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 Feickert
Hello, 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