The Podcast
Show Links
- Delafield Quilt Company - https://delafieldquiltcompany.com/
- Temi transcription service - https://www.temi.com/
- Bixby Chocolate - https://bixbychocolate.com/
- Authentic Vintage Posters - https://www.authenticvintageposters.com/
- Grip Clean - https://www.gripclean.com/
Help the Podcast
- Apply for Shopify Store Consult - https://jadepuma.com/pages/podcast-consult-application
- Try our Linear Shopping Experiences app - https://apps.shopify.com/linear-shopping-experience
Transcript
Scott:
Hello everyone. This week for the podcast, I have another store owner guest. This is a husband and wife team outta Wisconsin, and they have a website called Delafield Quilt Company. And welcome to Kathy and Bryan.
Kathy:
Thank you. Thank you.
Scott:
So why don't you start off on how you got started with de field. We're where the idea for the store came from. Why are you in this business and how long you've been doing it and where you're at today from, you know, business performance standpoint?
Kathy:
Sure. Well, the, the company came from my love for fabrics and for specifically qu fabrics and the store was a nice excuse for Mele me to be able to buy fabrics with excuse it was for the store. It's, it's grown a little bit over the years. I think 2017 was when I officially opened it very, very small, and it probably wasn't until more of the pandemic that I just started to spend some more time on it and to grow the inventory to kind of expand the, the items, not just cool fabric, but notions tools, anything that you could use to for sewing projects essentially. Yep.
Scott:
Yep. And today is this a full-time job for you or a part-time job?
Kathy:
It's a part-time job
Scott:
For both of you. Excellent. And is, is that where you want it to be forever or is your goal to have this be your full-time gig? Always gonna be a part-time gig.
Kathy:
I would say probably in the near future, more of a part-time I'm not quite ready yet. And I know Brian's not quite ready yet to leave our full-time jobs, but I do think that this would be something that hopefully I can retire early and go into this more. Full-Time
Scott:
That's that's not really a retirement though then is it? But it's a good idea. I get the point of it it's hobby,
Bryan:
But I love it's when you love fabric,
Scott:
Explain for people who may not understand the world of quilting today, cuz my great-grandmother actually made my quilt for me. She probably made it before I was born. The one that I grew up with as a kid in new England, explain, you know, what quilts are doing today? Like who's your audience you selling to? Are these grandmas or is, is quilting a more popular pastime than
Kathy:
I would say it definitely ranges in ages. I tend to sell more of, I think a younger audience fabric typically, but then it, I certainly get grandmas as well and quilting is kind, I think since it's kind of, it it's evolved since really YouTube came around and there's been lots of YouTube videos. Modern quilting is a thing artists really that have turned fabric into these beautiful creations. It, it really is quite a, a range of, of people I would say probably be more female, but there's also some, some male quilts as well. Excellent and designers too of fabric.
Scott:
So if, if you had like a target audience in mind, who do you think, what does that person look like to you?
Kathy:
I would say myself cuz I, I don't buy anything. I wouldn't sew myself.
Scott:
So, but we're talking women that are doing this and, and men also, but mostly women that are doing this that are fairly young and are doing this as a hobby. Is this entertainment for them? Is it creativity? Why, why are quilts?
Kathy:
Well, I think it's just it with any creative art form. It's an expression of someone's creativity. There is a lot of I think people quilt in clubs and groups. So it, for a lot of people it's social with sewing since I was young from my mother and I think many people learn from parents or grandparents, but it didn't really start to love it until I was more into my thirties. And some of my friends who are a little bit older than me too, kind of introduced me to the love of it again. And it just became a real, a reason for people to gather get together. So not only their own projects, but charity projects too.
Scott:
I, I, I love the, the soul aspect. It didn't even cross my mind that this could be a social activity or where people are getting together that some people book club and some people may have a quilting club and, and that's how they, they pass their time. That that's awesome. So your business today, who, what's the size of your business? How many, you know, sales are you getting? What's your conversion rate? Where is your traffic coming from? How would you S is your business today?
Kathy:
I would say well we sell on Etsy and we have the, the Shopify website between the two, I would say on average, about $2,500 a month in sales. I'm not really sure about the conversion rate. I know we typically get about 60 visitors to the site a day, usually one to two sales a day.
Scott:
And where are those customers coming from? Wh where, how do they get to your Shopify store? I, I would assume on Etsy. It's just the Etsy audience. You're not doing much marketing above and beyond posting there, but on the Shopify side of things, where does your traffic come from? How are they getting to your website?
Kathy:
I would say it's a kind of a cross speed to Pinterest and Google ads. Google ads, really the only thing that I'm paying for marketing wise this last month, I, I think most of the traffic has been through Pinterest.
Scott:
Yep,
Kathy:
Yep. Which is a mystery to me. Cause I don't know how a little through Facebook we get as well. Oh yeah.
Scott:
And on the P the Pinterest side totally makes sense for me where people, or probably either if you're posting up there and if you're not, then you know, other people are probably posting things they found on your site, whether it's a, a pattern or an idea or, and you know, they want to share that with people. Cause I see in your, your feeds down at the bottom, you don't have a Pinterest account. Is that, is that correct?
Kathy:
I, I do have one for the company. I just don't have it linked down the stage. Yep. Yeah.
Scott:
Okay. It doesn't surprise me that Pinterest would drive traffic for you. And you might even think about for advertising thinking about going to Pinterest and trying advertising on that audience before you go to Facebook or something like that or Instagram, which would be more expensive, less people on Pinterest and is a smaller platform, which actually can be an advantage because your space is right down there. What they're trying to do. Right. It's right. Attract people who are creating and sharing ideas, which is what Pinterest is all about. And that's what you're doing also. So that might be an interesting place for you to go after now for 2022. Do you have like a business goal in mind that you're looking for for your business?
Kathy:
I think ideally we'd like to double it from 2,500 to 5,000 in sales a month.
Scott:
Do you have plans on how you're gonna go about doing that?
Kathy:
Nope.
Scott:
Okay.
Bryan:
Well largely building inventory more selection has been a big piece of it.
Kathy:
Yeah. And I, I do know that I think, I think, and you can tell me if I'm wrong that we need to do some SEO work just to get some more traffic. And we did enlist the service a few months ago to help with that. Haven't really seen much of an increase yet. I think that might be something to help.
Scott:
The beauty of SEO is, or the promise of SEO is free, right. But nothing in this world is free even free SEO traffic. It costs you a ton of energy and time at the very least. And if not money to create the content, right. SEO is generally about content and the stores that are really successful in SEO strategy create and generate lots of content. And it's like, they are a content business first and then they sell products on the side. Second. some of them, I, I have a couple clients who do like photo shoots and videos and films, and then they just happen to sell the t-shirts that you see in their, their films. They're very SEO based and very content driven, but just optimizing your product listings alone is generally not the winning solution for an SEO strategy, right? There's also content creation behind that.
Scott:
But if we look at your, you know, your goal, let's just say your goal is to double your revenue per year. There's two ways you can do that. You can get more money out of your existing users, which is either increasing the average order value or the customer lifetime value or increasing your conversion rate. Or you can bring more users to your site, right. And generally, you know, the idea of, oh, I'm just gonna, you know, get more money out of my existing users. There's nothing wrong with that. And it's a great strategy, but at your small size, without knowing your conversion rate, I'm gonna guess right now out that it's two or 3% and you're not gonna take that two or 3% conversion and double it to four to 6% to double your, your revenues. Right. That's just, you know, it's not realistic. Anytime you like talk about increasing your conversion rate, you're talking about, oh, I'm gonna increase it by 10%.
Scott:
You're not talking about doubling or tripling. Although, you know, I've done story designs where we do that, but that's like 10, a really bad old broken site that was built literally in 2004, that doesn't work on mobile phones at all. And all of a sudden making it work on mobile phones, that's when you get a doubling your conversion. So for you, it's gonna be more along the lines of, and there's no one answer, right? There's all these parallel streams you're doing, but for you, it's probably gonna be driving more traffic to your site, which is a fairly easy thing to do. Now, all you have to do is spend money, but the, the challenge for all store owners, right? You guys are laughing too. Like, of course it's easy to spend money to, to bring traffic to your store, which you want to spend money profitably. And that's the hard part. It's really easy to spend $10,000 in ads and bring a whole bunch of people to your store and even have them convert. But do you make a hundred thousand dollars off of that or do you make $5,000 off of that? And that's the hard, hard part of advertising on the internet and it's only getting harder. That's why I think, you know, on the Google side, you, you said you were doing AdWords. Are you doing shop shopping ads or are you doing keyword ads or text ads? You know
Kathy:
The shopping ads.
Scott:
Okay. Can you spend more money and drive more traffic through that?
Kathy:
I have uped it recently. Okay. but I just did that last week.
Scott:
Yep. And do you know what the ROI on that is? Do you know what the return on investment or, you know, there's all sorts of metrics. Are you, are, is it profitable for you?
Kathy:
I, I have looked at some, I don't know it off the top of my head, but there has been somewhere it's barely profitable. Yep. I would say yep. Depending on what was purchased.
Scott:
Yep. So as you think about your traffic sources, right? So one of the things is, and actually, you know, I said, there's two ways to increase your revenues. There's many more than that. Obviously I was oversimplifying and one that just came to my head. What lot of people do a really poor job of, I'm not saying that in your space, cause I don't know how these products should be priced. But one thing people don't do is leave enough margin in their, in their price to allow for advertising. Most stores are gonna spend about 25% of their revenue on customer acquisition, if not more and many small stores, when they start out, don't price enough to factor that 25 to 30% margin into their prices. So another way for you to increase your revenue is to increase your prices. And that's probably not a realistic one, but it's one you should think about as you're thinking about this, cuz if you are not profitable with your ads or barely breaking, even one way to make that profitable is to just increase your prices. There's a lot of other things which I'm gonna assume you're doing, which is having good copy, having good creative and, and doing all those things well, I'm spending $10 on ads and, and selling a $10 product. It's a lot harder to be profitable than selling a hundred dollars product or a thousand dollars product. So do you know how you're priced any inch your competition today?
Kathy:
I would say we do pretty well price wise against them, not too much lower, but I tend to look up everything that we sell, cuz there's a lot of competition out there for fabric. Yep. A lot of the same things offered. So typically I will search go slightly lower. If I can
Scott:
And maybe that's, you know, something to think about right. Is do, should you be slightly lower or not? So let's take a step back and tell me what the de field brand means to you. If it means anything at all, when, when you say de field quilt company, what do you want your customers to think about when they hear that?
Kathy:
Well, Dell field, I, I picked a while ago, cause it's just one of my favorite towns in Wisconsin.
Scott:
Oh, that's not where you're from. I assumed that was your hometown or something.
Kathy:
We grew up right next to it. Both of us did. Okay. And so it's kind of, and I always had my back, my mind, if, if we would ever do a brick and store, I would want it in Dell field.
Scott:
Okay. What does the brand mean? Right. What should customers think about the Dell? And let me, let me phrase it for you. Another way. If you were a car company, which car company would you be?
Kathy:
Probably Tesla.
Scott:
Why?
Kathy:
Well, I like the efficiency of it. It's modern. I think you, you save money with not having to pay for gas and I own one,
Scott:
But a Tesla right. Is, is not a cheap product.
Kathy:
No.
Scott:
Right. They're not trying to be the cheapest electric, even the electric cars. Right. They're not trying to be the cheapest out there. Right. And they actually purposely started at the top of the market to establish a Tesla Tesla brand. And they always promised, oh, we're gonna come down in market. And even today the Tesla's three series or whatever it's called is still really freaking expensive. Right. Their, their promise used to be, we're gonna make the $25,000 electric car in the future. And I don't think they're ever gonna do that because they've done a great job in making the Tesla brand be worth more than that. They're not trying to be competitive on price. They're trying to compete on feature performance. They have, you know, the fastest cars that have the most, you know, miles per recharge and all that kind of stuff. But they're, they're definitely not competing on price. And if, if you want de field to be that sort of brand right. Known for innovation, design, whatever, maybe cheapest price, isn't part of that brand in your customer acquisition today. Are you driving any traffic organically? You know, you had mentioned SEO before. Is any traffic coming in from your social networks or from organic or is it all mostly paid traffic?
Kathy:
I it's a little bit of a mix. I Instagram brings in some okay. Traffic. I do some emails, but it's, it's really like every two months I send an email out and usually that will give some traffic as well.
Scott:
What are you using for email?
Kathy:
It's a Shopify app, like segue or something.
Scott:
Okay. When you send email, do you make money or do you get traffic to the website?
Kathy:
Do you know? Both typically I, I share what the new products are. Yep. And typically a few sales through that. Yep.
Scott:
Yep. Is there a national quilting day?
Kathy:
Yeah. Yes.
Scott:
What day is it?
Kathy:
I
Bryan:
Don't know. There's, there's several quilting related holidays that, that we've caught and posted on.
Scott:
Exactly right. Those should be emails. They are.
Kathy:
Yeah. And we typically do like an Instagram posted than that day. I would say there's, there's a balance with time. I, I, I would love to do more social it's I guess I'm not quite sure what I should zero in on cuz it's limited time. Cause we both work and then trying to focus on kind of things that be most bang for the buck. I guess
Scott:
When you do social, what does social mean to you? When you say you wanna get more traffic from social, you wanna do more social? What does that mean?
Kathy:
Probably more Instagram posts that would lead to, I would love to have more blog post. I, I think in the, the quilting world, there's so many resources that I also want our website to be a resource to people where they can come for free patterns, maybe a blog post or a video on how to do something in quilt related. Yep. And I think that could draw potential sales as well. How,
Scott:
When you say, you know, do I'm looking at your social here right now and I'm gonna get a little critical here. You have 321 followers on your Instagram and your most recent post had three likes. The one before that 11 likes three likes 2, 5, 5. None of them with comments, right. Generating traffic and revenue from an Instagram feed is really, really hard. That's not to say you can't generate traffic and revenue from Instagram with things like ads and that kind of stuff, but just on the feed, it's really hard. And you'll notice that people that do a really good job of that have followings in, you know, the tens of, and hundreds of thousands and literally millions. Right. I I've had clients come to before. Like I have, you know, 25,000 followers on my Instagram feed. I'm I'm gonna, you know, start a business off that.
Scott:
And then you do the math and let's just say, assume, let's assume if you have a hundred thousand followers at 10% of them are gonna come to your website in a year's time. So that's 10,000 people. And if you have a decent convert version rate, that's 2%. So 2% of 10,000 people, if I do my math, right, I think that's 200, right? So 200 sales out of a hundred thousand followers per year. It's it's, you know, really, really small numbers. You need massive numbers to, to generate a lot. And that's why a lot of people who are successful on social are actually doing advertising on social. That's why I would look for you starting off on Pinterest, cuz I think your audience is aligned to your product and contents. I would start advertising on Pinterest to start creating that traffic to drive to your store, you know, the, the right people.
Scott:
Now that all said, you know, you've mentioned a couple times and I actually told agree with generating organic traffic, whether organic is on social or on search, they both start with content. If you don't have, you know, unique content, let me look at your Facebook feed for exam for second here. You know, you have what a lot of businesses have, which is basically, I'm not gonna call 'em ads, but you're just showing your products. Right, right. And we all do the same thing. We're all guilty of, of it. The ones that are more successful at this type of stuff are gonna have more engaging content, more unique content. Video is super, super, super popular today. I, I personally believe that you cannot create enough video for your business. If I look at your video page in which takes me straight to YouTube, you've got, you know, five videos here already. And by the way, these videos are awesome. I looked at 'em already.
Kathy:
Well, thank you, my husband, he, he mixes them.
Bryan:
I don't know much of about fabrics, but I figured that
Scott:
Piece out. No, you did awesome. Right. And, and Kathy, you have the most beautifully manicured hands here, my main fabric. Right?
Speaker 4:
Thank you.
Scott:
But the videos are shot really well and they're really informative. Right? So as you were talking before about, you know, creating a, a sense of community or, or education and that kind of stuff, I totally think that's a place that you could focus on. You could start creating content like this, that walks people through the whole process and you know, step one is this. And step two is this. Cause what happens over time is people will search on the internet for, you know, how to make flying geese quilt block. And if you start making more and more content, you'll start ranking higher and higher for that. Now a couple tips and tricks for you here is if you go to my website, Jade, puma.com, I have a video tutorials tab just like you do. But whenever you click on one of my videos underneath it, I have a transcript.
Scott:
So all the words that I said here, I didn't write a transcript ahead of time and read it. There's software called te that I use temi.com. I think it is T E M I and you just put your YouTube link in there and it listens to what you say and converts it to text and gives you a text file. That's amazing. It, it, it's unbelievable. Right? And the accuracy is not a hundred percent at all, but for me, and I don't edit this, when I, when I put them up there, I probably should, but I don't. And the reason I do this is for SEO, right? So notice this video is hosted on YouTube, just like yours is, but I'm still on my website because I want people to come to my website and watch my video. If they find it on YouTube, that's great, but I'd rather than be on my website.
Scott:
So I'm always gonna host my videos on my website, even though they're hosted in the end in YouTube, and I'm gonna put that transcript underneath it. And what that transcript does is it gives Google text to index, cuz it can't index what's inside of your video. You have to tell it what's inside by putting that transcript underneath it. So I can at C for you starting to generate content as part of your customer strategy. And that content is just, just like what you're doing here with these five videos you've already done where you're actually explaining and adding value, cuz these, these are absolute fabulous, right? They add value. They explain to people what's going on. It's not just like, Hey, here I am in the store today. Let me, you know, I'll walk around and show you how wonderful my life is, right? This is I'm actually gonna help you learn.
Scott:
And I'm gonna educate you on this process, which I think is very valuable content. So I would just, you know, think about a strategy. We start creating more of these and adding more and more value. And you already mentioned your other strategy, which I totally love, which is your free content. And you have, I think on your website. Yeah. Free patterns and, and resources. Totally fabulous here. Now, if I download this PDF, it opens up the PDF automatically, right? So you're giving me this resource, which is let's just assume, is really valuable. It looks good. Right? Did you make these two Brian?
Kathy:
I did not
Scott:
Because these look good too. Right? These, these, these are way more professional than PDFs I make. Thank you. But you're giving this away for free. And, and most people charge a small price. It's called an email address. So you're not charging an email address risk for this. So you're not building your list. Some people may find you and like, like your content, but they never give you their email address. So you never get to communicate to them. Again, the reason you give away free content, like this is to collect an email address. You're trading with them. You give them value, they give you value right now you're giving them value and they're giving you nothing. So it want to think about doing is adding onto this, the collection of email. So SGO is, I haven't used to go a lot, but it sounds like that was the email tool that you're using. Yeah. You know, I'm sure you can figure out a way to collect an email address and then email them the PDF. Or you could use the digital download, which is a free app. And Shopify made by Shopify. There's a digital download app where they can actually add this product to their cart for free and check out. And there's no shipping cuz it's free and you'll get their email address as part of the order processing. Right. So you can do it one of one of those two ways.
Kathy:
Okay. That's a great idea.
Scott:
You're already, you know, you're doing the, the stuff you're, you've got this content. That's awesome. And you know, useful. Do you know how many people even download this?
Kathy:
No.
Scott:
Yeah. And that's that's cuz you don't, it's just a link, right? There's no reporting behind it. So you, if you can't measure it, you don't know if it's being effective or not. And either one of those two methods where you do an email sign up or you do this as a digital download, that would start to allow you to see what those metrics are. And then you can go from there, you know, your free resources and your videos, which are free resources also, you know, on your video, you know, let's assume this is in your page. Let's actually see what the end of a video looks like.
Speaker 5:
Okay. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and please consider subscribing to our channel. Thank you.
Scott:
Okay. So you're doing the normal subscribe thing that most people do, what you can also do. If you've got this video, yours embedded in your page, you could have an email sign up form right below it. You know, want more tips and tricks, you know, sign up for our newsletter and get notified. Every time we create a new video, that kind of thing, and even do a popup on pages like this. I don't know if your email tool allows you to do popups. But what I do for a lot of my cuff, we'll set up popups on the blog pages and not have the email pop up on the product page, cuz we want them to shop when they're shopping. But when they're consuming our content, we want them to sign up for the email list. So you can, you know, put an email sign up, you know, instead of, I don't know if you have, let me even see on your site here.
Scott:
Yeah. So you've got the one in the footer, right? So you can have a, a more overt one also on those pages or a popup on those pages where you're collecting that or you're giving that, that value up for free and then collect those email addresses. It takes time to build a relationship with somebody, especially, it sounds like, you know, for the quilts, they've got a lot of choices they're probably shopping around and, and seeing who they like on your site, you're not really giving them an opportunity to know who you are. Like the fact that you are a husband and wife team in Wisconsin is fabulous. Right? Like thank you. That, that sounds what a quilt site owner should be like as opposed to a company in China that is manufacturing, you know, questionable quality of fabrics and trying to sell them quickly. You guys sound like you're legit.
Scott:
And, and, and Kathy, you're obviously legit about your passion around quilting. So people would probably to that and connect to that and buy from you because of that. But you don't share that with them anywhere. When I look at your site today, there's no about pitch and nowhere. Do we say who the owners are? Your story? Like, like I said, I, I think your story's awesome, right? Husband and wife team, every loves the husband and wife team. That that's a great story. And Kathy, you do this because you love quilting so much. That's, that's what you've told me twice so far. I love quilting so much. I love fabric. That's why I do this. Everybody who hears that is gonna love it and remember that. But if you don't tell people that story, they don't get to connect with you right now, what you're trying to do as a brand and as a small business with a shop up for I store.
Scott:
And you're probably doing the same thing on Etsy. You probably have more of a profile on your Etsy page than you do on your Shopify store, right? Cuz they actually have have little boxes for you to fill out, you know, tell us about yourself kind of stuff. You want your customers to come to. You. Remember you form a connection with you and that's gonna be a human connection. They're not gonna remember you because cause you are the best price or the best selection, right? If they want the best price or best selection they're going to Alibaba or Amazon or Walmart, that that's where the, the best price in selection is maybe not the best product, maybe not the best service, but that's where they're gonna get the best on the price and those kind of things. So you've gotta differentiate where you can differentiate from big Megacorp. And that is the fact that you're a real human being who really is passionate about fabric and quilting. So I would double down on that big time. Do you have kids?
Speaker 6:
No
Scott:
Dogs per
Speaker 7:
Dogs.
Scott:
Yeah. So seriously in the about us page, I always tell my clients, I either want to see babies or dogs because of those things make you more human. I don't wanna see the corporate photo of you in front of your Tesla on some beautiful background. You know, I want you in a field with a dog throwing a tennis ball. And then I a video of you where you show your, your quilting room, cuz I bet you have one and you know, behind it is just stacks and stacks of fabric. Right? And the second people look at that, like, yeah, I can identify with that. I can relate to that
Kathy:
Person.
Scott:
Or I aspire to be like that person. I want my own dedicated quilt room kind of thing. So, you know, wherever you were filming your video, I, I bet you, the rest of that room is, is an interesting scene for those people, but that camera never comes up and shows you, which it should. And it should show the room and the background, you know, as we talked before and I was asking the question before, you know, what does Aela field brand stand for you? I think it's about people who are passionate about quilting and want to share that passion and love. Not about the best price, not about the most innovation and if I'm wrong in this, you can just, you know, tell me. But I think it's more about the passion for quilting and fabric designs, you know, uniqueness and fun. And, and that community thing that you talked about, which I loved, right? People that get together and have their quilting night or their quilting clubs or whatever they're called. How do you connect to those people?
Kathy:
I have a lot of friends that are sewers and so we typically will get together and usually wine involved and go to someone's house.
Scott:
Yep. What if you had a program that help people run a quilting club, like you wanna start a quilting club in Des Moines, Iowa, you know, Jane of Des Moines, Iowa. Well here, you know, is how you do that. Here's the PDF that says, you know, you want to do this, you wanna have wine and cheese and this and that. And here's your agenda. You should meet once every month. And for the first 12 months you should do this thing first and this thing, then this thing, or, you know, we recommend the, you do a quilt together instead of each person doing their own quilt or, or what, I don't know what the right answers are. Right? But imagine the advice that you could give them and the trusted resource you could become. And so you could have an email thing that they could sign up for, which is the quilt club email.
Scott:
And you could just set it up to send out 52 emails over 52 weeks or to 300 emails over 300 weeks, which is the agenda for each week's meeting. Or if it's every month, they should meet them. You send one a month kind of thing and help them with that thing, you know, sign up for our club and then get all this tips and advice. Now, all this takes content, which takes a lot of work. And this is, you know, a part-time job for you guys. So you're not gonna be able to on day one, generate an email list with 52 emails, but you can develop that over the next 52 months. Right. And do one E just stay ahead. I have to just start the sign up and then just stay ahead of whoever the oldest person to register on that site is. So if you knew that you had new emails have to go out, you know, you don't have to do one email a month to create an add to your list.
Scott:
You just keep doing it, keep doing it and make it part of your schedule. And then the beautiful part about that is anybody who signs up for it three years from now, they get the same emails on day one. You don't have to rewrite the emails because they all start their journey whenever they start it. And then you get to benefit from that content forever. So it's really hard to create and set up. It takes a lot of energy to create good content, but once you do it just starts breathing a life of its own. It's unbelievable. I mentioned before about conversion rates and metrics and, and you weren't sure yet, what are you using for metrics on your website?
Kathy:
I do have Google analytics set up. Okay. Honestly, when I, when I look at it, it's I can, I can tell like how many visitors and stuff, but it's, it just seems like it's so much that I can't quite make sense of it yet.
Scott:
It is. So Google analytics out of the box does not work well for a Shopify store. I use Google a looks for all my stores, but you have to optimize it for Shopify. So, you know, just go to my website and, and just search for Google analytics for Shopify implementation checklist. And just go through this, it it'll take you a half an hour or an hour to go through and do all these things, but it's well worth it. And then the best part about that is I've got some canned report. The, the Shopify scorecard is my favorite one. And you just click on this, it'll add it to your dashboard automatically. And then set that up as an email to be sent to yourself every week. So that at least every week you're getting one email with just a few metrics on it. And like the conversion rate is one of the most important metrics on that one.
Scott:
And then every week you just look at it for 10 seconds and you're like, oh, you know, I got 500 visitors last, last week. And that's, that's normal for me. I expected that. But if you got 800, you're like, you know what happened or if you got 200, you're like what happened? So just that little heartbeat, get that regular email sent to you often to start getting a feel, know, know what your metrics are, and then just look at them on a regular basis. And then you'll, you'll notice when abnormalities happen being on top of your metrics, it's a small level of metrics. You don't have to go into all the details and all the minutia, right? As a two person team, you, you can't know every metric on your site, on your website, what are the things that you see as needs for improvement that you, that you're looking to doing in the future?
Kathy:
One thing I wonder, and it's great that we're talking to you is what does an outsider feel about like the navigation of it? Did, did you come there and kind of get a sense of how to move around it and find the different products? Or are we off base?
Scott:
I actually think that navigation is really real important. So I, I like that you asked that question. Cause to me the most important thing about a website is the ability for people to find the product they're looking for and buy it. And so many people focus on other things like here's how cool we are, here's how hip we are. Right? And it's like, no, it's all about finding products and being able to buy them. And that's first and foremost. So I like the fact that you've got shopping links up here that said, explain to me Brian's provisions.
Bryan:
So Brian's provisions was something we started with the, with the onset of, of COVID trying to come up with items that you you're on here, buying fabrics for yourself. May, maybe you, you should buy something for your, your husband or wife or significant other to offset with what you're buying. So it started out by and large with just some self-care items. And then for a long time, I was carrying a lot of barbecue related items, spices, and, and rubs, which actually did pretty good during that first year of COVID because with the, with the economy shut down and the store shut down, some of the niche stuff I was, I was listing on there was actually selling really good. But then once the world started to reopen back up, that started to stop. And we started to phase that out.
Kathy:
Yeah. And I noticed on Google analytics that a lot of the searches were going to a low cost, you know, item on the Brian's provisions, which was kind of getting away. Yeah. From what we really intended to do. I think originally,
Bryan:
Yeah. A couple of the products were very popular in the marketplace. So yeah, I think there were a lot of bots searching us and finding and keying in on, on that. It was chili mix. Believe it or not,
Scott:
There's nothing wrong with that. You know, here, here's I, this concept that I call linear shopping experiences, and most people set up stores to do parallel shopping experiences. And what I mean by that is when you go onto a product page and it shows you five other products, you might also be interested in that's parallel in a linear shopping experience. We let you make the purchase. And then we ask you, would you like fries with that? So one of the, you could think about is if the whole concept of this is, Hey ladies, and we're overgeneralizing there, Hey ladies, you know, now that you've bought all this great stuff for your hobby, why don't you get something for your significant, other additional way to do that is when somebody's on here and they click on the Chanel and they add it to their cart. Maybe that's when you ask them the question, Hey, would you like fries with that?
Scott:
So what that looks like is let's just go to Bigby chocolate, go to one of their gifts, right? I'm gonna go to main gifts. So I'm gonna order their popular lobster dinner. And this is, you know, it's under the gift category and I'm gonna say, add to cart. And it asks me, do you want to add a gift card to this? Because you're giving a gift, it's a natural, it's a linear shopping experience. It makes sense that after you buy a gift, you might want a gift card. So if I say yes, please, if I say, no, thanks. It takes me to the card. If I say yes, please. It takes me to the greeting cards page. And I can see all my greeting card options. I'm like, oh, I'm buying a lobster dinner. I'm gonna get the lobster card at, add it to the cart kind of thing. So that's when I say linear shopping experience, that's what I'm saying. So for you, you could have a little popup that comes up and says, Hey, you wanna get something for your man? And if they say yes, then you can take 'em to the Brian's page and show them, you know, all their options there kind of thing. And that's actually an app in the app store called linear shopping experiences, which is free, which I just happen to make. So I'm promoting myself there, which I apologize for.
Kathy:
That's okay. That sounds cool.
Scott:
And it, it works for, because what I heard you saying, Brian is our purpose for these products is to, I don't wanna use the word guilt. Cause that sounds negative is to increase our average order value by encouraging people to buy for more than just themselves. And that's, it's that pack of Gummer Snickers bar at the checkout. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and that's why you need to put it as it end cap on the checkout. Not as it's own an element, right. It could be its own element here, but you know, if you want to incorporate it into the shopping experience and then another place to do it, right. If I go to my cart, you could have here some sort of promotion that says, Hey, do you want to, you know, buy something else? Right. So if we look at Bixby again and I go to their cart here we have, Hey, do you want a card? Right? We're for running the cards after the gift products. And we also promote them for every product inside the cart. So we have this little promotion here and this is just custom code that I, that I built in liquid for them. And then, you know, if they click here, they can, you know, go back and, you know, pick a card. They want, I've done other ones where there there's only one product being promoted there. If they click. Yes. It just adds it straight to the cart for them.
Kathy:
Is that part of the linear app?
Scott:
No, that's this is just custom manual code in liquid, which is not too hard to do. The point being is, you know, as you're trying to increase your average order value, there's multiple places to do that a lot. Like a lot of people just they're stored basically says here's all my products. Good luck. And what you want to do is guide people and walk them through. So let's get back to your question, Kathy of, you know, how about your navigation? How does it look and feel? So I'm gonna click on the first thing in your navigation, which is fabric. And it gives me a dropdown and I, I, I can't click this.
Scott:
So that's on drop. You have it set up on dropdown, not on hover. So I have to click for it to, to show up, not on hover and it's not on hover. So I have to act, have to click to get it, to show that. And if I click that, it doesn't give me anything. And that's probably a function of your theme and the way it's set up, but let's go into your view, all fabric, 387 products on this page or in this collection, I can filter it by just generic tags and I sorted. So there's not a lot of tools here. If someone's coming to you, let, let's say you have a brick and mortar store, Cathy, and they walk in. They're like, I'm looking for, for fabric. What would you do next?
Kathy:
I would say, what kind of fabric are you looking
Scott:
For? And what are their options?
Kathy:
Well, there's different themes. There's different collections, holiday fabric, baby fabric flannel fabric.
Scott:
Is that what this, this is trying to sort out for you is, is, Hey, do you want holiday fabric? Do you want solid fabrics? They're trying to get a little feel for what they're trying to do.
Kathy:
Correct.
Scott:
Yeah. And, and what I find is, and there's nothing wrong with that. That that's a really good way to set up your let's call. 'em Sub collections, right? Is you're, you've got this 387, which too many products for, for a consideration, you're trying to make smaller buckets that people can look at like, oh, let me just look at holiday fabric. And then now they're only looking at 36, which is a much smaller, easier to look through and, and find what I'm looking for. So that's nice. Right. In addition to just having that up there in that menu, you could have the click to the fabric page, not take me to view all fabrics or even the view all fabric, right. You know, you could take 'em to a page where they're making choices instead of, you know, showing them all 387 products, the, the exact same taxonomy you have up here.
Scott:
Do you want fabric collections? Do you want fabric by the yard? You could show those here cuz not everybody is going to, especially on mobile, right? If we look at this on the mobile phone. So I click on that. If I click on fabric, you know, if I'm in a rush, I'm gonna click this and there's not, you know, in a mobile it's much harder, right? So it's a much smaller screen. So what I like doing is having that top level node of the, you know, the notions, the fabric, the patterns and books, instead of having us go to a collection, I like them to go to a page and that page I build out, you know, I'm gonna go back to Bigsby car just cuz it's open. Right? So here on the chocolate there's bond, bonds, drinking chocolate car, MLS and bars. I click on it and I'm not seeing products yet. I'm still seeing collections. So then we show the exact same list you saw here, but now they get to, you know, pick what they want and if they wanna see all, they can still see all, give them another chance to make a decision and tell you what they're looking for. And then if we look at this page again, there's no rich filtering here. So I bet you there's things that you would put in. What theme are you using?
Kathy:
Debut. I believe debut.
Scott:
So you're an online store. One point. Oh how long has that theme been in place for you?
Kathy:
Since the start of the online one was that 2019. Okay. I
Scott:
Think so there's new fee features that work in. So having good filters used to be a function of a theme or, or even a theme. Couldn't do great filters. You had to use an app, but now Shopify has its own filters for collections that are much better. That's part of online store 2.0, you'd have to upgrade your theme. And you know, you don't know necessarily have to do that right now. Having filters at your collection page helps people make better decisions. Right? So I'll show you a real example here with authentic vintage posters, where if I look at, so these guys sell old posters, right? And if we just go into shop all, just see everything they've got ton, they got 578 posters. But what we have over here is we have filters and this is done through an app. We actually spent a whole bunch of time on this one figuring out.
Scott:
And we had guesses of what information about posters was important. So we had categories, we had size, we had the type of poster that it is period, price and origin. And in the, like in the beginning we had origin up higher. Like what country is it from? And we just looked at the click performance and nobody was clicking on France or United States. They didn't care where it came from. They were more visually focused on what the art was. We, you know, determined what we thought were gonna be good filters and then prioritize those based on how people were actually clicking on them. But imagine on your fabric or all your collections being, allow, being able to allow people to filter based on certain things, right? Like I don't know if there's multiple techniques in quilting, but there's probably different tools for different techniques. Right? And you can let people see that and select by that
Kathy:
You said that was part of the, the theme.
Scott:
This one here, this, this theme is the flex theme. It has good filtering, but this filter app was an actual app. It's called product filter and search. And I absolutely love it takes a little bit at a time to set up. But it's really, really nice. It's really powerful, probably more than you need for your store right now. You could get away with the, you know, built by Shopify filter if you had a newer theme, but if you don't wanna upgrade a newer theme, you could put an app like this in place on your current debut theme and it would work totally fine.
Kathy:
Okay.
Scott:
You're not giving them enough help at this level is the Uber point.
Kathy:
That
Scott:
Makes sense. And you can do that by making more buckets and making them walk through those buckets or having filters. Those are the two big ways to do it. Now let's look at a product page for you. Where did this information come from?
Kathy:
That's from the manufacturer. Yep.
Scott:
And it reads just like that. And you, your competition probably has the exact same stuff up there
Kathy:
Most do. Yeah,
Scott:
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, once again, creating your own content and your own, you know, product descriptions, your own content, it's hard that said it stands out, right? So if we go back to authentic vintage posters and for these guys, it's interesting point out, they only have one of these posters. They actually wrote this copy. It's only a paragraph or two, but they spent the time talking about their impression about that poster. And they have to do this for every single product that they sell and they only sell a unit of one. Now their price point is, is much higher than yours, but the, the point being is you could spend a little bit of time talking about your view of this fabric. Cause it sounds like you've touched every one of these right. And used every and, and think about this for a second.
Scott:
Imagine cuz writing, I find writing to be very hard. I find it really easy to talk on, on video. Like this kind of conversation is super easy for me, for me to, to sit down and type out my feedback about your website would take me forever. Right? What if you had video on every one of your pages where it's Kathy and Kathy tells you why she likes this fabric so much and she shows you one of her projects she did with this fabric and maybe you don't do that for every one of your pieces in the beginning, but you know, maybe you make one of those a month for the next 12 months and all of a sudden 12 of your products have it. And then five years from now, you know, 70 of 'em or whatever kind of thing, it's one of those things that builds.
Scott:
And then it's also giving you that street cred that I think you need to lean on with your audience, make that human connection. And now you are selling this product to them versus them reading this generic product description up there. Now I'm not a fan of share links like this, cuz I don't think anybody's clicked on one of those since 2005, but everybody puts 'em up. Right. And to me it's just like a waste of space. Now, if you actually see people using them great, but I don't think anybody ever uses them. Okay. And I'm also not a fan of you may also like, you know, this is Shopify's algorithm, which is not that sophisticated and all of your products are very similar, right. It's fabric. Right? So the difference is like I literally just bought new headphones for my computer over there today for my podcast stuff here.
Scott:
Right. I actually found Amazon's you may also like useful in that scenario because there's these Sony headphones, there's these sign Hauser headphones and there's these cheap, no ma name ones. And like, and you may also like I started looking like, oh, here's other things that are kind of similar in the headphones space. So it's useful. But at this level I think people probably care more about the texture of the look, what kind of fabric it is and what the color is. And the pattern is. So I don't think that you may also like will be as useful in your store.
Scott:
Okay. And if, if we're doing a good job in getting into this product page, by giving them those different, you know, elements in the filters and the collections kind of stuff, we're gonna have more confidence. They're on the right page. We don't need to recommend, and they're looking at this honey, do colored fabric that, Hey, you may also like apricot creep. They can probably figure that on their own. That's my guess. Right. And that allows you to make this page a little less cluttered and a little more focused and give you some space to put in that YouTube video where you're gonna sit down and explain to people why you love this fabric so much and you're gonna show them the product you made with this fabric that I think would, would be awesome by the way. Okay. I'd love for you to make one of those in the next week.
Kathy:
Okay.
Bryan:
There's some new product to be listed in. It might be a good time to do that. I
Scott:
Know. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's just, it's gonna, your brand will be so much better when you are the brand Kathy, because I'm watching you right now and you're like, you know, you're, you're very sweet and I mean that is total compliment and you seem truly authentic and that's gonna come across to anybody. Who's also doing quilting. Right. They're gonna appreciate that way more than any, you know, flashy thing that you do without your face on it.
Kathy:
Thanks.
Scott:
Do you have any blog articles or content like that or is it just the videos?
Kathy:
I do have some blog articles and that was, I use WordPress for that. Would you suggest that, oh yeah,
Scott:
That's
Kathy:
The Shopify blog or is it okay to have it separate?
Scott:
It used to be a best practice to have your blog on word in your store on Shopify or any other eCommerce platform. And that went away around 2017 because Shopify improved enough that just about anything you need for a blog, you know, there's, the WordPress is a way better blog tool, but the Shopify blog meets all your needs today where it didn't pre 2017. So one of the reasons you want this on the exact same site is this is a different domain. So all the SEO credit that this store gets, or this site gets doesn't help this main at all. Now you could link between them and bring traffic in on one and push over the other. So 10, 15 years ago, the SEO best practice was you literally create a thousand sites and you bring traffic in and they all link to each, each other.
Scott:
And you know, that was called gray hat back then. And, and since then Google hates that it and the, the strategy now is the exact opposite. You bring all your content into one site. Like I have a client today who she has four sites for four different product lines, but those product lines are very similar. And we're combining 'em into one site because for SEO purposes, it's gonna be better to have them on one site so that all the SEO juice is what they call it. All the inbound links for product. Well, all the other products are gonna benefit from that also. So bringing everything together today is the best practice where it used to be. You divided them up. So yeah, if you could, you know, bring your blog into your shop or into your Shopify, that'd be really helpful. Does this drive traffic for you at all? Do you know?
Kathy:
I don't know.
Scott:
Yeah. And that's where, you know, once you get into Google analytics and get that report sent to you every week, you know, one of the things in the scorecard that I, that I create is it shows you your traffic sources for the week. So every week you're gonna know like, oh, most of my traffic came from organic or it came from my ads or it came from, you know, my emails and you'll, you'll start seeing where your traffic's coming from. That's why looking at that every week and just understanding 10 seconds. Isn't, it's probably exaggerating, probably takes you less than a minute to look at it each week and go, all right, I understand what's going on in the past week kind of thing, but you're gonna be so much smarter by doing that for 10 minutes once a week, because what you don't want to do is invest time and energy in things that don't work.
Scott:
Right. But the challenge with content is it takes a time. It takes time for it to work, right? So for SEO, for you to benefit from all the content you create in SEO takes time, but you can also use that content on your social presences, all the things you're thinking about videos you make, you can then push those to your different platforms and drive traffic that way. Now, another thing to think about for you for traffic acquisition and social is, are there groups today that you can be a member of I'm thinking Facebook groups, as I say that for quilting and, and become a participant. So use that human connection to be seen. And you know, when somebody asked the, a question, like, how do you do the butterfly quilt thing? All you do is you add a link to your blog article about that, or your video about that, right?
Scott:
And it's not a sales thing, right? It's just being really friendly and helpful. What I do a lot of times is when my clients ask me, how do I do this? How do I do that? I create a video, not for them. I create a video for anybody who has that question. And then I share that with my client and, you know, they get the answer. But then that video now exists on the internet. And I made that transcript from all my videos and it starts getting indexed in search. And all of a sudden people ask that same question. My client's asking, well, they now get an answer from me. So as you're creating that content, find natural places, those conversations are happening and insert your content in a non salesy, very helpful way. And that's a way to help start building your brand. And it can also drive what content you create.
Scott:
So like, I wait for my clients to ask me a specific question. Then I create the content for it. And I ask myself, is this a question that everybody's gonna ask? Yes, it is. All right. Let's create content for it. If you start participating in these groups and forums, you could see what questions people have and that could help you determine what content to make. And then when they ask the question, the next time you just drop a link into your video or into your bog and that kind of stuff. And they're not gonna, anybody gets upset about that. Well, they just got issues, right? Cause you're not saying, bye, bye, bye. You're like, here is free resources I'm providing for you. And that just starts building your brand and reputation in those communities. And I would imagine that the Facebook quilt, I bet you there's a bunch of Facebook groups for quilting.
Kathy:
Yes.
Scott:
There's many. Yeah. And I would bet you, a lot of them have lots of activity and lots of people in them. So that to me might be part of your social strategy is tap into those existing groups, cuz there's probably so many of 'em for you to create a new one. It's it's probably too late. Like I used to advise people five years ago, you know, go create a, a Facebook group for your industry because they prob the one probably didn't exist back then. But now there's thou 10,000 for every, you know, industry, but just participate in those groups and add value in those groups. You don't, you don't come in and go here's our new product line. Right. I would never post that on a Facebook group. Now there might be some Facebook groups that's appropriate, but that would be too salesy, but going in and like, Hey, you know, here's our new video about this new technique that I think would be totally appropriate at any time. So as you're creating that content, it's gonna take a while for it to generate that organic search traffic. But you can use that content in other channels, like social, but you gotta find the natural, intuitive ways to do that. And I, I think that Facebook groups is the first place I'd look at in some industries. It's more like, you know, you go to Reddit and look there. But for you it's Facebook groups, I think. How did you come up with your logo
Kathy:
We used? I think it, it was called design hill and did a logo competition.
Scott:
Okay. Excellent. How wanted did it cost? Do you remember?
Kathy:
I think it was $500, which made, you know, at the time I was like, Ooh, if that seems pricey, but much better than anything that we could have ever done.
Scott:
Oh, I, I absolutely agree. Like my first Jade Puma logo was actually, you know, clip art from shutter stock and I just, it was a, it was a Puma with, and I put a green shade over its face and that was my logo for a couple years. And last summer I actually paid for a logo and it's worth every penny you pay for it. Cuz they do such a, you tell 'em the right things like your logo. The reason I was asking the question is I like your logo a lot. It's nice. Thank you. Right. I actually like the, the de field font. It seems, you know, a little more like my, my I'm thinking about my grand grandmother, when I think of quilts, cuz she made the, the one that I slept under and it, it looks like something my great-grandmother would have like that, that kind of font. Right. And the sewing machine and the stitching. It's all really nice.
Kathy:
Thank you.
Scott:
All right. So if you want to double your revenue, you're probably gonna need to double your traffic or at least, you know, 1.5, 1.75 year traffic, and you're gonna have to do a better job in monetizing your existing customers and the monetizing, your existing customers. Primarily that's gonna be your email tool, which are not that heavily invested in yet. And for your customer acquisition, we've come up with a couple of content strategies to do that, which are term plays and your short term strategy for that should be, I would start off looking at some Pinterest advertising.
Kathy:
Okay.
Scott:
Does that all make sense?
Kathy:
Yes, it does. Thank
Scott:
You. Now that's like four or five different, you know, initiatives, right? And each one of them takes time and energy and I'm a, I'm a big fan of doing everything one at a time. Just pick one thing you're gonna end for you. The starting point for you is content.
Kathy:
Okay.
Scott:
Right. Cuz the organic search stuff is content based. The social stuff is content based. The engaging on social platforms is, is content based. You know, the Pinterest you could do without content. I would get a little bit comfortable with taking videos of you putting your face in it, not just your beautifully manicured hands. Right. And get comfortable with that. Like in the next few months, if you could create a couple videos of you and having a bout page about you and start making your brand about you and your passion and sharing that with people, that's where I'd start off.
Kathy:
Okay. It's hard to put your face out there though.
Scott:
You know what? Everybody agrees with you 100%, right? It's hard for everybody, right? If you ever watch Janet Jackson's first music video, she was horrible. And I forget which video it was, it was bad boys or something like that. She is horrible in that video. And if you watch her in a, in a music video, she shot like eight years later, she exude confidence, beauty, charisma. Like she was not a natural in front of the camera. She was awful when she started. But how she got good is she just did it. Right. And she just kept doing it. And I dunno if you ever listened to a year ago, I did a interview with a guy who runs a company called grip clean. And I talked about his TikTok a channel. Right. And he makes lots of videos and, and he's so good at making videos is like, how did you get so good at that?
Scott:
And he used to be a professional motor motorcycle rider. He's like, I just got comfortable front camera. And he's like, I'm a total introvert. I hate this stuff. But I had to do it to be, you know, a professional motorcycle rider. So he is like, that's how I got comfortable. I actually he's like, I'm never comfortable. I just have gotten over being uncomfortable about it. And that's like, for me, like I'm an introvert. I, I don't like putting myself out there, but I do it every day because I've done it so many times now I'm used to it. So that, and that's why I challenge you literally in the next week before this podcast episode launches create a video and put it on your site please. Cuz if you do that doing five more after that, it's gonna be so much easier. And if you wait, you're always gonna procrastinate or at least I would. Right. It's so easy to procrastinate. So just get yourself in that force yourself to do it. Everybody's uncomfortable. You're not unique in that, but everybody can get more comfortable and you know, you're, you're gonna a year from now. Like yeah, let shoot a video. Let's go, come on. Let's do it.
Scott:
Any questions about anything we talked about?
Kathy:
I don't think so. Excellent. Like Brian said, there's so much to that. I'm just trying to take all in. I took a lot of notes too, and we'll definitely listen to the podcast. Cause of course that'll be a good resource for us to yeah.
Scott:
Yeah. Well remember you can't do everything we talked about and don't feel like you have to pick one thing, just start doing it. And once you get that under the belt, then start doing the next thing one at a time, get comfortable with it. But I, I do think for you start with video and, and start because that's the most uncomfortable one. Like if, if you were given your, your priorities, you'd probably wait till last for that. Yes. And I really, you know, every single and this isn't about you guys at all, every single Shopify store today should be making video. And if they're not, they're missing the game. I fully believe that. So you will have an advantage over all the other quilt companies. If you're the one making videos and your, your vanished enough to price, it can be videos in that human connection. All right. Thanks for your time today. It was great talking to y'all.
Kathy:
Thank you for sharing your expertise.
Scott:
You're welcome. Appreciate
Kathy:
It.
Scott:
All right. Thanks a lot.
Kathy:
All right. Thank you.