BridalLive

courtesy: Pure Brides

Over the past few months I’ve had the privilege of working with Anna and Gemma from Pure Brides in Norwich, Norfolk UK.  Pure Brides carries fabulous Wedding Dresses, Bridal Gowns in Norwich, Norfolk.   Anna and Gemma have been instrumental in providing feedback and suggestions for BridalLive enhancements; especially for the UK.  Many of the features you see in BridalLive are a direct result of their insightful feedback.  So if you happen to be looking for wedding dresses in Norwich, Norfolk, Pure Brides is THE place to go.

I caught up with Anna and asked her a few questions about BridalLive.  The interview follows:

Tom: Tell us a little about your shop?  How did you get into bridal, your location, how long in business, sq footage, etc.

Anna: I’m based in Norwich in the UK and got into bridal simply as the opportunity presented itself, the numbers looked good and I was looking for a different direction from the corporate background I had come from. We have been trading for 5 years now and have around 1300 sq ft.

Tom: What made you choose BridalLive over the other bridal-specific software vendors?

Anna: There was nothing else in the UK that was even close to doing what BridalLive does. I have looked at a variety of different options, only one of which was Bridal specific and none of these even came close to what I was looking for. I was at the point where my web designer and I were looking to try and develop our own software when I found BL and so it was a great find for me as all the hard work had already been done!

Tom: How long did it take to learn to use BridalLive?  How long to train your staff?

Anna: My manageress and I found it very intuitive and got to grips with it very quickly, and we are pretty used to working with Windows and regularly use a computer, the other members of my team have definitely found it harder, as they are less comfortable working on a computer and are very used to writing everything down, so the transition has been painful in places, but they do all love it now and despite the many ‘how do I’ type of questions that we get throughout the day, they can see the benefit and are beginning to feel more professional as a result of BridalLive. It’s take a few months, but we are rather unique in that we were the 1st UK shop and have had to change several bits and pieces to make the system ‘feel right’ in the UK and we deliberately took it slowly as we weren’t able to fully switch over until all the UK specific updates were in place.

Tom: Has BridalLive improved your bridal shops operations? How?

Anna: YES! It’s very easy to immediately locate brides info, and there are no excuses for mislaid paperwork or incorrect balances or payments being taken. The reports features are fab and actually made it very clear to me where we are making good money and where we need to re-evaluate stock etc.

Tom: What is your favorite feature of BridalLive?

Anna: There are so many, the reports are excellent, but so are the tasks, you’ll never again forget to do something, just set yourself a task and it will stay in the list until you mark it as completed! Yay, a few less sleepless nights worrying about the thing I’m sure forgotten, but can’t actually remember what it is!

Tom: Would you recommend BridalLive to other bridal shops?  Why?

Anna: Absolutely, although the fact that I don’t want my immediate competitors to have it tells a story!

I want to thank Anna for taking time out of her busy schedule to share his thoughts and insights with everyone.  Pure Brides has an excellent selection of Mother of the Bride dresses.  Check them out!

Version 1.3 is a direct response to your feature requests.  All of the enhancements and new features added in this version were a direct result of the outstanding feedback I’ve received from shops using BridalLive.  In this blog post, I’ll outline some of the more notable new features.

Improved Order Tracking/Management

In version 1.2, in order to be able to see the status of a customer order, you had to open the customer’s Sales Order and click “Associated POs”.  We’ve improved this in version 1.3, by adding the PO #, Est. Ship Date, and Qty Received to the contact’s purchase history tab.  These new fields are available for each sales order line item listed in the purchase history.  Also, you can now jump directly to the Inventory Item, Sales Order, or Purchase Order right from the from the line item!

Additionally, we’ve added the ability open the contact tab directly from the Purchase Order.  For each line item on the PO, we’ve added a new icon that will open the contact’s tab.  Also, we’ve added the ability to copy the Contact’s name and event date to the notes field on the PO.  Simply select “Copy contact information to PO” when you are creating the PO and voila!

From the POS side, you can now enter notes for each line item and track which items have been taken home on a Sales Order.  Also, for those of you who require a certain deposit percent for Sales Order (i.e. 50% down), you can now specify this percentage under Administration > POS > Default Deposit Percent.

Receipts got an upgrade as well.  With version 1.3 you can now print your logo and any line item notes.  To add your logo, simply go to Administration > POS > Print Logo on Receipt.

Improved Appointment Options

In version 1.2 appointments were either “Pending” or “Completed”.  With version 1.3 we’ve now introduced the concept of “Re-Booked”, “No show”, and “Canceled”.  Using the accompanying report titled “Appointment Status Count By Month”, you can now track how many appointment were not completed and why.  With this feature, you will now have the ability to measure improvements made in Pre-Sales communication with the bride.

Also, the Quick Appointment now has a notes field where you can enter notes specific to that appointment without having to open the appointment.

Improved Inventory Management

In version 1.2, every item was unique by short description, size and color.  As a result, new items for the same style were added to the inventory every time a different size or color was sold.  While some prefer this technique, we added to option to manually specify color and size on the Sale and Sales Order without new items being added to the item list.

To make things even easier, we’ve added to concept of Color Groups and Size Groups that can be added to Vendors.  When these color and size groups are linked to the inventory item, the color and size fields on the Sale/Sales Order use these available options. Moreover, this feature establishes a foundation needed to be able to suggest sizing based on the contact’s measurements.

For a complete listing of new features and improvements, please reference the release notes.

How to get the new version

Updating is free and simple and takes less than 30 seconds. On each computer running BridalLive, follow these 3 steps:

1. Open the Administration Module
2. Click “Program Settings” in the left navigation menu
3. Click “Check For Updates” and accept the updates.

As always, if you have any questions/suggestions, please contact me.

Helping you thrive,

Tom Esposito

It’s finally here and you’re going to love it.

If you’ve ever wanted to automate your prom dress registry, it’s here.  If you were one of the many that requested Credit Card processing, today’s your day.  With over 25 new features and improvements, version 1.2 is the next step in making your bridal business more profitable.

For a complete listing of these new features and improvements, please read the release notes.

For more information on how to use the new features, see the Online User Guide.

Updating is simple and takes less than 30 seconds. On each computer running BridalLive, follow these 3 steps:

1. Open the Administration Module
2. Click “Program Settings” in the left navigation menu
3. Click “Check For Updates” and accept the updates.

Have fun with it and let me know how we can make it better.

Shameless plug follows:

Today BridalLive’s Marketing Tools are helping retailers all over the country generate more web site leads, reduce appointment cancellations and increase their closing ratio.  If your shop could use improvement in these areas, I encourage you to learn more about the marketing tools. To see it in action, contact me directly at 1-888-764-2605 for an interactive live demo and case studies.

In this post, outline my top 7 website re-design tips for your bridal shop website.  If you are thinking of overhauling your website, be sure to read these first.

1. Focus on conversion – The only reason you have a website in the first place is to generate new leads.  If your old website wasn’t set up to measure conversion, make sure your new one is.  For more information on this, take a look at my other post on Measuring your bridal shop website’s conversion rate .
2. Your website must attract prospects – Your website has to be more than just pretty, it has to attract visitors.  Visitors are attracted by remarkable content.  Whether that be a great blog post, a cool video, or a special promotion, you must give web surfing brides a reason to visit your website.  Once you’ve figured out what that is, be sure to tell the world.  Post to Facebook, tweet, write a blog post, share a video on you tube, etc.  The bottom line is that your brand now has more real estate that it can claim online and much of it is free.  If you do nothing else, be sure to create your local listings at all of the top search engines. Here are the links: Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, Bing Local.  As an added bonus, the effort spent to create your Local listings will help you out in the SEO department as well.
3. Create Landing Pages – Landing pages that visitors usually “land” on first.  Often times, these are pages have been optimized for search engines.  Since most visitors don’t enter your web site through the front door (home page),  make sure that each of your landing pages are well designed with appropriate calls-to-action.
4. Re-use what’s working with your current site – Don’t completely trash your old site if there were parts of it that were working.  For example, if you have a significant amount of inbound links to a page, don’t get rid of it.  Keep any keyword rich copy that you spent time creating and re-use that as well.
5. Don’t re-invent the wheel – There is a reason why amazon hasn’t done a major re-design of it’s website.  It’s because it works.  There are plenty of designs out there that work really well.  Take inspiration from them.
6. Spend more time creating content than beautiful design – Be sure to include elements to your site that allow you to change and/or produce content on a regular basis.  A blog is a great way to keep fresh content on your site.  Plus, it shows that your business has a pulse.
7. Include a simple way to measure your site’s effectiveness – We’re bridal retailers and we don’t have time to check our web site analytics every day.  That’s why it’s important to have a system in place for measuring your site effectiveness.  I keep tabs on a few key numbers: Conversion rate, bounce rate, total visitors.  Then I look at my top 10 referring sites to make sure that my marketing spend is in check.  These numbers usually give me an idea of how well our site is working.

What are some of your tips for redesigning a web site?  Anything you learned last time around?  Share your ideas with the readers of this blog by commenting.

This is the thrid article in a series entitled “A Systematic Approach to Bridal Shop Marketing“.  In the last article, I showed you how to convert your bridal shop website visitors into prospects. If you’ve completed that step you are now driving tons of traffic to your web site and getting them to perform your calls-to-action.  Now it’s time to focus on how you can measure the effectiveness of your website.  Specifically, your website’s conversion rate.

As Bridal retailers, we routinely measure our closing ratio for our in-store product.  We also monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns by tracking coupon codes, asking brides how they heard about us, and reviewing the “referring sites” in our web statistics software.  The more retailers I talk to, the more I’m finding out that there has been little attention paid to the effectiveness of their website.  In today’s world, simply having a web site is not good enough.  Your web site MUST be doing its job of driving foot traffic in to your bridal salon.

Most web sites have a conversion rate of less than 1%.  Conversion can be influenced by many different things: the placement of your calls-to-action, the quality of the web site visitor, how compelling your marketing copy is, etc.  In the last article in this series we talked about how to establish effective calls-to-action.  Now, we’ll look at how to measure your results using Google Analytics.

The rest of this post will assume that you are familiar with Google Analytics.  If you are not familiar with Google Analytics, I advise that you read my previous post entitled Setting up Google Analytics for your Bridal Shop’s web site.

Now let’s look at the steps needed to measure your web site performance.

1. Establish web site goals
2. Measure
3. Tweak

Establishing web site goals within Google Analytics

Before you can measure the effectiveness of your web site, you must first establish “Goals” for your visitors to perform.  These are the same as your calls-to-action and you must tell Google what they are before they can be measured. Before we get started, if you are a BridalLive Marketing Tools customer and would like to establish goals for your Marketing Tools submission, please read my previous post entitled How to use our Bridal Shop POS Software to measure website conversion.

To establish goals inside of Google Analytics click the “Edit” button next to your web site profile.

Next, you’ll want to add your goal.  Click “Add Goal” on your web site settings page as seen below.

Next, you’ll want to name your goal and choose the “Goal Type”.  If you simply want to measure how many times a web visitor visits a web page on your site, choose “URL Destination”.  This is the easiest type of goal and the only one that we’ll discuss in this post.  Now, enter the URL of the page on your site that you’d like to measure.

Once you’ve defined your web site goals, it’s time to start measuring.

Measuring your Web Site’s Effectiveness with Google Analytics

Google provides a lot of nice graphs and stats that help you visualize your web site’s performance.  To view the Goals stats, navigate to the “Goals” section in the left navigation bar.

On the overview page, you’ll see a “Goal Performance” graph that shows how many conversions you’ve received and what percentage of visitors are converting.  It’ll look something like the graphic below:

There are a variety of other great reports that Google provides within the “Goals” section of its Analytics software.  Take a look through and be sure to visit often to keep tabs on how well your site is working for you.

Tweaking your website

It’s important to remember that measuring performance is only half of the equation.  Once you’ve established the means to measure your performance, you must now work on improving your site’s effectiveness.  Some things that you can play around with are:

1. Change the location of your Calls To Action
2. Simplify your home page
3. Make your Call To Action stand out more
4. Place your Calls To Action in more places on your web site

This concludes the discussion on measuring web site performance.

Follow the links below for the rest of this series:

1. Part 1: Your Lead Machine
2. Part 2: Conversion Principles
3. Part 3: Measuring Conversion
4. Pre-Appointment trust building and differentiation
5. Fostering post-sale word of mouth

Stay tuned via Email, RSS, or Twitter.  You are not going to want to miss the rest of this series.

I hope everyone enjoyed the webinar last night on blogging. I’ve included some notes from the session below.

Getting Started with Blogging

3 Step process:

1. Install
2. Configure
3. Design

Installing your blog

If you don’t have a host like BlueHost that has a simple WordPress installation feature, then you’ll have to follow WordPress’s Famous 5-minute Installation

Configuring your blog

The most important things to remember here is that you want to make your blog “Public” by making the neccessary selection under the Privacy settings.  After you’ve done that you’ll want to make sure your Permalinks are set up properly so that the links to your blog posts are keyword rich.  To do this, set the “Common Settings” to use a custom structure of “/%category%/%postname%”.

One of the last steps in configuring your blog is to install plug ins.  Here is a list of plug-ins that you’ll want to install:

1. Akismet – blocks spam comments
2. All in one SEO Pack – helps your posts be keyword rich
3. Google XML Sitemaps – builds a “map” of your site ans submits to Google and other search engines routinely.
4. Subscription Options – or something like it that allows people to subscribe to your blog.
5. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Shows a list of related posts at the bottom of each post.  Great for keywords
6. Sociable – or something like it that allows people to book mark your site on social sites.

Designing Your Blog

When it comes to making your blog look pretty you have a few options.

1. Free Themes – search within WordPress to find and install free themes
2. Premium Theme – use a site like Templatic to find some really nice premium themes
3. Custom Theme – use a site like Elance.com to find a WordPress freelancer who can make a theme that matches your website

I’m looking forward to the next webinar where we’ll look at how you can measure website conversion rates using Google Analytics.

As technology evolves and consumer behavior changes, you must understand how to use technology to market your business more effectively.  I’ve put together a series of webinars that can help you get started with today’s technologies.  To register, simply enter your email address and click “Sign Up”. Attendance is limited to the first 20 subscribers. If you are unable to attend or miss the cut off, contact me (tom@bridallive.com) and we’ll work something out.

This year’s Tampa Seminar was amazing.  There were some excellent sales and marketing sessions led by Jim Butler of Arizona’s Bridal Warehouse and Bridal Training Systems.  Jim really knows what he’s talking about and if you are serious about growing your bridal business, you need to be paying attention to what he has to offer.

Jon Saltzman (Jon’s Bridal) gave 2 talks. One was for Newbies and the other was a great contrast between Special Order and Off-The-Rack shops.  Lisa (Formals Of Litchfield) and Barbara (Mary and Tux) had a great presentation on how to make bridesmaids a more profitable part of our businesses.

On Monday, I spoke about “How to use today’s technology to gain a competitive edge”.  During the talk, I gave away a few prizes.  Angela Ng from Bridal Image in San Francisco and Lynn Atkins from Charlotte Bridal both won books.  The grand prize, a FREE COPY OF BRIDALLIVE, was won by Beth Clark of Bridal Chateau.  Congratulations to all the lucky winners.

Many of the attendees asked if I would post my presentation and hand out.  You can find the powerpoint presentation here and the hand out here.

Rachel and I enjoyed meeting everyone.  We’ll see you next year!

The Better Bridal Group seminar starts Monday 12/7/2009. Are you ready? If you haven’t yet registered for the event, jump over to www.bridalconvention.net and get signed up already!  Last year (although we couldn’t attend) there were over 50 bridal stores represented sharing their ideas and networking.  This bridal seminar easily pays for itself.

This year I will be giving a talk entitled “How to use today’s technology to gain a competitive edge”.  I’ll address how changes in marketing have allowed savvy bridal shops to leverage new technology products.  I’ll also be demonstrating how you can turn your website into a lead generation machine.  After that, we’ll do some hands on demonstrations of some excellent software products that can help streamline your marketing efforts.

There will also be some excellent sessions led by Jim Butler of Arizona’s Bridal Warehouse and Bridal Training Systems. His materials on sales and marketing are a necessity if you are an independent bridal shop looking to get ahead of the curve.

I look forward to meeting new shop owners and developing new friendships.

image courtesy of Roadside Guitars

This is the second article in a series entitled “A Systematic Approach to Bridal Shop Marketing“.  In the last article, I showed you how to build your bridal shop lead machine . If you’ve completed that step you are now driving tons of traffic to your web site and it’s time to start thinking about what you want all those visitors to do. Whenever I consult with folks about the design of their website, I always start off with the same question. “What is the purpose of your website?” So, what’s the purpose of your site? If you answered that by saying “to impress brides or help brides learn more about my shop”, then I challenge you to rethink that.

For non-e-commerce sites, I have yet to find a better purpose than converting website visitors into in-store traffic.  Studies have shown that the most effective way to convert a site visitor in to a lead is with a clear call to action that can be performed immediately.

The days of web users randomly surfing the web is coming to an end. The Web is a selfish place. People don’t have time to read the same old sales messaging about beautiful and exquisite gowns. Besides, they’ve already visited a hundred other sites with essentially the exact same wording.  Web surfers today scan pages looking for something specific. Most have no interest in links such as “What We Do” and “Who We Are”. They only care about what you can do for them. Keep this in mind when you are creating your web content.

Great web content is active. It lets you buy, subscribe, donate, apply, submit, contact, discuss, get help, or get involved. Every time you write a piece of web content you should also write at least one call to action at the end of that content.

A link is a call to action.  Think carefully about your calls to action. Are they clear and precise? Are they making the right statements?  And, most importantly, will they result in more foot traffic in your bridal store.

You have to tell your users what they can do on your site. Avoid rhetorical questions and get to the point. “Request an Appointment”, “Watch a video”, “Sign Up”, “Join Us”, are all effective call to action statements.

So what are the top 3 call’s to action on your website?  If you’d like to share your calls to action, add a comment to this post!

I’ll close this post with a case study of our shop’s website (Bel Fiore Bridal an Atlanta Bridal Shop) as an example.  Take a look at this excerpt from from our home page and then read the reasoning behind and the placement of these calls to action.

If you look closely you’ll see 3 calls to action on the home page. Each targets brides in various stages of the buying cycle. The main call to action is “Request an Appointment”. This is aimed at brides who are ready to start visiting bridal shops. The next call to action is “Sign up for a free bride tank”. This is aimed at the bride who is still surfing the web and assembling a list of atlanta bridal shops that she’d like to visit.  We want to be one of those shops, so we encourage her to engage with us by giving her something tangible to leave our site with.  The final call to action is to connect with us via social media.

One important thing to note here is the placement of these calls-to-action. User studies show that people digest web page content in the shape of an “F”. So you’ll see our primary call to action is right in the middle of the page with a BIG BUTTON, followed by the sign up form and social media to the right.

As an exercise in examining your calls to action take a look at these sites and try to locate their calls to action:

Project Management Software – http://basecamphq.com/

FreshBooks for Blackberry – http://www.bookkeeperapp.com/

The Knot – http://www.theknot.com/

Follow the links below for the rest of this series:

1. Part 1: Your Lead Machine
2. Part 2: Conversion Principles
3. Part 3: Measuring Conversion
4. Pre-Appointment trust building and differentiation
5. Fostering post-sale word of mouth

Stay tuned via Email, RSS, or Twitter.  You are not going to want to miss the continuation of this series.