How was the talk "How to sell food on the Internet and attract customers to your offline business"

The numbers

Registered for the talk: 56 people.
Assistants: 25 people.
It was held on November 25, 2019 in the space provided by ULab, the co-working center of Alicante.

Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

How to sell food on the Internet and attract customers to your offline business: The Talk

As Christmas is approaching, from WPAlicante we are approaching one more month to the space of ULab to feed you both your knowledge and your stomach, for free. This time, the information comes from Fabian Lopez Colomawho tells us about his experience selling nougat on the Internet through turronesydulces.com. Fabian is a high school teacher and founder of the Ecommaster e-commerce academyThe company also provides training in ecommerce and digital marketing for professionals, entrepreneurs and lifelong learners. He was co-organizer of this meetingup during 2015-16.

In addition to the classic round of questions at the end of the talk, typical of all meetingups, on this occasion we were also able to enjoy a turron tasting with our speaker and his shop TurronesYDulces.com. And to finish the day we also enjoyed networking accompanied by refreshments at the kiosk in the Plaza de San Cristobal thanks to our sponsor: Weglot, the plugin to translate your web to the language you want.

Here are some points that we found interesting, although we include them at the end of this entry The full video of the presentation. .

Problem: Scaling up the company

The problem that the nougat sector has is that practically all year round it is quiet and stable until the Christmas season arrives and that is when everything shoots up, new competitors can come out... and it is very difficult to prepare for this in such a short space of time.

The website that supports this talk is actually programmed in Magento because when it started there was no wordpress or woocommerce.

It may be a good idea to try out new business models or diversify your products:

You can try selling parts of the items you use in your manufacture, such as the boxes/molds you use for your product if it is practical, or the candied fruit used in the preparation of the fruit nougat.
Specific products can be sold at Amazon to reach a wider audience.
You can even choose to sell on your website products from brands other than yoursThis is a way to complement your sales and avoid having to duplicate your production if it is not feasible to do so or to meet the needs of your customers that you cannot directly cover with your manufacturing.
In order to satisfy customers, it may sometimes be in the interest of certain products to have a low margin.

Users are changing their behavior, their tastes and needs and therefore the business model is also changing. People behind a counter have dedication to service and what they want most is to satisfy their clientele. In the end, behind an online store there are also people and therefore this vocation of service remains the same, or at least it should be maintained.

The omnicanality can be very interesting, but also complex to manage. Fabian started with an online store and now has a physical store as well. In the end, you can get your products to customers from many different channels and you can interact with customers through all of them. The interesting thing is that once you've made a client, you're able to recognize them regardless of the channel they use to reach you.
The means of payment can be another headache. Depending on your clientele, you may even be interested in maintaining cash on delivery, if it is older people who do not use a card or transfer. Sometimes it can also happen that you are told that payment is made by transfer and you prepare the order in advance and then the transfer does not arrive because the customer backs out of the order. Care must be taken with these types of situations to minimize losses.
In order to scale up the business it is important to work with automatisms to make your day-to-day life easier, because manually handling every order and every interaction with the customer would make scaling unfeasible. Therefore, tools like the ones we will see below become indispensable: Connectif, Doofinder, SalesIQ, Zoho CRM, Mailchimp, Zapier or IFTTT
The magic formula in a store, be it physical or online, is the formula of income. For there to be economic income we need to have visits to the trade and for those visits to convert, that is, to make purchases. In a physical business there is usually a large conversion rate (CT), while in an online one, the CT is usually 1 to 3% maximum.

income = Visits x TC x PM x f
TC = Conversion Rate
PM = Medium Order
f = frequency of purchase

Elements to consider in the online store

On the web we must bear in mind what our intention is to the user and use the tools that frameworks such as WordPress offer us to achieve our goals as:

MailchimpExit intention: It offers you the possibility to generate "exit intention" pop-ups, that is, when the user clicks on the close button, before it closes it allows to generate pop-ups with a discount coupon, for example.
Coupons and discountsDiscounts: Discounts can be offered to the customer if they register, or if they subscribe to a newsletter, if they reach a certain amount of purchase or exceed a previously made purchase. It can also be rewarded with free shipping above a certain amount.
A powerful search engineThere are search engines that are very slow. You can use a browser that is "software as a service", such as DooFinder. This type of tool allows the search engine to not be on the server where the page is located, which greatly speeds up response times. In addition, they are very powerful search engines with autocompletion of words and with many features that you can predefine according to your interests, such as giving weight to your products so that some come out in the search before others and optimized for mobiles
Tracing tools to analyze the service and improve it, such as Connectif.
Online chat toolsThey can be used to chat in real time with customers who want any kind of help, as if they were in a physical shop. They can also be used to monitor customers, seeing individually, who enters, how long they stay, by what means they entered, if they are new or recurrent... Examples of these chats are Zopim by palbin.com or SalesIQ by Zoho, which also has a CRM. We may use the information we have in the CRM software to filter and perform specific actions on certain customers, such as sending a unified response to several of them, for example, if they are asking for prices and help in opening a store and using us as a product supplier. You can also filter those who have consumed more to send them personalized emails ... like making newsletters but by hand and segmented by those data that interest you most.

There are also a number of additional actions you can take to earn income, such as

Campaigns on Facebook. It's hard to get a sale through Facebook. To increase the chances of success you can use the Dynamic RemarketingAnd even improve it by adding interesting information such as videos about your product development process, for example. Facebook feeds back on the events that occur on your website and gives you comprehensive information so you can decide which ads to keep because they're successful and which to discard because they're always going out to a small group of people (and people get tired of seeing the same ads). Until recently the call to action on Facebook ads was to visit your website or leave you a message on Messenger. Now you can also get a message from Whatsapp.
Campaigns to improve the LinkbuildingYou can have your website talked about on the networks or on television, in press articles and thus improve the SEO of your website. One example was what Fabián, our rapporteur, did by doing a vote on Twitter so that people could say which politicians they thought were "harder" and which were "softer" and with the result, he put the face of the "hardest" politician on a turrón de Alicante bar and the "softest" one on one from Jijona and sent them to him. Then he told about it on the networks and it was even in the national news so many people talked about it and his website was mentioned in many digital media.
Google add-ons: thanks to this you can control your competitors, so it can be interesting to keep it. You have to be careful with the campaigns you introduce to ensure that the conversion becomes profitable. It's funny how most of the traffic is already done by mobile phone but the purchases are still through the desktop so it may not interest strong campaigns through mobile clicks, even if they are a penny a click, if people do not really finish the purchases by mobile. It is important to have the ads worked out so that the search intentions will lead you to the pages you really want, for example, it is not the same if you get a search for "Turrón de jijona" from Spain than from abroad, if what you show is an informative video (the one from abroad you can focus more on export).
Humanize the online store and ordersThe newest addition to the online store is the addition of videos and animated gifs to the order emails. Videos on the web favour SEO because the user stays longer on the web. You have to be careful because it can also slow you down and that would harm the SEO (it makes the page speed worse). This can be fixed by changing the web programming so that the youtube widget is not loaded directly but there is a preload of the image and only when you click on it does it load the video.
Adding automatisms to improve processes using Zapier Or IFTTT. The first one is a tool that allows you to create workflows from an event and for that it integrates a lot of market tools. For example, you can use an incoming mail as a trigger and have it generate a dropbox backup or a slack alert. With the second one, interactions between social networks and other services such as voice assistants, home automation services or mail assistants can be automated. The ultimate goal is the same as already mentioned: to automate workflows to minimize manual work effort.
Use Google Analytics dashboardsGoogle Analytics: You can use Google Analytics to track what's going on on the web, where you can see the number of orders, the average order... Also those panels can be imported. You can google "dashboard analytics" and see how to do it.

Other examples of interesting services made in WordPress

Fabian shows us other examples made in WordPress to take advantage of domains and maximize profitability by minimizing effort:

Ecommerce, which is no small thingE-commerce course: it is a course on ecommerce through mailchimp, sending information weekly. It is mounted on a expired domain related to the topic you wanted to address and that already had some course included and links from some university and other course pages, with a DR Contains the Astra theme, basic, and including Autoptimize to optimize it, clearfy to improve SEO and simplify it and some other plugin and you'd have it.
Turronalapiedra.com: Online shop of turrón a la piedra, to take advantage of the specific niche of this type of turrón that is in great demand. This was also an expired domain, which contains a wordpress with woocommerce and is well positioned in Google. Use the Forge's page buildercreated by Manuel VicedoThe WordPress team is made up of a very talented WordPress developer from Alicante, Spain.
The blog of turronesydulces.comWordpress: It is a wordpress with a different template than the main website. It's done on purpose because something very simple and fast was required, mainly to improve SEO and to be able to show certain contents, like the Amstel Turrón that came out recently.
The ecommaster conferenceThe website that informs about the online marketing congress held in Alicante. It's made in wordpress with Divi.

Final networking questions and issues

QUESTIONA very important topic when you are in front of the public is opinions. There are restaurants that after a visit send you an email asking for your impression (if you have left your address) or ask you to do a review on Google or other platforms such as Amazon, where opinions score high. How do you get customers to comment on you?"

RESPONSEAfter an order, I always try to send an email with the link to the review, especially in Google My Business there is a link you can send to customers to write the review. It is important that the reviews on the website itself cannot be falsified and are born from a verified purchase. This is done through external companies that control this information and are the ones that ask the client to make this type of review, such as verified opinions. And the fundamental thing is that this review is then picked up by Google in the snippet, that is, in the information it shows in the search engine itself when you perform a search where you appear.

QUESTIONWhatsapp Business: There's the Whatsapp Business and there seems to be a possibility to see the catalogue there. Do you know how to do it?

RESPONSEWhatsApp Business: It allows you to both create your product catalog and automate quick responses by saving sample messages that you can easily forward. For example, if you're frequently asked the address of your establishment, you can prepare a response that includes location on Google Maps and some reference photo. It also allows you to tag both contacts and conversations, so that you can locate them quickly (those that are requested, those that are queries, incidents...). At the moment the catalog theme is not useful because it has to be registered manually, it cannot be imported from the store feed, so it is a waste of time. Right now it may make more sense for small businesses that don't have an online store.

QUESTIONIn your experience, does Google Analytics really deliver all the sales, or is a CRM better in that way?

RESPONSEHe doesn't throw away all the sales. Google Analytics' analytics is totally different from Facebook's, for example. The differences are due to the models of attribution, which is a world I do not even understand. Sometimes they assign the sale to the SEO and other times to AddWords depending on the number of visits you have made or on the last click, or if you have seen a campaign on a website, so they never match. In addition, Analytics shows you only the sales of the FrontEnd (those that have been made through the web), so if someone calls by phone and that order is registered directly in the backend (in administration) Analytics would not count it. That is why sometimes we ask the factory to register through the web as if it were the user himself, so that Analytics can count it.

Glossary

CRMCustomer Relationship Management (CRM): This is a way of interacting with the customer thanks to the knowledge we have of him. There is CRM software that is mainly used to control the activities of Salesbut they can also manage other areas such as Marketingto boost the demand for our products, or ServiceWe take care of our customers so that they are satisfied with the result of interacting in our store. These programs search for and store information about customers who are interacting with the store, such as Analytics data about the URLs they have visited in the store.
Dynamic RemarketingThe one that shows you the products you have already visited or the shopping cart you have not finished. A static remarketing would be to show a specific product as an advertisement, without having any feedback from your actions on a website.
Linkbuilding: The links that are written in other pages to the entries of our web. It can be internal or external. In the first case is when we write links within our own web to other pages of ours and in the second case is when those links are on pages other than ours. The more prestige these outer pages are, the better.
Expired DomainThe owner has stopped paying and can no longer use it, so anyone else can buy it. The good thing is that it keeps all your SEO intact, so you can get a well-positioned domain instead of having to start from scratch. There are associated SEO metrics that most expired domain directories show, and that can help us decide on one of them, such as the number of Referrer Domains (RD), that is, the number of domains from which the expired one is linked. There is a more detailed metric and that is the number of backlinks, which is the total number of external links pointing to the website in question.