Ep 7: Online Store Success Checklist Part 1

Ready to boost your online sales even more?  In this two part series, Ali Dee goes over all the ingredients to set your store up for success. She goes through the first five of a total of ten items on her checklist. Get your notepad out, you're going to want to make notes so you can implement these items today.

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Transcript

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This episode of boutique success club is brought to you by boutique blastoff launch your dream boutique. have you been wanting to turn your dream of owning a successful boutique into reality? Let me introduce you to boutique blastoff launch your dream boutique. The ultimate online course designed to guide you. Step-by-step on your boutique journey. Hi, I'm Allie D your boutique bestie and chief cheerleader in this program, you'll gain the knowledge, confidence, and strategies to build a thriving boutique that stands out from the crowd. So what are you waiting for? Start the journey to launching your dream boutique today with. Boutique blast off. Head to boutique success club.com to enroll now. Welcome to Boutique Success Club. I'm Allie d, the founder of Boutique Success Club, your boutique bestie, and your chief cheerleader with over a decade of experience in the retail industry trenches. I'm here to help you skyrocket your store. Get ready to dive into insider strategies and educational resources that will transform your boutique business. No more guesswork. No more struggling alone. We'll be your partner in this journey, and together we will conquer all the obstacles. This is Boutique Success Club. Hey, Hey, welcome to the boutique success club podcast. I'm your host, Allie D and once again, this is my favorite time of the week. When I get to spend. A few minutes, several minutes, actually talking about what I love and what I know you love as well, the business of growing a boutique. So this is whether you are online or a brick and mortar store. My whole entire goal with this podcast is trying to set you up for success. So just teaching you the steps, the tricks, the hacks, the techniques that I've learned in my 10 years of experience in the retail industry, it has been such an amazing journey, a challenging journey. But also one that's incredibly rewarding. And I want the same thing for you. I want you to be excited and enthusiastic about your journey. I don't want you to have fear or anxiety or overwhelm or frustration. There's just no need for that anymore. We have this amazing way to connect. It's the boutique success club year tune, Dan, which means you are already dialed in to understand then that you're going to have to do what it takes and take the steps you're going to need to take to set you up for success. By the way I'm feeling like extra spunky today. I did my hair yesterday, so, um, I do my own at home highlights. Aye. I still can't believe that I do this. So I've been going to the same hairdresser for an eternity, like, uh, definitely. 15 years. Um, he is amazing, but he's 90 miles from me. And so before I had kids that was like, no big deal. I could just, you know, Um, Work at the store or get some work done and then leave and spend all day going all the way to his salon, having a nice lunch, shopping, all the things. Well, now that I have a one and a three-year-old, that is just not feasible for me anymore. Time is of the essence. So, um, I wanna like, let me preface this first by saying I have. Been dyeing my hair. Many colors. Ben blond for the past 20 years though. Um, since like high school. So I feel like I am a hair color enthusiast, and very knowledgeable about it, but yeah, anyways, I'm going off on a tangent, but I have, um, colored my hair. It is freshly blonde and, um, I just get extra pumped up when it turns out good. It's it's like, it's, it's a refined process, but I feel like I figured it out. Okay back to work Today, we're going to be diving into the online store success checklist that I have created. I just created it. I'm super obsessed with it. And this is the one thing, like the last episode I told you that I'm getting asked over and over again is how to improve your online sales. And really, before we even do that, we need to make sure that our stores are set up for success. So there's certain actionable steps that you can take that I just want you to have an overview of. So this is available@boutiquesuccessclub.com. If you want to. Read along or download that it's absolutely free. It's called the online store success checklist. Um you'll see there the pink button for it just hit download it'll get sent straight to your email um when we can be on our way but if you want you can just listen to this episode and take notes this is going to be part one of a two part podcast series Getting your online boutique up and running is one thing, but getting it up and running the right way and just knowing all the little things that have to be in place in order for people to trust you and buy from you online, which is like really the biggest determining factor of how many sales you're going to get. There needs to be like some basics in place, and I'm not talking about web design and like glitzy, glam, and what color your buttons need to be and what font you need to use. Like let's just eliminate all of that because that's not the reality of the certain things you need to make sure you're going to be able to convert as many customers as possible so i'm going to give you like the first part like i said it's the first of a two part series so let's do the first five things that you need to make sure your website has in place in order to set you up for success The first item up forbid, I'm just kidding. Do we have any price of prices, right fans? Cause I used to love that show. Um, anyways. Okay. So the first thing you need to do is make sure you have clear branding. So you want to make sure your website has like a distinct, memorable feel overall. Um, so when someone comes to it, it's easily recognizable. This usually means having a well-designed logo, consistent color theme, and visuals that are appealing, like good. Graphic design elements, not like excellent. You don't have to be the best in the world. It just has to be. Acceptable. So that's the first thing you want to make sure there's clear branding. And also one thing you want to think about when you're creating your branding is make sure that it's all directed towards your ideal customer. So the person that's going to connect with your store, the most, the one that's most likely to buy. Make sure that you're creating those brand elements when you are designing them or maybe you've already designed them and you're already like a year into your business and it's just not clicking on your website. You may need to look at some of these elements, like does your logo represent the type of person that you want to buy from you? And just a quick example of this, let's say you are really focused on being eco-friendly. Uh, you sell mainly like earth tones, and it's just that vibe like that earthy vibe. You want to make sure, obviously that your logo has those elements as well, because you want to attract and gain trust of that customer. As soon as they hit your website. I just snapped. Cause it's so important. So that would be having those earthy elements in your logo, in your branding and your colors. You don't want to have like a bright pink website. Like I do. If you're trying to attract a customer that's more into like rust and sage and earthy vibes neutrals get it okay so clear branding that's the first thing Next, I know this can be a tough one for some new boutique owners. But you really need to have high quality product images. So this means using pictures that are of high resolution. So when someone hovers over it and they zoom in, they can actually see the product details. You're also going to want to make sure that you have detailed product photos. And that's your highlighting the qualities and the features with those photos. So, one thing I see a lot of new boutique owners doing, and it's not the worst thing in the world is they'll take photos directly from the vendors. In fact, in one of my businesses, we are a wholesale company and we encourage customers to take any photos they need to use from our website, because we want you to have something. Uh, next level step would be to make sure you are creating your own product photos. And the reason why this is important again, is because of branding. Uh, people are either going to see you in the image or the model that you pick for the image, and they're going to immediately associate it with your brand eventually. So just making sure that you're having good high quality product images, you really need to spend some time figuring that out. Maybe it's setting up a backdrop in your house or. At a friend's house or in a garage, whatever it is, getting a cheap, easy to set up background. Putting your phone on a tripod using a timer and just whatever you can do to make sure you are making things as best as they can be for your stage in business. So if you're just getting started and you don't have a huge budget for photography and for a model and for this and that, then. A you're probably going to have to use yourself. Be, you could find someone that's going to do it for free. That's a friend of yours that you can like give them a couple things, you know, from your store. Um or see you're just going to have to use what the vendors have but preferably you're going to want to start branding your photographs as soon as you can so customers can come to your website they see that you have nice branded photos and again it's just building that trust factor Next on the checklist, you're going to want to have compelling product descriptions. So what does that even mean? Okay. You're going to want to write engaging and persuasive product descriptions that speak to the benefits. And unique selling points of each item. So you're just going to want to describe the product the best that you possibly can put in the detail. Also, don't be scared to bring a little personality into it. In fact, you should. You should be using the tone that you think your ideal customer will like. So is that a playful tone? Is it a sassy tone? Is it a professional tone? Is it a corporate tone? Whatever tone your ideal customer will resonate with? That's the tone. You should write your product descriptions. And again, don't feel like you have to be stiff and super structured. It just needs to be something that's going to relate to them. So again, I do this in my stores, depending on the store. It has a different tone. So maybe like it's you know for my western store it's things like saddle up for this new cute trendy whatever like using terms that are going to relate to the person shopping on my website again this is going to make them feel comfortable and welcome and part of the community and ultimately trust you and buy from you Okay. One trick that Shopify has that maybe other e-commerce platforms have as well. I don't use other e-commerce platforms anymore because Shopify is just simply the industry standard. They're always the first to adjust to whatever the retail industry demands are. So I I've been sticking with them, even though I have used others in the past. I just had to totally migrate all of my stores to shopify So you may or may not know AI is all the rage in assisting in writing. Copy. Copy is just a fancy word for the text on your website. So if you see any like gurus talking about their marketing copy or their product copy, all there is, is, it's just, they're just talking about the text under that certain thing. It's just copy. I don't know. It's what we, what we call it in the biz. Um, so now there is a way for you to populate your product descriptions. By teaching ai on shopify directly what type of voice you want to use you can select the different type of voice and then also giving it the highlights that you want it to write about and then it'll write your product description for you and then of course you can adjust it to make sure that it's exactly what you mean for it to say sometimes it can get a little wonky ai is still new in a lot of these places so just make sure you're double checking the product description and that it's accurately describing what you want it to describe and in the tone you want it to use Real quick boutique bestie. I know you've been thinking about building and growing your own boutique. It's that beautiful dream that you have in your mind, but maybe you just need like a little push forward. That's why I created the boutique success bundle. If you are tired of the overwhelm, the guesswork, the confusion, then this all in one bundle is for you. I break down everything into modules. It's a step-by-step process where we are building the foundation, setting you up for success. It also has every single guide I have ever created right there and an easy to access dashboard plus Q and a with me, if you get stuck. So if you've been thinking about jumping in now is the time go to boutique success club.com and join us today in the boutique success bundle. Next up on our checklist is simple navigation and my boutique besties this is the one that gets boutique owners by far on their websites this is something i see time and time again that is just not done correctly And if I'm speaking to you on this, don't feel bad about yourself. We can fix this. This is just probably the most common thing. That I see boutique owners doing or online store owners doing that. Haven't really understood how important simple navigation is to the success of your store. So what I see, the mistake that I see most people making is they will just, when Shopify generates your store, they will lump all of your products under one tab called shop. So you'll maybe have like your homepage, your about page, your shipping page, your shop page. And then from there, you'll click on shop and it'll just be like a thousand products with no. Uh, navigation to tell me how to get to where I really want to go. Like, let's say, I want to see your tops, your dresses, your cute socks, your accessories. I'm just going to have to scroll through a thousand products to find a simple pair of earrings. Like, no, it's not happening. You're immediately going to lose that transaction that person's going to bounce off your website. They're going to say I'm going to find someone else that has it easier for me to shop. We don't want that to happen with you. So let's discuss a little bit what your navigation should look like. And intuitively speaking, you probably know this. Maybe you just don't know how to do it so we can go into all that. In the boutique success bundle, which is available@boutiquesuccessclub.com. It's how I teach my students to set up their navigation. But if you go shopping on any website, You'll see that everything is broken up into categories. So you may see on the top of the website, a little like three bar thing that you click on. That's the top menu. So you'll click on that and then it'll break it down. Into a bunch of categories instead of just having the word shop. And then you click on that and you, you know, overwhelmingly with a thousand things, you're going to click on the different categories. So you're going to create one that says new arrivals, you'll create one that says tops, create one that says dresses, and then you're going to sort all of your products, but you can do automatically by the way. Into each of these categories to make it super easy for your customers to buy from you. This is so important and it's just mind blowing to me when store owners or boutique owners will come to me for assistance. And, um, they'll ask me to help them. You know, fix their stores and we'll dive into it in a session. And the first thing i do is look at their navigation and i go oh my gosh no wonder you're not getting any sales how could anyone ever find anything and again it's nothing to like beat yourself up about it's just learning that that's not a strategy that's going to get you any kind of success in online e-commerce you really have to make your store as organized as possible and as simple as possible so again simple navigation that lays out a guide to how the visitors can shop your store is going to be so key And the last thing I want you to check in part one of this two part podcast series about setting your online store up for success. Is, I want to make sure that your website. Is optimized for mobile. This is again so important and most free themes on Shopify will come with this feature, but you just have to make sure you're using it properly and it's turned on and you can of course do this by checking your own website When you go there from your phone or your tablet to make sure it looks right. So mobile optimization. This just ensures that your website is mobile responsive, and it's going to provide a seamless shopping experience when your customers are using their phones. And by the way, did you know that most of the e-commerce transactions happen from phones? Like people are not going to their desktop and sitting in their office and shopping online? No, they're sitting in their recliner, watching TV, they're scrolling, they're shopping, like it's all happening from the phone. So if you were under the assumption that. Your website needs to look perfect. Um, from a desktop and the phone, it doesn't really matter. Like that is the completely opposite way to view this. What is so important is that your website is extremely. Easy to see and navigate when you're using a cell phone again, here's the first way you can do that. Pick up your phone. Go to your online store. What does it look like? is text cutoff, our pictures cut off. Can you click on all the menus? Does everything do what it's supposed to do? If you click on a photo and it's supposed to go to a category page, is that working? Are your product reviews showing up? Are your product pictures showing up? What happens when you zoom in on them? Like all of those things. You need to make sure you're looking at on your phone. That's the first thing I do. When I update my website, I go immediately to my phone and I check it and see what it looks like. And then I'll make tweaks. For example, let's say you're doing a graphic for new arrivals and it looks so cute and you made it on Canva and you love it so much. You upload it onto your website. You look at it on your phone and you can't even read the text because it's so tiny. Once it goes onto a cell phone. It's a simple adjustment, but if you're not thinking about that, boom, you're losing sales because people can't even read what they're supposed to do. Whatever the call of action is that you've created on that graphic. So it's so important to also double check everything from your phone. Every time you update your website. The graphics, the theme, any changes, just make sure that it's all mobile friendly. Because that is where 90%, if not more of your transactions are going to come from. Okay, boutique bestie. We've made it through our first five items on the checklist. How many items did you have? Correct. Where do you need to improve? What can you do to improve those things? All of those questions. I now want you to think about, maybe you wrote these down on a notebook. Maybe you print it out. maybe you downloaded my free online store success checklist. So you have it in front of you. I want you to go through and like write a check. Mark. If you feel like you have really nailed that one thing. If you need to work on it, put a circle around it. And let's go to work on it together in the boutique success bundle. This is where I dive into every single one of these categories and really teach you the nitty gritty on how to improve and set every single one of these items up. So you can get the most sales you possibly can from your website. These are simple things. These are like nothing that you can't do. Nothing is too techie for you. Nothing you can't figure out. If I can do it, you can do it. Trust me. It just took me a lot longer to figure this out because I didn't have anyone telling me to do. I'm here telling you. Exactly how to do it. So I want you to take advantage of this again, go check out the boutique success bundle. It is like my favorite thing in the entire world. It's all in one, it has a full seven module course on starting a boutique, or maybe you haven't seen success and you need to revamp your boutique. This is a great program for you to go through. It also has all of my guides, like every single fricking guide I've ever created is in the boutique success bundle. And what's so cool is it includes my guide, like my Tik TOK for boutiques, which is one of my most. Most popular guides. I also have just added new modules to it and new products like how to boost your sales on Shopify. Um, there's also, all these great hooks and content ideas for boutiques. So it's really just, I feel like I needed this all in one place where I could give you guys one spot to go, to get any answer that you had whenever you need it. And then of course, if you get stuck, I'm always available via Q and a, and there's information on how to reach me right there in the boutique success bundle module. So you should never feel confused. You should never feel lost. You should never feel alone. I don't want you to have any of that anxiety. This is just truly something that I want you to enjoy. But this is also definitely for the people who are ready to take the steps. Boutique success bundle is for those gals that are like, oh, I just can't take it. Everything in my being is saying that I need to do something to grow my store or start my store. These are really the gals, the boutique besties that are going to really benefit from boutique success bundle because you guys know I can lead you. I can tell you all the answers, but if you're not going to be the one to put one foot in front of the other and actually take the steps, you're just going to be standing there with all this great information and never take any action. And that we're not doing that. My boutique bestie, we are taking action. All right. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of boutique success club. Don't forget next week will be part two. When we dive into five more things that you need to make sure your store has in place to see online success. Oh, and by the way, if you want a little sneak peek at what those five will be, of course you can go to boutique success club and download my online store success checklist. Again, it's totally free. They're all right there. Um, so I highly suggest you do that. If you want to get like a step ahead. All right guys again, thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to leave me a five star review. Follow me on Instagram Tik TOK. Let's get into the conversation. I love you guys so much. You're going to do amazing. Let's get to work. Talk to you next time. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this episode of the boutique success club. Don't forget to subscribe and give us a five-star review. It really helps us grow and reach more boutique besties. have a great day and go get them.