Gift biz unwrapped episode 336. And where e-commerce is really going to help is that you can do everything from your home and you can continue to sell things online. Even while you're at a farmer's market Attention. Gifters bakers, crafters, and makers pursuing your dream can be fun. Whether you have an established business or looking to start one. Now you are in the right place. This is gift to biz unwrapped, helping you turn your skill into a flourishing business.
Join us for an episode, packed full of invaluable guidance, resources, and the support you need to grow. Your gift biz. Here is your host gift biz gal, Sue moon Heights. Hi there, it's Sue and welcome to this week's show today. I'm going to give you a new option to get support for the many, many things you have to do in your business. But before we get into that, I want to give you an update on what's going on in my private Facebook community gift biz breeze. It's time to update the buzz book.
And if you're interested in being included, now's the time to submit your information. It's totally free. The buzz book is a compilation of small handmade business owners like you and provides a way for you to support each other. You can do this of course, by purchasing from one another, but it goes deeper than that. The main goal is to provide a way to connect with people who make similar products to yours so that you can discuss the nuances of your industry.
It's a way to easily find and get in touch with fellow Breezers, who are also in your local area. So you can get together for coffee or even establish a formal schedule for networking or meetups. It's also a way to create collaborations. I've seen local brick and mortar shops reach out to regional makers to display their products in store, helping increase visibility for both of them.
I've also watched Breezers get together and do virtual shopping shows, offering different, but compatible products, thereby getting exposure to each other's audiences and let's face it. This going live thing is a whole lot easier when you do it with somebody else, the things we can do together through our connections is far greater than what we can achieve on our own. And the buzz book facilitates that. And again, it's totally free for more details and to learn how to be listed.
Join the gift biz breeze, Facebook group, all the details. Along with a video, talking more about the program are right there, separated in a special guide for easy access. Okay, let's move on to today's show covering how to be more efficient in your business, how to tackle all the things without it, having to be only doing it all the time. You need to be able to have a social life outside your business, you know, and sometimes it feels like that's just absolutely impossible.
Well, help is on the way I like to free flow the conversations. And in this chat, I do something I've never done before I create a fictitious company and we role-play through how this small business owner can use the solutions presented here to run her business easier and even more important most effectively so that she can produce the greatest results.
I am really excited today to introduce you to Georgia UB Dolla of spring bot spring bot enables growing e-commerce businesses to manage their email marketing and paid advertising in a single platform. Georgia started with the company about two and a half years ago as an onboarding manager on the customer success side. In her role, she helped email businesses navigate the platform and consulted with them on marketing best practices.
Today she's a lead senior account manager, working closely with clients to ensure they are maximizing the features available to them. On the spring bot platform. I learned about this program through one of my makers MBA VIP's so shout out to Sheila of heavenly treats for you. Once I researched spring bot, I knew that I wanted to bring this option to your attention too. So here we go, Georgia. Welcome to the gift biz on wrapped podcast. Thank You so much. Thank you for having me.
I am really excited to dive into all my questions about spring bot. And like I said before, share with everybody what this is all about. But before we do, I have a traditional question that we do on every single show here. And that is to have you describe yourself different than I just did in your intro through a motivational candle. So if you were to create a candle that would speak to you with a color and some type of a quote or a motto, what would your candle look like?
So my candle would probably smell something like a eucalyptus, a very calming scent. I tend to be very calm in stressful situations. So I enjoy having that in my home. It would probably be a white candle and the quote would be something like the pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, but the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.
And I think that's something that I always like to live life by not seeing situations as what's wrong with this, but more of an opportunity to try and fix it. And that's something that we also talk about a lot spring bought as a company. We always see problems as opportunities. We don't say we have an issue or something we need to fix. It's always spun around as a opportunity to improve and learn, Right. To be optimistic about being able to solve whatever the situation is.
Right. I'm just curious. Do you think that people are programmed to be one way or another? I do think it's a mindset. It's hard for me too, because I feel like everyone else in my family is more of the pessimist side. So I don't know where I came out with the optimistic side of seeing situations, but I do think it's something that you learn. You either can be in a bad mood dealing with difficult situations, or you can take them in stride. So I prefer the latter. I agree.
Well, we're going to get along famously because I am also a very optimistic and positive person, but I just think it with some of the people that I work with, I can categorize each and every one in one way or another. And just by observation, cause obviously I'm not in their heads, but I think that they just put up and it's a little bit more of a challenge if they think more glass, half empty type versus glass half fall.
And that's really also interesting to hear that you guys have acknowledged that as a culture in spring bot to really approach things in that certain manner. So I'm already feeling really, really good about that. Okay. Share with me a little bit about your journey and what you did before spring bot and what attracted you to join the company. So I graduated with a PR and marketing degree. So my first job out of college was actually a public relations specialist at a food and beverage company.
So we handled food and beverage clients from all around Atlanta and did their PR and their marketing. So it's similar to kind of where I'm at now in terms of, I worked closely with clients there, but it was a little bit more on the creative side, the PR side, because I would have to write press releases, draft social media posts and things like that. Whereas at spring bot I'm more consulting on those types of
things. I'm consulting on what best practices are for your social media channels, what you should be doing in terms of marketing, how you should position your emails. And I'm not actually doing it for the customer.
And I've, wasn't familiar with customer success until I came to spring bot, but I found that this is really the perfect role for me in terms of it's a combination of kind of what I was doing before and a little bit more of what I want to do, which is the consultative approach to helping businesses grow well. I love what you're saying, because from an experience background, you have done it.
So I think your credibility and your understanding of what your customers are encountering, you know, that more because you've already done that. You've been there versus someone who just comes in and is trained to do a certain task or is told what best practices are. All of that you've actually lived it. So I think bringing in that experience, and I didn't know that about you, so that's impressive. And just another good layer for our conversation here today.
What was it about spring bot that made you look and say, yeah, this is where I want to spend hours and hours and hours of my life. Spring bot wins kind of the awards every year for best places to work. So that's something I was really looking for. Cause I was just looking for, I'm going to spend the majority of my time somewhere working. I want it to be somewhere where I enjoy somewhere where I feel supported somewhere where I can grow.
And I have a clear career path and in my research of spring bot and then throughout the interviews that I did, I met with a lot of people from the team and everyone just talked about the company culture and how supportive the environment was. And so that's really what attracted me to spring bot in the first place was that, And you're still relatively new two and a half years ago. So you've got a lot of things that you can help impact as the company continues to grow.
But spring park has been around for eight years. So we're a much newer company. We're still somewhat in the startup phase, kind of at the cusp of graduating from that startup field. From the time that I started at spring by I look back at what the platform looked like. The email tools we used to offer two and a half years ago are nowhere near what we offer.
Now. We are constantly adding new features and we're constantly improving on certain things that happen with any growing technology business. You know, you're going to experience bugs, you're going to experience glitches. We take the feedback from our customers and work to improve the product. So it's a totally different product that it was when I even started Well in eight years, it is a young company and you're kind of in on the ground floor.
They've got some things up and rolling by the time you entered in, but there's a lot of opportunity. I'm thinking for you to impact based on your past experience and where you see things going in the future, et cetera. So that's really exciting. And that's where one of my favorite aspects of the customer success role is, is that we are really on the front lines.
We are the ones talking to customers day in and day out, and they are not shy about telling us their feedback on what's good and what's not. And it's our responsibility to really take that feedback back to the team. So are you guys hearing this from other customers seems to be something that they're really looking for. And then we take that back to our leadership team, back to the development team so that we can work on making a better product for our customers.
So let's bring this down to the individual business owner level right now, I'm going to pretend like I'm someone coming to you and considering your services. I think that would be a fun way for us to share what spring bot is all about and make it really relatable to our listeners. Okay. So I make dog biscuits. I make them out of my house, my businesses growing.
I have not hired any employees yet because that makes me super nervous, but I'm getting to the point where I'm probably going to need to, I might need to start looking at some help with making my products, but they're all natural. I want to keep control. So right now I am not planning on producing them through a factory, maybe some type of outside production place, but I want to keep control.
I've done social media and kind of dabbling in Facebook and Instagram, no idea where Pinterest would fit in, but I don't have time for it. Anyway, I go out to craft shows and farmer's markets. That's the way I'm usually selling. Yeah, I know I'm supposed to be getting email addresses, but if I'm honest, I haven't done that. Well, maybe I have 20 people on my list. I'm not sure advertising. Why would I advertise? Like Facebook should be able to give me the ads for
free. That's what I hear should be happening. And so I heard about spring bot, people are saying really good things about it, but I don't understand how it would apply to my business. So Georgia, can you help me out? Yes, you are really one of our ideal customers because you're at the cusp of growing beyond what you can do on your own.
So you've done a great job at setting up some foundational tools like getting into those farmer's markets to start growing your brand awareness or selling your products. But you're not going to be able to go to farmer's markets all the time. And where e-commerce is really going to help is that you can do everything from your home and you can continue to sell things online while even while you're at a farmers. You're right.
Because sometimes the weather interrupts and we have a bad show or certain times of the year, we don't even have farmer's markets in my area. So you're absolutely right. Imagine if something like a pandemic happens and you can't, that would Never happen. And all farmer's markets get shut down for a full year. People are relying on the e-commerce side of their business, more and more. And as a small business owner, time is money.
So the biggest thing for you to do is implement some time-saving and cost-effective marketing tools into your marketing plan. You don't have to break your bank, spend thousands of dollars on a agency or hire a full-time person just yet. You can automate a lot of great features to help reach your audience, even when you are not physically at a farmer's market. That sounds interesting to me. And I also forgot to tell you, I do have a Shopify site, but I'm not really doing a lot with it.
I have a couple of products up there. Not much traffic is coming to it. I mean, it works fine. I probably could make it look nicer, but I do also have that, but it's not really doing anything for me either. So when we first take on customers, we really focus on what their site traffic is. The reason for that is site traffic. Pretty much determines how many sales you're going to get. To an extent.
If you have a hundred people visiting your website a month, the amount of people you're going to convert from your website is much lower than if you had 5,000 people coming to your website a month. So we approach all of our consultating on what types of features you should have in your package and what you should really be focusing your money on based on a pyramid. You first have to get people to your website. That is the biggest part of the marketing funnel.
Once you start to drive new people to your website, then you need to start doing things like collecting emails, sending them automated emails, to continue to engage with them as they move up through the marketing funnel. So the marketing funnel starts out at the traffic level and kind of dives into the retargeting level where you're following people around. This is where, when you leave a website, you might get an email from them or you might get advertising on Facebook. That's the next step.
Once you've built that traffic up and then the final step is to convert. So it takes a while to move people through the marketing funnel. Most, most consumers require 12 to 15 touch points before they actually convert. So it's important that you have a lot of automated tools in place to help reach them when you're not available to send them an email personally, or again, be at the farmer's market to really convince them to make that purchase.
Okay. So now I'm going to revert back to myself because that was really hard during that kind of role-playing because I wanted to say some other things too. Okay. So now let's analyze this person. I think this could be interesting. So you were talking specifically about e-commerce, but this person who makes dog biscuits also has a lot of face-to-face presence. And gosh, I saw this in 20, 20 all the time, like people were caught unaware because they were out face-to-face, that's what they love.
That's part of the reason why they have their businesses, because interacting with people, getting that immediate payback, because they collect the money. There's no shipping, you know, so they miss all of that. But now most people understand that they should have an e-commerce element to it as well. For all the reasons we already know. I don't have to restate them here because now things are starting up again. And we are going back out to shows and farmer's markets and all of that.
Could I collect email addresses in my booth and add them into my email list? You should Absolutely do that. Okay. As long as I've told them that, that's what I'm doing. And I think the best way to do it is to offer some kind of prize and say, enter your email address, subscribe to our email list and have a chance to win something, because they're going to be more likely to put it in their email address if they have a little bit of an incentive.
And they're also probably not going to say no to you, to your face. If they're looking at purchasing your product and you ask them for their email address, they're most likely when it's face to face, they're going to give it to you, right? Well, when they're a customer, they probably are going to give it. And legally you can add them to your email list. They've been a customer of yours, kind of thinking of the old cam spam act type thing.
But if you do a sweepstakes, then you just make sure that you say enter the sweepstakes and then you'll also be added. So you'll see all the latest styles and new promotions, but somehow you have to have it stated somewhere that you're actually adding it. You just can't take lists of people because you have their email and add them in. You have to tell them what you're doing, right? Cause We also really want to focus on a healthy subscriber list.
You don't want to do anything like we've seen customers come in with a huge email list and they say that they bought the email addresses. And then we asked them what their open rates are, unsubscribed rates and their open rates are at 1%, which is well below the industry average, which is usually around 15 to 20% on the open rates. And then the unsubscribed rates were really high.
So when you get into a place where you're sending a lot of emails to people that are not engaging, so you have a really unhealthy list. It's really hard to get out of that because email providers like Gmail see you as Fanny. So now even people who subscribe to your newsletter might not be getting your emails because they might be going straight to the spam folder because you've been sending emails to a bad list. So that's something we always say to avoid. I don't buy lists first off for sure.
Cause you don't know the quality of the list and honestly, a hundred dollar email list that is quality people who are really interested in your product is way better than a 5,000 email list that you have no idea who those people are. Absolutely. For sure. That's the case. All right. So I have some emails and I'm going to attract them more. The shows that's really smart. And I, it's not that hard for me to do and let's face it. We've said this before.
We've talked a lot about email marketing here already Georgia, but it's worth just to saying again, that people are very protective now over their emails. So if you just say, Hey, let me add you to my newsletter. They know darn well, it's not as adding to the newsletter. Now you're going to promote to them. They're going to get sales campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to do something that entices them and makes them interested. It's worth it enough for them to give the email.
Correct. And going back to the e-commerce side, what you would want to launch on your Shopify site is a pop-up with some sort of incentive. So when people land on the website, they have a chance to subscribe for 10% off their first purchase or something along those lines. And I don't know about you, but I find myself when I'm shopping online, I get that pop-up immediately.
And I always subscribe because in the back of my mind, when I'm shopping around, I know that I'm going to get a discount on those products. So I know that they're going to be cheaper than what I'm looking at. So I'm always more incentivized to go ahead and subscribe to a pop-up cause I can always unsubscribe. I decide that I'm actually not going to purchase one of the products. It's nice to have that in your back pocket as you're learning about.
And I know that there's a lot of resistance against pop-ups because people feel that they're very intrusive, but I got to tell you, I have a pop-up on the gift biz on wrapped site. Cause I actually have two different sites and a lot of people opt in. I was surprised. Cause I thought, you know what? I'll put it up. I'll see what happens. And now that it's up, I mean, it's been there now for a while and people are opting in every single day.
I'm so glad you brought that up because we get customers all the time that come on board and say, I don't like pop-ups I don't want to be that annoying marketer. That's in their face. As soon as the customer lands on the website, I think the customer's going to leave immediately if they get a pop-up from me. But I always say, you know, give it a try at least for a month. You'll see, popups are not as annoying as you think they are. And you can also delay the pop-up.
I mean, I think that what I don't like are the popups that the second you land on the site, you don't even know if you are in the place you want to be before a pop-up comes in. So you can delay it like even 10, 15 seconds. Let someone get a look a little bit for a second and then let it come in so that it feels a lot less intrusive that way let's walk this through again for understanding of our pet biscuit person.
So she's not done a lot already with email marketing yet, but she has a perfect way. And she's feeling comfortable now that she'll collect email addresses two questions really quickly. And I know some of this might be covered through spring bot or some of it might be covered in whoever you're using for your website, for example. So let's just keep with Shopify because that is my all time. Number one recommended space popups are put together through your website, right? Not through Springboks.
So that is something we offer through spring buy it's. One of the first features we encourage customers to get turned on. It's the pop-up and then the automated emails. So if you already have one through Shopify, big commerce, whichever site you're in, you can keep that. Or would we want to convert over to spring bots because of tracking or something. We suggest switching over to spring blots one to keep everything in one place.
That is something that small business owners are looking for is kind of that's our big pride and joy is the all-in-one marketing place. So they don't have to go to Shopify to edit their pop-up and then go to spring about to edit their automated emails. It's kind of all done in one platform. So that's what we usually recommend, but they can absolutely keep their own pop-up if they like the way it looks and they want to keep it there. All right.
And again, I mean, this is the big thing about spring bot. I don't know that we really formally explained or clarified all of this. I mean, we said it in fancy words, but what I'm seeing you correct me if I'm wrong, Georgia is the really cool thing about spring bot is you don't have to go to your website all the time versus social media platforms to post versus a blog area, to put your blog in versus an ad center to run your ads. Like those are all different segments.
You can come to spring bot and do everything in one place. Correct? So with spring bot, we would hook up to the backend of your Shopify. So we would actually pull in all the reporting from your Shopify site.
So even if you wanted to see how many orders you got that day in general, you can see that through the Springbok platform, you can pretty much do every single thing in terms of marketing through spring bop, the pop-up, the automated emails, the advertising, Facebook advertising, email creation, sending your email newsletters through our system posting to social media. So it really is kind of the all in one encompassing platform. So let's dive into a little bit more of that.
Someone lands on my website, I have a pop-up they sign up for my email list. I also then am attracting emails. So these are physical. Some people still do like the paper list type thing. Some people will do a QR code where it will automatically add them to the list. But if it's physical, how do we get those into our email list over at spring pot? Do we hand type them all in? Yeah, you can hand type them in or put them in an Excel sheet and then just upload that Excel sheet.
And so you can do it one by one in the spring about platform, but I would recommend just putting all the emails into a spreadsheet and keeping that handy and then uploading that spreadsheet every week or every month. Okay. So then I'm flipping a little bit back and forth, but we're at the point of collecting email addresses and every single email address, as long as you're collecting quality emails is a prospective customer. Some of them might be customers. Some of them are prospects.
So when did they come in? Oh, this was my other question just really quickly, you know, that pop pop-up where someone gets 10% off their first order. Is it in spring bot with your system or is it also with, let's go back to Shopify that once they've used that once they won't ever see it again, when they come up, Correct. So popups, no matter where the pop-up is hosted, they all kind of work in the same way where it's based on cookie data.
So as long as the customer isn't clearing their cookies, like if they cleared their cache and cookies, then when they visit the website again, it's going to think that they're a brand new customer because they don't have the cookie that tells the system that you've already seen. The pop-up once. Another way is to go in an incognito browser. So if you aren't an incognito browser, you're always going to get a pop-up because you're always going to be viewed as a brand new customer.
And the way I kind of feel about that, is there going to be people who are going to try and override any system you have, and it's a waste of time to worry about them. Like if someone keeps wanting to get their 10% off, whatever, like spend your time on attracting new customers, if that person's just going to do that. Oh, well, At the end of the day, it's still an order.
So as long as you're still making money off of that order, it's not worth your time to really chase them down and say, you can't use that coupon code, but we typically, it becomes an issue. We tell customers to use unique coupon codes so that everyone can only get one coupon code in use at one time.
And then in the backend of Shopify, you can actually example if the code was just going to be something generic, like welcome 10 for 10% off, we always tell customers to put limit one use per customer. And that way they would have to sign up with a new email address every time. Because if they try to check out what that email address and that coupon code, it's going to tell them if they've already used it. All right. And we're not going to worry about that. Right? Cause we're optimists.
We believe that people do what they should do because they understand the situation and they want to support small businesses. All right. So now I'm not sending out very many emails. I know I should be, but it's just one more thing to do. How could spring bot help me with an email campaign more about spring pat and how it can help you in your business coming your way? Right after a quick break. Hi, I'm Anita community manager for the ribbon print companies, customer support program.
You'll also find me when I accompany suit to exhibit at trade shows where we get to meet many of our existing customers in person and introduce new people to the world of ribbons printing. It's always fun. Seeing the reaction people have during a demonstration, when a ribbon is created with their company name, a related image or their own message that they helped to design on the spot. They're always amazed that within seconds their message will print right before their eyes.
Of course, that's rewarding for me too, as I get to enjoy the smiles and the excitement that this is even a possibility. And that's when they realize how easy it would be to do this in their stores too.
So can you, you can personalize ribbon for your customers to celebrate birthdays anniversaries or whatever you like, but we're also seeing a lot of our customers use the ribbon printer for their branding by adding logo, ribbon or labels to products or for flavor or scent designations to our number. One comment we hear when we're out with our customers is that the ribbon printer is a game-changing addition to any business, large or small. I'm proud to be part of the ribbon print company team.
And I'm even more thrilled that we're there to ensure our customers, that they can use their printer with ease all while bringing in additional revenue along the way to learn more, go to the ribbon print company.com. So we do have a creative team in house that handles email campaign creation for our customers. Whether you want once a month, we can go in there and create an email campaign, really consult with you on, are you running a sale this month? It's February.
Maybe we should do something for Valentine's day this month. And we can build that from start to finish design it, make it look really nice and think of the subject line best time to send it so we can do all of that for our customers. That really just don't have the time to send an email campaign out, or we could Do it ourselves either Way, or you could do it yourself.
And that's where I'm not on that creative team that would actually build out the email campaigns for our customers, but you'll have an account manager and the account manager would be someone like me, who we could get on a call and I can show you exactly how to build the email in spring bot. I can walk you through best practices. We can talk through things, but it would be you the store owner actually building out and sending that email. You have the flexibility one way or another.
Correct. Okay. So what about going back to someone's brand new to the list? So I've either added them in manually myself or they've come on the site and entered in their email through the pop-up. What about some type of a welcome campaign? Pretty much. So once the customer lands on the website, they get the pop-up they subscribe, then they will automatically get a automated welcome email. That's also set up in spring bots automatically is all set up for you at when you start.
So the welcome email, you really want to focus on the messaging in the welcome email. It's kind of your first introductory message to your consumer base. So you want to keep it short and sweet. You want to keep a lot of nice imagery in that email because they're more likely to click on that email and go back to your website. If there's pretty picture or nice brand imagery, How do you feel about the double opt-in, where they have to confirm and verify their email address?
We do not recommend that to anyone unless they are required to do double opt-in. So we have some customers in the UK or Europe, for example, and that is a requirement. Yeah, that's part of that GDPR, Right? GDPR compliant. We really don't recommend it unless you're having issues with your subscriber base and you're getting way too many fake emails or something like that.
And you really just want to focus and hone in on the people who are going to double opt in, but we found that often you won't get a lot of new email subscribers that way, because they will just forget to go in and click. I just think about the fact, you know, how so many people have email addresses that they only use for promotional things. And so then when you want to send emails to them regularly, they're not going to get them because they don't go into an email box that they look at.
Correct. So I guess that's just testing on the backend. When you start seeing what your open rates look like. If you feel like your audience tends to fall in that category, then maybe you test it and see or something like that. And it's something that you can go back on. So if you do need to do it for a little bit, you can always go back and not collect, do double opt-in in the future. We've gone back and forth with it. I don't know which one is right or not.
Right. I really don't have an opinion on it. I just is a question that came up. So on the email side, then you can do the automated campaign. So when somebody joins the list, it can be like a getting to know you sequence. It can be just the delivery of the coupon code. If that's what you're doing to get the 10% off or whatever, and that can automatically go. And then you can also do monthly letters. So with spring bot, I can do two different things. I can do the automated campaign.
If someone signs up for the 10%, then the email will deliver that coupon code that they'll use, and then maybe a welcome campaign or whatever those automated things would be for a new customer. So we can do those timed campaigns that then are for anybody who signs up for an email and they get this first sequence. And then you can also do the monthly emails where you can get help and direction with it, or you can do it yourself, correct? Yeah, but this is just one facet.
And I think we've spent a lot of time here. So I'm going to speed this up a little bit, but this is a point where a lot of people are still. So I thought it's worth the time here that I really think it is something that is relevant because we'll get customers sometimes that are manually sending abandoned cart notifications to customers they'll manually go in there and do it.
And they don't know that they can just automate those types of emails and build out a specific flow for if they abandoned to this item, they get this abandoned cart email. And if they are a brand new customer, they'll get this type of abandoned cart email. So I do think it's worth the time spent on talking about Wonderful. So that's a whole nother topic is if someone comes in, they start adding things to their cart and then they get
distracted. The kids start fighting, who knows what happens and they jump off the site. They might even forget that this is something that they really wanted. So that abandoned cart email is really helpful. And I know that abandoned carts recapture, what is it like 70, 80% of the sales. I mean, it's a lot.
And we always suggest having at least two abandoned cart emails and maybe even three, but because some customers will purposefully abandoned the car because they know that they're going to get a coupon code. So that's something that you'll start to see. People will wait for it, but we always suggest having a few different ones. We would not offer the coupon code right off the bat.
See if they purchase just regular, full price, just keep top of mind, keep reminding them that they have that product in the back. And to your point, product dependent, because you might have margins on some products where you'd be willing to make an additional discounted offer and some where you won't. And certain times of year, I'm thinking too, because as things get closer to let's say Christmas, and if it's a Christmas themed product, you don't want to keep that inventory for a whole year.
So things like that, and that's all business strategy, but let's move on to talk about a couple of other things that spring bot can help us out with the two things I want to focus on are blogging and then ads. So let's start with blogging. This has been a huge topic in the podcast. In fact, I recently did a blog challenge to our listeners and I have a whole episode showing and highlighting the winners of the blog challenge.
So we have talked a lot about the value of blogs for product based businesses, which quite honestly a lot people don't think about. So we've kind of gotten to the point talking about why this could be helpful, but I think the real stumbling point is I don't have time to write the articles or how do I put them on my website or how do we even do this? So where can springboard help us with?
Well, yeah, the great thing about blogging is blogging tools are often free, but there are a few more budget friendly options. Like the one spring bot offers that can help you track the performance and effectiveness of your blog a little bit better so that you're not wasting time just writing content. That's actually not getting any engagement. So the biggest advantage of blogs is that it really helps with your SEO.
If you write a blog, post titled 10 things to do, You got to use our pet person pet biscuit. Yes. Let's use that example. So for the dog biscuits, maybe we want to write an article about how to train your dog and how to reward them with the dog biscuits. So you can do a quick Google search just to see when you start typing in how to train your dog. It'll automatically start to try to complete your sentence by pulling in what people are searching the most.
So you automatically know kind of what you should title your blog posts for Google SEO purposes. But when you publish that blog, now, when people start searching for that kind of stuff, your website is going to pop up. So not only are you just educating your customers on something that they're interested in, you're also embedding your products within that blog article. So now they've come to your website. Now they might sign up for your email list because they liked that blog posts.
They want to hear more. And then everything kind of goes back to the marketing funnel. They just keep kind of going through that marketing funnel steps, they get re-targeted with automated emails or your email newsletters or advertising until they eventually purchased. Really. This is another attraction tool to use the power of Google. When people are searching all of a sudden, there's a blog article where you're providing the solution to whatever the topic is here.
We're talking about dog training, and then they end up jumping over to your site. After they've read the art or the article sitting on your site, right? It sits on your website already. But the thing that I really like about what spring bot offers is the issue is consistency. And having the time to actually write articles so you can write your own articles. But then I also saw where you have a licensed blog library, right? Where we can pull up.
If we see articles that are relevant to our audience, you always want them to relate to your product some way an extension or something. That's interesting to your audience. You can take already written articles, right? That are already then have the right keywords and all of that Georgia. Right? So we know that the idea of having to sit down and write these articles can seem really daunting and can take some time.
So if you're looking for more of a hands-off approach to blogging, we have a content library with tons of prewritten licensed blogs, like you were mentioning, and you can go in there, it'll prompt you to update a few things like the main kind of blurb up at the top. You can include your products. So the articles kind of written out.
For example, we might have our article already written about training a pet, and then all you would really need to do is just embed your treats and your products in there. And that would only take a few minutes. We can take the base article and adjust it as we like Adjust it slightly. So since they're pre-written and they're already licensed the way they are, that you can't change everything, but the program will kind of prompt you to change the things that you should change.
So is this a way then that your article is going to look a little bit different than someone else who might've accessed and wants to use that article also, Right? That's exactly it. Okay, perfect. And these are already all the keywords. All the SEO has already been thought through, Right? They're already really optimized for that. And you could use a mixture on your site,
right? Like, let's say there's one month, you have no time to write an article, but you know, it's super important that you stay consistent because you've trained your people to be watching for an article all the time. Plus, I'm not sure if this happens. I think so. But when we do emails or blog articles, our website traffic increases like there's a direct correlation, so you want to stay consistent.
So if you have a month, when you just can't do it, maybe four of the 12 months, if you're on a monthly schedule, are these articles that are licensed and already written for you. It doesn't have to be all or nothing on one side or another. But I see that as a huge, Yeah. When customers say they really need to drive traffic to their website, but they don't have the budget to spend a lot on advertising. Blogging is the best tool to use. All right. So let's now approach advertising.
And again, I mean, I know the audience, well, like some people will do a little bit of advertising, but partying with money to do a test is scary for a lot of people. I mean, we do have people who are running Facebook ads or boosting ads with all the Facebook changes. I'm hearing that that may be a better option than it used to be. I don't know. We'll see how that goes out. It's still so new, but what do you say about, well, I guess we should talk about social, all told posting and advertising,
right? Cause you cover and help with Yeah. So when it comes to social media, just posting to your social channels is also a great way to drive new traffic to your website. There are so many people on Facebook and Instagram, Facebook, and Instagram tend to be the best social media tools to use for e-commerce businesses. That's where most people look to find products that they enjoy. And if you're posting to social media, it doesn't really require any budget.
You don't have to, like you said, boost your posts. You just have to be consistent.
But the one thing that I see when it comes to social media and advertising is if you don't have high quality lifestyle images, your social media posts and your ads are not going to perform as well as if you take the time to invest in a little bit of photography first, because if you're just posting pictures of the dog biscuit, just on a blank white background, it's not as enticing as a picture of a cute puppy, getting fed a treat or something along those lines.
So you really want to paint a picture for your audience. Always Totally agree. And I'm just thinking through, like, I would just go and look at all the adorable puppies, right? And if this was your business, I'm thinking of a couple of people within my community who directly relate to pets. You can have your customers provide photos too, of there who doesn't want to share an adorable photo of their dog with your product and get promoted on your channel.
Exactly. There's so much opportunity there and you're right. I could just go through and look at all of that. It's kind of like cute baby pictures. You ended up following the page cause you want to see more cute dog pictures. You like dogs. And then you keep seeing these treats just, it comes inundated in your mind that you need to purchase these treats because you keep seeing them over and over again.
And then one thing, when it comes to advertising still on the high quality lifestyle images front, when some customers start to do advertising for the first time, they'll see their website. Bounce rate is not great. Usually when we see a high bounce rate, it's because your website has all your products just on a white background. And that's the first thing that they see when they get to your homepage.
The first thing that they see when they get to your homepage should be one of these lifestyle images. That's really going to paint the picture of who you are as a brand. And that's going to really take your advertising dollars much farther because people won't get to your website and bounce away immediately. They'll stick around long enough to get the pop-up. And that's kind of where it all starts.
I think this is an important point too, because this is where I think a lot of people say, well, I've put money towards ads, but it hasn't worked. Advertising helps bring somebody over to where they can purchase the product. And to your point, if you see website traffic increase, but it's bouncing. That doesn't mean the ads aren't working. That means the ads are working, but there's something on your website that is a barrier to the sale. So all these things work together,
right? I've started calling this Georgia, your sales channel panel because they do all work together. Like craft shows ended up collecting emails, which ended up getting people on your list, which ends up getting people to your website, which then social media. They also start following you on social and all of it works together. And this is just another perfect example that if things aren't going right on your website, it falls apart, right? I like what you're saying here.
So let me repeat and see if I've gotten this right, Georgia is, if someone comes to your website, it should be interesting and intriguing for them to want to look further. So that's where you're saying there should be a lifestyle photo so that they clearly understand what your product is. So it can't just be any kind of photo it should have and relate to your product and have your product in it. And that's more of the homepage and whatever else you're going to put on the home page.
And then when people want to know more, let's say they jump over to a shop now page, or maybe you have featured products, a little lower on the home page, then it's okay to have the individual product specific photos. Is that right? Hit the nail on the head. Okay. So at the very least, so I don't want to overwhelm anybody who like they have a site that the second you get there, all you see is boxes of product, a little bit of adjustment. Like you want that first banner image.
If you will, to be a feel, good image, a lifestyle image where people could put themselves in that picture and see using And your product. Exactly. And you can tell what the brand voice is through these lifestyle images. So it's something you definitely, and you don't have to hire a photographer. I mean, these days, the I-phones shoot great pictures. So you really just need to paint the scene and take some pictures, do a little editing and then get those images up on your website.
Absolutely agreed. Okay. And so at what point would you say in a business's evolution, would it be time for them to start running ad? So two different types of ads. One would be your traffic ads. Those you should start as soon as possible. It takes a lot of time to really see the results from traffic ads. It can be really frustrating for e-commerce businesses because it's not that immediate sale. You don't see, oh, I started ads at $5 a day. I got 10 conversions.
It really doesn't happen overnight like that. So if you're trying to build your traffic, I suggest having all those foundational tools in place like the lifestyle images on your website to start building up your social media, following for free, have the pop-up ready to go have the automated emails, all set, and then start putting money into advertising on the traffic side for retargeting.
We don't typically recommend retargeting ads until you've built up enough traffic for the ads to really work and be worth it. I think somewhere around the 3000 unique visitors, mark is usually where we would want to be when we suggest retargeting ads.
And as your traffic grows, your budget on the retargeting side will grow as well to make sure you're reaching all the people that are coming to your website and leaping without purchasing, not to say that if you have less than 3000, you're not going to see a conversion from retargeting ads. You definitely still can. And I see it all the time.
But if you really want to do you have a small marketing budget and you need to know where to focus the budget, the most it's always going to be traffic first. So traffic means getting attention, getting visible, having people even know that you exist. So that's bringing people over to the website and those ads are less expensive too, than if you're doing like a direct sale or promotion, they go through Farther.
You'll see that traffic ads show a lot more impressions and get a lot more clicks than the return. And you will get some sales because people will come over and they'll see, and they'll be interested. And they'll peak. I'll get the pop-up. Everything will work well together.
Once they get on the site, if they just get one traffic ad and then they come to the website and there's nothing else, I'll kind of keep them engaged and keep them coming back multiple times, then it'll be harder to get that sale. So that's why we always recommend having as many retargeting features kind of already set in place so that when they do come to your website, everything's automated.
And I would suggest that some of this advertising that you're doing here, where you're just bringing people over to your website is a continual refueling of your funnel too. So, and if you have that working in the background, then that's helpful. Cause you're always getting new eyeballs. In addition to other things that you're doing, maybe social media posts, et cetera, but you're always getting new people over to your site. And then it's their choice. Is this right for me?
Am I interested or not? But you don't have to do anything. It's automatic. How much help do you give? And of course it varies based on how much people want to invest in all that. But how much help do you give us for our social media advertising? So we pretty much will manage the advertising for our customers. So there's two different types. We do have that creative team that builds emails. They also can handle ads directly in your Facebook business manager for you.
So they would build out the audiences run those ads for you. The other side is the ads that I manage, which are called just regular web retargeting ads. And then they also can serve on Facebook and Instagram.
It's just a little bit different because you're not directly in Facebook business manager, but our customer success team would handle the majority of the making sure the ads are performing well, setting up the audiences, making budget recommendations when it's needed saying, you know, we're getting a little ad fatigue, these ads up and running for awhile. I can see that they're starting to not perform as well.
It's time to switch up the imagery, time to switch up the incentive in the ad, that kind of thing. And I got to say, I mean, the value of using a service like yours and I'm talking specifically for advertising right now is people who are working for you on your account or me on my account. However, I want to say it is also seen what other of your clients are doing.
So they're getting this group of experience and knowledge of what's going on that then can serve as recommendations for what you should be doing, not sharing other people's information.
Obviously that's all confidential, but it's this base level of knowledge that if you are a solo preneur and doing it all yourself, the only thing you're seeing are your results, We can kind of see What's worked in the past for similar brands and we'll know that, okay, this type of marketing tactic works well for doc treat companies or worked and now isn't anymore. So stop doing that. Let's do something different that is working. You have your finger on the pulse of all of that.
Where as again, the business owner who's has so many hats to wear. We may never see that. So that would be more of a waste of money versus helpful expenses. Really overall, I come out of the advertising agency type industry. What I see spring bot as in my mind is an agency for small business owners.
Like you've got everything under the same umbrella, like all the different types of services that I need to build and grow my business apart, obviously from not product development or order fulfillment, but everything else is Yeah. And we get customers sometimes that just got burned by an agency. They spent thousands of dollars with them a month and they didn't, weren't seeing the results to be able to continue to pay that thousand dollar a month cost that usually agencies have.
Cause they have a very small customer base. They only have a few clients that they work with and that's what they do all day long. When really when you're a small business, you might not need that level of agency style work. You might just need somewhere like spring bot where you're paying a much plus management fee, much smaller kind of costs for the platform itself.
And you're still getting a level of support that you need in terms of running your ads, just consulting on what the best practices are, what you should be doing. So of course, everyone listening is saying, okay, so what do the numbers look like? What would be an investment if I wanted to look at spring bot? So can you give us some parameters? Yeah. So it starts at 1 99 for kind of our base package. That includes unlimited automated emails. So we talked about the welcome.
We talked about the abandoned cart. We didn't talk about all the other automated emails that we have, which are ones that you want to use to gather, repeat customers. So when someone purchases from you, maybe after getting that welcome email, they purchase for the first time you don't just want to stop there. You want to send them an automated email a few months later and see if they can come back. So we have emails like a win-back email.
That's automatically set to go to customers that purchase from you, but it's been a certain amount of time and they haven't come back to purchase. Again. We have back in stock type of automated emails, The key word there is automated. So that once it gets set up, you're not having, like, we wouldn't need to provide you with, oh, these are the people who purchased three months ago and haven't come back. It's all in the system works behind the scenes for you,
Correct? Yeah. I would like an anniversary email, for example, even if you start with Springbok today, if you set up our anniversary email, which is it's automatically set up to go out to customers that purchase from you a year ago for the time. So for example, if I purchased from a dog biscuit a year ago today, and the store owner turns on the anniversary email, I will automatically get the anniversary medals that you purchased from us a year ago today. How are things going?
Check out our new products and get another 10% off your next purchase. So I'm someone that I was not on their email list. I purchased from them a year ago today, but I haven't heard from them since haven't really thought about them. And I got this automated email and now I'm reminded of that product. But another thing that a lot of people don't know is automated emails work on a different set of email rules. You do not have to be on an email list to receive an automated email.
So the email is captured because they've placed an order through your system, but they're not officially getting monthly emails because they never signed up for them. Although what you just described is acceptable with an anniversary, Correct? Yeah. So things like, for example, an abandoned cart, you still get abandoned cart emails, even though you did not subscribe to the newsletter yet, or you haven't purchased yet. So automated emails do work on their own set of rules.
So it's a great way to keep retargeting customers that purchased in the past. Try to get them to come back in, even though they're not receiving your monthly newsletters. So 1 99 a month includes unlimited emails. And I got to say just what you described there, several sales, depending on your product, we'll pay for the 1 99 a month, Right? It usually does pay for itself, especially if you take the time to really focus on that pop-up first.
And they all these automated emails really setting them up to be high quality emails with good incentives, targeting the right types of people. And then you can kind of set it and forget it. You don't really have to touch those automated emails or the pop-up again. But I do recommend going back and every six months or so, just refreshing things like subject lines or the types of images you're using Is that what's included in the 1 99 a month. I just want to give them a few of these packages.
So the 1 99 a month includes the ability to send your email newsletters up to 5,000 subscribers. It also includes all the reporting. So reporting on how many new customers you have versus existing customers. We purchase demographic data on all the customers. So as customers are coming in, you'll be able to start to target them based on what country or state that they're located in. You can start sending emails based on their level of status. Like, are they a VIP customer?
Have they purchased from you over five times in the past year? So you can start to use those segments in your email campaign. So you're not just blasting out information to your whole list. You know, once your list grows to a certain extent, you really want to start giving people specific content based on how they've engaged with your store in the past.
So that's also included in that 1 99, the ability to schedule out your social media posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is included as well. What about blogging? The blogging is not included. So the blogging would start at 99 a month so that I have to double check, but I believe it gets you the three licensed articles a month. So 99 would get you three licensed articles, plus the ability to create as many blog posts as you
want. In addition to that, Okay. I'm thinking probably because everybody has different situations going on, that the best thing would be to go and look at the site or wherever you're going to direct us to. Cause that's going to be my next question for you, but to look at their specific situation and see how spring bot could be a fit. If what we have said has enticed people to learn more.
So what would someone do if they want to discover and have a little bit of a conversation, or just look at the services available and see if this could fit for them. So if you go onto the spring bot website, you can kind of look at the pricing just to see what it would look like. What types of features are available. Cause there's things we didn't even touch, like SMS, text messaging, and certain things like that.
So there's tons of features that you can add on to your base package and you would pretty much just request a demo. So on that website, you can click the button that says request a demo. And someone from our sales team will set up, maybe a screen share, call, just show you exactly what the platform would look like and talk you through based on where you're at, where your traffic is at, what features they recommend you start with in your package.
Fabulous. To me, it sounds like a breath of fresh air thinking that, you know, if I make an investment like this, I'll have lots of things covered for me in my business that I can't possibly do right now. You know? And the goal is always not to just spend more money for zero return it's to invest money so that you make more sales over and above your investment. I always think like when people hear 1 99, it's like, well, $200 a month.
Like I can't afford to do that while you can, if it brings you in 500 or a thousand dollars new businesses. And then if you're saving time by automating some of these features, you can spend that extra time that you have on other parts of your business. And then that will help grow you even more when you have the time to spend on that. Absolutely. Couldn't agree with you more. So anyone who's interested, absolutely. Jump over to Springbok. See what it's all about.
See the things that we didn't discuss here and requesting a demo. It doesn't cost anything right, Georgia. It does not cost anything. Yeah. So if You are interested, definitely check it out. And even if you're not sure if the time is now for you, go take a look because then, you know, what's available. Maybe it's going to be a little bit later in the fall. Doesn't matter when, but go check it out.
So you see what the potential is and then you can plan it in for later if necessary, or you're going to come back and listen to this podcast again when it's time. So Georgia, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you going through a lot of what spring bot offers to give us a feel along with a lot of amazing business best practices. So I really appreciate your generosity and being on the show today. Thank you so much for having me.
We love to help customers and e-commerce businesses grow. So this is what we love to do. It was a great step in that direction today. Thanks again. Awesome. Thank you so much. Interesting. Yes. We've been talking a lot these days about having a sales channel panel in place that includes all the things face-to-face and virtual shows, networking, social media, email marketing, your website spring bot could be a solution for you to better work through all your channels.
That's why I wanted to cover the options available during the show to hear more about the sales channel panel, go back over to tips and talk episode 27. That's just a short bit ago where I give you all the detail behind this strategy. Thanks so much for spending time with me today. If you'd like to show support for the podcast, please leave a rating and review. That means so much and helps the show get seen by more makers. So it's a great way to pay it forward and now be safe and well.
And I'll see you again next week on the gift biz on wrapped podcast. I want to make sure you're familiar with my free Facebook group called gift is free. It's a place where we all gather and our community to support each other. Got a really fun post in there. That's my favorite of the week.
I have to say where I invite all of you to share what you're doing to show pictures of your product, to show what you're working on for the week to get reaction from other people and just for fun, because we all get to see the wonderful products that everybody in the community is making my favorite posts every single week, without doubt. Wait, what aren't you part of the group already, if not make sure to jump over to Facebook and search for the group gift biz breeze don't delay.
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