Are your sales switching to online? Can it deliver the revenue?

Well Coronavirus has certainly taken a firm grip on the economy and our country as a whole since last week’s show. If you have a bricks and mortar business presence now is a great time to take it online. To match that revenue you’ll need to make sure online is as efficient as it can be.

What I learned

• Self-isolation is boosting online sales
• Can your online match your physical revenue?
• The opportunities in a new landscape
• Should you pause ads?
• Optimise the basics

Transcript

Wow. What a week. Last week, the show was, “Are you prepped?” And the reason for that was I’d been looking at the data of the week before and I went, “Whoa, this could get ugly.” And so last Friday, hence why I’m here, we bugged out of the office and we went into self-isolation. Unfortunately, most people didn’t and we’re here now. So there’s a lot of things you could be doing. The things that I said last week, especially if you’re moving from bricks and mortar now to traffic going online, like we talked about, if you’ve got several stores around, how are you going to make sure that the revenue that maybe you weren’t getting from them, you can maybe now get on the website? Will the website transact as you hope? Do you know that? Go and have a look at these things, test these things. This is what we do now.

So all week I’ve been talking to clients about this and what’s happening and I’ve been watching the search trends and there’s obviously some big spikes, and there are ones that you don’t expect or things that are unexpected. But there are opportunities out there. We’re talking to some clients about re-purposing maybe their corporate product for a home workforce. How does that change? Does the corporation and the enterprise still need these things in the office and now the office is at home? So it’s all these things that we’re thinking about with our clients and working through. Some clients are choosing to pause their advertising. Some people will say that’s a bad idea coming into a recession. I’ve had one client pause today because his sales are going through the roof because of the category he’s in. And another one I’ve said, “You know what? Let’s just do it a couple of days. Let’s just see how it works out because of the nature of the advertising, the AI and those sorts of things,” and we just want to adjust a few things.

But apart from that, just be careful what you’re doing, especially if you’re going from bricks and mortar and you haven’t done a lot of that. Just get yourself educated fast. Obviously, if you need help, call us. Email me. It’s [email protected]. And we’ve got several ways that we help clients. We’ve got short term mystery shopping packages that we can do. And these are just ways to make sure your site works well. There’s a lot of things you’re going to have to look at now. You’re going to have to look at speed. You’ve got to make sure all those products that are popular and easy to navigate to. You’ve got to get rid of those giant carousels or those giant shop windows that we keep talking about because they’re going to slow it down, not only for the download time now, because everyone’s watching Netflix, but also because of the scrolling the user has to do. It has to get past that image to click on the thing that they want.

So all of these things are more important than ever now and this is what you have to be really laser focused on. You don’t want to lose sales when you don’t have to at a time like now. All right. So if you want a hand, just email [email protected]. We’ve got some things that can help. If not, just go through it with a fine tooth comb. Have a look at the speed. I’ve talked about all the tools before. I’ve shown you how to do all these things. You know how to do it. Take care, chin up, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.