Copy of Copy of fixing-the-leaky-bucket_2023-aug-11-0305pm_retail_initiative
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[00:00:00] What's up crew? I am glad that you're here today 'cause this one is important. So this week I was playing with my son. He's three years old. His name's Benjamin, actually. Benjamin Theodore. If you're watching a video, I. I have a bunch of Theodore Roosevelt stuff behind me 'cause I have a weird obsession with him.
[00:00:16] But anyway, Ben was playing like we were playing with balloons and we have these balloons that blow up really long and you blow into them and then like you're not really supposed to tie it, you would let it go and then it flies everywhere and they're super fun and my [00:00:30] kids are obsessed with him. But my three year old has also learned to play with little kid scissors and he had cut hole in the end of one of the balloons.
[00:00:41] And he's like asking me to blow it up. And I didn't notice the hole at first. And as much as I was blowing air into it, the thing would just not inflate no matter what I did. I could keep blowing, but it just wouldn't inflate. And that had me thinking about e-commerce and, and of course like that's, [00:01:00] I'm, my brain works that way, where I always, I, I love analogies.
[00:01:03] I love comparing like real life situations. And so of course my brain went there. 'cause it's, I'm a nerd, so forgive me for that. But it had me thinking about e-commerce and. How much we focus on driving traffic, which is good. Like we want good Ss e o, we want a great social media presence. We want our ads to be effective.
[00:01:24] But what a lot of us do is we kind of have a hole in the air balloon. You know, another, [00:01:30] it could be the leaky bucket where we have a bucket, but it has a ton of holes in it, and so we're doing all these activities that are fueling the traffic to our site, and if we're crushing it, awesome. You're getting thousands of hits a month.
[00:01:43] But then what happens if we have a leaky bucket? It doesn't matter how much water you put in the bucket never fills up. And so what are those things that prevent the bucket from filling? When you look at e-commerce, and there's really three things that I, I want to go over [00:02:00] today of how you can address that leaky bucket to make the most of the traffic that you're getting.
[00:02:05] So number one is conversion. You're, you're putting all this traffic to your site. How is our site converting traffic into paying customers? And there's a few areas that you could look at, but the two biggest ones, I have a whole training on it. I'll put the, uh, link in the show notes where I walk through.
[00:02:23] It's called the Conversion Effect. And I walk through like, no matter where you are right now, where in this like, [00:02:30] Pyramid are you and where you should focus first, but I wanna talk about the first two. Number one is site function. I know this seems simple and a lot of us are gonna write this off, but I want you to go evaluate your site and does it function as it's supposed to?
[00:02:44] Do images load correctly? Do does our text format right? Or when it goes on mobile, does it look really wonky? Do our buttons go exactly where they're, we're expecting them to go. A lot of times we think like, oh, our site was set up by this amazing developer, so it [00:03:00] functions. But one of our biggest clients was having this week where they called me and they were like, Hey, like our conversion is tanked.
[00:03:06] We don't know what, and I started clicking around the sites and the buttons were all wrong. I was clicking on tops and it was taking me to new arrivals, and it was a mess. The person that normally did that stuff was out of town that week, and the buttons were just messed up. The site was not functioning correctly, and all the bells and whistles, all the great imagery, all of those things could never compensate for a site that doesn't function.[00:03:30]
[00:03:30] So we're not even talking about how great it is yet. We're just talking about it, doing the basic things it's supposed to do. So this is something I recommend, like go through once a month, make sure that it's functioning as it's supposed to. But number two, and this is the most important one, is connection.
[00:03:46] When your customer lands on your site, do they immediately say, Yes, this is a site for people like me, like I, this is where I belong. Have you ever walked into a store and you didn't think that a store could be made for you, [00:04:00] but that place proved you wrong and it showed like it had everything that you loved?
[00:04:04] And this happens when we know exactly who we're serving and what our brand does for them. And we can build our buying and our merchandising and our site experience around that. And so online, this comes in two, two forms. One, an emotional side where through our imagery, through our copy, they resonate with us.
[00:04:24] And so what the mistake that we could make is we just have a big welcome to our [00:04:30] boutique copy, or we put our logo in our hero image and we just talk about ourselves instead. What if we had copy and imagery that made them feel more understood? We're not trying to make them understand us, we're trying to make them feel understood.
[00:04:46] So think about that for a second. What's the difference? That's the difference between a logo or welcome to our store. And back to school language. 'cause that's what they're thinking about right now. So when we write about what they're thinking about rather than [00:05:00] what we are thinking about, we get to capture that customer.
[00:05:03] And then there's another side and it, it's the way that we're solving their problem. You know, if you think about a spectrum here, like you have cold traffic, warm traffic, and hot traffic. Cold would be someone who's never been with you before. Warm is someone who's familiar with your brand, maybe they've bought from you one time and hot is like your best customers.
[00:05:22] These are the people. People buying from you all the time. Well, if we think about what resonates with them, you know, at, on the hot end, new Arrivals is [00:05:30] great, like they are bought into your brain and so they want what's newest. The mistake though is a lot of us lean into here's what's new, look what's new.
[00:05:38] We have new all of our emails, all of our social is, look what's new. But if you think about the other end of the spectrum, that cold traffic, which if you're trying to increase your traffic and you're trying to fix that leaky bucket, we have to think about them. That first impression is really for your cold traffic is what's new, really the thing that they're after, probably not [00:06:00] here.
[00:06:00] We can think about, okay, what problem are we solving for them? Is there an agitated pain, something that we're kind of poking at and saying like, Hey, you didn't know that you needed this, but you actually do. Like you didn't know you needed jeans, but your closet's full of skinny jeans, and that's on the way out.
[00:06:17] Stay in fashion. Maybe it's solving a problem around an event that they're thinking about. So if it's back to school or if it's fall wardrobe and those kind of things, that resonates with cold traffic much [00:06:30] more than look what's new. And so what, what you'll want to do when you think through that connection bit is think first.
[00:06:37] What imagery and copy would someone land on our site and know they're in the right place? And then how are we showing that we can really help them? That's not through new arrivals, that's through something else. And so what is your customer thinking about right now and how can your brand help position itself to solve it?
[00:06:54] So that's the, that's the basics of conversion. I have a longer training on that that I'll put in the show notes, but [00:07:00] then we get to the second part and it's list growth. I'll get to retention in a second, but if, I don't know if you realize this, but there there's a marketing rule, it's called the seven touches, and it's that many times most people will not buy from you until they have touched your brand around seven times.
[00:07:19] Because a lot of us, we think that it's like social posts, website purchase, and that's what most people do. But in reality, it's like social posts, another social post, click browse [00:07:30] around. Leave another social post and. They end up buying from us seven touches later. And so that's the importance of working to stay in front of our people.
[00:07:40] And one of the best ways that we can do that is building up our list of not just purchasers, but even visitors to our site. And so this is where value added things like, yes, the promise of a discount. Is an incredible one. Early access to things is an incredible one, but thinking through how are we building our list on our site so we can not [00:08:00] just stay in front of them on social, but we can stay in front of them in their inbox or in their text messages as well.
[00:08:07] We first, we focus on conversion, turning our site into something that can turn traffic into paying customers. Then we're working to build our list to get those seven touches, as in as many areas as possible. In my own world, like one of the, when people come in, I. Whether it's through a webinar or through an ad or through anything.
[00:08:25] I'm trying to get them in my Facebook group. I want them seeing my YouTube channel. I want them [00:08:30] on the podcast. I want them following me at retail, Josh, on Instagram. And I want them to kind of get into my ecosystem as much as possible, because typically the more someone's in my ecosystem, the more likely they are to wanna work with us.
[00:08:45] So in your world, what does that look like? Then the last one is your retention strategy. This is the way that we aren't just getting that first purchase, but we're getting the second, the third, the fourth as quickly as possible. Because if you think, like, let's say you are [00:09:00] crushing it on paid ads. You just, you dominate.
[00:09:03] If you're doing well, you're paying $20 per customer, $20. And so let's say they spent 90, well, the reality is you didn't really make money on that transaction. That's the hard part about ads. And so where ads can start to be profitable is when you can get most of those people to buy a second time and a third time and a fourth time, because then there's no new customer acquisition cost.
[00:09:26] It's just at that point beyond the cost of the item and [00:09:30] fulfillment, it's just profit. And so there, that's where our retention strategy comes in. And that, that looks like three things. You know? One, it's your regular emails. And the thing here is you probably should email more than you think you should.
[00:09:43] So is there a rule like once a month, once a week, once a day? There is not a rule, but think through what you're currently doing. And it probably is more like you could be emailing multiple times a day. And the interesting thing here is a lot of us say that we hate email. We [00:10:00] don't email because we don't like email, but a fascinating thing that I've seen is that we tend to have behavior that, or we have preferences that we think we have, but our behavior shows otherwise.
[00:10:12] We say we hate email, but we click through on emails and we buy things. I. So our per our, our express preference and our behavior are two different things, and it's likely that your customers do want to hear from you. And so feel the freedom to email more than you think you should, and you don't need to [00:10:30] overthink what they are.
[00:10:31] You can use chat g p T to get a ton of subject lines that are designed to open. But emailing and staying in front of your people, ss m ss is the same thing. Now, I wouldn't recommend texting near as much, um, but s m s today, this is text message, is like email 20 years ago. Open rates are insane. Click through rates are insane.
[00:10:53] It is probably the most effective way to drive traffic to your site. And then the last one is [00:11:00] automation. And this is my favorite one because this goes on behind the scenes. And so it's having automation set up that, not just your abandoned cart, but what does your welcome flow look like, where you're inviting people into the brand and getting buy-in into the brand, or you know, if someone doesn't shop for you from you for like 60 days.
[00:11:18] How are we getting them back and buying again? And so these are some incredible things. We actually have a toolkit. I'll put it in the show notes. Um, but I would recommend getting some of those things in. And when you have these [00:11:30] together, a higher converting site, a stronger list, and a strong retention strategy that fixes the leaky bucket.
[00:11:37] And that's when we can start to look at s e O. Facebook ads, social, and I'm saying don't, don't do those things. But what I'm I am saying is don't obsess over them without fixing these other pieces. Otherwise, it's gonna be just like me trying to blow up that balloon for my son that he cut a hole in. No matter how much air we put in, it's not gonna give us the result that we want.
[00:11:59] So [00:12:00] I hope that this episode was helpful. This one was much more tactical, uh, and so I hope that you're able to implement some of these things. Quickly. If you do enjoy it, do me a favor and leave a comment. Um, if you're on YouTube or leave a review, if you're listening to the podcast, then let me know what you think.
[00:12:16] Uh, that stuff means a lot and it helps us reach other people. So I'm grateful for you. Can't wait to see you next time. I.
