Regardless of if a shopper starts online or walking the sidewalk in front of your store, the path to purchase is as unique as the pieces themselves. This week's conversation illuminates the diverse ways consumers shop for everything from engagement rings to casual accessories. We dissect the importance of not just catering to high-ticket items but also embracing the varied desires of a broader clientele. By balancing in-person consultations with digital exploration, businesses can craft a shopping experience that resonates with a generation of buyers seeking both meaning and variety in their purchases.
Learn more about National Rarities: nationalrarities.com/pages/host-an-event
Send feedback or learn more about the podcast: punchmark.com/loupe
Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com
Regardless of if a shopper starts online or walking the sidewalk in front of your store, the path to purchase is as unique as the pieces themselves. This week's conversation illuminates the diverse ways consumers shop for everything from engagement rings to casual accessories. We dissect the importance of not just catering to high-ticket items but also embracing the varied desires of a broader clientele. By balancing in-person consultations with digital exploration, businesses can craft a shopping experience that resonates with a generation of buyers seeking both meaning and variety in their purchases.
Learn more about National Rarities: nationalrarities.com/pages/host-an-event
Send feedback or learn more about the podcast: punchmark.com/loupe
Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com
Welcome back everybody to In the Loop. What is up everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. Thanks again for listening to In the Loop this week. I'm joined by Stuart Blessman, the Director of Digital Marketing at Punchmark, and we're talking all about the consumer journey and we've talked a little bit about this in the past, but we've framed it in the perspective of buy funnel and that's a little bit different. So buy funnel is the process of taking prospects and converting them into shoppers, and the consumer journey is more about the process of like marketing to them, then coming to the store or visiting your website and then the options of converting them and then eventually remarketing and retargeting to them and drawing out the journey and recycling it back into it. So they can kind of relate to each other. But we talk specifically about the journey of it and Stuart's an expert on this. He's been doing digital marketing for years and he talks about it to highlight some of the key channels that you can rely on. That might, for example, make it easier for you to convert or shine some light on where some people might be getting lost. It's a fun talk. I really enjoy speaking with him and if you're interested in learning more, you can always email him. Stuart at punchmarkcom, we love to know that In the Loop's at you. All right, enjoy the conversation Free demo today at punchmarkcom.
Speaker 1:While you're enjoying this week's episode, take a moment and leave us a star rating on the Spotify mobile app or, if you're on Apple Podcasts, leave us a star rating and a review. It's the best way to help us grow into show that you really enjoy in the show. Thanks, and now back to the show. What is up, everybody? I hope you're having a good day. I'm joined by Stuart Blessman, director of digital marketing. How you doing today, stu?
Speaker 2:Doing pretty good. You ready for the holidays.
Speaker 1:Well see, that's breaking the immersion. This is going to come out next.
Speaker 2:Sorry man, yeah, sorry, no sorry no, you know what.
Speaker 1:We're going to leave that in there, that way people know we're recording this on December 18th because we want this to come out. This is going to come out, I think, on the 9th of January. So really off to a rockier start right now. How?
Speaker 1:are your holidays, Mike, All right anyway, that's how we keep it, we keep it lighthearted around here. But we're going to be talking all about customer journey and I think that we've talked about this a little bit in the past or as part of other stories. But, Stu, can you kind of set up for me what the customer journey is and how it relates to the online or, just like you know, commerce lifestyle?
Speaker 2:Sure, the customer journey as traditionally understood by a number of different businesses, including the jewelry industry, kind of boils down to a couple of different parts. One you got to attract people, you got to get their attention. You have to bring them to your website, provide a good experience for them on your website or in your store, and then what is the experience like after they have purchased from you? That's basically the customer journey from start to finish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how does the customer journey differ from, for example, by funnels, because we've talked about that in the past, but I know that they are relatively similar, or maybe in ethos. How do they differentiate from each other?
Speaker 2:So the customer journey, as separate from like a marketing funnel or a sales funnel, is much more viewing things from the customer standpoint, whereas like a marketing or sales funnel kind of like fits your business, your systems, your people, your processes over on top of that to try to match the customer journey.
Speaker 1:Hmm, I see. So do you consider there to be two different customer journeys when it comes to in-store versus online, or do you feel that they are part of the same journey, you could say, with two distinct exits?
Speaker 2:you might even say it's almost a bit of a Venn diagram between them. So many places want to have a customer journey that is overlapping. Website is very the same as the in-store experience, et cetera, but when it comes to things like websites shopping online volume comes into play, because your website can process more people than your store's physical location can even handle. So you're trying to find that sweet spot between them.
Speaker 1:So can you walk me through it? What is like step one on the customer journey, as you kind of identify it when you're talking with these jewelers?
Speaker 2:Step number one with a customer journey comes down to what is the customer looking to purchase, or rather, what is their current need, pain point, what are they looking for? They need to find something in themselves. So, within jewelry, a standard kind of starting point of a customer journey could be I am thinking about proposing to my girlfriend I need to start thinking about buying an engagement ring. That thought that initial action is where things start with them.
Speaker 1:So that's pretty early. I mean, they haven't even touched any type of platform or product or anything related to the business. This is kind of like a conceptual stage. And then where do they go from there? Is it still a conceptual one, or is there like a more tangible kind of step after that?
Speaker 2:Let's flash forward a little and assume that they've saved up a couple of money, a couple thousand dollars, that they want to invest into an engagement ring. Maybe they've even started planning out what the engagement will look like At that point. More than likely the average consumer nowadays, when you start talking like younger millennials or even into Gen Z range you know the 24, 28 year olds they're going to pull out their cell phone, they're going to start looking online, they're going to start looking at the different styles that are available and as they're looking at those styles, looking at the different diamond options that are available to them, they'll start picking up on things such as is this a brand, is this a national chain or is this a local retailer that I could talk to face to face and have a relationship with?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I was going back again, breaking the immersion for a second. I was going back and I was looking at our best episodes from last season when I was making the wrap up episode. And as I was going back, I listened again to my interview with Renzo. Actually, renzo, project manager at Punch Bark, and he was talking about shopping for rings for his husband and what the process was like, and you know as well as I do that Renzo was probably the most well informed when it comes to shopping and commerce. Oh yes, I mean, he just reads everything and I didn't really realize how big of a step that is. I'm kind of a grip it and rip it kind of guy Like I go on whatever one they serve me up. I'm probably going to get that one first, which I probably make up a large portion of people who just type in jewelry stores near me and then go to the first one that's served with the highest relevance. You know what'd you say?
Speaker 2:A lot of people, and ourselves included, when you get good marketing, you get good advertising. We will latch on to that first thing we see and say, oh, that is exactly what I want. It kind of informs every other decision we make after that, because that was our initial, you know, exposure to what we're looking for.
Speaker 1:And so let's just say they go for the jewelry stores near me, let's say they go. That approach Is that kind of where you start to kind of find that there's the most impact for, for example, seo and things like that. Is it in that stage, and if they progress past it without clicking on that website, that it's kind of like you sort of lost them or their ways to earn their dollars back if they don't click on you right away?
Speaker 2:If they don't click on you right away, it's going to be a bit of a nutrition thing. You're just going to need to be in front of them regularly trying to remind them hey, we are a better choice, we are a better option. Interesting enough for one of our previous workshops that we do for our clients in Charlotte. I did some research into the whole. Like Googling near me at the end of a phrase, so, like you know, jewelry store near me, jewelry repair near me it almost always is a vast ton of impressions. People are doing that, but when you look at the clicks like for every you know a thousand searches, it's like you know a handful of clicks that happen. That type of phrase does not necessarily drive a lot of traffic to a store or to a website, but you show up for that regularly. People will find you based on a number of other factors, including are you on my way home from work, are you close by, has somebody else referred you to me, or do you have a lot of stars on Google?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that that just impressions man, I absolutely hate that term so much because it's like I feel like they attribute way too much to it sometimes. But I don't think that there's. You know, it definitely works, because when I think about impressions, we're talking about advertisements. We talk about them just even on like the larger scale, like we're talking about, you know, super Bowl ads, the most expensive ads in the world, those ones but also we talk about them on like a smaller size, you know, having a display case right next to the checkout at, like a grocery store or something like that. Those are advertisements too, and you can shop from them as well. But I think we're going to away from the point Now. Let's just say they got their dollars and they've looked at different jewelry stores and they are, you know, comparing, and then they decide they're going to stop at Stu's Stu's blessed jewelry store. I what? What would the next step be? Is it visiting, or is it visiting the website? What would you say?
Speaker 2:Depends on the customer, and it could either be visit the store or visit the website. If I was a 24 year old and I'm looking for an engagement ring, I'm in way over my head. It's a dizzying number of options available online. I will probably want to go into a jewelry store and have a conversation as to what next steps look like. What can I afford? What do you recommend Most popular? On the other hand, if somebody is like, hey, you know, I am just looking for a nice pearl necklace. I want to buy, you know, a nice bracelet as a Christmas gift or Easter, valentine's Day kind of gift, more than likely I want to pull up my phone, start with things like you know, google Shopping tab, start with Instagram, pinterest. Start looking at all the different styles that are available and just click through the funnels, visiting every website to get a sense of what does this look like in person. What are the options available to me?
Speaker 1:You know we always seem to when we're talking about punchmark, we always sometimes discuss the engagement ring purchase as like kind of what our quintessential purchase is. And are we wrong in doing that? Because I imagine that the or at least I kind of hypothesize that the customer journey, for example, for a pair of earrings where there's no measurement, there's no ring size, there's no style, kind of when it comes to it, you're going to get what you're going to get Is that different than, for example, this extremely important you know, not that earrings aren't important, but extremely important purchase like an engagement ring is, you know, are they? Are they different or is it still the same consumer journey?
Speaker 2:It's a different consumer journey and it's a different on website experience overall. So many of our listeners will know, we did something called the e-commerce growth program last year and into this year as well. One of the things that I noticed as I was auditing you know, dozens of websites that were taking part of it was they would all tell me we want to grow our e-commerce sales, but when you look at the design of the website, you look at how things are laid out in the navigation. It was all focused on bridal engagement, things that require almost an in-person purchase, not an online purchase. It's important to have a mix between the two, but if you're focused entirely on bridal, you will be missing out on an e-commerce type of audience for the most part.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have one client. Just to take it to the other extreme for a moment, we have one client. They do the most number of transactions on our platform, so they are doing transactions every single day multiple a day, sometimes very popular. And one thing I've noticed, though, is they are not the number one sales website. On the website they're actually averaging. Their cart value is like somewhere in the $175 to $250 range very often, but they're doing double, triple, quadruple the number of checkouts that even some of the top performing stores are doing. So I always wonder so you just mentioned engagement rings. If you go all in on that, you risk missing out. Do you think that you can also kind of make a mistake in you're doing too many lower value checkouts as well and you might be syncing yourself with cost of handling, or that you're syncing yourself with, like, maybe you should remove some of those lower end products, so that way, if someone does check out, you are making up a $75 or $100 difference in the checkout at the end?
Speaker 2:Yep, at some point it does come down to finances operations knowing precisely how much it costs you to ship something out, the time of the employee doing the shipping, the price of the item online, like, you'll find out what your profit margin is and how much profit you're making. But that's kind of the numbers you need to know either ahead of time or after. I would tell people, yes, you should keep an eye on what is the low minimum on your website. You don't want to get the reputation of like an Etsy store or some Instagram account. That's their own market, that's their own niche. If you're in fine jewelry or if you're a traditional jewelry store that has a wide range of brands and products, you might not have the $10 items up there, you might have them at the counter, but you should at least have a bunch of $100 or $200 items on your website that are always available and easy to purchase.
Speaker 1:So I'm thinking one of our clients. They have a ton of category widgets just below their banner and a lot of them are speaking, yeah, for like engagement or for earrings in for bracelets or necklaces, and a lot of them are the more simple gold or silver jewelry and it's a lot of like just kind of easy to buy giftable kind of things. And when you look at it a little bit more though, like kind of towards the bottom of the page, it's a ton of advertisements for like engagement rings and stuff like that. And I guess I always wonder if that's like maybe if they swapped the locations would they sell more higher ticket items, or is that not the way these kind of things work?
Speaker 2:I don't think that's how a lot of these things kind of work that way. It's probably very smart on their part to have things like the engagement, the higher ticket items lower down because people looking for those things will find them. But you're not turning away. 60, 70% of your audience who comes to the website thinks I'm not going to drop you know four grand on something. What else do you have? It's good to have multi-channel marketing. It's good to have a single message out there. But if your business is only pushing you know we are the bridal store, we only deal with engagement rings you are missing out on a lot of other audiences. You know men in particular buying. You know gifts for the guys for you know the bachelor party things like. You know anniversary gifts. There's a wide range of buyers and ideally you would have marketing and messaging for all of them, bringing them to the right places on your website or store.
Speaker 1:Stu, I want to ask you about what happens if someone goes into a, into a store, and they love something, or you know they seem like a hot client and then they don't buy, and what you can do with that. But let's take a quick break and we'll come back in just 30 seconds. This episode was brought to you in part by National Rarities. Are you looking to boost your business with no cost to you or want a special promotion for the doldrums of next year? Look no further than National Rarities estate buying events. National Rarities runs three day buying events from your store that not only attract new customers but also keep your current ones coming back for more. Their expert team of buyers are ready to visit your store, handle advertisements, lead the estate evaluations are easy to work with and it's not just jeweler purchasing. They also buy designer handbags, artwork, antiques, stuff like that. These events frequently attract a different type of customer than your usuals, because who doesn't love getting a little cash back? Elevate your store's reputation, build lasting customer relationships and become the jewelry destination of your community. It's all about simplicity. They take care of the logistics. You enjoy the rewards.
Speaker 1:Visit nationalraritiescom. Slash pages. Slash host dash and dash event. It's going to be in the show notes below or reach out to Justin Van Maeter by emailing. Justin. That's J-U-S-T-I-N at nationalraritiescom. Let them know that in the loop sent you Thanks Back to the show and we're back, all right. So we were just talking about what happens when someone comes in and it seems like a hot lead. So someone goes in and they are looking at a gift for someone and it seems like they should buy something and then they just don't. How can? What does the customer journey look like for remarketing to them or retargeting to them or keeping them on the hook even after they've exited the physical store?
Speaker 2:On websites. There's a number of different things you can do to remarket, bring them back to the website or even bring them to the store. Ultimately, the biggest classic one out there is doing things like an abandoned cart. Everybody adds a product to their website cart list or their shopping list or their website cart. They don't quite want to purchase it at that moment. You can send them an abandoned cart, either within an hour, within 24 hours, even a week later, and say, hey, come back, we have it available in other styles, we can answer any questions. Or here's 10% off. A lot of consumers know that if they put something in their cart and abandon, the business wants their sale, so they just have to wait them out and then get that 10% to 15% off.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, let me tell you a quick story. So I run a Etsy for my paintings and I have some paintings on there that, as I'm progressing, some of them just kind of aren't probably not as good, or I painted them a year ago and they just haven't moved yet. So I'm probably going to take them down eventually as the listing expires. So I had this one of the city scene. It was up there for like probably a year and I was considering taking it down and just kind of putting it into. Like you know, I just have a folder that I just kind of hold onto them and someone goes in, adds it to their wish list and I was like, oh cool, that's nice that there's getting a couple of hits. And I didn't realize it. But I had set up an abandoned cart email that sent from my account. But what you can do is you can customize them to send a fancy discount code. So I was like, well, I don't want to send like a monetary amount because I'm very like against discounting the dollar value of my art. I try my hardest to not ever discount the actual paintings themselves, because they're tied to hours spent on painting. I'll discount, like, my prints and my cards, because those are separate, but the paintings I try not to ever discount.
Speaker 1:So when I set up my abandoned cart email, I was like, oh, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to offer them free shipping. Oh, so smart, because, like you know, shipping on my paintings if there's a frame it could cost them 15 bucks. So they get this thing, they check out with it. And I was like, wow, how crazy, like it's so cool. I made a sale. I look at it. They made a sale to someone in the UK. I was like, oh, wow, that's even crazier. I'm trying to look is this person real or not? Like, did I get scanned and I'm looking through and I noticed that they had entered in a coupon for free shipping. And I was looking at it and I went and shipped it out and they use free shipping and it burned me for $45. And I was like, wow, okay, but when we take a step back, maybe we talk about what we were just discussing. The customer journey makes sense when you start to kind of think about it.
Speaker 1:So, this person went to my store and they were shopping and they saw this painting of fine and they thought it was the right one. They added it to their cart and maybe they got all the way to the last step and they saw that shipping was going to be $45. So they didn't want to have to pay $45 and then they left and the fact that I sent them a free coupon for $45 off theoretically they were like, oh, that's the last thing that has to that kind of made up my mind. And of course they made it.
Speaker 1:So like I'm happy that I made the sale, like it really was cool, but it was sort of funny. I learned a valuable lesson. I will be setting a floor threshold for for these kinds of things, so that way it's like at most you can get $25 off your shipping or something like that. Because I have to be honest, it was probably my first, maybe second sale ever to somewhere outside of the US. So just a real life example kind of kind of interesting. I was so ecstatic and then I immediately was like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot I can't believe.
Speaker 2:That's a valuable lesson. To learn what?
Speaker 1:are you going to do? You know I I'm pleased that they have my painting, on the other hand, kind of annoyed that they ate $45 off my plate, but whatever.
Speaker 2:So 10 to 12 years ago I was working for, you know, a chain. We had an e-commerce store that I managed and we would do different kind of like tests on different tiers and things, free shipping at $79, $99, $129. The most orders I would ever get was when we would drop it down to like free shipping at like you know, 49, 50 bucks, that kind of thing. But whenever we do that, we would always have to have a conversation with finance ahead of time because we realized we're a loss leader. We're like losing a ton of money Anytime we dip below. I think the number was like 119 or something. So we'd run a sale After the sale was over, like if it was during the holidays or something like that. If somebody was paying close attention to our website, they would have seen the prices go up, because we would do the numbers internally and realize we're just hemorrhaging money Unless we go above a certain threshold with things like free shipping. You got to do what you got to do.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, I would like. If I had raised the price of that painting. I had sold from 250 and I raised it instead to 295, but I offered free shipping to this person. Theoretically, we kind of end up on the exact same spot the customer is happier because they got this free coupon, yep, I'm happy because I still made my dollars. But it's just kind of something to think about and I kind of want to kind of loop that into the next thing. So this customer journey Would just say they end up actually purchasing it. This person gets to the finish line. They buy their really nice dangly earrings. So is that, do you consider it a separate customer journey when the next purchasing phase opens up? So, for example, they close that journey and they purchase the, the earrings. Then the next gift occasion comes up. Is that, do you consider that to be a separate journey, or is that all part of the big, long expanse of this person being a customer or a client for for your store?
Speaker 2:You could kind of view it both ways. I mean me personally in a more operational type of role. I would view it as a second journey and that's where I'd pull in concepts. You know, like you know, customer lifetime value. If somebody orders you know, three times over three years, I can expect five thousand dollars out of that, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:In this case they, the previous customer, would get put into a new audience, one that has, you know, signifier a you bought from a certain category, you bought from a certain price point or you just bought from us in the past. I would send different messaging to that person to convince them to come back. But I would try to be as respectful towards like Time not gonna hit you up a day later, a week later, kind of thing. You might not want to purchase things except brought on an annual basis. And I have to accept that the customer doesn't really notice that. They don't really think about that as much often and if they do, more than likely you're gonna get some unsubscribes, they're gonna get really annoyed with you. But it is the second stage of their customer journey, ultimately, after the first success.
Speaker 1:Hmm, so you do kind of break it up because I, on the one hand, well, I've done in the past, especially with, just with my Etsy, and I know it sounds bad that I don't use a punchmark website for my paintings, but it's just, it's like hey, do you need to have a race car just to get the, just to get to the grocery store? It's like you know, sometimes you can just kind of take the cheap way out.
Speaker 1:So I kind of want to ask also about, like you mentioned like what if you start remarketing to these people and they start unsubscribing? One of my best tactics that I've done is I take every Order From my Etsy at the end of every single year, I dump them into a spreadsheet and then I send a Christmas card to every single Person who's ever bought from my website. So if you buy one One thing from my website, then you'll always get a Christmas card going forward, unless you unsubscribe, which is no problem. Do you think, though, that that kind of business of free is that what you kind of Advocate for now? Or is this kind of I don't know? I feel like somewhere between personal and business, especially with a lot of our listeners are coming from like a big store. I don't know if that's actually the right approach, if it needs to be more nuanced.
Speaker 2:I mean, personally, I don't really need to get a Christmas card from the place that I buy my tires from. Sure, it is a nice guess here, but it's also, like you know, okay, give me a coupon code that I can use within the next six months after Christmas, kind of thing. Yeah, I think in your case, and especially with jewelry, to where it's a lot more relationship based, that type of like gift will go a long way. I was talking to a friend of ours, one of our marketing clients in Florida. They recently hosted a dinner for their top customers over the past year and I got sent some photos. There was maybe like 25 people just one long table. Look like an amazing time and I guarantee you those customers are gonna remember that, refer new business to them and come back to them for life for Any and all things that they're looking for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I guess people are gonna be listening to this on the other side of the holidays, so we'll just say it's early January. What is the kind of the mindset now, when they are starting a new customer customer journey? Is this like, alright, we need to focus on, for example, collecting reviews from people who have purchased this past holiday season? Is that kind of what you would advocate for? Or is it about starting to get in their ear about the next viable moment, for example, valentine's Day?
Speaker 2:Customer reviews will always be good. Sometimes that is the final deciding factor on somebody coming to you. Maybe you have, you know, a thousand more than your local competitor. They're not gonna really have an impact on your Google rankings, but they are very important to have. Starting to advertise, grab attention for the next big event, which in our case will be Valentine's Day coming up. That is important. It lets people know hey, you know, start planning ahead of time. You're basically doing them a solid by taking the decision making and the reminders out of their hands. You're just facilitating it.
Speaker 2:But the biggest struggle a lot of jewelry stores have is that attraction, that basically getting people's attention. You want to call impressions, you want to call it arbitrage, whatever it is. You gotta reach a large audience. But as marketing budgets are, you know, kind of flat right now, some people are kind of improving them and increasing them, using a portion of those dollars to always attract new people and not just the person ready and waiting to give you their dollar. That is ultimately what you're gonna need to do if you want to keep on waiting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it comes out to that that thought I've always had about. So is it better to compete in the big ocean you know what to say November, december, to be spending your, your marketing dollars? Then hey, let's go and Get strike with the irons. Hop, so is everybody else. Or do you start shifting your dollars into, for example, january, february, march, when it's less competitive For people's attention and the marketing then?
Speaker 2:so let's go back in time a few weeks here during the holiday season and talking about the marketing budgets that I'm seeing with our marketing clients. So some marketing clients of ours they have a thousand dollar a month budget. We have others that are dropping, you know, twenty five, thirty, fifty thousand dollars a month. You know it could be different channels, it could be different campaigns. On the lower end, I would recommend keep the campaigns you are currently running and make certain that they're, you know, focus.
Speaker 2:You're not trying to go across the entire country, not trying to go across the entire state, but leave the lights on. We're always available for repairs. We're here for appraisals. If you have a custom need, call us today. If you have those budgets where you can do ten thousand, fifty thousand dollars a month in advertising, this is what we're seeing happen. People are wanting to pull in a little so they're more focused on their local market or the categories and brands that make the most sense of them, and less focused on what. Try to get the people who are willing to drive two to three hours or cross states to come to us, because right now you're getting a better ROI from that. But that'll change after the holidays when it's like, ok, we can relax and expand a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, kind of just invest in your, in your local, a little bit more. I just come from an area that is very heavily on tourism, so, for example, they're always getting a different crop of people every Well, we'll just say, a couple couple weeks there's a different event in the summers and also during the winters, because the very winter based tourism, and I guess that is one of those things it's like do you have to kind of invest into your local community as well and kind of keep your, I guess, that base, or is it better just to get the people that are coming in every single time and just catch the dollars from them?
Speaker 2:Are you a brick and mortar with an established presence or are you trying to go full e-commerce, and location doesn't matter. That's a good point.
Speaker 1:So we're kind of wrapping this thing up. We've talked about the customer journey, about you know kind of intent and then awareness and then actually getting through the store and then perhaps remarketing if you didn't make the sale, or remarketing if you did make the sale, how that interacts with your online experience. I kind of want to talk a little bit more just at the end. Let's just say you close a sale, what kind of remark, other remarketing offers or Options do they do? They have to kind of just kick around their head, perhaps after the holidays, most digital platforms out there talking about like a Google, a Facebook and Instagram.
Speaker 2:You know they operate off of cookies. You can tag somebody and continue to remarket to them, even if they purchased from in the past. So we'd recommend campaigns of you know, come back and upgrade, we have an event happening. You can basically drop any type of messaging advertisement you want into those kind of audiences and the platforms will serve it to them. So things like you know Google Analytics for everybody listening should look at their audience section in Google Analytics. For because it'll identify for you, like, what portion of your audience is like purchasers, visitors. You know you can kind of segment it out. Take that over into Google Ads and you can say I want to target that audience with this type of messaging and then just swap it depending on the need or what's going on right now in the store.
Speaker 1:Man, it just seems so like a big task. Do you have any like easy steps kind of like for the first steps? You said looking in GA, for I mean on the other side of the of this of this holiday we're going into January Do you have any suggestions on like what is going to be hot this year as far as marketing channels?
Speaker 2:in GA for the easiest. Well out of the gate it has like an all visitors kind of audience setup. I would say the easiest next step would basically be segment that into did not purchase, and now you have everybody and you also have a more targeted that you can whittle down, kind of thing. Next year is going to be a year of some significant changes in the digital landscape. Google is changing the game Once again. Chrome is basically getting rid of third party cookies for a lot of tracking. They're wanting you to use their tools more, less reliant on third party tools.
Speaker 2:Nobody really knows how that's going to show, how that's going to like flesh out. Right now they're just testing the waters in January, so to speak. I think that remarketing will always have a place. Owning your customers, your customer information, will always have a place, like you know, with email marketing, things like that, but a lot of the more customer marketing things like that, but a lot of the more common set it and forget it type of campaigns. They might start to struggle as Google, facebook and etc. Keep on changing, trying to monetize their platforms to yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1:there's one thing that's consistent is that Google does not want everybody to succeed they want only the people who pay them money and who are leaning in to succeed, and I think you saw that with any time you know anything related to SEL, it's like it used to be about like cramming or packing what was the term? It's like when you just put a ton of keywords into there and they're like now that's way too easy to game.
Speaker 1:And then they were like they have to be very specific. And then you know, as people did that more, they're like no, now you got to actually spend us money, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yep, bad actors can ruin it for everybody. Actually, over the last month or so, google has made a surprising announcement, or kind of like quiet announcement. They've revealed that a stores hours on Google business profile lead to higher rankings for that store, so this is like a local SEO thing. It kind of makes sense from a consumer standpoint. I only want to see top of the rankings for stores that are currently open If I'm looking to go to a store. Google has gotten smart, though, because they've already found people who tried to game it and said we're open 24 7. Google has literally shut people's Google business profiles off and you have to appeal that decision.
Speaker 1:Wow, and all right. One more question before we kind of wrap this thing up what's your opinion on Tik Tok shop? Right now I feel like, oh God, man, they are shoving that thing down my throat and I am very reluctant to get into it. I am one step away from turning my to getting rid of Tik Tok off. My phone is far too good, is the most.
Speaker 1:I cannot believe that people actually watch like ad support and media like on TV when the most entertaining content in the world is available for free on Tik Tok, but alas, yeah, I, I delete my Tik Tok Monday through Friday.
Speaker 2:I can't, I can't, okay. So Tik Tok is an interesting beast, you know. Let's set aside the international implications of things like that. Sure, tik Tok wants you to stay on their platform, just like Google wants to show you information within the search before you go to a website. So anybody who's setting up like a Tik Tok shop be prepared that you can't link to your website ever. You can only manage your inventory, manage your checkouts, your store, all that kind of stuff from Tik Tok itself. Now, where we as, like you know, the website provider, the product premium vendor provider, things like that, we're trying to provide the best possible product feed to all our jewelry stores so that they can make the decision themselves and have all the data, all the images, everything available.
Speaker 2:Beyond that, I don't know how involved we're going to get in Tik Tok in the future. To be honest, there's only, you know, a handful of people who are even asking about it. Shout out, vincent and Alex. But yeah, but it is such a large audience, it's a great way of getting a lot of attention and things. You just got to really adjust your expectations in terms of what kind of sales you might get for it and how is it going to give you some traffic? And I'm going to guess right now, you know, 60 70% of our listeners probably won't invest in it. The ones that do, I hope they see a really good return, for as long as it's a valuable platform for even they start saying we're going to deorganic you and monetize everything.
Speaker 1:Deorganic. That is a brand new word that Stuart just made up on live on the air. I appreciate you listening. Yeah, this is a peak behind the current. This is the first one that we've recorded for season five, so really pleased that we got one in the in the bucket. Stuart, thanks for joining me. Where can people find you if they're interested in learning more about the digital marketing program at punchmark?
Speaker 2:Reach out to marketing at punchmarkcom or visit the digital marketing pages on our website. There's a nice little chat icon in the corner. You will send me a message. Please leave your name and email.
Speaker 1:There you go and you know what. We're always trying to connect in the loop with other people and if you mentioned that you heard about this from in the loop, we will do a little bit extra for you. I think I appreciate everybody. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Bye, all right, everybody. That's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This episode was brought to you by punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burpo. My guest this week was Stuart Blessman, the director of digital marketing at punchmark, and you can reach out to him at Stuart at punchmarkcom and he'll get right back to you. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cochran. Please, please, please, rate the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's the best way to help us grow and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom slash loop that's L-O-U-P-E and let us know what you think. All right, thanks everybody. We'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Bye.