Jenny (00:29)
If your website is basically a digital business card, trust me, you are leaving money on the table. When I first started my website, when I first started my business, I just made it myself. I think my first one was like on a free website host. It worked great for a while, but over the years we've kept sort of refining and redoing things and learning more and.
When you do it in the beginning, maybe you hired someone or maybe you DIY it like me on Squarespace to let people know that, Hey, I'm a flower farm business. Like I'm for real. That's great and all, but is it actually helping you get customers, make sales, grow your email list? Maybe, maybe not. In today's episode, you're going to walk away with
five website tweaks that will turn your site into a customer generating money making website, even if you are not tech savvy like me. And I want to say that because you don't need a fancy or expensive website to make sales. Like my website is hosted through Squarespace. It has pretty much forever. When I first started, think I was on like Wix or something. And then I moved to Squarespace, but
it's not very expensive. It's less than $300 a year to have a website that looks like pretty professionally done without spending a ton of money. So you don't need a fancy or expensive website, but you do need a smart one that works for your business. Like most flower farmers build a website to have a online presence, but it needs to also be doing things to grow your business. So.
Let's go into five specific ways that you can turn your website into a tool that actually boosts trust with your customers, drives revenue, builds things like your email list without needing like a full redesign. So five tips for you today. Tip number one is to add clear paths to buy on every page of your website. You want to make it really easy.
for customers to say yes to buy from you. You wanna make it easy for them to buy from you. I know from experience, I have gone to other people's websites where I've wanted to buy something and I've had to spend like five whole minutes just clicking around trying to find their checkout page or their shop page and it's so unclear that I've just given up and I've gone to somebody else to buy something. Like this has actually happened to me and it happens.
potentially to your customers all the time.
You want to make it really easy for them every page on your website. So you're about page, your products page, your seasonality page, whatever you have on there. It should have a link on there somewhere, a very clear and obvious one to a sales page, a product product page, or like a next step for them to take. You can use buttons, you can use banners that come across the top of your website or like just bold call to actions in the text that say things like.
Order now, sign up for a subscription, book your consultation, like find your flowers, whatever it is. You can use those on any page of your website and just make it really easy for people to buy. You know, for example, if you have a blog, which I recommend that you do, ⁓ it really helps with SEO or search engine optimization. So you can get found by people who are actually looking for your flowers online.
So if you had a blog post about spring flowers, that should link to like a bouquet pre-order or subscription sign up somewhere where they can buy something related to that topic. It's not hard to do this pretty easy to optimize. So that's tip number one for you. Add clear paths to buy on every single page of your website. Tip number two kind of dovetails into that one. It's.
making buying seamless. This means that you want to make buying as easy as possible. We call this frictionless sales. When you make things so incredibly easy to sign up, there's nothing stopping anybody. You wanna remove friction so you can get more sales. An example of this that I just experienced like two days ago is if you've ever bought,
Dalia tubers, for example, from somebody where they have the option to save your credit card information or any website doesn't have to just be like buying diet tubers, but there's software like usually shop or Shopify where you can have your credit card information saved. the next time you go to buy something, it'll automatically populate. Right. I was trying to book myself a massage the other day because I haven't had one in years and I really feel like I could use one.
And I had gone to this spa before I'd been a couple of years since I'd been there, but I was just like routine trying to book one on their website. And I went to go enter my credit card information and it wasn't saved, which like not a big deal. It's doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but then I was like, shoot. I don't have my wallet on me. I don't have my credit card on me. I'll have to come back and finish this later. And guess what I forgot about for the next three days was.
going back and finishing at checkout and actually booking that massage. This will happen to customers all the time. If there's a lot of decisions that have to be made, like if they have to choose from a whole bunch of different products or a whole bunch of different offerings or there's a bunch of different, I don't know, like colors or something like that, the more decisions you have,
For people to make, it may seem like you're being very accommodating and you're adding a lot of options for people, but a lot of times they're just kind of getting confused and they're not really sure what to do or what to buy. So you want to make things as frictionless and as easy as possible. You want to avoid making people click like five different times to check out. You want to use clear pricing, like really simple product pages, really easy payment options, like stuff like that.
Like don't make people fill out a bunch of forms or something before they buy. Have them buy and then send them the form to fill out afterwards. Cause anytime you have extra steps, you're making more friction or introducing more friction into that sale, which can decrease your conversion rates. So try to make buying seamless. That's tip number two for you. Moving on to tip number three is showing social proof.
All this means is that you're basically letting your customers do the selling for you. Social proof, like ratings, testimonials, all that kind of stuff can really help other people make decisions. For example, if you are looking on Amazon to buy something, a lot of times you'll probably see that they have at the top of some of their products, best seller. And it has a little star there.
It's letting you know like, Hey, this is a best seller. This is something that customers really like. And then of course on Amazon, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of reviews. You should be doing the same thing for your business. Now you might not have thousands of reviews, but we have quite a good collection of our CSA customers, our subscription members, like a lot of testimonials from them on our website. So if someone's on the fence about purchasing something,
They'll see that there's real people who have bought these things from you before. They have really liked them, had nothing bad to say about them or, know, if they do, you don't put that on your website, right? ⁓ and hopefully they don't. We generally do not have people say bad things about us, which is great, but those testimonials and reviews can be really amazing for helping potential customers make a decision to buy on your website, pairing reviews and testimonials with customer photos.
makes it even more powerful. And if you're ever in like the press or, ⁓ in a magazine or you have like a publicity feature, definitely put that on your website as well. As I'm saying this, I'm realizing that we were published in pretty two, like major local magazines this past year, and I have not updated my website with those yet. So that's something I need to do.
That being said, even just one really great quote or testimonial can help build trust and help people who are like kind of sitting on the fence, feel confident about making a decision to buy just from your website, not ever having to actually like talk to you or anything like that. Social proof gives them a reason to click the buy button.
Moving on to tip number four is to optimize your website for mobile. And this is something that I find very frustrating at times, but maybe because I'm a millennial and I really like to use my computer to look at websites. Like don't get me wrong. I use my phone a lot too, but, ⁓ the majority of the people who are visiting our websites are doing it on their phones, not
on laptops, not on computers. And I know this because in my website analytics on Squarespace, I can look and see the percentage of people who are visiting my site from a desktop computer or a phone. And you should be able to do that too on wherever your website hosts, whoever's hosting your website. So I know a lot of people are, visiting our website for
On their phones. And this is something that we're currently working on right now is re optimizing our whole site to make sure it looks good on a phone. So one tip that I have for you is like, if you're, you know, most website hosts, they have an option to preview your website either on a phone or on a desktop. But if it doesn't, and even if it does, I always look on my phone and I have somebody else look on their phone physically.
to see what the webpage looks like and make sure it looks okay. Because sometimes the like text or the photos can get moved around. can, the formatting can come up kind of weird. ⁓ Text might look bigger or smaller on a phone than it does on your desktop. And so it's kind of hard sometimes to make it look good in both ways. And depending on your website host, they might have like some automatic things that will make it look good in both places. And sometimes they don't. So,
Yeah, your site's gotta be ready for customers to see on their phone. I think there is a statistic floating around somewhere and I don't know the exact one, but something like over 50 % of visitors will view your site from their phone. So. You know, another piece of this is when you have your call to actions and you have your buttons that lead to your product pages or your buy now pages, you want to make sure those buttons are really tappable on a phone. Like they're easy to hit, easy to see.
It doesn't come up as like a really small, um, text or link or something like that. So we want to make sure that is available and easy to use. And that also your images load fast. If this happens to me, sometimes if I try to go to a website and it's loading super slow because you know, we all have like TikTok brain, which I don't use TikTok. So hopefully I don't have TikTok brain, but I know there's lots of people out there who do probably our customers.
But if something doesn't load like really fast, people just kind of move on to the next thing and you can be losing customers that way as well. So I want you right now, if you have a website, get out your phone when you're done listening to this podcast, type in your URL for me, it would be trademarksflowers.com. Go to it and see if it looks good on your phone, not my website. Look at your website to see if it's good on your phone. And if it's not,
You know, you got to fix it. Actually go through the motions that a customer would have to go through. Like how easy is it to actually buy something from your phone? If you're a customer looking for flowers and you go on your website, like how easy is it for them to actually buy something on there? Go through the motions and see how many clicks actually takes, see how many pages they have to actually go through, see how many times they have to enter in information to get through their checkout page. Like.
Really make it optimized for using a phone on your website. Now moving on to my final tip. Tip number five
is to capture every single visitor possible on your email list. We do this using something called an opt-in. That's also called the freebie also called a lead magnet. Also could be like a wait list, like could be anything, but you want to put something on your website that entices people to get on your email list. could be.
A free cut flower care guide. could be a guide to DIY and your wedding flowers. It could, it could be so many different things. could be a $5 off your first purchase. could just be like a simple discount. If that's something that you want to do, you want to have that very clear on every page of your website, not just like down in the footer. Like we try to put them like very upfront first kind of thing that you see.
or maybe second kind of thing that you see, but very clear, like if you're not gonna buy something from us right now, or even if you are, like we have this very cool thing for you to get on our email list. It can be something that is irresistible for your ideal customer. It could be just so many different things depending on what you're selling, something that they want. Like if I was selling gardening packages, like,
Like I used to do this a long time ago. Used to sell flats of cut flowers for people's cut flower gardens. It's not something we do anymore, but we were targeting, um, backyard cut flower gardeners, just people who were hobbyists, wanting to grow cut flowers in their backyard. So we had a long time ago, this like seasonal planting guide on what, when to plant certain kinds of flowers, whether they were cool, loving flowers or heat loving flowers. And that got a lot of our customers interested in that.
Once they were on our email list, we let them know when our flats of cut flower plugs were going to be available and then they would come and buy them. So do you see how getting people on your email list, how that's going to really help you make sales in the future? Use your website to grow your email list so you're not dependent on just like social media.
If you have people visiting your website without a way to grow your email list, it's kind of like planting flower seeds and then never harvesting them. It's kind of like a waste. You want to optimize your website to welcome people into your world, your business's world as much as possible. You want to capture their information so you can reach out to them and say, hey,
saw that you might be more interested in our flowers or our blog or our freebie or whatever, just wanna let you know that we have flowers available this weekend at our farm stand or we have flowers available next week at this farmer's market, whatever it is. That's how you start to develop relationships with people and you really start forming a solid and loyal customer base. And it can all start with your website.
So that is my five tips for you today. Just a quick recap. The first one was.
to add clear paths to buy on every page of your website. Tip number two was to make buying as seamless and frictionless as possible. Tip number three was to show social proof like testimonials and reviews. Tip number four was to optimize your site for mobile and viewing on phones. And tip number five is to make your opt-ins unmissable and capture as many visitors.
that come to your website as possible on your email list. So all of this said, your website can and should help you make more money, even while you're out harvesting in the field or transplanting or weeding or sleeping at night. It can really help. And you would be surprised. I have people who buy a lot of things from us at like midnight, two in the morning. Like it must just be people who can't sleep at night and are like just
shopping on their phones. I know, I don't really know, but you would be surprised that your website can actually help you make money even when you're not working. So I encourage you to just take 10 minutes and do like a site audit using these tips, like go through your website tonight or sometime this week, look at your pages, see if you can add in some better call to actions, create a freebie or even if for now until you have time to work on something like that, put just a sign up for our email list.
on your website somewhere if you don't have that yet. And if you don't have a website yet and you wanna make one, definitely go get started. And if you need help with any of this kind of stuff like optimizing your website for sales, growing your email list, even optimizing your website, I talk about all this stuff inside of my online business program for flower farmers that's called Six Figure Flower Farming. Registration will be opening.
this November 2025, so mark your calendars if that's something that you think could help you. And finally, if you got any value out of this episode at all, I would love it if you shared it with another flower farmer friend or just with the world because I am on a mission to get as many flower farmers to have profitable and sustainable businesses as possible and you can really help me on that mission.
You can also leave a review for this podcast on Apple if you haven't already. And if you have, thank you from the bottom of my heart. It really means a lot to me and helps me to know that what I'm doing is really helpful for you guys. So thanks for being here and I'll see you next week. Same place, same time.
