by: AskPat 547 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 547 of ask Pat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answer your business questions five days a week.
Alright, here's today's question from Valerie.
Valerie: Aloha Pat. My name is Valerie Ray. I closed my brick and mortar shop about eighteen months ago, Bambulei. Now I focus solely on the boutique's website in sales: bambulei.com. It's a scaled-down version of the unique boutique but it's not doing as well as I had hoped. My question to you is do you think I should niche it down and focus specifically on an item that was one of our best sellers from the past when we were open as the brick and mortar shop? Thank you for all that you do and all the things that you provide great information. You're awesome. Aloha.
Pat Flynn: Hey Valerie, Aloha. Thank you so much for the question today. I appreciate it and you know niching down on an eCommerce site to focus on a best selling item is always a smart idea. I've seen people like Gary Vaynerchuk do this on his one website and so many others. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to get rid of everything else though. I think that's another mistake that a lot of people make especially in eCommerce. When they have a best selling item obviously it's important to put that out there. It's best selling for a reason. But I've seen a lot of people narrow down just to one specific item only and not even offer any other ones. And that's a huge mistake because people love to buy more from people they love to from already. And so having your featured item on the front page for example, big up-front, do a promotion for it. I think there's a lot of things you can do also to increase sales from there.
For example, running short promotions, being able to use scarcity to your advantage. For example, making sure on a holiday season or some sort of week for example, it's only priced at a certain point for a certain amount of time until it goes up again or there's bonuses available with that. You can also package that item with other items you have too but it's important that not only that's featured up-front, but you have other upsells and other things down the road. That's where I think a lot of people who are in eCommerce especially fall short is that they sell one product and one product only. If you have somebody who's interested in one product then it's really easy to upsell them more either after the purchase or even during that checkout process.
Now Valerie, I don't know how sophisticated you're getting with your sales process online but there's a lot of things you can do to test what's working and what's not. You can use tools like optimizely.com for example, or others, to see and split test different images, different copy, different offers and all those sorts of things. And that's what I would recommend you do. I think it's really smart to focus on a best selling item however, because that's what you should be doing. We should always be working on and implementing and optimizing what is already working. So if you know this is a best selling item, yeah, absolutely feature it and have it be the one that's featured in any advertisements that you do.
I would also recommend if you have yet to do so experimenting with and implementing a retargeting. This is something that I know works really well both in these information world but especially in the eCommerce world. You might have noticed this happening already with sites like Amazon or other sites you go to for when you see a product for example you go and visit the sales page and if you don't purchase, you'll see that item pop up in advertisements all around the web that are served up through other systems that are third party systems we don't need to get into now. But retargeting is really powerful. So if you have somebody visit your website for example or even that particular item and they don't checkout, hopefully you can track and see how many people are visiting that page versus how many people are not converting so that you can track and see if it actually works which it should. And what happens is it uses a little cookie or little image on the site. Again that's what retargeting does. Basically if people don't purchase after going on that page, the next time they go to Facebook for example, if they use Facebook retargeting they'll see an ad for that image, and it might even get as honed in as saying, “Hey we know you're interested in this. Come check it out. Here's special deal for you.” You know, so there's nothing to lose there right? Because people who were on the page and then dropped off they weren't going to purchase anyway, but if you remind them that this thing is there, plus give them a little bit of a discount, you're making more money then if you hadn't done that because people would have left and had never come back. Retargeting is a great, great, great powerful tool that I'm excited to get involved with starting this year, later in the year once some more products come out.
So Valerie, hopefully that plants some seeds in your head and gives you some thoughts of what you could do. Like anybody doing eCommerce can benefit from retargeting and that's actually where I would start in addition to making sure that you give some good deals and make sure you are focusing on not just the best selling item but what happens after people become customers too. Also, I'd recommend reaching out to your existing customers and seeing what else they might need. Valerie thanks so much and we're gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much. For everybody else out there, if you have a question you'd like to have potentially featured here on the show just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on the page, thank you so much.
I also want to tease out a little bit that the audio book for Will It Fly? A lot of you have been asking about that actually, 'cause a lot of you I know listen to audio, obviously you're listening to this audio but instead of reading the book you can listen to it and I just finished recording the audio book. It will be available next month at some moment in time. There's a review process through audible.com which is where it will be served and editing, we're doing that right now. So it's going to be great. Very happy with how it turned out and I look forward to sharing that with you. You can check it out at WillItFlyBook.com if you're listening to this in the future and it will be available on that Amazon page through audible.com and I look forward to putting that in your ears later on.
So thank you again so much. Just wanted to share that was coming and as always I like to end it with a quote and today's quote is from Bill Gates. He said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Great message. Cheers. Take care and I'll see you at the next episode of Ask Pat. Thanks. Bye.