Online Marketing
Beef up your new web presence and round out your digital marketing toolkit with one of the additional services below.
Check back soon as more digital marketing services are added!
CREATE FORMS | SEND SMS TEXTS | USE POPUPS | SET UP YOUR PAYMENT GATEWAY | SELL GIFT CARDS | CREATE CUSTOMIZABLE PRODUCTS | TRY FILLABLE PDFs | OPTIMIZE YOUR GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE | START AN E-NEWSLETTER
WEBSITE ELEMENTS
Communication
Use detailed contact forms
After your new customers find you on the web, they need to be able to easily reach you! You could just add a link to your email address on your site, but this is a sure way to get inundated with spam. The reasons for using detailed forms are numerous; first, they allow you to start the conversation with potential customers the RIGHT way, by getting the exact information you need. If used correctly, a detailed form can also weed out inquiries from parties who aren't actually very serious about becoming a customer, and save you precious time. Check out how my clients at Cross Cultural Journeys and The Smithshyre use their forms.
Employ SMS Text Notifications
Getting notifications from your website via SMS text can be useful in many ways. First, you can send notifications to yourself or your team when new sales are made in the store, so orders can be fulfilled more quickly. You can also get notified when someone fills out a contact form; my client Chocolati gets notifications of new wholesale inquiries, to allow faster responses to potential big orders. You can also send notifications to your customers. Unlike other types of notifications, 90% of SMS are read within the first three minutes of delivery and have an open rate approaching 100%.
Consider using popups on your website (carefully)
Popups are one of the most controversial parts of owning a website... many people hate them! It's hard to deny though that popups, when used correctly, do work in making connections with customers and clients. The trick is to use them carefully, and sparingly (i.e. only for the purposes most vital to your business). Check out popups created here that allow my client to add new people to their email list, and give a boost to the ongoing conversation with their customers.
Ecommerce Ideas (using WooCommerce)
There are an almost limitless number of ways to increase the usefulness of your online store, thanks to the sheer size of WooCommerce, the most popular WordPress Ecommerce platform. WooCommerce has a 25% market share and generates 7% of all online sales worldwide, including those from low-traffic websites.
Set up a Payment Gateway
Most online payment gateways, such as PayPal and Square, typically charge about 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, which can be addressed by adjusting your purchase prices. Having a good payment gateway has become a necessity for Ecommerce these days, for obvious reasons! For my business I use Square, which I highly recommend simply for ease of use. Let me help you set up your online payment gateway!
Use gift cards
If you're not yet offering gift cards online to your customers, this is an easy extra revenue stream you should consider. The platforms I build on WordPress for gift cards feature email notifications that are sent to the recipients automatically, with no labor on the business side, and are customized to make it as easy as possible for cashiers to make balance adjustments on-site at your brick & mortar establishment. See an example of gift cards created for The Grub Hut.
Sell customizable products
A popular idea for my eCommerce clients has been offering product packages in their online stores that their customers can "build" and customize to their hearts' content. For example, my friends at Chocolati in Seattle, WA wanted to give customers the option to build their own boxes of chocolate truffles, picking the ones that they wanted and adding a gift message if desired. Check these products out, but beware... may cause you to crave chocolate!
OTHER ONLINE MARKETING TOOLS AND TASKS
Try using fillable PDFs
I create fillable PDFs for clients several times per year, turning official office documents into PDFs that customers can fill out and email back to you instead of filling out printed copies on-site. You can also have customers electronically sign certain documents instead of hand-signing them. This is an example of a fillable PDF.
Optimize your Google Business Profile
Google Business Profiles (formerly known as Google My Business) are hugely important for making sure people can find you easily online. According to the folks over at Yoast, the most prominent WordPress SEO plugin, your Google Business Profile "continues to be the single biggest driver of local SEO success." Now's the time to make sure your GBP listing is fully optimized!
Get help creating a new E-newsletter
If you are new to email newsletters, this can be extremely tricky territory... as much variation as there is between web browsers (like Chrome and Firefox), there is even more chaos when it comes to the world of email clients (like Outlook and Apple Mail). If you have ever received a newsletter and thought "this looks terrible," you've probably also vowed to not have your own newsletter make the same mistakes. Grow Your World can help you design your email newsletter, and show you how to use it going forward (including testing it for all your recipients).