Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every

Day. Welcome to Material Retail Dubs, episode 22. This is the second episode in a two-part series. If you haven't listened to episode 21, I suggest going back and listening to it. This episode is gonna be about using your website to benefit your store. Last episode is about using your store to benefit your website. It's just super important for us as business owners to realize that our website and our store are part of our brand and our business. It's not website versus store, or store versus website. It's website, end store, and social media and all these things. They come together to form one business and one brand that your customer's gonna interact with. So using one channel to benefit the other is extremely important. So let's jump right in. So what's the importance of using your website to benefit your store? Why do we even need to worry about it?

You know, you have a store, people are walking in, you know, you have these big windows and it's great. Well, your customers are on their phone all the time. They're scrolling on social media, they're browsing websites, they're doing what they do. And there's no doubt that whether you're 12 years old or 60 years old, you're using technology, most likely using a smartphone. And you gotta be where your customer is. Your customer might also have a job which is in front of a computer nine hours a day sitting at a desk. And I don't know about you, but I definitely can't sit by my computer for nine hours without, you know, taking a few 10 minute breaks, looking at my favorite websites, checking my social media. You just need, you just need a break to recharge and, and, you know, start working again. Um, so you gotta hit your customers where they are.

That being said, we could use our website to drive customers in store. And here's a few ways you can do that. Number one on your website, it's super important that you have a About Us and store page. Uh, this could be one page that tells a story about you, about your store, where you're located, the city you're located in, who you are, what you believe in. Just tell a story. Get the customer to engage with you and get the customer to feel that connection with you. Um, and it's just extremely important. Put pretty pictures. You could even put this stuff on your homepage, but get the customer that's on your website to realize that you do have a store, to remember that you have a store, um, and to, you know, have that urge to come to the store. Second thing that's open overlooked is you can use it as a place to showcase your newest or best items.

So most websites have the ability to control what you put on the top of your website or on the homepage of your website. So put your best items up there. If you've just gotten a new line from, you know, your customer's favorite brand, put that on the homepage. Let them know that you just got in new denim from your favorite denim brand. Um, that may spur your customer to come into the store. Next thing often overlooked is something we talk about a lot is we, you know, collecting customer data. And it's super easy to collect customer data in store cause you're talking to the customer, they're making a purchase, you know, it's hard for them to say no. They kind of wanna be involved with your loyalty program and things like that. But use your website to collect customer data. Get a popup going on your website saying, you know, sign up with your email for 10% off, uh, your first order.

Or, you know, give us your phone number so we can text you or put in a little request form that they could come in and, you know, request special request thingss. Um, or even like an appointment scheduler like you, you know, it's so easy to just put a link on your website for a person to just schedule an appointment with you at your store. You're at your store anyway, or you have an employee at your store anyway, just call up private shopping appointment. Um, set up a Calendly. It's super, it's free, it's super easy to set up. Um, it's calendly.com. Throw that on your website. Again, the goal is to try to use your website to get people in store. Now, obviously we want to, you know, make money on our website and sell stuff on our website, but at the end of the day, we want customers coming into the store and buying as well.

The next thing you can do is once a customer place an order. If she's a local customer, say within like a 30 or 40 mile radius of your store, you know, depending all kind of the city you're in, if you're in Manhattan, you know it's gonna be different than you're, if you're in, you know, rural Oklahoma. But if you get an order and the customer is within driving or walking or, or whatever distance to your store, put in a postcard in that mailer with an invitation to come to the store, uh, whether it's a discount or again, an invitation to a private shopping session or encouraging them that if they haven't returned to come to the store. Cause it's free to return the item in the store. Use your packaging to get the customer into the store. We can even take this a step further.

And we talk about our email channels, our text channels, our social media channels. They don't all need to be driving customers to your website. Yes, you want them to link to your website. Any email you send out gets a link to your website or to the page that you're talking about. But we could talk about the store on these channels. A lot of people hesitate and they think like it's an online channel. We gotta only talk about online. But again, like it's an online channel and we want to use it to just build up the whole business and the whole brand and everything you're trying to do in store, you can talk about online and vice versa. Um, and at the end of the day, this is gonna give the customer the ability to shop the way they wanna shop, when they wanna shop where they wanna shop. And, uh, just being there for your customer, um, is super important. Well, that's it. Thanks for listening. Looking forward to the next episode.