Transform Your Online Presence: Stop Losing Leads and Boost Conversions

It is one o'clock and I'm here today with my special guest. I'll tell you about him in just a second.

You are here for Stop Losing Online Leads, How to Fix Your Website and CRM. I'm Bob Bibbs, the retail doctor. You probably know about me because you are following me on Facebook or LinkedIn and you're on my newsletter or you've gone to my website or you've read one of my thousands of blogs or all kinds of other things. I'm kind of a big deal as my sign says there, I'm kind of a big deal.

And one of the ways that I become a big deal is having amazing vendor partners and relationships with professionals who know more than I do. And while I have used HubSpot for probably 15 years or so, I needed to upgrade and went to Ben's company, No Bounds, No Bounds Digital. And he's a platinum, right? Platinum consultant. So you're dealing with the best of the best. And I'm going to ask Ben to introduce himself.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Bob. I am honored to work with you and grateful for the opportunity to speak with your audience. I'm sure we got a bunch of sharp cookies here on the webinar, and I'm really grateful for some of that initial feedback that you gave to say like, hey, what is it that we actually want to talk about here? because you know what? I could drone on about a lot of things, Bob, I bet you feel my pain.

But really what we heard from everyone that registered is we want to talk how to convert website visitors into buyers. That's first and foremost, how to fix and improve basic website functionality, and also how to create effective email marketing strategies. Now I'm going to throw in a little curve ball there too. I was really surprised that there was a fair number of people too, who spoke about like, how do I engage and retain existing customers using my web presence?

And you people, I think that that is a very astute and thoughtful observation as well. So I want to cover all those things here in this program and I want to make it interactive as well. So, hey, if you've got some questions, put them in the chat. There's going to be an opportunity for Q&A later. I'm going to try to keep us all from falling asleep. I know that Bob's going to do some things here as well to make sure that we're engaged in this as a conversation as we go through this webinar.

So thank you everybody for coming. I really appreciate it. Super grateful for it. Let's talk. Let me give you some tidbits here just about converting websites into buyers straight away since that was such a- Hold on, you're getting ahead of me.

I want to launch a little poll here first all right all time all right everybody how confident are you about your website type it in real quick go go go go go go go quick quick quick quick quick come on come on come on stay with me keep going keep going, What I like about this is I don't have all of them saying help. So we're at, all right, all right, all right. I'm going to end the poll and show the results that you got something to see. So now you can go on. So that's good. I think so.

Okay. And a healthy attitude to have that, you know what? We could, we could always use some, some improvement. That sort of idea that maybe we're not the worst in the planet, but I know there's always ways to get better at whatever we're doing. Fantastic.

All right. Let me give you some tips and tricks of some things that you can do to convert website visitors into buyers that you may or may not already been doing. As I say, Bob's audience are smart people. So some of these may not be news to you, but you know what? Based upon some of the feedback about really getting some nuts and bolts of website stuff in order, I think at least one of these is going to be something that you can take back and implement.

One is shopping cart abandonment. If you are not already following up with people, if you have e-commerce enabled that are putting products in their cart and then leaving them there, you need to get that set up. There's a couple of reasons why. First off, you already have these folks on the hook and that is a lot easier to convert those people into actual paying customers than it is to create new demand, find new customers.

They've already taken a very proactive step in that process to becoming a customer. So definitely set up shopping cart abandonment. You need those tools in place to be able to throw out some emails once people put that in their cart. A couple of thoughts on those shopping cart abandonment emails. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of discounting all the time, but this may be one area that you want to at least test it, consider it.

But bonuses, incentives, that's absolutely something that you can consider here with shopping cart abandonment emails, at least getting in front of them. Because you know what? People are busy. I put stuff in shopping carts all the time. And then, you know what? Some people say I have a short attention span cookies. You know, you just move on to different things. Like that's life these days.

And so you definitely need to remind people that they were in process of doing this transaction. And it's a smart idea for them to do so. All right. So that's number one. Number two, you're going to hate me. People don't like this from a user experience perspective, but an exit intent pop-up. When people leave, stop them. Try to stop them. and and make again there's something worthwhile incentivize them.

Reinforce their smart decision that they're making by making a purchase online it could be anything it could be like before you go hey what five tips on how to decorate your home for the holidays it could be it could be a number of things it doesn't necessarily mean a hard sell right all you really want to do is get them into your system to get something that gets their email into your system That's the mother load. All right.

100%. If you're not paying for ads, and that's a rabbit hole in and of itself, but retargeting is one of the areas that I think most people can set up and be successful. It's not going to cost you a lot of money. It's not going to take a lot of management time. It's something that you can very likely DIY or work with somebody, have it set up, and then just manage that day-to-day. So definitely look at that. And you all know what those are like.

You go look at a website and suddenly the ad shows up on every other page you've got. You can set those to be within an hour, a day, two hours. There's a lot of ways you could do it. But if you're selling something that has any chance of somebody having to have a considered purchase, it costs more than a little bit. Clearly, we're getting this from the guru right here. That's number three. Number four. And you know your sales cycle too. So be mindful of that when you're setting these things up.

If somebody was on your website two weeks ago and that's eight days too long for them to make a buying decision for your product, you know what? You don't need to be following them around the internet for two weeks or four weeks or eight weeks or whatnot. But on the other hand, as Bob said, if you've got a considered purchase, they're going to be in the market for two months, three months, six months, whatever it is. You want to set up those retargeting campaigns accordingly.

All right. Fast loading website. This one is a no brainer.

First off, people are going to your website on mobile phones, and that is inherently slower, especially if you're using canned themes and templates and so on and so forth. And if you're putting tons and tons of plugins in there, especially for smaller companies who say, boy, I can add this plugin to my WordPress site. And now I have the functionality that I want. Absolutely true. But you slow your website down every blast of time you do that. And when you do that 30, 40, 50 times, you know what?

Now your website's running like molasses and that affects your conversion rates for sure. So let's go even farther than that. And what does it also affect? The bigger issue, which you and I have explored with Sightlight, but it takes too slow, is Google really punishes you. It doesn't like that. You get all sorts of flags, right? Yep. Yep. 100%. So from a conversion rate perspective, every second your website is faster than it was before, you're going to see a 17% lift in conversions on average.

When it comes to SEO, what Bob was talking about is one, the actual page load speed, but also from a user experience perspective, maybe your website does this, or maybe you've experienced this yourself. You load a webpage and the page shakes around. That's called cumulative layout shift. Not a good user experience. Google's going to ding you if you have something like that. Google wants to see your page load straight away, something load straight away.

You know, not the pinwheel of death for the first second and a half, and then everything magically appears. That still might be a fast loading website, but it's very confusing for the visitor to not really see much of anything for that first second. So being able to get something up on the screen as quickly as possible is another one of those metrics as well.

So you definitely, there's more nuance here to what we're talking about, but big picture, faster website, more conversions, better search engine optimization, no doubt. And not everything has to load at the same time. So we call some of loads lazy loading. So at least we know where we are and other things can come up. And that's another discussion. But just to make sure you all understand, this all sounds easy.

Is this easy to get your site to get the get within the parameters if you've been doing things wrong for a while, Ben? Well, and then there's trade offs, too. So, I mean, there is some complication here. But if you're willing to say, you know what, I'm going to I'm going to remove all that functionality I just talked to talked about in plugins. And I'm OK with taking away animation and video and this, that and the other thing.

Like, hey, you can get there pretty quick. but the truth of the matter is there are those trade-offs and you're thinking, hmm, how do I get this video on here? Because I know it showcases my product really, really well, but it slows down my page by a half second. Well, holy smokes. How do I handle that? Do I give in other areas? Do I shorten the video? Do I, you know, do I just get rid of the video in general? You know, there's a bunch of different things that you need to consider there.

So yeah i mean you can go in there with a with a hatchet and make your website really quick really fast but you know you're going to give up some other things as well so you definitely need to be mindful and strategic in your approach just the same you don't want to worship at the altar of google and shoot yourself in the foot with a bad user experience at the same time so that could the best quote so far of the webinar. And we're only 11 minutes in. I know. Spit and fire, Bob.

All right. Last but not least, an amazing offer. Boy, this is marketing sales 101, but you should have a really great offer, especially if you can't compete on price. You know what? If Amazon can kick your pants in price, what can you beat them on? I mean, that's not a rhetorical question. So think about that for you and your business. What do you win on? And that should inform, even if you're doing e-commerce, okay, we can beat other retailers on customer service.

So don't just sell them the product, sell them the customer service too. How do you do that? I don't know. An amazing guarantee that another retailer can offer. Support that another retailer can offer. Those are things that you can add to your product descriptions and reinforce so that someone feels confident buying from you and not just, buying from the other guy that's a nickel cheaper because it's easy to figure out who's a nickel cheaper. Excellent.

All right, cool. Those are my five top tips for converting website visitors into buyers did anyone get something new out of there just want to make sure that i'm going down what's one thing you heard from ben right now just type it in what's one thing you heard from ben right now because we we really wanted to deliver on your first question which everybody was talking about how do i go through and convert more an amazing offer all

right jennifer that's one good for you sweet all right we like the amazing car abandonment sweet amazing offer retargeted ads Get them into your system I think they're listening All right.

Let me talk about a couple of different things. One is, despite the desire to improve, that is great news. I should say, you don't need perfection. You don't need perfection with your website. You just need to be better than the other guy. And then you also, and maybe even more importantly, you need your website to reflect what your objective is.

I go to so many retailer websites that they really want someone to go into their bricks and mortar store, but you wouldn't know it by going to the website. Or they really want someone to pick up the phone and call, but you wouldn't know it by going to their website. Or they do want those e-commerce sales to augment what they're doing in real life. But that's not what you see on their website.

So that I think is really important is to just get really smart about what behavior, what action you want someone to take when they go to your website. And then everything should fall under that objective.

Once you have that figured out, hey, you know what? You can layer in some other stuff, but that should be primary.

I'm going to jump in here real quick. So go to a friend that doesn't know your website, get on their computer sit with them have them go to your website and say what do i want you to do, if they can't answer it then you've got the problem because that's all that matters what do you want me to do do you want me to buy something do you want me to look something or do you just want me to throw like a 20 page menu at me and go like we've got all this stuff

or you're just proud talking about yourself because a customer only buys when you're talking about who you so knowing that customer is right that's too ben is not the world is not necessarily to your customer if you're a garden supply store in wenatchee south carolina versus milwaukee you want your neighborhood to lock up what they're doing what's the best practice for getting your, that wants to stated clearly on the website well calls to action would be certainly

a big one but i'm gonna let the expert talk all right like putty in my hand luke thank you let me go let's give a couple examples here. And I think that that might help illustrate what we're talking about. So here I am on Mainly Tubbs website, and I apologize in advance if anyone's from Mainly Tubbs. I don't believe so. And frankly, they're doing a lot of things very good on this website.

So don't get me wrong. I'm going to say some good things, and then I'm going to give a little tough love here as well on this site, along with some other examples as well, just so that we make this real and not abstract. So if I am a hot tub, swim, spa, sauna retailer, what do I want people to do? I want them to likely come into my showroom. And so let's think about that. And then I also realized like, hey, I've got an expensive purchase here.

I'm not selling iPhone cases to tweens where I might want to do like some real direct response marketing. You click, click, boom, and then we're done. Like I need to do some education. So what are we doing well here and where could we improve? I think with the education piece, mainly Tubbs website does a great job. Like straight away, you can see now we're talking about health benefits. Why would I actually want to purchase one of these products?

One of the possible reasons, health benefits. Sure. So when I click into here, I actually get real substantive information about the health benefits. And not only that, there's an opportunity to convert with a more thoughtful, middle of the funnel offer. I'm thinking about buying a hot tub. Like here are my considerations that I should have. So this is very, very well done from an education piece. Boy, could they have stood to come up with a buyer's guide for the two other

health benefit pages that look fairly similar? Yes, they didn't do that yet. But there's definitely some good education happening there. I'll be darned if this pop-up doesn't come back up here. But you might have noticed earlier on that there was a, there we go, that there's the buyer's guide as well. So they're using calls to action to get people's attention and whatnot to get people to convert into a lead. So there is definitely an effort when it comes to call to action.

Getting people to do some of the behaviors that you want them to do. If I could just jump in for one sec. I also appreciate everything is short because on a phone, you get that. The first things they had at the top was the sleep better, ache less. Was that the two, I think? But it's really easy. Want to learn more. I mean, it's short.

You don't want to have these long paragraphs. it's very readable would you agree ben i mean it's like you feel like i could spend time here it doesn't feel overwhelming no doubt and then we've got this knowledge base as well so again i think the education piece they're doing a really good job if you have had someone come into your store purchase from you as a retailer and you know what there's so much information out there that sometimes they

come in as educated as you are and isn't that an amazing thing because Because boy, you know what? They're going to make a purchase decision and they're going to move forward because they've already done all that research ahead of time. So that really puts you and them in a really strong position to move forward and make a great purchasing decision for them. So long as we've got that education and place in peace.

Piece of place. You know what I'm talking about. So long as that you're educating your customer, and then you're also moving them a little bit further down the buyer's journey. And I do like how they're doing that too. So there's an educational component, and then there's the, hey, let's convert on this offer. And then this offer is actually a little bit further down the whole sales process. Now, where I would love to see a little bit more, obviously they want to start

some sort of conversation and they have a chat over here. I think that's good. But boy, ultimately, they're going to want someone to get on the phone or especially in the showroom. And we went through this whole homepage here, not a lot to get you to show up to one of their locations. They have this little link up here.

And if you get into that little link, yes, like you can find the page, pages for the individual showrooms the individual location pages themselves are really solid but they're fairly hidden there's no real effort to get you to figure out where mainly tubs is located and how to get into the store and nor is there any really great effort made to incentivize you to come into the store.

If you go to the specials area, yeah, they say, look, we've got limited time offers and da-da-da-da-da, and you should probably speak with someone at the store to learn more about those offers. But none of this stuff is really compelling to get you into their showroom. Like, why would I want... Would you make an appointment to have a personal walk through our showroom, right? Would be like, oh, great.

Anything like that, that would be what we're talking. And I think this is a challenge we all have in our websites is you're not thinking like a customer. You're thinking like a store, like I've got all this stuff up here, choose from it. And it's like, no, no, no, that's not it. You have to actually go out and shoot the cow and you have to butcher it.

And then you have to bring it in and you have to cut it up and put it on the plate and grill it, put it on the plate, carve it, and then put it on the fork and then say, and here's ready for your mouth. But too many of us, I think we just say, well, there's the cow. And we don't think, oh, we've got to go through all these processes to buy it. So the more that you can help them, I think to your point, I thought this was a great site as you first showed it, Ben.

I was like, where's the CTA that says, come in and visit? And I didn't know that this was in my neighborhood. I could have been in some other state for all we know. We aren't really localized to that. So those are good points. Don't hide it. If you have locations, let us see that. What i got out of that bob is that we're coming over for dinner is that the is that the idea no okay we're having cow.

All right let's keep going along those lines too like what can you do to make that and this is not a website thing right but this is an operational thing that you can use to to make your website more compelling and your offers more compelling like why would someone show up to your showroom And in this case, you know, boy, you want to feel what those jets feel like. Like you can't experience that over the phone. You can't experience that by watching a YouTube video of what the jets look

like. Like you want to feel that. And a lot of them have a setup. You can set up, you know, they'll fill it with water for you and you can see what it feels like. Put on your swimsuit with your family, your daughter, your wife, whatever. And they'll do it. I mean, that's something I've only learned with working with tub manufacturing before, but we don't get that here. And it is a considerate purchase. That's a lot. You know, when someone... And I'm not going to tell you, I didn't run your...

Well, I guess I am telling people I don't run their business. But... Look, in a case like this, and this may not be the case with you, but in a case like this, people are making $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 purchases at this company. And so, you know what? Maybe you offer them a glass of wine when they show up in your showroom or some sort of carbonated water or whatever the case may be.

And you know what? I don't know if you've been to a restaurant lately, but man, if I took my wife to mainly Tubbs and they offered me a glass of wine, that's like $30.

Box between between the two of us and you know what it's money worth spent well spent buy a box of and if you painted the picture on that call to action and you told them come in we'll get you you have some sparkly you'll be able to feel the thing and we'll be able to make the best choice with you then you're not alone in the decision process that's the other thing we miss is, customers who feel alone are typically not going to splurge they're going to take the lowest instead of the best.

And that's never good. Graham's asking to help a customer to a site. Can we ask something like, what brings you by today and provide several categories? You can, but I think you run into challenges with that, don't you, Ben, that suddenly you're having to really think where you're expecting them to guide the journey and you want to guide the journey, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think about why would they care enough to tell you the answer?

And if you've got a good response to that, amazing, go for it. You can poll them. I think you would be better served to wait a little bit later till they're committed to you after they become a customer, after you start a sales conversation with them, and then you can get some qualitative feedback as well. That would be my first take. What do some of you think would be a great idea that they could have done? Put it in the chat.

What's one thing you think they could have done? And when you first saw it, you thought, I wonder if they, what's one thing you think they could have done? Put it in the chat. We're going to keep moving. We'll come back and review those. But what do you think they could have added? Yeah, let's hear it. You know, some of this is science, but some of this is art as well.

And when we think about, you know, your objectives and where you are uniquely suited to make those offers, boy, I just came up with some random ideas. Not random ideas, but thoughtful ideas for the objective, but those aren't the only ones. So I'd be really interested to see if anyone's gotten some other creative juices flowing as we've discussed this website. They don't. You've exhausted it. So why don't you move on to your next one?

I like to think that they're just so shocked by the amazing content that they're speechless because you're so thorough it's exactly it that's it well you know what i'm going to throw out a couple ones as i move into the next one events events are great in fact one of the things that i like about this website and this website does some things, that again i think this is almost a deceptively good website here so i wanted to pick something that didn't look oh my goodness it's terrible i got one or

two of them but but this bookstore, What do you want people to do when you own a bookstore? You want them to show up at your bookstore. So what's helpful to get someone who's on your website to show up to your hours, that sure helps your your address, where you're located, that helps. And we're in Houston. I appreciate that right off the bat. We're in Houston. Yeah. Top left, whatever that word means, but we're there. Yeah. I guess if I read books, I would know what that, that word means.

All right. So there's a lot of what I think is really positive things there. If you want someone to show up at your store, those are, those are the kinds of things that you need. So, Hey, you know, think to yourself, if I want people to show up to my store, do I, my hours, do I have my location?

Do I have those kinds of things that are actually going to make it easy to show up to my store front and center, or at least easily accessible? You might not. You might have. Sorry. There's a little delay. We're not talking over. I appreciate the picture of their store. It's not some generic thing I got on iStock, you know, two people reading a book, which is worthless. I go like, oh, I know that place or, oh, when I, when I'm going to go there, I know what it looks like.

We all understand that that's the number one thing they want us to do, right? We know that there's no question that's what they want us to do. And it didn't have to be too wild. I'm a little concerned the type is a little small for my eyes, but especially for readers and older people. But what do you think, Ben? Yeah, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that because going down here, boy, there is an email address down here.

And, you know, I'm feeling my 40s here because I can't read it unless I highlight it. And then I sure can read it. But you know what, But what that means is that this site is not accessible to anybody who has actual vision impairment in any means. And that's something that's also a search engine optimization component as well. So if you don't have enough contrast between colors on your site, people will not be able to read it. And Google doesn't like that. And you know what?

One in eight men are colorblind. In some way, shape, or form. My father was 100%. Yeah, so are my uncles.

Yeah. So, I mean, if you're a human, you know someone who has some form of colorblindness. So you should absolutely consider web accessibility when you're designing your website. So you want font that older people can read, people with vision impairment can read. You want a well-laid-out site, and so on and so forth as well. You certainly can help things when it comes to font size and contrast. Those are. And it's very hard to read what else is going on there.

It doesn't look like a bookstore. We really go down. Yeah, it's, it's, it's kittens or something. It's a kitten gallery and it's an outside cafe. And then the books is really pretty small to understand what is it. And then critiques on Kaboom love us or hate us. It's like, why should I go there? That's the compelling thing that I think needed to be there.

Like you come here because x because someone put in the column put in it's as simple as who we are what we do and where we are and why us and i i said i think it's more than that it's really what we do for you than what we have isn't that kind of the the difference in the better ones like. Yeah um and and i agreed across the board i i think all the above for sure looking at more info here too. I do like that they have events.

Again, why would I show up? Why would I show up to this store versus going to Barnes and Noble? Or why would I show up to this store versus going on to Amazon and just buying a quick online and I can get the ebook or I can just have it shipped to me two days later? Like, okay. Events is one of those things. Like maybe they've got local authors and authors. Maybe they've got, you know, book signings, et cetera, et cetera.

Things like that that book discussion groups those sorts of things that if i'm thinking well why kaboom here's an answer to it but here's the problem when you click on this the most recent event is in march 1st of 2019 so i should say like look if you're not going to keep up with something you're better off not to do it than to than to do it so wrong and it brings up a great point because a for effort like absolutely if you updated it every week every month with new

things that would be awesome and google would love it it's fresh stuff but for your user experience as you say. It's subpar well yeah because you know what this is from 2019 and then i go back to and i think hmm, are they really open every day from noon till six? Like maybe they were open noon till six until the pandemic. It's a fair question. And that's the issue, right? Suddenly a question mark forms. And now I don't have a reliable.

It's like we're reading a book and you have to decide, is this a reliable narrator? And you're like, no, it's not a reliable narrator. Oh, okay. He sees the world differently. It's the same thing everyone does for every type of product we sell, every service. Is this a reliable person I can trust to pay attention to details? Good. Yeah.

So those are definitely some things to keep in mind. And some of this should be striking fear in your heart, because I promise you, if you go to your website, like some of this stuff exists.

Yeah. And more, which we're not getting into. All right. Let's keep going because we're already at half. We're halfway through, my friend. Let's do it. Way too much. And by the way, if you spend the time to be with us all the way to the end, I have an amazing two-page PDF that Ben is going to send out along with the recording. So stay in there. And I know it's a lot to take in.

Take one or two things and write it down that you could actually look at and say, we're going to go after it because this isn't brain surgery.

It's a matter of getting better wherever you're at. Right, Ben? Yeah. And just thinking about it and putting in the work. Just put in the work. It takes effort. It takes time. You need to be thoughtful, but this is something that any retailer can do right. Or hire it out, which is what I decided a long time ago. Yeah, I know HubSpot. I can do a lot of things to it. At least I understand it.

But when someone says, oh, my girlfriend's boyfriend's dog's brother was able to build a site for free, that should be like your ears should be tingling. Yeah, the design is the least important thing. Would you agree, Ben? It's pretty pictures. It's all this. It's like, who gives a crap? Will it perform? Yeah. I mean, look, making a pretty website is oftentimes putting lipstick on a pig because you don't have those fundamentals in place. Okay.

Let me talk about one other one real quick, and then we'll move into the CRM side of things because I want to make two, again, fundamental points. One is look at your website. Stuff is broken. Like stuff just doesn't work.

And then and then the other point is so let let's let's do that here so here i am you know what i ended up going with a silver ticket outdoor movie screen i should say oh cool we watched the karate kid 40th anniversary last month i was very pumped about my purchase but i did not buy from this website and there's a bunch of reasons why and they're spending money Like I found this website from a Google app.

So they're spending money and I get to this website and I'm like, okay, maybe I want to look at this in more detail. Can't. Oh, can't goes here. Not possible to look at it in more detail, then, okay, let's leave a message. I can't leave him a message. This brings me back to up here. Where's the message that I leave him? Can't do that. If I were on my phone, maybe I could call him then. I tried to leave him a message. I couldn't, but there's no click to call here.

And so by the time I'm thinking, well, I can't get a detailed image here and i can't figure out how to get more details about this product like i'm gone and there sure is a lot on that page there's a lot to take in what you're looking at and yeah that description you're probably going up against amazon because it looks like it's right out of a vendor's catalog that's right so i see a contact us now on the bottom right, you do got a little chat their little chat or something so it's.

Your website potentially has broken stuff and now hopefully your website doesn't look so you know the kids these days call it sus for suspect my generation called it sketchy, you probably have sketchy stuff going on in your website i don't know if you let spammers comment on your blog. But you know what? You got to clean that stuff up. You have out of date stuff like events from five years ago. That's sketchy. That makes someone wonder whether you're still in business or not.

So it can take a lot of forms. But what I want you to do is I want you to go to all the important pages of your website. And I want you to click on all the links, make sure they all work, make sure they all go where you expect them to go. I want you to try to buy something. If you have e-commerce, you'd be surprised how many e-commerce stores exist that don't even have like the ability to purchase. And you wonder why no one's buying anything. It's because they technically can't.

You read it, like read what's on your website. And as you say, like, is there anything really compelling here? Or did I just copy and paste something from the manufacturer's catalog? Is there something that I can do to improve that offer? Is there misspellings?

In a world where you've got Grammarly and ChatGPT and Claude and all that, there is nothing stopping you from making those incremental improvements on the copy on your website because you could just copy and paste it and say, hey, ChatTPT, how do I make this more compelling for my target audience? Alright, so we're going to take it. We're midway through. I need you guys to put in the chat how much value are you getting out of this so far? 1 to 10. 10 being best.

Put it in the chat. Go, go, go, go, go. We're going to keep going. Oh, thank you. Oh, there you go. Amazing. Alright. I've got to give you a little feedback, Ben. I appreciate that. 20 from Mr. Luke. Stroking my ego. I appreciate it. Alright. Grandpa Tough Cookie. He's out of Pennsylvania. Man, okay. Alright. That's your neighbor. Alright, anyway. My neighbor. Oh, he smokes. So, all right, let's talk about the other side of that.

And it's funny because there's not a whole lot of webinars that talk about website and CRM, but you know what?

They go hand in hand because your website generates the lead or your website gets the initial customer, but that whole nurturing process is what keeps the customer, is what cross-sells and upsells the customer. What actually gets that lead to convert into a customer. And so if you're knocking it out of the park on your website and you're generating leads and you're doing all these other positive things, but then you let that lead languish, you're still not going to sell anything.

You're still not going to generate revenue. So we need to get both of these pieces of the puzzle together.

Together and that's why we're going to launch this quick poll because what's the one thing you have to use when you're when you're doing these things so it's email so how confident about your own email go go go go go quick quick quick quick quick don't think about it go go go quick quick, oh they're answering come on come on come on 40% have answered come on come on come on, 60% have answered come on come on you've been 19 seconds come on you can type it,

We're at 70. Come on, I'm going to shame the rest of you. Come on, you other people. I'm shaming you. Come on, come on, come on. I'm still waiting. I know you're out there. Come on, I need a little more. I got to get to 80%. Come on, come on, come on. Then we'll talk anymore unless I get 80%. Yeah, all y'all that said I'm a 10, and now... I know. Now you're leaving me hanging. All right, well, I'm not going to waste any more time. I am going to show you results. Ta-da. Okay.

That is awesome. That is awesome. You're awesome. All right. Good for you. Good for you. You know what? A little bit more in that middle of the road, but a lot of people feel more confident on the email side of the house and the nurturing side of the house than on the website side of the house. So let me wet your whistle here for especially the folks in the middle. But even if you're feeling like you're doing awesome with email,

one, share some of that knowledge. If you've got some good stuff to share, like we're in a group of retailers that want to help each other and see each other grow. Sweet. Put some stuff into the chat. I don't have all the answers. I got some answers, but you got some answers too. So I want to hear them as we go along. Feel free to give your words of wisdom. But hopefully you get something as well, even the folks that are in that awesome category. All right.

When there's a form submitted, maybe going back to mainly tubs or the considered purchases, people that aren't doing direct response, there's going to be form submissions. There's going to be people who are requested consultations, downloading things, et cetera, et cetera. There needs to be an email series that follows that. I like to look at things from, or probably the simplest way to think about things is from a funnel perspective.

So you want to have that top of the funnel offer where someone, you know, is just learning about some of their problems. You want to clarify some of the problems that your products are solving at that point. And then when you send them these follow-up emails, you want to. Give them more information about your product offering and why your solution helps solve the problem that they have. And then in those emails, and here's something that I think is an advanced tactic.

So even you folks that are doing awesome in email might get something out of this is your offer over email should be one step further in the buyer's journey. So if you're sending them a top of the funnel, high level educational email, you want something that's kind of in the consideration stage in terms of your offer. So here's a buyer's guide.

Gave you something educational. Here's a buyer's guide. On the other hand, like if somebody's already there and they've clicked on that buyer's guide, well, now I want to give them different kinds of email. I want to send them not so much general educational stuff and learning a little bit more about your solution and your products. I want to disabuse them of their objections. Why am I too expensive? Why do I take too long?

Why this, that, or the other problems that they might have with buying from you specifically? Because we already know that they're in the middle of the funnel. They're already considering you buying from you, and they're already considering buying from somebody else as well. So you need to do objection handling at that point over email. And then again, your offer is the next step in the buyer's journey. So buy now. Schedule,

time to come into our showroom, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that that is a really valuable way of thinking about nurturing people down to the point where they're ready to buy. So definitely. Categorize your possible form submissions and lead generation tools as to whether they're in the top of the funnel or the awareness stage, the middle of the funnel or the consideration stage, or down in that decision-making stage where they're at the bottom of the funnel.

And then use your email strategically, depending upon what stage that you know they're at in the buyer's journey. So Lydia uses a template. We start with a picture of a project completed by a customer, highlights a few products. That's one way, but that's very far down in decision phase. When I'm learning about what other people have done, it's usually when I'm all the way down and I'm thinking, oh, well, what other people have to say with it?

I don't usually lead with it, right? Because you don't know these people. You really want to find out, well, this is going to meet my needs? And then are these people trustworthy and reputable? And how does this compare against somebody else? And then the last one we're looking for is, boy, I really should talk to somebody about this. I need to find out more. Does other people use this?

That's typically the way funnels are typically used. So thinking about how that works, you bring them through them with your emails. And you all know that if you're on my email address and you've downloaded any of my products, there's going to be at least three to five emails that are going to tell you more about my solutions or things that you can look at. Some are just informational. Go see this blog, download this.

But in the end, it's to weed out because some people fall off on that journey and they don't want to take the next step, right? So those people, well, the funnel just kind of stops, but you want to always think, how do I bring that person to the store to call me, to click and do something all the way through this, right, Ben? That never leaves. Yeah, I mean, that's something that can be set up and then that system is in place.

And in addition to that general system, I think you need some other bread and butter email automation in place, which is... If you do events, anything in person, like obviously you want to confirm that they're coming, remind them to show up to that kind of event, send a welcome email to new customers, thank them for their purchase, maybe give them some cross-sells and up-sells. Doesn't just need to be one email here.

This could be an opportunity to talk to them about accessories or all those other things that you offer and add value to them. Reengagement. how many people have you given up on that are in your database that it's time to dust that off and see if they're back in the market. Customers that you lost, customers that you had once upon a time, those are people that every so often, again, knowing what your sales cycle looks like, you need to be pinging these folks.

I mentioned about shopping cart abandonment. So there's a number of touch points in which you need email or text messaging or some sort of communications channel in place. So definitely want to see those automations put in place as well. We're looking at HubSpot, by the way. I bleed orange brackets. That's what I understand. Obviously, you could do things like this with other email automation applications.

But if you are interested in learning more about HubSpot and how those things can get set up, I'm happy to chat about that at some point as well, if you don't already have a working CRM and system in place. You have about three minutes left, dude. Then we take questions. No doubt. All right. Last big piece that I want to conclude with is having some sort of established sales process. Of course, again, if you've got something where people see it, they buy it, fine.

But if you have a considered purchase, you need to have that documented sales process instead of all your sales reps just living on their own little island. Unlike luxury, we have some luxury retailers here. We have some people that have pretty expensive items. If they didn't buy it when they were in the store, but you were able to text them something, that still can go in your CRM and you can still follow up in a nurturing sequence.

The idea is that if you aren't following up with them, some competitor probably is. In their social feeds, on email, on direct mail, you name it, right? Yeah. And you're letting people fall through the cracks because there's only so much that you can keep up in your mind. And when you have a lead come in, you can't let a live one go.

So if someone has come in to your jewelry store and they're going to get married and they're going to make a big purchase, especially as a young person, boy, you know what? They may not make that purchase right then, but you know who they are at that point. Get their contact information, follow up with them, let them know about something that they might not have considered. Do something to get them back into the store.

And I want to just follow up on that. I know I'm jumping in a little bit here, Ben, but you've got so much great information. At the same time, yes, it's easier for Jane, who's your salesperson, let's say, to just send a text to them from her phone.

Bad thing is that's lost to you it's not in your cm we don't know that jane followed up with them we don't know on the other side we thought jane followed up and jane never sent them anything so that's why email is still such a big driver of traffic and why everybody is using it and more and more and you're getting more spam and everything else because we know that is the number one thing people will check over everything else is an email from me if you got these things figured out.

You know what, this has been a good opportunity to pat yourself on the back and maybe celebrate tonight. But I also hope that at least you got something out of this, something practical that you can take back. So please let me know if there's something that you got out of this training in general. And I do want to... Put it in the chat right now. Put in the chat, What's one thing you got out of today? Put it in the chat right now.

And that means all of you, not just the early risers who are here. Come on, put it in the chat. And while that's going, you can keep talking about whatever you're talking about. And we do have an offer here as well. So all this stuff that we talked about, if you've been feverishly taking notes, like heck, maybe you got some of what's in that checklist. But why don't you make your life easy here? And I will put my email in the chat. And you send me an email. you tell me you want that checklist,

I will send that checklist over to you. So you have that. Come on, there's more of you out there. I'll send that right away here for you. There's more of you out there. There's only five things you got out. Come on, come on, type it in there. What's one thing you got out of today? And then you've already answered that. Give us a rating one to 10, and then we'll take questions. So you got two things. I'm looking for what did you get out of today?

And then if you've already answered that, I want to find out what would you rate it? A 10, one out of 10.

I need to i don't have a good process uh form submission follow-ups great cycle customer list awesome check for broken links that's huge that's an ongoing thing my website is like 15 20 years old it started on wordpress and came forward and we thought we caught them all ben and it's like invariably it's called a 404 you go there and it's 404 like the website's like there's nothing here dude and you're like how did that happen like yeah it happens it happens all the

time at every point you have to have a direction, a path that you want the viewer customer to take more than the CTA. That's really good. That's good. And we'd really like to know how to make the website more relevant and expose it. Think about eye problems, contrast follow-ups. Oh, good. Also, the text size has to be big enough. All right. So we'll take anyone's questions now.

If you have any questions, put them in the chat now. Have a friend review our website and tell us honestly what they think, if it makes sense. That's not the question asked, though, Jody. It's what do you think I want you to do? That's the question. And if they're still scrolling and you see them going up and down and they're trying to answer because they want to be kind, then find a stranger to do the same thing. Oh, and do it on your phone because the phone can make things look very different.

If you're creating a new website, right, Ben, your first thing is always it's got to be mobile design first, not desktop. For sure. What questions do we have? No one's asking questions. They're still overwhelmed with either their brilliance that they knew it all or that they are comfortable not knowing what they don't know. And that's fine. And we can end at a little early. And that's fine because we do have a lot. This is incredibly beneficial to me.

Thank you both so much. I've got so many update ideas to work on now. Can we watch it again once the webinar ends? Of course, we'll send it out. It may not get out till tomorrow morning, so don't look for it within the hour. And I will have, do you have an example of a site that's close to perfect? Well, I think you can go to Amazon and you can pretty much assume Amazon or Walmart will be perfect.

Go to the big people and write, I mean, these are people who have 30 people trying to figure out what should and shouldn't be done. And you know the simplicity would you just pull up i don't know if you can do it on your personal thing ben but you just pull up on amazon do a search for i don't know jeweled dog collars let's just do something like that so what i appreciate about it. Instantly, we see the results, but all those choices on the left, look at the fulfillment speed.

Look at all of the granular things that you are in charge of. The material, they've really answered those questions a pet owner would ask, right? The size, the material, animal life stage, amazing.

The retailer, I don't even know what a giftino is, but all of that coupled with you're seeing the recommendations right up front you're seeing the pricing right up front anything else you would add that you see in that ben that makes that a yeah so i see a lot of positive things here but you know what i i will push play devil's advocate here with you a little bit bob one of the things that i think sometimes these big retailers for one i have a user experience issue with walmart website.

We usually shop in-store or have in-store delivered to us. And I got to click here every blasted time. Every blasted time I shop at Walmart, I get my stuff delivered. And so I'm looking for stuff that's in-store as an example. So you know what? These places are really good, but they're also not perfect. Every time I'm on Best Buy's email list and darn it, They have sent me multiple emails with misspellings over the years, and I post it on LinkedIn every time.

And I post it on LinkedIn every time because people think they can't compete with these big retailers. They think they can't do a better job than they do. But you know what? Especially with the small to medium-sized retailers on here, like, look, this is your baby. Like you care a thousand times more than like the, the lead intern that wrote the initial draft of the email that I got sent from by Best Buy. And you can absolutely use that to your advantage and beat the big boys.

That's like the best way to end our time together here today, Ben. Thanks so much for joining us with No Bounds Digital. He has put his email in there. You can follow up with him. Also be sending out his two page PDF with the recording. Look for that no later than tomorrow morning. And just remember that all of these wrap up into the idea of instead of being on some of your chat buddies and saying how a business sucks or telling all the horror stories.

Find something you can be excited about from all the things that we've run over today and then just think, I can do this. And then you test it. And if it works, awesome.

And if it doesn't, you just change it. You're not locked into anything, right, Ben? What would your final thoughts be? 100%. I think you're right to say that we probably concluded with some really good stuff there. So please don't hesitate to reach out to me for the checklist or any follow-up questions. I'm happy to talk to you about how you can better improve your website and CRM. Thanks. Well, thanks for joining us again. This is my last webinar of 2024. We'll have a new series in 2025.

And remember, we're about as successful as we make our minds up to be. I'm Bob Fibbs, The Retail Doc. Thanks for joining us today. Bye.