 In a time like this, it's very important to understand your customer. Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where we share marketing agency insights, best practices and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly, co-founder and chief strategist here at Slam agency, a digital first full service marketing agency, which helps brands captivate, motivate and inspire people to action through advertising. And today I want to share with you, just a few tips for transitioning during this time from real world, in person offline business to online business. Now a few weeks ago we talked about remote working and that's great for teams. That's great for production teams and corporate teams who, you know, are doing work day in and day out. But what we need to start talking about now is how to transition from an offline sales environment to an online sales environment. And for many businesses that have never sold online before, this is your first time even thinking about this. And this is what I want to do. I want to share with you a few tips to help you to get online right away and begin your journey into e-commerce. Now a lot of times on this show we talk about understanding your customer. And in a time like this, it's very important to understand your customer. Number one, understand that your customer has been going through a very difficult time just like you have. Their job security might be threatened. Their routines have been shook up. All of this is happening at a time when as a business, you've got to figure out how to survive and you've got to figure out how to take that stuff from doing business in an offline traditional way to doing business online. And so the first thing I want you to do is understand that customer journey. How do you do this? If you have a budget, if you're marketing director with the budget, invest some of that budget into market research, into customer research. Don't rely on the data that you have from last year. Don't rely on the data that you have from six months ago. It's time to do social media surveys, to reach out to people. Everyone's online right now. Reach out to them and ask them how you, your business can improve the quality of their lives right now. Research your customer, figure out what it is that they need, where they're going to find this information, whether it be online or offline, and how you can become a resource along that customer journey. Now, there's a few areas I want to highlight in the customer journey. The first is discovery and going from brick and mortar to online business, you have to think about how customers are going to find you. Okay. Now, right off to the bat, in order to make this transition a little bit smoother, a little bit more seamless, I want you to, as soon as you have your online store up and running, get to your current customers. I hope you have an email list. If you do, begin to email them. Try not to use the word coronavirus or COVID-19 in it, because what's going to happen is maybe they're just going to ignore that email. I think it's one of the many millions that we've all been receiving during this time. But reach out to them and tell them how you've optimized your business and how they can support you. These are your existing customers. If they're on social media, do yourself a favor, make a video, put your face out there, say this is how we are impacted and this is what we're doing to optimize our business. I love this word optimize our business in order to serve you better, to serve you in this time of need. If you do that, put some money behind it. You know, a lot of people say boosting posts is a waste of money and it is when you're trying to do specific targeted advertising. But in this case, put a video out there, put some money on it and make sure that your followers see it, okay? Because you want them to know what you're doing and how they can help you survive and thrive in this time. So you have your online store and now you need to communicate to your existing customers, whether that be by email, whether that be through social media, whether that be by phone. I mean, pick up the phone. This is the livelihood of your business at stake. So pick up the phone and start making calls, letting people know how they can do business with you during this time, okay? So that's existing customers. New customers, it's all about discovery. It's all about being found. In the next few weeks, I'm going to talk about what you can do as a new online business to be discovered, to put yourself in a position in the search engines, to advertise in the search engines, to advertise in social media in a way that will bring in new customers, to remind old customers that may not be on your list that you're still a viable option, that you're still doing business. And this discovery element is super critical in a time like this because everybody's going online to find the products and services that they need right now. The next phase in the customer journey is evaluation. Essentially, once they discover you as a potential option, they're going to evaluate your product or service offering to see if it fits your needs. If that's the case, you want to be credible, you want to avoid any sort of moment in that visit to your website that might deter them or promote the clicking of the back button or the bouncing off your page. So you want to provide trust indicators on your site. We're going to be talking about that in future weeks. If you pass all of those tests and you have a product or service that the customer might want, then at that point, a purchase is going to happen. And the last thing that we want at this point in time is for the user, for the potential customer to abandon that shopping cart. So think about what in this experience is going to prevent them from completing their purchase. We're going to talk about that in future weeks. But let's say you make the sale because I believe you will. At that point, it's super important to bring them in. Bring them into your email newsletter, your social media following. Provide, number one, a great customer experience and then a great follow-up experience because in this day and age, it's all about community and every buyer, every customer is a part of your community. Bring them in just like their family and help them to survive and thrive in this time as well. Now, I mentioned providing a great customer experience and as you know, customer service is king when it comes to retention and when it becomes to winning repeat business. But what I want to tell you is more so than customer service right now is standardization, meaning is to develop a predictable, reliable set of products and services that your customers know that they can come back to your site and they can get those things. You don't want it to be like this menu of options today and this menu of options tomorrow. Break it down, make it simple, make sure it's profitable for you, whatever business or industry that you're in and make sure that you're providing more value than you're taking in payment. And if you do that, then this is going to be a very good time for your business. So how do you transition from a brick and mortar to an online business? Number one is to understand your customer and not to understand the customer that you had six months ago, but the customer that exists today. Who are they? What are their pain points? What are they trying to accomplish? And where do you fit in in this customer journey? Speaking of the customer journey, it's always about discovery. So make sure that your business is able to be discovered online. Once a person can find you, they're going to evaluate you. So make sure you have a high quality experience and website and credibility and trustworthiness there on the site. There's many ways that you can do that. I'm going to share some of those with you in a future episode. Make sure that it's easy to make a purchase, that there's not a whole lot of steps, that there's not a whole lot of opportunities for that person to change their mind, what we call bounce, abandon the shopping cart. And then finally, once the purchase has been made, once you've made the sale, bring them into the fold. Make them part of your community. Bring increase to them. Provide a great customer experience and great customer service. And then finally, standardize at this point in time your product and service offerings. Don't get super creative and leave things up to interpretation or customization. Standardize your services so that people know what to expect and exactly what they're getting when they are shopping online, okay? So these are my three keys, my three steps for transitioning from brick and mortar to online sales. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Next week, I'm going to talk about ways to get discovered online, how to become more credible, and the things that you need to do on your website to convey credibility, and how to make sure that your website is doing everything that it needs to do to close the deal rather than push it away, all right? If you've enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and let me know. In the comments, if it's on a social media site, if you're watching on Instagram or Facebook, let me know. If you're listening on a podcast network, be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. And you're in the marketing world, you're a marketing professional. 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