reasons. First, your shipping carrier plays a real role in your customers experience. Yes, we want our customers to have a great experience on our website, we want them to find the products, be able to figure out what works best for them, buy the products smoothly, and then have the products start the shipping journey to them quickly, right? That's our job as website owners. But when we choose a shipping company to work with, we are then passing that responsibility for the customer to have a good experience to the shipping carrier. And luckily, most of the carriers do a pretty good job of this, right? But things happen. If you've ever ordered something online and had it get lost in transit, or just significantly delayed, or maybe you've had something arrive broken or even destroyed in transit. I mean, I've seen some crazy destroyed packages in my time. Let me tell you, it's amazing what can happen to a package. These are all factors that influence how the customer views they're shopping experience with you. The second reason why this matters is that shipping is one of the largest costs that we as a website owner have to take on. Getting our products to our customers is really expensive, and so we don't want to be taking any more costs than necessary, and we want to be getting to best experience for our customers and for ourselves for our money. And the third reason is that in the end, problems cost us time, money, and customer goodwill. If you've ever dealt with a package that's gone missing, or been destroyed in transit, you know how frustrating it is to have a customer who's upset who is getting a hold of you. That costs you time and money. You're trying to keep them happy and you typically going to end up having to reship that package, right? So that's costing you money. And meanwhile you're off trying to deal with the shipping carrier and file an insurance claim, that's costing you time. I mean this just starts to really eat away. It eats away at your productivity, it eats away at your budget, and it eats away at your customer goodwill. So let's walk through the factors that you need to be considering when you're choosing a shipping carrier to work with, or more than one shipping carrier to work with. Now, quick disclaimer here: I am not just going to tell you which shipping carriers are best. As we talked about in Episode Two, when we discussed optimizing your payment options on your website, I feel like I do all of you the service if I just say "Oh, you should do this, this, and this." Because you are going to have a unique circumstance. You are going to have changing circumstances. The providers that are available are probably going to change. The shipping market has been stable for a long time, but there's some signs that companies like Amazon might me coming in and offering some additional competition so some things are changing, right? Better to have all the information so that long-term you can make the best possible decision for your business. Also, today I am going to focus on shipping providers in the United States. This is my area of expertise; is shipping within the United States and that's the group I am most comfortable talking about. This included the United States Postal Service, UPS, FedEx, and to a lesser extent, DHL. They are a much smaller player in the United States these days. But if you are outside the United States, these same general factors that we're going to talk about really apply everywhere right? So stick around, you'll probably still get the information that you need, even if we don't talk about your specific country's options. Okay, so the first factor you need to consider when choosing a shipping carrier is which shipping carriers will integrate easily into the eCommerce platform that you're using, so in this case you're looking at the software that you are using to run your site. So this could be something like Shopify, or Volusion, or DemandWare, or Magento, but whatever it is you're using likely already has preferred providers, or carriers, so maybe like the Post Office and FedEx, or the Post Office and UPS, something like that where they're already integrated into the platform and this is going to make your life so much easier. That's not to say you can't consider a different provider but there may be more work involved and would just suggest that you put that into your calculations, right? Like, if you are going to need custom development work on your site in order to ship with, say, DHL, then that is something you need to give serious thought to. Okay, let's talk about cost. Cost is so near and dear to all of our hearts, right? Shipping is very expensive and the more we can get the cost down, the better. Without question, the average weight of your packages is going to be the biggest factor in determining how much they cost to send. Now, the shipping carriers are all constantly jockeying for position here and especially for low weight packages, packages under 2 pounds, there's this constant competition and switching around of services available, but if you are shipping things that are very lightweight, I just want to put a shout-out out there that you really should look at the Post Office. FedEx, and UPS, and DHL to a certain extent are all trying to compete for that business but the reality is that the Post Office, at least at this point, is still a less costly option for those smaller packages. One of the companies I used to have, our average package was, I think, like 6 ounces. We were shipping things that were very small and light. And so, the US Postal Service's First Class Mail actually was a great option for us. It was only a couple of dollars, it included tracking, First Class Mail in the United States, last time I checked, is being flown on FedEx airplanes so it's getting places pretty quickly, there's a lot of good things about First Class Mail. So, if you're in a position where you have things that are lightweight, don't forget about the Post Office. Another factor you should really be looking at when you're choosing your shipping carriers, and this kind of goes back to the platform integration we were talking about, is you want to be able to shop rates. And this means when you weigh the package in your system, and you put in the address, you really want to be able to see multiple shipping options. Sure, you could memorize the map and have a really good idea just looking at, you know, a two pound package is going 4 zones away, is it going to be a better price with this service or this service. You may have the ability to do that, most of us probably are not going to memorize a shipping table. So, I would just encourage you to be thoughtful when your choosing your systems and doing these integrations to make sure you don't lose the ability to price check. I really can't think of a situation where you would have the best shipping deal with only one carrier all the time, unless you are shipping one uniform package all the time. Another way you can potentially save money on shipping charges is to use a preferred provider through your eCommerce platform. So let me give you an example: My eCommerce site that I currently have is setup through Shopify. Shopify actually has negotiated rates with The Post Office and UPS. So if we ship through one of those two options, we get a fairly substantial discount, one I'm actually fairly happy with. So that's something to keep in mind too, sometimes using a preferred provider through your platform can save you money. The other way to get discounts on shipping costs is to be shipping a lot of stuff. Once you're shipping in volume companies like FedEx and UPS negotiate your rates with you. I'm not going to claim that that is any fun, I have done it many, many times, and I could happily go the rest of my life without having one of those conversations again, but just note, that as you grow, if you are shipping on your own account and not through, like, a platform like Shopify, you might eventually qualify for some discounts. Okay, so the next factor I really would encourage you to look at is how easily you are going to be able to work with the carrier's customer service department if something goes wrong. If you are shipping things that are perishable, or if your clients have very specific expectations when it comes to timeframe for delivery, then you really need to take that into consideration, and which shipping carriers are willing to make you those guarantees. And, if your package doesn't arrive in time, or if it arrives damaged, or if it gets lost, what does filing a claim look like? Does the shipping carrier offer as much insurance at an affordable cost as you're going to need to cover your product? What's the process for filing that claim? Is it very time consuming? Are claims generally paid out promptly? Is there an argument that's going to ensue? These are just the sorts of questions you want to be asking. Now, this might not matter at all if you're shipping very low value items, then this might not be the place to spend your time and money worrying. But if you're shipping costly items, particularly costly to you, then this something you need to give some serious thought to. So hopefully from today's discussion there are a few things that jump out at you that are most important for your business that you need to consider when you're choosing shipping carriers. I would encourage you when you're doing your research to reach out to local entrepreneurs and ask them who they use, and what their experience has been, because a part of your experience is going to be determined by the group that is picking up and handling your packages wherever you are. Also you can reach out to the companies themselves, especially if you are shipping a decent amount of product, you may be able to ask for a rep to be assigned to your account so you can ask these questions directly to a single person, have that single point of contact. So you've got some options here. Thanks for joining me today and geeking out over shipping options. I hope you had fun, and I hope that there are a few things now that you can think about and go apply to your own business. I'll be back in your feed in a few days with a new episode. If you haven't yet be sure to subscribe at that little button in iTunes and Stitcher and that way you'll be notified when the next episode is available. If you'd like to learn more about me, or The Savvy Business Method or you'd like to reach out and ask a question, or give me an idea for a future episode; I'd love to hear from you. You can find me a savvybusinessmethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Bye for now!   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed todays episode please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com, and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 004: Choosing Shipping Carriers for Your Website

Episode 003: Using Remarketing to Boost Your Website's Sales   Episode Summary:  Site visitors are hot leads but often don't buy on their first visit. In this episode, Julie walks you through how to use remarketing to specifically target those visitors and encourage them to visit your site again (and make a purchase this time).   Episode Links: https://business.facebook.com/ https://www.adroll.com/ https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method with your host, Julie Feickert. Julie Feickert Hello and welcome to episode three of the Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. I'm so excited to tell you about my YouTube channel today. I finally got it up and there are a bunch of short videos on there. They're about one to three minutes each. So, it's really quick tips for you guys. So after this podcast, can you please go over and check it out? I'd love to get the feedback. And of course you remember to hit the subscribe button over on YouTube. I have a lot more videos coming and that way, you'll be notified when they're available. All right, so let's launch into today's topic and that's remarketing. You have probably noticed that very few people buy from a website the first time they visit and that's really frustrating, right? Like, if only we could convert more people on their first visit. And yeah, there are always going to be things that we're going to be trying to do to continue to get our conversion rates up. But in the end, there are always going to be individuals who need to come back multiple times before they're ready to make a purchase and those are hot leads, right? I mean, they already know our website. They've seen our products. They're interested in buying this sort of thing and so in theory, they are going to be the easiest leads to convert on their next visit. So how do we market directly to them so that they come back to the site that second time and place an order? And you're going to do this using the same system big companies do. Let me tell you a quick story. A few years ago, we moved into a new house and the Washer and dryer that came with the house were clearly not going to last. The washer was making funny noises. The dryer wasn't consistently heating up. I mean, it just wasn't a good situation. Now, I have four children and two businesses and a mastiff. If you've ever seen the movie Turner and Hooch, that should give you like a mental picture of what I'm working with here, so you could imagine that having my washer and dryer break is going to go badly. It doesn't matter what day it happens. So one night I grabbed a glass of wine and I started looking at washers and dryers online and in the middle of my search I popped in to check Facebook and sure enough, there was an ad for the washer dryer set I'd seen on a big website five minutes earlier. This is what is known as remarketing. My internet browsing history of viewing that product on a website was being used to show me hyper-targeted advertising. And there's a reason so many big companies use this marketing method. It works so well. And here's the best part. You as a website owner, even if you are a very small company, can use this method too. So let's talk about remarketing, which you'll sometimes also hear referred to as retargeting. This is where we show ads specifically to previous site visitors to encourage them to return to our website and hopefully make that purchase. Okay. So specifically, how do you do this? Right? Let's get down to the nitty gritty details. So the first thing you're going to need to do is pick companies to work with. Now, when I look at my remarketing campaigns for my companies, I generally split them into two buckets. The first one is Facebook. Facebook, as the biggest social media platform in the world right now, is a really great place to run remarketing ads, partially because people practically live on Facebook, right? Your customers are on there constantly, and so running ads on Facebook can be really effective. Now there are a couple of ways to run remarketing ads on Facebook and one of them is to work with Facebook directly and you do this through their Business Manager system. If you don't have Business Manager set up yet for your business, this would be your first step. Just Google business Manager Facebook and it will come up and they will walk you through the whole process. It is not difficult. They really want your business and your money, so they make this really easy. Okay. The other set of remarketing ads I run for my businesses are what I call general web ads and these are going to be ads that are going to appear basically everywhere but Facebook, so if you go to say your favorite news website, you'll often see ads there for maybe a pair of shoes that you saw on Zappos or Amazon will show you something you were searching in the last couple of days. So these are general web ads. They just appear on all sorts of websites. Website owners can sign up to serve them and so by working with general web ads, you're generally catching your customers pretty much everywhere they browse. Now for general web ads, I recommend working with a company called Ad Roll and there are a bunch of these companies out there, but Ad Roll's been around I think the longest and they're definitely the big one in the industry. They're pretty easy to work with. They have reasonable policies and procedures and so I don't really see any reason not to work with them. Ad Roll also has the ability to run Facebook advertising for remarketing as well, so you could run both your general web ads and your Facebook remarketing through one system if you want, or you can split them up and run your Facebook ads through Facebook Business Manager and run your web ads through Ad Roll. Okay, so once you've chosen which companies you want to work with, the next step is to place a pixel on your website. Now a pixel is a small amount of code that you place on the back end of your website and it allows for tracking of the customer behavior on your website. If you use Google Analytics with your website, if you have integrated your email service provider, the company sending out your newsletters and that sort of thing, you've already worked with pixels. There's just a little bit of code. Now with remarketing, you will need a pixel for each company you work with. So if you're just working with Ad Roll, you need an Ad Roll pixel. If you're going to be working with both general web ads and Facebook ads through Facebook business manager, then you need a pixel for Facebook Business Manager as well. Both companies are really good about giving you incredibly detailed instructions on how to get this installed. Depending on the eCommerce software that you are using, some of them make it ridiculously easy to do this and some make it a little harder. But uh, don't let this stop you. This is not difficult. You just need to get it done. Now the thing to remember about the pixel is this is how these companies track visitors to your website. It's kind of like a calling card. It allows Facebook and Ad Roll to find and identify those same people when they visit other websites. Now, probably the biggest thing to keep in mind is that you cannot collect any data until you have your pixel installed. There is no way to go back and collect retroactive traffic data. So if you are planning on launching a website, I would really encourage you to get these pixels installed before you launch, so that you are gathering all of that traffic information. If you already have your website up, get these pixels installed today. Even if you're not sure if you want to use this method of advertising yet, you can still be collecting that data. Okay, number three, you want to set up your audiences and so this is really about deciding who you want to show ads to. Now, if you're a brand new website or you don't have a ton of traffic, it probably makes sense to show the ads to everyone. You really need to have at least a couple of hundred and preferably a couple of thousand people who have been tracked to the pixel for these ads to be worth your time and energy, because the ad rates are for the cost per thousand impressions. So that's the ad being shown a thousand times. If you only have 200 people on your list, then even that thousand impressions is going to be everyone's seeing your ad five times and that's a way to make everyone really tired of you really quick. Right?There is such a thing as ad fatigue and you do have to be careful with it. Okay, so let's say you aren't really tiny or you didn't just start and you have some decent traffic. You want to keep in mind that Facebook holds that data generally, at least right now for 180 days and Ad Roll holds that data for 120 days so you can really play around with your audiences here. You could have an audience, for example, of people who have visited a page on your site in the last 30 days versus the last seven days and you could test and see which of those are going to work better for you. I generally recommend that once you have more than a little bit of traffic, that you start to think more seriously about intent. So by intent, I mean what are the signs that someone is more likely to come back and purchase and so for example, you should definitely have an audience set up for people who abandoned their shopping carts, right? Like, those are your hottest leads. You definitely want those people to come back. Also, people who have visited multiple pages on your site or key products can also be really hot leads that you would want to make sure that you target. You know, the good news here is that at the moment at least, both Facebook and Ad Roll's minimum budget for an ad campaign is like $5 a day. And with Facebook you can usually split test that amount. So really you can do a bunch of small runs to kind of see what works best for your business. You know, do people who visited two or more pages in the last seven days outperform people who visited your site in general in the last 30 days, for example. These are the sorts of things that you can test and work out. Now, while the minimum budgets for both Facebook and Ad Roll are really affordable that you still have to keep in mind the pricing that you're paying. Like I said earlier, the pricing is based on what's called CPM, which is essentially the price per thousand impressions. Now this pricing is going to fluctuate throughout the year, so your $5 minimum campaign is going to get you way, way more impressions in say June than it is at the end of November when a whole bunch of companies are bidding for that same space. It also really depends on the industry you're in. If you're in a highly competitive industry or if the types of customers that you are targeting are also highly targeted by other businesses, you're going to pay more and that $5 minimum ad spend isn't going to go as far. Okay. Number four: you need to load your ad images and start running ads. It sounds so easy, right? When people click, they'll be back on your website. So just real quick, let's talk about the two different kinds of ads that are really common with remarketing systems and the first are called static ads and these are just images jpeg or gif images that you upload into the system and generally their purpose is to remind people that your company exists and to come back. These work really well if you have good brand recognition or if you have a very limited product selection. So let me give you an example. One of my companies, we develop and sell robotics curriculum for middle schoolers and high schoolers. This is not a very crowded market so we're pretty much one of the only people doing this. And so if I put up ads and just say robotics curriculum, people generally remember who we were because that's probably the only robotics curriculum site they've been on in months. So those static ads can be really effective if you have that recognition there. They can also be really nice if you're advertising a special offer. So if you're running a free shipping weekend or come back and save 10%, something like that, they'll static ads can be really handy. One thing you need to be careful of, though. If you're going to do an offer, the offer has to be easily redeemable. So if you're running a site-wide free shipping sale, great. Everybody get free shipping when they check out. If you're running an offer specifically to the people you're targeting with your ad, you're going to need to direct them to some sort of landing page or have a way of getting them that coupon code. It can technically be in the ad, but you're probably gonna run into problems because very few people write things down, right? But the goal here is if you make it hard for people to redeem the offer, your ads will get kicked by Facebook and Ad Roll. You do not want that to happen. That's points against your account, right? Because it looks like you're being fraudulent and trying to trick people. So just be careful. If you're going to do a special ad or special offer of some sort, you really need to make sure that it's going to be super easy for people to understand how to redeem that offer. The other type of ad you see really commonly with remarketing are called liquid or dynamic ads. And that's the example I gave in the beginning, right, of that washer and dryer I was looking at. These are the ads that will generally show you the exact product that you looked at on someone's website. These are really effective. So you might ask yourself, why wouldn't I just use those? And there's a couple of downsides to them. One: they tend to be more costly. They also tend to require more tech setup. There are often minimums to run these ads, minimum budgets that you need to meet. It's changing all the time. So I can't really give you good specifics that would last more than a couple of months, but just be aware that these ads, you know, there are some downsides to them, but once you are spending enough, once you have a sophisticated enough system going on, these can be a really effective way to sell your products through remarketing. Okay, so even if you are not completely convinced you want to run out and start doing remarketing, I would still encourage you to get your pixel set up immediately so you can start gathering data. This is not a fast process, unless you have very large traffic numbers you're working with. So you know, you want to get those set up generally at least several weeks to several months in advance before you would need to run your ads. Because once you have lots of data, your ads will be more effective. So setting the pixel up is kind of an insurance policy, right? So you're gathering all that data so you can wake up one day and say, oh, I want to go use my remarketing ads to advertise my Black Friday sale. Well yeah, you probably should have set those up, you know, 30 to 60 days in advance. Okay? So just something to keep in mind. Go out and do the pixels now and that will preserve your opportunity to then go out and do remarketing and the future. Thanks for joining me today. I hope this is helpful and that you are feeling inspired to use remarketing in your business. If you have feedback or ideas for other shows, you know, I would love to hear them. Visit me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube and I look forward to seeing you next time. Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 003: Using Remarketing to Boost Your Website's Sales  

Episode 002: Optimizing Your Website's Payment Options   Episode Summary:  The payment options you offer customers at checkout can increase the rate of completing the sale or drive customers away. In this episode, Julie discusses the major payment options available and how to decide which ones belong on your website.   Episode Links: https://www.paypal.com/ https://pay.amazon.com/us/  https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/  https://pay.google.com/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod      Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert. Julie Feickert Hello, welcome to episode two of the Savvy Business Method Podcast. Where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Before we start today I just wanted to let you know that you can find links to resources I talk about here in the show in the show notes along with the transcript of the show. I realize that sometimes when you're listening to podcasts you may not have the option of quickly writing something down. And so those show notes are there so you can scan back through them and grab the information you need at a later time. Now today's topic is optimizing your website's payment options. Because getting paid is really important, right. Like none of us have businesses, or at least not business for very long unless we're getting paid and paid consistently. So maybe you're in the process of setting up a website and you're starting to think about what payment options you want to offer. Or maybe you're in a position where you have a website currently but you might not have put a lot of thought into the payment options that you have available for your customers. Today I really want to dive into how you evaluate different payment options for your specific customers and there can be a lot of moving pieces here so I want to just go through systematically and talk about what's important to consider and how we can make the checkout experience as smooth as possible for our customers. Now really, we could go about this two ways today. I could just tell you what I have setup on my own websites and that you should just use the same providers. But that would be doing you a great disservice. My goal with this podcast is always going to be to give you information so that you can make the best decision for your specific situation. I mean, shoot, I have two websites and I actually have different payment providers for the different websites. So even between my situations I have differences. And so I'm going to assume that you've got some unique things going on too that need to be considered. Also, let's get real for a minute, options change right. The providers that are popular today might not be popular tomorrow or might not be around in two years. And so you really do need the information so that you can make ongoing solid decisions for your business. Okay, so let's start by talking about why does this even matter. If you've had a website for a while, you've probably figured out that only a small percentage of your website visitors actually add anything to their shopping cart, right. And then only a small percentage of those people ever check out. Generally speaking, on an eCommerce website, you're gonna see a conversion rate and that's the number of people who actually buy something ... that number is probably going to be between point five percent, so half a percent up to maybe around five percent. That is not very much, right. Even five percent isn't very much and that would be a dream for so many eCommerce sites. This number is dependent on so many factors. It can be the industry that you're in. It could the specific website or products, you know maybe you have products that are an impulse purchase so you're conversion rate's gonna be higher. The eCommerce site I currently have ... people going to that site generally take many weeks and sometimes months before they make a decision because they need to know that this product is the right fit. So that rate of people checking out can vary all over the place. And there's a whole bunch of factors there that you can't control. But today we want to talk about some of the factors you can control because you really can't afford to have anybody getting lost in the shuffle, right. Especially when you're first starting out your website. Every single sale is so critically important. So how can we use payment options on our website to encourage more people to check out? And the key here is making it easy and having something for everyone. So let's start by talking about the most common way that people pay for things online, credit cards. Now I occasionally will see business owners on some of the forums or some of the Facebook groups and things arguing about whether or not they really need to take credit cards on their website. Generally the argument goes, well if I have something like PayPal, so many people have PayPal accounts anyway, why can't I just use PayPal instead of offering say PayPal and a credit card option. So let's stop and think for a moment what our goal is with our check out page. By the time someone gets an item in their cart, right, where a small percentage of our visitors are getting an item in our cart. And then they hit that checkout button and now they're on the checkout page. You're only goal, once they get to the checkout page is for them to click the place order button. You want every single thing during the checkout process to be as slick as humanly possible. Think about like applying Vaseline all over your checkout, right. Nice and slick we want people going all the way to the end and clicking that place order button. So that's what's important here. So when we think about payment options and you think about someone entering their information and getting down to the payment options, and just think about yourself, when you're shopping online. You get to the payment options and there's no credit card option. This is a red flag for people who shop online and here's the really interesting thing, they may not even realize it's a red flag. People know what it's like to shop online at this point right. Your visitors to your website are not unique to the online shopping experience. They probably have already been to Amazon today. They're used to seeing certain things in a checkout. They're used to putting in their billing address and their shipping address and selecting their shipping options and then putting in their payment information. And so if we have things about our checkout that vary from the norm, we are putting up a distraction, a red flag, something that is sending a signal to our customer that they need to pause for a moment and question whether or not this is a legitimate website, whether it's safe to put their information in, and these are absolutely not questions we want our customers asking during checkout, right. We want full trust so they hit that place order button. So even if they are the type of person who would have used PayPal anyway, you've just given them a massive red flag by not having a credit card option available. So no question having a credit card payment option available on your website and one that is easy to use and looks like every other website on the internet, right, so they enter their credit card right there on your website. This is really important to credibility for your site. And I get it, credit cards are a pain in many ways for small business owners. There are issues with fees, fraud issues, charge back issues, but I am here to tell you that all of the issues that exist with credit cards are things that you as a business owner can learn to manage and to mitigate so that you can accept credit cards with confidence. Okay, so moving on. Now that you're accepting credit cards on your website or hopefully I've convinced you that you are doing the right thing by doing so, let's talk about other payment systems. So going back to our discussion a few minutes ago about people putting stuff in their shopping carts and then not checking out. This is what's known as an abandoned cart rate. These are the people who put something in and then they leave your site for whatever reason. Now the abandoned cart rate on a standard eCommerce site is going to be somewhere around 75%. Ouch, right. Like that is ridiculous. If we could get our abandoned cart rate down we would have a lot fewer problems as website owners. And no question there are many reasons why people abandon their shopping cart. But let's talk about one way with our payment options that we have the ability to take that abandoned cart number down even further. Let me tell you a little story. It's eight pm. The kids are finally in bed and you're exhausted after a long day. So you grab a glass of wine and your tablet and you can finally look for that pair of shoes to match your dress. And you find them and they're perfect. So you add them to your shopping cart, you start checking out and bam, they want your credit card number. Seriously, you just sat down. You don't want to get up and get your wallet. Argh. You'll just order them tomorrow. So you close the window and abandon your cart. And the next day, you forget to go back and buy the shoes. Sound familiar? I've done it, you've done it, and I can assure you your customers are doing it everyday. This is why you need what I like to call an I don't want to get off the couch payment option on your website. This is a payment option that does not require someone to have their credit card in hand in order to check out. And the most common one's currently are PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Pay and Apple Pay. So one question I often get from small business owners is whether or not anybody actually uses these. So you have a credit card option, I mean really, how many people are really going to use PayPal or Amazon Checkout or any of these. And in my experience with my websites as well as talking with other entrepreneurs, it's generally about half and half. So about half the people will use credit cards to check out and about half the people will use a combination of the other options available on your website. Or more specifically I see currently about 40-50% credit card and then maybe 30% Amazon and 30% PayPal on my eCommerce site. But this then leads to another question, right. How do you choose, or are you supposed to have lots of alternative payment options. Should a website have PayPal and Amazon and Apple Pay and Google Pay. So here is my general rule of thumb. You generally need at least one and preferably two alternative payment systems. You should always prioritize the payment systems that have the most customers currently and right now that's PayPal and Amazon Payments. Thanks to the popularity of the Amazon Prime program, a ton of people have Amazon accounts. And of course PayPal has been around for years and was the only real significant player in the industry for so long that lots of people have PayPal accounts. I can definitely see Apple Pay and Google Pay gaining momentum over the years. But right now I would say that PayPal and Amazon are must haves for most eCommerce websites. So what would be the argument though against having all four available. And the biggest thing I would be concerned about is whether having three or four options makes your checkout look cluttered. You know there's always that risk when we give customers lots of options that we introduce indecision, right, into the decision making process. And so instead of just clicking something quickly, they stop and say, well wait, I could use this one or I could use this one or oh yeah, I meant to sign up for an Apple Pay account, maybe I should do that right now. So sometimes having less options are usually enough. As a website owner it's actually a better situation. So hopefully this discussion today was helpful as you start thinking through how you can best setup the payment options on your checkout to ensure as many of your customers as possible press that final place order button. Thanks so much for joining me today, I hope you had as much fun as I did. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows I would love to hear them. You can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com or on Facebook and YouTube. Also please be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher so you don't miss an episode. And of course, I would greatly appreciate if you could rate and review this podcast in iTunes because it really does help other people find it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 002: Optimizing Your Website's Payment Options  

Episode 001: Six Ways to Grow Your Email List Using Your Website's Traffic   Episode Summary:  Your website is the source of your hottest leads so you need to collect as many email addresses as you can from visitors. In this episode, Julie walks you through small changes you can make to your existing website to give visitors multiple, well placed opportunities to sign up for your email marketing list.   Episode Links: https://www.shopify.com/  https://www.volusion.com/v2  https://www.bigcommerce.com/ https://magento.com/ https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert. Julie Feickert Hello, and welcome to the first official episode of The Savvy Business Method Podcast where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Our topic today is six ways to get more email signups on your website. Now, if you've been around eCommerce for a while, you've probably heard that it's really important to do email marketing. You may have even set up an email list and maybe collected some emails, but how one earth do you get from the three people on your email list, because you know it's you, your mom, and your best friend in the beginning, right? We all have to start our list somewhere. How do you get from those three people to a list of 10,000 subscribers, 50,000, 100,000, half a million? When we build an email list, we are looking for sustainable and significant revenue stream for our businesses, and so unfortunately, you do need those bigger numbers. Now, no question, there are many ways to collect email addresses and to build your list, but I want to talk today about the method that tends to be most effective for the least amount of cost, and that is collecting as many email addresses as possibilities from visitors to your website. Your website visitors are already on your website. They are familiar with your brand. They've seen your products, your information. They're going to be far easier to convince to part with their email addresses than random people on the Internet. Let's talk through how we optimize our websites and make small changes so that we can convince as many of our visitors as possible to give us their email address and start really building our email list. Now, the first method I want to talk about today is by far the most effective, and that is to have a popup that pops up when people enter your website, generally about two to five seconds after a visitor lands on your website. Of course, I'm sure you're very familiar with these. In the last few years, sites big and small have employed this technology, and they employ it because it's incredibly effective. Six years ago or so when I first put a popup on my website, I just felt like a terrible person. Here I was interrupting my visitors' experience. They had to stop and figure out whether to give me their email address. Popups were fairly popular at that point, but they still weren't everywhere like they are now. I really fought this idea. I had a few people who I really trusted say, "No. Nope, Julie, seriously, you have to do this," and I did, and you know what, I grew my email list drastically through having that popup. Popups are great because you can really test and figure out what works best for your website visitors. You can use different graphics, different wording, you can even have different offers. You could offer, say, a booklet of recipes, or you can offer a 10% off coupon or free shipping or something like that, and you can just keep testing and figure out what is the most effective way of convincing people to hand you their email address. Now, along those same lines, I'd also encourage you to put an exit intent popup on your website. This is very similar. It's generally a box or a page overlay that comes up, but this one is going to be triggered when it looks like someone is getting ready to leave your website. Generally, that is when their mouse cursor goes up over the URL bar or up into that top part of your site. That's how the system triggers as, "Oh, this person's about to leave. Let's show them the popup." Exit intent popups are really useful for a couple of things. One, of course, they're giving us another opportunity to collect an email address, which is the goal. We want as many email addresses as possible. The other nice thing about an exit intent popup is it can sometimes be another opportunity to help convince someone to purchase something, because as much as we want their email address, we'll get that if they buy something too. Buying something is always our top priority. With an exit intent popup, we might want to tailor our offers a little bit and say maybe free shipping or 10% off or something that could help a customer say, "Oh, wait. I was going to leave, but you know what, I think I'm going to stick around. I think I'm going to actually buy that thing." That would be the ideal outcome, right? We want to do that. Now, both these exit and entry popups might sound a little bit intimidating if you're not fairly tech-savvy, so let's just talk about this for a few minutes. You're really fortunate because the technology that's available now for website owners is so much easier to use than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Odds are good that the ecommerce software that underlies your website, so this would be Shopify, Volusion, BigCommerce, Magento, whatever you're using to run your website, generally speaking, there is probably some popup functionality built into your software. Now, whether it will be exactly what you want is a different matter entirely, but you probably have the built-in ability to do this. If you don't, or it's really not the level of functionality you need, then there are generally apps and plugins. This is a very popular marketing method, so there are actually a ton of options. You want to make sure you pick a system that does both entry and exit popups for sure. Other things that are really nice if you can find one are systems that allow you to do A/B testing, which is split testing, so that's where you create two separate popups, and you change one thing. Maybe you change the picture or you change what you're offering them. Then you run them both randomly to people. Everybody sees one random option, and then you can see which one performs better. That's a great feature if you could find a popup system that's affordable that allows you to do that. Another feature to look for when you're shopping for a popup system is if you can do any sort of strategic targeting. For example, can you put a different popup up for someone who's on a certain category page versus another category page? Let me give you a practical example of how this works, and I have personally see this work amazingly well for one of my businesses. Let's say you're running a camera equipment website, and you want to give people who are looking at buying camera bodies a booklet on comparing different types of cameras for different projects. You could set your system up to show them a popup that offers them that specific ebook in exchange for their email address if they're sitting on a product page that has to do with camera bodies. Then you could have a completely different offer for people who are visiting pages for camera accessories like tripods. Maybe you could offer them a handout that goes through the six pieces of equipment every beginning photographer needs, something like that. This can be incredibly effective because you're meeting people where they're at. Instead of giving them some random that you're hoping appeals to most people, you're giving them an offer that appeals to people in their much more specific circumstance. It is great option if you can do that with your popup system. Another way I see this used really effectively is to change the offers on the exit intent popups based on whether or not someone has something in their cart and even the value of their shopping cart. If they have something in their cart, you might want to offer them free shipping. If they have something, maybe they have hundreds of dollars in their cart, you may want to offer them free shipping plus 10% off, maybe a little bit better incentive. Again, if you have an ability to test and split-test your offers, you could potentially really dial in what works for different groups of people. You've probably caught on to the fact that I love popups. I think they are one of the most effective ways to build an email list using people who are already visiting my websites, so why wouldn't we just use popups? Well, I mean, there's some practical realities. Not everybody is ready to give you their email address the exact time that a popup appears. When they see that first popup come when they're on the site, maybe they really want to look around a bit. Maybe they want to make sure you're legitimate and that your products are what they're looking for before they give you their email address. There's another reason. There's that little evil thing called popup blocker, and a lot of people are running popup-blocking software these days. We need to be thinking about what are ways that we can capture email addresses from people who are possibly running some sort of popup-blocking software. Now, let's go through a couple of other ways that you would need to optimize your website so you can collect as many email addresses as possible, and none of these ways that I'm about to go through are going to collect as many as the popups. I mean, they're probably always going to be your best performers, but it is well worth your time to put at least some of these other options in place so that your customers have every possible opportunity to give you their email address. Let's look at a floating opt-in. Now, a floating opt-in is generally a shape or a bar sitting at the bottom of the screen. That's very common on mobile websites. This has some sort of offer on it: sign up for our newsletter, free ebook, get recipes, something like that, and it just sits in the same place on the website, even if someone is scrolling. Like on one of my ecommerce sites, I have a floating box that sits up on the upper right-hand corner, and even when you scroll through the site, it's always there, and it just says free ebook. If you click on it, you go to a landing page where you can enter your email address for the free ebook. Generally speaking, these floating opt-ins, in my experience, are like my number three most popular way to collect email addresses from visitors, and that's really just because it appears on every page and it's always there. But there's a couple of other options too. One is to add a static opt-in box to your content pages. When I'm talking about content pages, I am talking about pages that are there to support your product. Back to the camera example. If you have a camera equipment website, you might have a page that compares different types of cameras or different types of tripods, and it could be really useful on the side of the page to put some sort of static box that just sits there and collects email addresses. Now, if you're running a website that has more of a blog-style template, this can be really easy because you can just use one of the spaces that's normally dedicated through pushing through ads. You could just use one of those square boxes and put your collection information in there. Just having that on every content page is just yet another reinforcement of this idea of, "Hey, join our community, get this offer," whatever it is you're offering your customers so they can sign up for your email address. Also, in terms of your content pages, and this is the fifth way to make a minor change to your website, I would encourage you to put calls to action one every content page. This can be some messaging around "if you like our information," or "if you like our recipes, get more by signing up," and you can put that information in the middle of an article or at the end of the article, or both. If it's a long article, you could probably get away with putting it two or three times. Again, you're just reinforcing that idea of joining your community of getting more information from you. When people are reading your content pages, especially if they're getting half, three-quarters, all the way through that content, odds are good that they see your content just being valuable, so this can be a great time in that moment to really collect that email address. Number six on the ways that we can make small changes to our website so we can collect more email addresses is to link in the header or the footer of your website, or both. This could just be a link that says, "Sign up for our newsletter," or, "Get 10% off," or, "Free shipping," or, "Free ebook," or whatever your offer is. You could put it up in your header near your account information in your shopping cart, or you can stick it down in your footer near the About Me page and the link to your frequently asked questions, those sorts of things. That's six different ways that you can make small changes to your website. None of these are very difficult. Most of you will be able to accomplish these on your own over the next few days. These can make a big difference in the number of email addresses that you're able to collect. Now, when I'm talking to entrepreneurs in person, and I'm telling them that they need to do these six things on their website so they can collect more email addresses from visitors, I generally hear the same couple of objections over and over again. Let's talk about them briefly. The biggest objection I hear is that you're going to annoy your customers or seem really pushy. This is an objection that tends to keep people from doing any of these things, especially the popups because they feel more intrusive. Let's first step back and really think logically about this. None of these six things that we've talked about today is an uncommon thing to see on a large ecommerce website. This is simply good marketing practices. I'm willing to bet that most of your customers visit other ecommerce websites, and probably big ones, on a regular basis, and so none of these things are out of the ordinary or considered to be black hat tricks. This is all out there in the open, commonly used. But if these ideas are still giving you heartburn, never fear. You have an option. Hopefully, you have something like Google Analytics installed on your website. It's a system that helps you see the statistics of your visitors' behavior when they're on your website, and what you can do is you can put one or two of these things in place at a time, and then look at your numbers. Watch your numbers for a few days. You want to look and see, are your visitors leaving your website more quickly, are they still visiting the same number of pages per website, are they bouncing at a higher rate, and when we talk about bouncing, we're talking about people who visit our website, land on that one page, and then leave the website without going to any other pages. If those numbers are not changing, then you're probably not annoying any of your customers, or enough of your customers, I should say, to a point where this is going to be a problem for you. No joke. You're probably going to hear from one or two of them. Some people really hate marketing in all forms, but you want to look at the broader numbers. We never want to make decisions based on the complaints of one or two customers. We want to step back, look at the broader numbers. Is the behavior of most customers on my site changing? If it's not, that's great. Am I collecting more email addresses? If I am, great. Then it sounds like you're doing something that is working well for your website. All right, so one more thing before you run out and start making changes to your website. It is really important to stay up to date on any legal changes that happen concerning how we as website owners collect and use email addresses. Now, you may be aware that there was just a major change in the legal situation in the European Union when it comes to email marketing, and odds are good. There's probably going to be some changes in other parts of the world, including the United States in the foreseeable future. This is just something you really need to be aware of and keep up to date on. It's always nice to have a small business attorney handy to to ask questions so that you can make sure that you are staying well within the bounds of the law. But beyond that, I would really encourage you to use this opportunity to treat other people's information the same way that you would want your information treated. That means that when we send email, we want to be sending email only to people who knowingly signed up for our email list, who knew what they were signing up for, and we are sending them the information that they expected to receive. If you do that, it goes a long way. Thanks for listening. I am hopeful that you're all going to run out and start making changes to your website and collecting more email addresses today. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit that little subscribe button so you can be notified with each new episode, and if you are excited about what you learned today, I would really appreciate kind reviews and five-star ratings. I promise I will read every single review, and those ratings and reviews really do help other people find this podcast. If you have ideas for topics for future episodes, or you just want to get to know me better, visit me at savvybusinessmethod.com or on my Facebook page or YouTube channel. I would love to hear from you. Until next time. Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 001: Six Ways to Grow Your Email List Using Your Website's Traffic  

Episode 000: About The Savvy Business Method Podcast   Episode Summary:  In this episode, meet host Julie Feickert and discover her journey from starting a tiny home-based business to building a multi-million dollar company as well as her passion for helping small business owners plan, start, and grow an online business of their own so they can create a better life for their family.   Episode Links: There are no links for this episode.   Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert. Julie FeickertHello, welcome to the Savvy Business Method podcast. My name is Julie Feickert and I will be your host. I'm so glad you're joining me today because I am passionate about helping small business owners plan, start and grow an online business. I have been there myself. Ten years ago, when I first started my online company, I didn't know a great deal about running an online business. I mean, I'd gone to business school, but that was a whole lot of theory, which can be great, but not much in the way of the practical skills. When I first started, I had this tiny website my husband built, and I had about 10 products. And my goal was to supplement our income so I didn't have to go back to teaching at the college at night. I had just had a baby and I was having a hard time with the idea of getting dressed up, putting my makeup on, driving in rush hour traffic, to teach for four hours until 10:00 at night, just to come home and get up and do it again the next day. So I thought surely I could start a small business online, right? Like lots of people do that. And in the beginning there, I did every single job myself. I answered every customer service email, I shipped every order, I did all the marketing. And much to my husband's amazement, my business started to grow. And it kept growing. And when I passed it off to a new owner a year ago, we had hundreds of products, millions of dollars in sales each year and a team of about 30 people. And along the way I learned two really important things. First I learned that running a successful online company is a combination of having practical knowledge and skills, putting in the work, and making good decisions along the way. See, I'm a realist. The idea of get rich quick schemes, that doesn't appeal to me at all. I have a family to support and I don't need any more stress in my life than absolutely necessary. My goal is always to build a business that is stable and sustainable. Second, I gained a better life for my family, one with more security and flexibility and for that, I will always be grateful. But something else started happening during those years too. When I would meet customers at shows, or people would email me, they'd often tell me how much they loved the company. And then they would tell me, "Oh, but I could never do what you've done." And that broke my heart. See, here's the thing, it's not true. I believe in the depths of my soul that many people can do what I've done. It's a matter of acquiring the knowledge and skills and doing the hard work and making good decisions along the way. What I did seems like a big thing. But it's really not. You don't do it all in one day, I promise. It's about waking up each day and doing the next thing and doing it well. So my goal with this podcast is to help you gain the knowledge and skills you need, so you can start and grow a successful business online. Maybe your goal is a side gig, to supplement your budget. We're going to talk through how to set systems up so you can be as efficient as possible and work on your schedule. I get it. You may have to do this on nights and weekends or during the kids nap times. Maybe your goal is to replace your family's income like I did. We will talk through how to grow the company while setting it up so you can manage it long term. Maybe you have big plans. Maybe you want to grow even further and provide jobs in your community. Well, I've got good news for you. The skills you need to run a company with up to say, 25 employees, really doesn't change greatly. And we'll talk through the ways it does so you can build those extra skills you need along the way. I am so excited to share this time with you. Please be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes or Stitcher so you'll be notified with each new episode. I'd love to hear from you, and the questions you have about planning, starting and growing your business online. If you want to learn more about me and the Savvy Business Method, please be sure to check out savvybusinessmethod.com and visit me on Facebook and YouTube. See you soon. Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method, with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 000: About The Savvy Business Method Podcast