- Jennifer Glass
- CEO of Business Growth Strategies International
Sponsors:
- Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!
- Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Show Notes:
- eCommerce vs mCommerce
- Customer Avatar
- Buyer Journal
- Traction
- It’s the Bottom Line That Matters: Quick Tips & Strategies You Can Use Right Now to Grow Your Business in the Next 12-Months
Strategies
- How are you driving traffic?
- Look at shipping – Increase AOV – Average order value
- Look at costs
- Are you using Level 2 or Level 3 data?
- Hotspot Videos
- Kiosks and Apps
- Email Marketing
- Lead magnet
- Abandon Carts –
- Omni-Channel Marketing
- The Journey from $0 to $200k per Year Selling on Amazon
- Hot items
- Shopify – 12 Trending Products to Sell in 2020
- Spark Shipping – Best 50 Dropshipping Products Of 2020
Transcript
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Jennifer Glass about the seven strategies to grow your e-commerce business. This is the business to be commerce episode 152.
Charles (00:19):
Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow the e-commerce business. I’m your host, Charles Palleschi. And I’m here today with Jennifer Glass. Jennifer is a CEO of business growth strategies, international. She is a business growth expert who works with small to medium-sized businesses to help them find the money that they are leaving on the table. On this show today, she maps out seven strategies that you can use to grow your e-commerce business. I love the kind of list format, which kind of has different bullet points and kind of, we go from really different parts of the business anywhere from growth to saving money, but basically ways to just increase the business and not leave money on the table. So think it’s a great episode to check out all seven and I’ll also link to them in the show notes. She goes a lot of good links. So we’ll put all that there. So check that out if you can too, and let’s go onto the show. Hey Jennifer, how are you today?
Jennifer (01:13):
I’m doing great, Charles. Thank you so much for having me. I hope all is well with you as well. Yeah.
Charles (01:17):
Have you on the show, definitely excited to dig into this. I love having a list of things in particular, so seven strategies to grow your e-commerce business. So we were talking about this earlier. You kind of mapped out just seven things. Is this generally for e-commerce or you’ve worked with, and you work with small business owners in general, right?
Jennifer (01:39):
Worked with, I work with small business owners and general but it really is, you know, a lot of the strategies that we’re going to be focusing on are focused for the e-commerce folks. Yep. A lot of strategies without a question are work both ways, whether you’re online or offline, but there are certain strategies that are going to be focused specifically to the online businesses and how they can take that and really convert even more clients into people wanting to buy. So if you’re an e-com client econ business, you’re definitely going to want to pay close attention. If you are in an old world you know, one of those professional brick and mortar or whatever kinds of businesses, this is totally going to be up your alley as well. Cause a lot of the strategies are really working both ways in terms of what you need to be paying attention to and why, why not? Okay. All right. Let’s get into it. Absolutely.
Charles (02:43):
Where would
Jennifer (02:43):
You start? Well, the first thing that I just want to kind of start with is the difference between e-commerce and M commerce. For those of you that are listening, that may not really have a definitive knowledge, but e-commerce is commerce via the internet and commerce is business done on a mobile device. And there is a difference in terms of the way that people are looking at things, the way that they’re shopping, the way that they’re interacting with your business. Because if you do have a brick and mortar business and somebody is in your business at that time, and they go on their phone, that is going to be an M commerce transaction. If they’re looking at information about a product or if they’re trying to price match or what have you, which really is going to be important in terms of that understanding just as we get into that conversation, as we look at the rest of the strategies and how it can potentially relate back to e-com and commerce or brick and mortar kind of business.
Jennifer (03:45):
But one of the first things though, once we get that straightened down, one of the strategies that we want to look at is what exactly are you doing in terms of marketing in general, right? How are you driving traffic? There is search engine optimization, there’s ads. And one thing about ads, a word about that. If you don’t know who you’re targeting, right? There’s a term in marketing called an avatar and I’m not referring to James camera’s blue people. In terms of the avatars, it’s a representation of your ideal client. If you know exactly who you’re marketing to, you can create ads that are going to hit what their pain points are and then deliver on those points. If you are looking at it from a different perspective, though, like I’m just going to Mark it everybody, then you’re not going to be converting on those ads.
Jennifer (04:38):
And that’s really going to be a major issue that you’re going to want to look at because you don’t want to be wasting money. Whether it’s during times of good economic times or down economic times, it doesn’t matter. You don’t want to waste money. Every dollar you spend as a dollar, you don’t have to put back into your business and put food on your table. So you want to be really paying attention to how you’re actually marketing and the right ways to get out there. So that’s one of the issues that you’re gonna want to be paying attention to. Another one is reviews. How many of you are looking at reviews?
Charles (05:13):
I’ve mentioned this one thing with the avatar. I’ve mentioned this before on the show. And I think that’s one of those things that you tell business owners at the beginning, like you should do this. And they’re like going through the marketing book and they just like skip ahead to another chapter and just like gloss over it every time. And it’s like the most crucial step you should not be doing that, especially when you’re smaller and can’t afford to right where you need to know exactly who you’re targeting. And you’re going to, you know, maybe when you’re larger, you can have 10 different target markets, whatever that is. But when you’re small, you need to be retargeting, you know, like Fred the farmer and like it’s Fred is like a left-handed farmer that likes to drive. Like, you know, it’s like super specific on and people even named the avatar, like these, like the friend, the, whatever, that sort of thing. And you used to be so like laser specific, I think so many people just like skip over that step that, and I said it every time, but want to say it again, because it’s so important that people don’t just gloss over that part.
Jennifer (06:10):
Oh, absolutely. And it’s also really important as you’re looking at that avatar, what their buyer journey is. And if you’re not familiar with the buyer journey, it means how do they start realizing they have a problem and going from there to the point where they ultimately end up buying from you, if you’re going to be saying something, Oh, you’ve got a, and I’m going to pick on an accounting software as an example. Cause I seem to do this all the time anyway, but why not? So if I have a business and I am outgrowing my accounting solution that I have right now, my software, I know that my software can do what it does. I may not even know how to put it into words. What my problem is before I started figuring out, Oh, I should probably talk to another company. So I don’t even know that I have a problem until really I know exactly how to quantify what the problem is.
Jennifer (07:07):
And then from there I can then move forward. But if you’re marketing in a way, yeah, we can handle up to 150,000 people on an accounting system. You know what, if I’ve got five people in my office, you just completely lost me. You only have one first chance at a first impression, which is why that avatar is extremely important and what the avatar’s pain point is at that moment. So that way, you know exactly where they’re going. Because if you can’t talk to the issue, that’s keeping Fred the farmer up at night and Fred is looking, I have to meet payroll next week. And he doesn’t care about buying anything else except for what is going to help him meet payroll for his farmhands that are going to be necessary. That’s all he cares about. And so stop trying to sell him a coaching software because it’s completely irrelevant to what he needs and it’s not going to make that difference.
Jennifer (08:06):
If it’s something that’s going to help him, like here’s the tool that can dramatically increase your crop yield. Well, do I need it in six months? Or do I need it next week? Yeah. I always need crop yields to grow. I’m a farmer, right. But I don’t need it in six months. So keep in mind where your avatar is at that moment so that you can Mark it in the right direction. And so if you’re going out and you’re going to be doing Facebook ads, pay attention to them, find the people that are specifically looking in the specific area that you are trying to address and bring them into your landing page. At that point, don’t bring them down all the way in the end of the road and start giving them all these additional one-time offers, whatever of LTDs and things you want to be doing, because he may not be looking at that right now and he’s not ready. And you may ultimately end up burning that relationship instead of cementing it.
Charles (09:07):
So start with basically how your driving style with that one funnel. It sounds like, right? Like have that funnel and just kind of nail it, how you get in, how you getting someone there and just figure that first funnel out.
Jennifer (09:18):
Oh, absolutely. It’s how my paying attention to my market. And then once you have that start that and always measure. If you can’t measure what you’re doing, how do you know it’s succeeding? And the other thing is so many people go out there and they try three, four, five different tactics to get a client. But how do you know, which is actually producing the result versus not producing a result. A lot of people stop paying attention to that. And it’s like, Ooh, there’s another shiny object, another shiny object. And I’m going to try all of these. And eventually you’re like, I don’t know which one actually works. And if you’re not, by the way, doing AB testing, which is why this is really important. You can’t now what you need to improve on is your offer failing because it’s the wrong audience, the wrong message, the wrong offered the wrong time. What is it that’s failing or not giving a lot? Or how can you increase what’s out there once, you know, it did work. How can you put more fuel on the flame to help it go even more? So that way you can get even more people just like front, the farmer coming in is going to want to buy from you because you answered Fred’s problem.
Charles (10:35):
Yeah. You can always tell a small business owner when you asked them, how do you generate leads? Like what’s your marketing looks like. And whenever someone answers word of mouth is like a 99% chance. That’s just, that’s like translates to, I don’t know. I’m not like I just have no idea. So whenever I asked them on just how you even leads word of mouth, that means I’m not sure it means they’re coming in. Right. You got busy, you know, people are coming, you know, you’re doing things and people coming, you just don’t know what things are making those people come and you can’t do, you can’t do more of them. Right. Because now you’re in this place where, Oh, okay. Like, which, you know, we’re doing five different things. Should we increase a, B or C? You know, which ones should we even increase? Where should we double down? So you kind of have to now spend money on all of these things because you don’t know which one’s actually driving the business. So yeah, that’s my task. Just ask someone, where are you getting leads? And if they say word of mouth, you know, okay. You’re not really sure I get it.
Jennifer (11:29):
It’s one of those issues that so many small business owners don’t know. And they’re not really sure exactly what it is that they’re doing in terms of all of their strategies. I mean, I, in my business, I show clients how they can even generate new opportunities without spending money on marketing and advertising, which is something that so many people like by second wife and yeah, it’s true because there are strategies like joint ventures. You really don’t need to spend money for a joint venture strategy that drives business to you. Think about who else your target client is working with. And then find those people create a relationship with them. And then, Hey, guess what? You have people coming in and both sides you’re cross referring. And then if you go down the food chain, who else is involved in the event chain for what somebody is dealing with, right? If you take an example of a a floor, right? And you look at the bridal market, you can immediately get in there. And then you can say, let’s partner with the jeweler was partnering with the DJ, the photographer, the wedding hall, et cetera. And there’s even more. So it’s a ton of value that people can get just by paying attention to the right things and stop wasting in the wrong places.
Charles (12:49):
Yeah. There’s actually a book. And it’s not the book everyone knows is traction. No one ever knows about this. Another one. Yeah, by Gabriel Weinberg is super good. It actually talks about hair or the different traction channels. So this traction that you S one and one’s more popular, there’s another one with distraction channels and I’ll link to it in the show notes, but it shows here are the different ways your business can just generate leads like hair or just the top. I don’t know how many different channels they have, but there’s a bunch and it’s all stuff like you’re saying like joint ventures stuff. You might not think about that may or may not actually even cost anything. So I think that’s helpful just to kind of use that as just a thought experiment to kind of run through what are some channels. Maybe SEO is one of them, but there could also be, like you said, ones that don’t require any sort of funding and just hard work. So,
Jennifer (13:37):
Oh, absolutely. My book also is the bottom line that matters quick tips and strategies you can use right now to grow your business in the next 12 months, those through eight strategies to offer exactly those points in joint ventures. One of those strategies in the book,
Charles (13:53):
Okay. We’ll drop a link to that. All right. What is strategy number two?
Jennifer (13:58):
So strategy number two is looking at your shipping programs, right? Especially during certain times in a year, free shipping is expected, but what do you do to encourage people to during the rest of the year, go for that free shipping level instead of having a paid for shipping, right? You can use shipping to your benefit where it’s really going to make a tremendous difference in terms of your business. Think about it. From this perspective, a lot of businesses have increased their minimums to get free shipping. You have to spend $25, one to $34. Once a $39 went to $49, went to $79 to $99, different ways that you can increase the value of the cart that somebody’s going to want to go with. If you partner with another company and you’re both sharing again, this is going back to joint venture. You’re both selling something to this client individually, or you are combining your efforts to reach this person. They can buy that $99 cart. You both benefit and guess what their purchase habits changed to now be used to buying from you $99. Now $29. Think about that for a second. If I’m getting 70% more in revenue, that is a ton of opportunity that you have, that you can be looking at as you move forward in terms of where you are.
Charles (15:39):
Yeah. I th I don’t think people I think people do underestimate that average car that ever check the value of his car value. Just increasing that. Yeah. Not even 70% and increasing that 10% that goes right to the bottom line is like that number. And this is like 10% on your top line, right? So this is a big number, just like any increase you can do that has this huge return. And yeah. So anything like free shipping, anything you can do, just like whatever your average check of value is now average cart value, whatever you can do to just get that higher. It’s a win. It’s a big one. And usually like you’re saying these ways are things that cost you very little. They’re just kind of a little bump things that, you know shipping might be, if you kind of calculate out, it might be very little an actual cost, but huge. And what it can do for you.
Jennifer (16:31):
Absolutely.
Charles (16:33):
Yeah. Okay. I like that one. Cool. What is strategy three?
Jennifer (16:38):
So our third strategy is looking at your actual costs. So many businesses think, Oh, Hey I have a credit card account. Congratulations. You have a credit card processing count. If I’m selling, I probably have a merchant account, but here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t know if you’re selling business to business, are you using, what’s called level two data in your business? Now, a lot of you are probably wondering, like, what the heck is level two data? What is she talking about? Level two data is additional information that gets passed along with the transaction. And your processor has to allow that to go through. It’s not buying default. And a lot of processors don’t even know, or the salespeople don’t even know about this when you speak with them because they are new in the industry, or they’re not interested in helping you save because they make more money.
Jennifer (17:34):
What you want to know of is you want to know, I can pass along the invoice number, the tax information, the customer information, and what exactly is in the cart. And that information goes on the credit card statement to the, that made the purchase from you. If you think about it, the business, how do the finance office doesn’t know what all of his people are spending on? He gets the bill at the end of the month, and he has to make the checkout to American express Citibank, whoever the credit card is issued by. But because he doesn’t know who everything is, what all the transactions are. He may dispute some of them. But if you show all of the transactional data, that’s there, now he knows upfront more of what is there. So you’re reducing the likelihood that he may be disputing that payment. And you can save as much as half of 1% 50 basis points.
Jennifer (18:34):
Now, if you have a $100 order, it’s not a lot, I’ll be real, right. But how many, $100 purchases are you making over the course, or $100 sales are you making over the course of a month, over the course of a year where those 50 cents start really adding up, right? If you’re selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of these transactions, that is a huge amount of money that you can be putting right back into your revenue, because you’re no longer paying it out. You just have to know exactly how to make that work for you.
Charles (19:12):
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Charles (20:00):
Now onto the show. Is that something you can do in like a Shopify big commerce easily? I’ve never, I know you have, you hit these calls all the time, where somebody, you put your business name on the statement and you got a call from someone in finance, some company, and they go, did someone buy something from you? Like they have no idea who you are. You don’t know who they are. It’s like just two people that don’t know. You don’t know the other one and just kind of talk. And you’re like, I don’t know. Like, do you like in whatever product? And like, I don’t know. And you both just have this like odd conversation. So like how easily it is to cause like, and we’ve all done that call. Cause like no one even knows why they’re calling or like, and you’re just trying to figure it out. And yeah, there’s probably that percent right. That just, they see it instead of calling or maybe they call and they just don’t recognize the name of the company. They just literally dispute. And as we know, you lose most of those, right? Like most of the time you have to lose them or they’re just a pain to fight. So like yeah, having, having that data though, how do you do that? Technically? Is that something that’s easy and Shopify big commerce?
Jennifer (21:03):
So the answer to your question is it’s not something that Shopify would be doing itself. It is something that the processor that you’re working with has to a allow on your account and be the gateway or the virtual terminal that you use to have the ability to pass that information. And then Shopify or whatever kind of shopping are you using has to pass that to the gateway so that it gets sent along with the transaction. Got it. So as long as you’ve got that going through, you can make that happen. And with our payment processing solutions that we offer, we make sure that that’s upfront. We say that that’s fair and there’s discounts offers for if you’re business to government. There’s other discounts that are there as well, level three data once again, offer discounts to,
Charles (21:55):
Okay, so you call this level two data. So that’s interesting
Jennifer (21:59):
Too, in level three data
Charles (22:00):
In level three data, and it’s essentially putting just what was in the card, but they use a purchased on the credit card statement, like an itemized list.
Jennifer (22:09):
It’s the invoice information. So the customer number, the tax information, a total transaction amount, which is already going through anyway, it’s customer data. You know, so if it’s Charlie one, two, three is the customer code that goes with it or a PO goes with it. So that has to get passed along. And there’s transactional information like that, that when it does get passed, everything else can get cut in terms of the information, because that information is being passed along. And again, your processor will tell you specifics to their system, if there’s other items that they need. But traditionally that is what is needed.
Charles (22:54):
Okay. That’s a good, that’s a good one. You don’t hear that one very often. All right. What is number four? I like that.
Jennifer (22:59):
So this is a big one for those of you that are doing Shopify shopping cards. And I don’t know how many of you have seen this before, because it’s really relatively uncommon. And it’s a technology that we have that allows us to create what’s called hotspot videos. Think about if you were doing a video and you were in a department store and you were going around the shoe department, as an example, you can in the video, have a hexagon shape, pop up over a specific pair of shoes. Let’s say that I, a pair of Jimmy Choos or Christian Louis Vuitton, right? I can put that hexagon all shape right on the Louis Vuitton shoes. And if I put my mouse over it, as I’m watching the video, I’m curious, what is the shape? I’d put my mouse over. It opens up a popup on the video and it says, add to cart. I can shop directly through this video. Think about what you’re doing. We know video sells much more than text. We know photos sell more than text. Video sells more than photos. How many more clients and sales can you get? If you properly are showing exactly what you’re doing to get that hotspot video, right? If you can make that work for you, think about how many more business, how much more business you can do.
Charles (24:43):
And is this something like a I’m picturing like home decor, right? Where you’re like, Hey, we like renovated this house and it’s a video and you do a blog or something. Some piece of content on somebody walking through his house, they renovated. And there’s like, you know, the little thing on the dining room table and like, Oh, you can buy that. And like, you know, the comforter in the bed and you can buy like, is it like that sort of thing where, okay, so you use it for content. And basically it is content on like his, we did for this house and asked the person’s walking through, explaining it. There’s just like, here are the things, 10 things, and it just takes you out of a, does it take you to
Jennifer (25:14):
The checkout page items?
Charles (25:16):
Does it take you right to the checkout page or how people using these
Jennifer (25:19):
Take you to the checkout page? It says, add to cart. Okay. And then you could eventually have that move straight into the checkout.
Charles (25:27):
So like one of those, I’m basically picturing one of those you know, when you’re talking on YouTube and you kind of point and you put the video right there and they click on and go to the next video, it’s that, but for commerce essentially, right? When you click over half a million, like it just pops you over there.
Jennifer (25:40):
Absolutely. And it’s a great tool that so many people have found extremely helpful and adding more.
Charles (25:48):
Yeah. Tell me something. If you’re doing some sort of content play for the right business, you can use that in a very very tactical way, right on driving. Like top of the funnel, here’s a video, here’s some, you know, here’s the latest fall coats, right? And you can show someone trying on like five different coats and each one can have, Hey, click here. And kind of like you do throw the platform and you do it through Instagram. Now you can do it through all these other platforms. But having that, it sounds like for your size, right? So something you can host,
Jennifer (26:14):
You host it yourself and you have it go straight into your system. It’s not having to use other systems that works extremely well with Shopify.
Charles (26:23):
Yeah. You can see that any sort of content actually being kind of a neat thing. I didn’t know. That was, I didn’t know. That was a thing. All right. What is
Jennifer (26:30):
BGSA marketing.com. That’s where you can see it.
Charles (26:34):
BGSA we’re going to link to dash. All right. What is number five? Keep count.
Jennifer (26:40):
Absolutely. So as using kiosks apps in your business, so again, it’s going back to that avatar that we spoke about who are they, where are they and how are these going to be used if you think about it? A lot of us are ordering tremendous amounts right now. Online. I may have an app. I may one food. I may want product. I may own service, and I want to order it through my phone. Or if I’m in store, I may need to order it through a kiosk that I don’t necessarily have to speak with someone individually, but there can be an order kiosk because I just didn’t see it in the store. How are you going to do that? To still increase your sale and increase what your opportunities are? It doesn’t cost that much to get an app created, but think about the loss business. If you don’t have one on mobile app proactive
Charles (27:45):
Or even a kiosk, and the kiosk could literally just open to a webpage on your site, right? Like exactly,
Jennifer (27:51):
You got it. Exactly. It doesn’t have to go any farther than that is just, let’s bring it so that we can allow people to have the most opportunities to buy from us. What we need to do is we need to teach our clients how to give us money. We need to make it stupid, easy to get that. If we can do that, people are going to want to keep buying from us. And they’re not going to want to go to our competition because they’re going to see the value right then and there without having to go and say, well, I can do this. I can do that at any different store because I’m making it really easy for them to find everything that they’re looking for. And again, joint ventures really comes in handy because if you can partner up what goes along with this, think about for a second, we all buy on Amazon.
Jennifer (28:43):
Amazon is great telling me, you may also want this. Apple is great at the upsell, right? As not just a cross selling. Okay. I bought the iPhone, give me also the AirPods. So that way I’ve got that, they upsell me the Apple care, right? They’re upselling me into a higher space, higher memory on the phone, a bigger screen. What can you do to do that? But sometimes though your products are not necessarily going to immediately allow for that. But what if you are selling jewelry, can you also sell flowers? Can you also sell chocolate? If that’s not something you can do in your store, you can sell, have that in your app. And immediately, like I mentioned before, partner with another organization, I can fulfill that order. The jewelry goes with the chocolate, goes with the flowers for Valentine’s day, mother’s, day, birthdays, whatever, and boom, you’ve got it right there. And it’s another way that you can use your app and your kiosk to get opportunities, to get even more business.
Charles (29:55):
Yeah. I’m seeing a lot in this year in particular, right, where there’s a lot of 20, 20, we’re talking the year of COVID brick and mortar retailers are going online, right. And having this thing where I have a shop it’s, you know how many square feet you can offer X number of products, but then as soon as you go online, you can basically go to that same, you know, four or five distributors have been working with for years and take their entire product catalog of a hundred thousand products and easily just add that online. And that’s something you could never do in the store. And I think what a lot of folks are doing is, Oh, you can’t find in the store, here’s our website, that sort of thing. But I like the idea of just having like almost a terminal in the store it’s cheap.
Charles (30:33):
It’s easy to do. It’s basically just hooked up to your site and kind of like leading people right there on, Oh, you know, you have this like obscure part that you need. Great. Let’s just go over here and type it on the kiosk. Oh, you can look it up our site. Let’s put the, your shipping address in here. It ships right to your house easy. So you can basically set it up that, you know, you’re using your website to sell products from your distributor, right. That you’re and otherwise people are just gonna be giving the URL and someone’s gonna go to Google type it, maybe find it somewhere else cheaper. But having it right there in the store, kind of just funnels people into using us. Right.
Jennifer (31:08):
And that’s one of the things you want to be the destination. If you allow some other platform to be the destination, whether it is Google or anyone you’re giving potential business to everybody else. And what happens if Google decides to ban me, right? We know Google penalizes people all the time, right? All your site isn’t loading quick enough, right? The speeds of for, or the time to first bite is too long, whatever it is that Google’s latest algorithm is going to be. When you’re listening to this program, we know that those exist. So think about what you can do to minimize those issues. If you can keep them directly on your site, the only thing you honestly control, you are going to be in a much better position. Don’t let it go to any other platform because at least there you own it and it’s yours.
Charles (32:07):
Yep. I like that. Yeah. I was in home Depot the other day. Actually I need some obscure, like pegged for my kitchen cabinets. I need it like a very particular size, like some I’m certain aisles. And there, I ended up searching the home Depot app and found out they don’t offer the five millimeter. They only have a seven. So I ended up literally in home Depot, just Googling. It, found the top link on Amazon, bought it from some random third party seller. So they lost a sale while I was actually standing in the store in the aisle, in front of the package, just because they don’t have it listed on the app. They didn’t have it on the site and ended up literally clicking on the first we have Google and I need this. I don’t know what it is like Amazon. Great. Third party seller sells on prime. Great. Sure. Whatever. Let’s go. So I was, I drove my car there just to find out, I’ll just buy it online. So I, yeah. That’s exactly my point. Yep. Yeah. I like that. All right. Yeah. Well, I’m still waiting for those texts to come in the mail, but hopefully today, what do we fr number six,
Jennifer (33:09):
Number six is how we use our email marketing. And this is really whether you’re online, offline, doesn’t matter. Again, everything is the same as what lead magnet or attraction marketing device are you using to drive people to you? You can use giveaways, you can use social hashtags, you can use other promotions and incentives to drive people your way, but you want to make sure that in your email marketing, you’re doing all that you can to make sure everything is going to make sense to ultimately deliver for you. The other thing also is if you’re not currently doing this, what is your abandoned cart sequence look like? And how do you create that? If you’re not currently doing it, a lot of people have gotten used to in today’s market. If I see something on a website, I’m going to put it in my cart. As long as I’m logged in, I’m going to put it in my cart and I’m going to leave.
Jennifer (34:07):
And some point overnight, the magical fairies at work are going to send me a message saying, Hey Jennifer, we realized you didn’t buy X or you’ve got something in your cart. It looks like you forgot something. Here’s 10%, right. Consumers have become so used to this that if you don’t do it, you’re hurting yourself because they’re going to never again, come back because they expected that. Right? The other thing also is sometimes though they may have thought they did it and something may have happened. And if your billing system processed the charge, but a sit all day and actually go through that’s what’s going to happen is they’re going to call it their credit card company and dispute it because I never got the widget that I ordered. So by having this abandoned cart sequence, you can actually stop the transaction, make sure the clients sees, Oh, I mean complete the transaction.
Jennifer (35:10):
For some reason, I can address that on the customer service side, make sure that everything gets worked out and then I don’t have to worry about that. So there’s a whole lot of different things that, that abandoned cart sequence can do for you. But if you’re not using it, start using it, figure out what you need to do, what technology do you need. And I’m sure if those of you that are listening don’t know, I’m sure Charles can definitely guide you in terms some apps or systems or what have you to make sure that as you’re doing this, you’re going to have the right opportunities in your business to make sure that you’re not going to be missing any piece of the transaction.
Charles (35:52):
Yep. We’ve had some BeneCard interviews on hair in the past and it’s kind of like remark Bennett carts, remarketing. It’s like this, it, it can’t hurt. Right? Like it almost never hurts. It costs so little to implement. And it’s one of those, again, things you’re attracting the user. Anyway, you’re doing all the hard work. Why not just do that? That maybe a banner card bumps you 10%, maybe remarketing is tempered. Like all these things are like now a percent on top of that, but you did all the hard work. Anyway, you hide the customer, you did the SEO, the paid, you did all those other things. So why not just now increase your chance of conversion. And again, it’s kind of like increasing the average order value. You did it already. So now just capitalize on the hard work you already did. So
Jennifer (36:34):
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s not just, you know, if you got the SEO value, it’s someone clicked off an ad that I did. I paid ad. If I didn’t convert them, then I completely lose. I’d rather lose 10% and get 90% of what I wanted. Then lose 100% plus the cost of the ed. So if you’re not doing that abandoned cart, start thinking about how you need to do that.
Charles (37:03):
Yup. I like that. Yeah. Just leaving money on the table, Ben and God’s lead magnets. And if you can WL marketing, obviously just get their email address because you don’t have to pay for the remarketing. If you can’t get the email address, then you pay for the remarketing, but it’s basically just find ways to follow them around. Right. If you can remarket to them, great. If you can get their email even better, but just always kind of chasing them down. Yeah. I like that.
Jennifer (37:26):
Yeah. And that’s the issue also, as we’re talking about guest checkout or register checkout in terms of the process, what you can always do is you can create again in the email marketing, we’re talking about incentives, right? If you give the incentive to get somebody to register for your account, your site, as an account, and then have them logged in, right. If I’m giving 20% off first purchase, right. I’m getting them in with that 20% first purchase, but I’m getting them in. And then I now have them on my list and how many more transactions might they buy from me? Because they’re now in my list, especially if you have it the right way and your list you want to be looking at as relationship based as possible is how you can create that relationship. So the point where I get the email, I want to actually look at it.
Jennifer (38:26):
A lot of us probably get a whole bunch of marketing emails that they just go into our promotions tab in Gmail. We never even look at, but there’s one or two that we’re looking at every single one, because we want to know what they’re offering. That’s what’s most important because when you’re actually looking forward to receiving that email, you know, that there’s a pretty good chance. Ooh. As long as the right offer is in there, they’re going to come and they’re going to at least look now it’s my job to convert on the site. The email already did its job. So as long as everything else on the site makes sense. They’re going to buy that too. And that just increases your lifetime value for your client.
Charles (39:07):
I saw a really clever one this year, actually. So it’s a post base giving, right? So black Friday, small business, Saturday cyber Monday, right. We just kind of pass that. And I saw a retailer who, before, you know, if you’re and everyone does this kind of scope out the potential black Friday deals like a week before and they had one little pop-up saying enter email to get like this like special black Friday coupon. And we’re going to give it to you black Friday. So you enter the email way ahead of time. You get on the list and they’re already drumming up business for black Friday, cyber Monday. And then the thing is you want it that coupon. So you’re basically like sitting, waiting for that email to come. And as soon as you get it, you open it. I have the coupon, you’re going to go there.
Charles (39:48):
Now it’s only available for one day. It was a super clever use of, you know, Hey, now that getting people on the list, now you’re getting people to actually click on the email. So you’re really, and you’re like drumming up like interest and you can say, Hey, we’re going to push it all a special day. So enter it today into your email today to get a coupon at this point in the future. I thought that was super clever that yeah, not everyone. I haven’t seen that one before and maybe you can only do it on black Friday, right? Cause that’s the one of the few times where people are looking at a week ahead of time to buy whatever their holiday presents. But you know, maybe there’s a few other times a year where Hey, for your a father’s day gifts for your Ballantine, that sort of thing. You know, people are looking ahead of time for Valentine’s day. So drop a coupon in a week. We’re going to hit everyone with a, give you your mail in a weekend, get this coupon. So I thought that was a clever thing. I saw the share.
Jennifer (40:36):
Exactly. And you know, one thing though, that is worth mentioning, it doesn’t have to be specific to black Friday. Like you said, come up with your own holidays. Having a Sunday came up with prime day, right? I mean, prime day did not exist before Amazon decided we need a sale in July for something. Right. So we’re going to make this prime day and guess who followed suit target Walmart? Because they realized we can’t let Amazon take all the sales. So target Walmart and a couple other larger retailers, one along because Amazon created that holiday. If you have a list or even if you’re just putting marketing out there and you say, listen on January 15th, right? We just got through new year’s, we’d got through the holidays, we need a figuring out how to deal with the rest of the holiday. Right? So we’re calling it the sober day.
Jennifer (41:38):
I think I might take that. So I, I create this sober day and I offer so many deals on sober day because now I’m really looking or goal day because I’m really looking at my goals for the year. And I want to make sure that I keep them so I can offer as many planners and goal oriented programs toward that holiday that I can start creating. And I can just push that out all over the place and starting in December, I can already start offering that and say, Hey, listen, January 15th, we’re going to be offering this on gold day or sober day. And it’s going to be an opportunity for you to get in, enter your email and we’ll let you know and give you the special coupon. That’s going to get you X percent off any of the purchases. That’s an incredible opportunity. So you can create your own thing and it doesn’t have to be on this scale of prime day, as long as you are going out there with that opportunity. Yep.
Charles (42:42):
Yeah, it does. And like you said, it doesn’t have to, I think people think I’m not Amazon, you know, I can’t do that, but eventually you have a list, right? Like you’re going to have a thousand, 10,050, however many people on your list and what you can create your own mini holiday using that list. Right? So that is the power of email marketing. And that’s based what Amazon did. They had their list if following and they obviously flyers out, they leveraged that you can do the same as a small business. It’s definitely not out of reach. So
Jennifer (43:11):
Cool.
Charles (43:12):
What is number seven? We’re doing good on time here too. Actually thought we weren’t gonna make it, but seven things. That’s pretty good. Yeah. I like it.
Jennifer (43:22):
Our seven strategy is omni-channel marketing. And for those of you that have not heard of omni-channel marketing, it’s being as many platforms as you can. So that means it’s obviously your website has luckily on Amazon, it’s looking at eBay, it’s looking at overstock oversight, looking at Walmart Groupon and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of different places that you can be that you really want to make sure that you are offering all of the opportunities that you can. So that way, no matter where somebody is, there’s an opportunity they’re buying from you. Now there’s a difference. How do I get into the buy now button on Amazon Walmart marketplace, whatever it is in terms of getting there. And Charmaz, I’m sure you’ve got the relationships to help people there as well, where people can reach out to you. Hey Charles, listen, I really want to learn more about this.
Jennifer (44:14):
How do I do it? And really have those solutions to make sure I can get the buy now option. And if you’re not even selling your own products, there are programs out there where you can find what is the hottest items people are. You can get that, send it into Amazon, send them into Walmart to be fulfilled by them. And then you don’t have to worry about the fulfillment even, and you just, as long as you’re willing to go up to X dollars on the seller, down to X dollars on the sale, rather you can just immediately put that in and then you can sell through your entire inventory and make that profit. That’s pretty good.
Charles (44:56):
It’s funny. The previous interview that was, I interviewed a seller that, that he went from just recently Xero to, I think, doing around 200,000 and uses a couple apps. Just that exact strategy you just found products are already selling. And he talks about the whole thing, what he did and started just kind of finding them, buying them, send FBA. And now we’re just doing, it was just rinse and repeating sort of thing. So this is a, that is a model it’s. So you don’t need to like create your own PR. You don’t need to do any of this stuff if, you know, if that’s just not your wheelhouse, you can just find stuff. And, yeah. So this is one 52. If you check out one episode, one 51 literally talks about how he walked through that step-by-step, which is pretty neat.
Jennifer (45:36):
Yeah. And if you need any more ideas, Shopify has amazing blog posts, all on items that are currently selling really hot on Shopify platforms. Yep.
Charles (45:47):
We’ll link to that as well. So that’s a Shopify blog post is nice. Okay. Yeah. I think usually I think folks are thinking they’re gonna, I mean, there’s two ways to do it, right? You can either create, demand or find a man and go where that is. Right. And two very different strategies. And I think if you create demand, right, that’s one thing where it’s gonna be this blue ocean. No one else is doing it. No one was doing it before you and you just, you you’re the inventor and you did this, but sometimes it’s a tough road going the other way of, Hey, here’s what demand is, is like the river’s already flowing. I just need to like step inside. And I’m already like getting pulled along the current often. That’s a lot easier, right. Of just finding where demand is, finding what demand is already.
Charles (46:31):
And it’s a huge business and you’re just going in there taking a fraction of a percent, but it’s there and it’s already, you’re just dipping your toe in the water and the water is already there. So I think people underestimate that. It’s a lot easier to generalist that, that way. So, absolutely nice. All right. Well, I’m gonna link to that blog post if we can find that, but yeah. Omni channel, I think it’s funny. It’s one of those times it kind of comes and goes, and I think it was popular a few years ago, but it’s still like, and then Amazon became so vague, but now it’s almost a Renaissance where everyone’s going out in the marketplace now, Walmart new way, like there’s all these other ones. And it’s almost become, it’s almost become popular again so that it’s having its omni-channel Renaissance right now in 2020 NFL. Like nice. All right. If people want to kind of check these out, if there’s something you kind of list on a blog post somewhere or
Jennifer (47:26):
The various strategies. Yes. And I haven’t actually done the blog post for that yet, but it’s going to have to be done and we’ll get the link there for it. Yeah.
Charles (47:39):
All right. Let’s do it. People will kind of want to check out what else. So you mentioned you have a book. I actually it’s did I get this right? It’s the bottom line that matters quick tips and strategies you can use right now to grow your business in the next 12 months. I found it on Amazon where we’re talking, but yeah. Okay. I’m going to drop a link to that. What else are you working on?
Jennifer (47:59):
So I am always working on helping clients grow their business and it’s through our payment processing business, our marketing business, our coaching business as ideally built out or not ideally, but it’s built out to help the clients get their ideal business. Where do they want to be? What do they want to do? And how do they want to get there? What we do is we try and make sure that people are not leaving money on the table. How do they get all the money that they want to get there? And that’s what we do to help them.
Charles (48:38):
And is this through like a coaching sort of arrangement, like a one-on-one type of thing.
Jennifer (48:41):
So it’s a coaching business, but everything is based on what somebody needs. So could be one-on-one coaching group, coaching hybrid, do it yourself. All different kinds of programs. And it’s, like I said, it’s teaching people what they need to do to work with me. And that’s where we are. And you know, it’s, even if you guys need to know how to improve LinkedIn, that’s another major area that we work with as well.
Charles (49:14):
All right. And what, what would be the best place to, I know there’s a couple of links here, but what’s the best one to kind of check you out.
Jennifer (49:21):
Check me out@bgsicoaching.com or on LinkedIn, under Jennifer R. Glass.
Charles (49:29):
Okay. We will put those first. Cool. All right. Appreciate everything, Jennifer. And when you get that blog post, let me know. Cause we’ll add a link to that as well. So, absolutely. Well, awesome. Thanks for coming on.
Jennifer (49:40):
Thank you.
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