August 15, 2023 • 51 mins
Ready to revamp your store and streamline your processes for the upcoming holiday season? Your journey starts with an insightful conversation with Alex Schlindwein of Diamond Diaries. Alongside our host, she reveals the critical importance of summer cleaning for retail stores, with a bonus of the top 10 tips to enhance efficiency and establish good habits. Uncover how consolidating duplicated customer accounts and cleaning up your marketing list can create a significant impact in boosting your retail performance.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back everybody to In the Loop.
What is up everybody?
My name is Michael Burpo.
Thanks again for listening toIn the Loop.
This week.
I'm joined by Alex Schleinwein,also known as Diamond Diaries,
and we're talking all aboutsummer cleaning.
So as the end of the summerapproaches and you're kind of
looking for where your next movewill be at the store, we want
(00:22):
to give you some suggestions,and we've got 10 good tips for
you to kind of spruce up yourstore as you get ready for the
final quarter.
Alex is great.
She's very well versed in howto run a good store.
She's a retail jeweler as wellin Florida, so she's always kind
of looking for ways that shecan pick up her store and
(00:42):
improve things, and a lot of ithas to do with your point of
sale system and cleaning up yourmarketing list so that way,
when you do start marketing forthe holidays, everything is as
efficient as possible.
I think it's a fun talk, enjoy.
This episode is brought to youby Punchmark, the jewelry
(01:03):
industry's favorite websiteplatform.
Whether you're looking forbetter e-commerce performance,
business growth or campaignsthat drive traffic and sales,
punchmark's website andmarketing services were made
just for you.
It's never too late totransform your business with a
user-friendly point of saleintegrated website platform
designed for growth and results.
Sign up for your free demotoday at punchmarkcom.
(01:25):
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and leave us a star rating onthe 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 usgrow into show that you really
enjoy the show.
Thanks, and now back to theshow.
Welcome back everybody.
(01:51):
I'm joined by Alex Flynnwein,also known as Diamond Diaries,
and we're talking about it's notspring cleaning, it's like
summer fall cleaning, it's kindof like the slow season of
cleaning.
How do we set this up, alex?
Is that kind of what you see itas?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, so I know this might not be true for all
jewelry stores, but in generalduring the summer we might
experience a little slowdown orjust have a little bit of extra
time because there's no holidayfor a little while.
We made it through Mother's Dayand Father's Day and really we
don't have the big next push fora couple months now.
So I don't know about someother stores.
(02:29):
We have a store that has a lotof snowbirds and the snowbirds
may be gone right now, so wefind ourselves with a little bit
of extra time in the summer.
So I thought it would be a goodopportunity to share some of
the kind of summer clean outactivities that I'm currently
working on, and some of theseactivities I try to repeat every
(02:49):
year.
So it's a good behaviors andhabits to use, moving forward
too.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, and we have 10 here, a list of 10.
And what I'll do is I'll makesure I put them into the show
notes and you can kind of maybejust take a look at them and
decide oh I do this every year,so I don't need to do this one
right now.
But maybe you pick one to threeof them and you go after them
and maybe it'll improve yourbusiness a little bit and,
(03:15):
without further ado, we can kindof just dive right into it.
Some of these are a little bitover my head because I don't run
a business and maybe I am kindof relying on Alex to provide
the context of it, but it's allcentered around, again, cleaning
out the junk, streamliningthings and making sure that your
business is ready to take onthe next push, which is going to
(03:38):
be the holidays and cyberseason, you might say.
So the first one is going to bePaul, just throwing a little
ding right here, mergingduplicate of customer accounts
in your point of sale system oryour CRM, and so can you kind of
set that up?
First of all, when we say pointof sale system, usually we're
(03:58):
meaning the edge Is that that'swhat you guys use, right.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yes, we use the edge and a lot of the things that I'm
going to talk about.
I will kind of set it up foryou in an edge framework, but I
think a lot of other point ofsale systems or CRM systems have
a similar functionality.
It just might look a little bitdifferent or be called
something different in anotherplatform.
So kind of keep that in mind.
(04:23):
But in the edge this happensfrom time to time where when you
enter a customer, when you'remaking a transaction, you might
accidentally enter a newcustomer that has already
actually shopped with you before.
You just didn't realize it whenyou were going to check them
out.
And the edge does have a lot ofkind of balances to try to make
(04:45):
sure that it'll ask you likehey, did you mean this customer,
if there is anything thatmatches.
But if you misspell thecustomer's name, if you don't
check for them first, you mightenter someone that's already
actually in your database andthen you end up with duplicate
customer records, which makesall of your marketing funnels
(05:07):
and initiatives cluttered andyou might accidentally send that
customer duplicated emails,postcards, etc.
So we want to clean that upbecause we don't want to waste
money and we don't want to miss,waste time or feel like we're
harassing that customer becausewe're accidentally sending them
marketing over and over.
So there is a function in theedge it's under the reports
(05:30):
section reports tab in the edgeand you can check for duplicate
customers and it's going to tryto match it based on name,
emails, phone numbers andaddresses.
So it's going to run a list ofeveryone that has where there's
more than one customer witheither the same email, phone
number, address or name on theaccount.
So that can be a good way tojust go through that.
(05:52):
The more frequent that you doall of these tasks not only this
one the less tedious theybecome, because the longer you
wait, the longer the list isgoing to be, obviously.
So this is a great task to doand it does require that human
touch of like.
You are going to have to gothrough one by one and kind of
see, yes, is that the samecustomer?
(06:12):
And then you can merge theaccounts if it is the same
customer or you can just ignoreit if it is truly a different
customer, and that can happen.
There are some common namesthat are going to happen
multiple times.
If you have a John Smith inthere a couple of times or
something along those lines, butusually you're going to find
some duplicates that can bemerged.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
And we notice that every single show season I'm on
a couple of vendors mailinglists because I've done
partnerships or business withthem in the past and I receive
all their marketing materials.
But then we have a bad habit ofthis.
We have a whole bunch ofaliases for Punchmark, so we
have, for example, podcasts atPunchmark and we also have
(06:53):
design team at Punchmark and allof those get directed to me as
well, and whenever we send outan email blast, we're on all of
our mailing lists and we end upI've received the same email
like nine times in a row, whichis like it's just will skew your
metrics and make it lesseffective, but you make a great
point if you're paying perrecipient.
(07:16):
It's just wasted money, so it'stime to clean that up.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, exactly, most email programs nowadays you do
pay per send.
It might be it's a big number.
You're buying half a millioncents for the year or a million
cents for the year or whatnot,but still you're wasting a send
essentially, and you might beoverpaying for the service that
you're using.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, so let's move on to the next one.
Let's talk about the cleanupphone number, address and email
function in the point of salesystem.
It's kind of I think it's allabout having just like accurate
and reliable data for your listof customers.
Is there kind of like morenuance to it than that?
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yes.
So this is different than thefirst option in the way of you
might have bad phone numbers oremail addresses in your database
.
And again, same principleyou're wasting time and money
when you have that bad data.
But, like you might have aphone number that doesn't have
area code in front of it, orit's not 10 digits or it's too
many digits, or it's notformatted correctly for the edge
(08:24):
to be able to run reports usingit.
Same with addresses you mightnot have a zip code.
You might.
It might not be a completeaddress of some sort, or just
might be incorrect completely.
So checking for that.
And then for emails there's allkinds of errors that can happen
with emails.
There might be, a spacesomewhere in the email.
You might have forgot to putcom, you might have spelled gmail
(08:46):
wrong, you might have spelledthe.
It might just be a bad email.
So this is a great way to cleanall that out.
The other reason I love to dothis is because when someone is
checking out a customer in mypoint of sale, if there's
missing information, weformatted it and this is an easy
setting in the edge to make itbold and it's red and it's
screaming at you and it's sayingplease get their information
(09:08):
and fill this out.
Now, if there is a phone numberthere but it's a bad phone
number or the wrong phone number, my sales associate doesn't
know to ask them for theircorrect phone number and we
might accidentally text themthat their repair is done, but
it's not going to get to thembecause the phone number is not
formatted correctly.
So it there's a lot of issuesthat could happen from having
(09:30):
bad data.
So doing this cleanup this oneis very quick and it's in the
customer field in the edge andif you scroll down, I think it's
under utilities and then itsays cleanup and you have to do
it individually for phone number, address and email and then run
through that I like to actuallytry to do this one twice a year
if I can, because you'd besurprised how quickly this one
(09:53):
can really add up.
I just did it a couple of weeksago and it cleaned up like a
thousand emails that were justwith misspellings and stuff like
that.
And sometimes I can figure out.
Okay, they just spelled Gmailwrong.
Let me fix that and save it.
Sometimes it's like I don'tknow what the correct email is
supposed to be, so I'm justgoing to delete it and hopefully
we'll have another opportunityto get the correct email next
(10:15):
time they visit.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, with just that punch mark.
When we were doing, when wewere launching version six of
the platform, we were dealingwith a massive influx of
projects and one thing that wediscovered, probably a couple
months into the process, wasthat we realized that a couple
of our email addresses that wehad at the point of contact for
(10:40):
some of our clients were notreceiving them because we could
only send to.
For example, we were onlysuccessfully sending into Gmail
from our automated system and werealized that, like, a bunch of
projects had languished duringthat because we hadn't picked it
up.
So these types of issues,especially around email
(11:02):
addresses I think because that'show we communicate the most,
but also probably phone numberstoo are the silent killers.
Like, if you don't clean thoseup, they will haunt you in a
weird way that you won't detectfor a very long time.
And there's nothing worse thanbeing like someone's mad and
either drops a project or, youknow, doesn't come back.
(11:23):
And then you ask them and theysay, oh, I haven't heard from
you in this long.
And then you go and you say,hey, I sent you this many emails
during this amount of time andthey say I never got one of them
and you realize it's becausethey have a bad email.
Well, this is the time to catchit.
I think it's very important.
I definitely agree.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
That's so true, and it really is a customer service
aspect.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yep, let's move on to .
I mean, we're on emails.
Let's talk about bounced emails.
I think that bounced emailsmaybe first of all can you
define what bounced emails areand then talk about how you go
about removing them.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah.
So anytime you do an emailblast, there's always a number
of emails that are going tobasically bounce or come back to
you.
It could be again like amisspelling in an email address,
just an email address that'sbeen closed, just undeliverable
for some reason.
And this goes back to the factthat most email service
providers you do have to pay persend.
(12:18):
So again you're wasting money,wasting time and you might also
have a customer servicedeficiency with a with a bounced
email, so you might not noticethis if it is a closed account
from doing some of the edgeclean out activities.
So that's why you want to dothis from your email service
provider.
(12:38):
Usually you can run a bouncedemail report, either for a
period of time or for certainemail campaigns that you sent.
You can download that.
And then I like to go back andcross check that with the edge
or whatever point of sale CRMsystem you are using and you
want to go take all those emailsout again because the customer
is not getting them.
(12:59):
They're incorrect for somereason or undeliverable for some
reason.
So I like to go and removethose one by one from the edge.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
And one of the benefits that will come with
that as well is it just willgive you a much more accurate
delivery number, as well as openrate and all of the metrics
that go along with it, whichmost CRMs will will provide to
you.
We use HubSpot as ours, andHubSpot has, like, a lot of
really nice metrics.
However, if you have just abarbaric amount of bounced
(13:30):
emails, it will throw off allthe subsequent metrics as well
deliverability and read link.
So we try to remove bouncedemails at the source, which is
usually associated with theactual account, and then that
way we don't try to deliver tothem again and that way we know
(13:51):
if something bounces in thefuture, it's a new issue instead
of a repeating one.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Let's move on to kind of a little bit more fun.
So those are moreadministrative.
This one is almost about clienttelling.
So you have on here make suretop customers have complete
profiles in your database beforeholiday marketing begins.
And I know that you'vementioned in the past about how
important some of your do youcall them whales Like your
(14:19):
important VIPs are.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
We call them VIPs.
Yeah, you call them VIPs, notwhales.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
That's not it.
So, first of all, what type ofyou know what is included in a
complete profile that you mightnot have right off the go?
Is that like an anniversary day, or is that like previous
purchases, or what do you add?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Exactly so.
We want to have a completeprofile.
We like to have name of husbandand wife or, you know, primary
customer and spouse, whateverthat looks like, and they're add
full address emails for bothparties, phone numbers for both
parties and birthdays, andbirthdays for both and an
(15:04):
anniversary if that's applicable.
So that's what we, that's likewe've gotten the gold star, if
we've gotten all of that andkind of.
The reasoning behind this toois the whole.
You probably heard of inmarketing the 80, 20 rule that
80% of your business comes fromthe top 20% of your customers.
And you know, at some point yourdatabase gets very large.
It can be difficult to havecomplete profiles on everyone in
(15:27):
your database and somecustomers just don't want to
give certain pieces of personalinformation, and that's fine.
But as much as possible youhave to focus somewhere, and so
you want to focus on the top 20%and so there's an easy way to
run this in the edge.
There's a top end report thatyou can run so you can make it
whatever number you want top 100customers, top whatever numbers
(15:51):
achievable for you.
You can run that and theneasily start from the top and I
like to call those customersDefinitely it's a client telling
initiative to just say hey,just wanted to touch base with
you.
I realized that we don't haveyour email in our system.
I want to make sure that you'regetting our special offers and
coupons.
Would you mind giving you know,taking a second to help me fill
(16:13):
out your profile for you?
And people love when you'recalling them and not necessarily
like trying to just sell themevery single time.
Like.
This is more of a service call,like I want to make sure you're
getting all of our coupons andspecial offers and I want to
make sure to congratulate you onyour birthday and your
anniversary and people areusually pretty willing to give
that information when youpreface it that way.
(16:35):
So this is a great thing to do,especially leading into the
holidays.
We want to make sure that wehave all our top customers
contact information so that theyare getting all of our
marketing.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And you mentioned the spouse being added.
Can you like try and just alittle bit of light?
I think we've covered this inthe past, but how do you market
individually to for a VIP, let'sjust say couple?
How are you marketing to themen and then or to the husband
wife?
How are you doing that?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
So right now we do, we do e-blast and postcard for
anniversaries.
That one goes to the couple andit will say it's actually
really cool.
There's a plug-in with the edgethrough with drive retail that
will customize the postcards too, and it will put their names on
it and it will say happyanniversary, sam and Laura.
(17:28):
Here's a coupon to you.
So that's going to thehousehold.
They're both receiving it.
They can both choose to use ithowever they would like.
And then birthdays right now Ijust have it going to the
birthday recipient.
So it'll say happy birthday,sam.
Here is your coupon to treatyourself for your birthday.
But we are working on one thatwould go to the spouse and would
(17:50):
be directed to be getting thema gift for their spouse for
their birthday.
So we're working on that oneright now too.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Man, it's that kind of stuff.
It really does make adifference and I think a lot of
people think that it's.
It should be like 100%conversion on that kind of stuff
.
Oh, I said that my postcards,so they should come back, and
it's like no, it's more likeyou're just going to increase
the likelihood or the chance orshorten the buy cycle just a
little bit, and that does add upconsiderably over the years.
(18:22):
And that's a that's a focus forus at Punchmark right now is
we're trying to again shortenthe buy cycle because you know,
if someone is buying every fouryears and you can shorten it to
every three and a half or threeyears, well, suddenly you're
increasing your profits by 25%.
Oh, quick maths.
Let's talk about setup Dropboxon other on.
(18:44):
Let me try that one again.
I'll cut that part, all right.
Let's talk about Dropbox andyou know organization for your
images and your files.
You had a big push at one pointto reshoot a lot of your
jewelry and I know that a coupleof our clients were really in
the middle of that.
I think it was from Barnett,anna Barnett from during our
(19:09):
retail roundtable.
She was mentioning that she wasgoing through it and I can only
imagine how stressful it iskeeping hundreds and maybe even
thousands of photos organized.
How do you go about organizingyour photos?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, so this is something I've really been
making a priority this year.
Specifically, I like to useDropbox, but you could really
use any file saving softwarethat you would like to use.
But we signed up for the youknow professional account with
Dropbox so we can all share it,everyone can add to it, and I've
set up specific folders forlike the content of what's in
(19:44):
the photos, especially for whatI'm using for social media.
So I have a key for couplesfolder that I'm saving into, and
what I actually started thisyear was breaking it out by year
too, because there's likelittle things I want to be able
to do at the end of the year.
I want to, if I want to make areally quick you know recap reel
of all our top couples from theyear, I can know exactly the
(20:06):
folder to go to to grab all mytop couples and their pictures
and make that very quickly.
Or let's say, like I'll make afolder for custom design and I'm
going to save all of ourcustoms for the year in that
folder, because you never knowwhen I need to pull an example
of a custom that we've done andI'm going to save the rendering
of the design and also the finalproduct of it too.
(20:29):
Then I'm also saving picturesfor, like, different categories,
like repairs, or, you know, mydesigners, and anytime I get
good social media content orpictures of a customer wearing a
piece or whatnot, or in storecontent, I'm going to save it in
that folder because you neverknow, like right now I'm
actually going through theredesign program with Punchmark
(20:51):
and we're redesigning myhomepage.
I know right, that's so excited, I can't wait for it.
But I needed to pull imagesquickly of, like, custom of
necklaces, of earrings for myhome page and I'm like I don't
know.
I have tons of good picturesbut like, where are they?
You know they're all saved inmy download somewhere and I got
to dig through my downloads andtry to find something good.
So just trying to get thatorganized, because when you need
(21:14):
to find a graphic to use for amarketing initiative, you want
to find it quickly and I thinkwe all have way more than we
think we do.
We just don't know how toaccess it.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
It's totally right.
And one thing just to you know,make this about me.
I will say that I've startedtrying to be more organized with
my this painting thing I'mdoing right now, and what I've
learned when it comes to stayingorganized is it's okay to make
more folders and more subfolders, it's okay to break things down
(21:45):
and when you have time likewhat this episode is kind of
intended for is it's okay tostart, like you said.
So you have jewelry, but if youhave one folder that is just
all of your custom jewelry, wellthen you're going to look into
it and then you're going to haveto either sort by day added or
by something like that wherethere is no sorting.
(22:06):
But if you go in and you add,for example, the year this
project was completed or you addother more interesting kind of
details to it, for example, withmy own paintings, I've started
adding two different folders.
I have scans, which ishigh-quality, high-resolution
(22:27):
scans of my paintings, and thenI add a subfolder.
That is what I call framed work, which is like the photographs
of the painting in a frame, outeither in light or on a wall or
something like that.
But there's two differentapplications for using the
images, even though they bothcan be considered work.
(22:50):
There are differentapplications, and it sounds like
you're doing that kind ofespecially also with the Kiefer
couples, because then you'regoing to use them in a variety
of different ways.
But there are some of thosevarieties required to be this
year's only, or onlyprofessionally shot ones, or all
(23:10):
just Instagram screenshots orsomething like that.
So it definitely behooves youto have a little bit more
organization and then maintainthat organization throughout the
year.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
All right, let's keep going.
Let's talk about updating yourphotos for your products.
It is the bane of everyjeweler's existence.
Going to a jewelry show, yougot to come back and you got to
re-photograph everything,seemingly.
Or you have to hound yourvendor to get their products
(23:42):
either added to their premiumvendor program or sent to you so
you don't have to shoot themall again, or you just have to
shoot them on your gem lightbox.
What's your process for that?
I think we've covered it in thepast, but what do you do so
that you can tackle thismountain?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah, I just want to preface that.
This is if you want to bee-commerce or have product on
your website.
This is a great project to workon in the summer and it's great
to get it up to speed beforethe holidays, because we all
know customers want to checkthings out before they drive up
to your store.
Especially during the busyholiday season.
They want to know it'sworthwhile to get in their car
(24:20):
and go to you.
So that's why having as much ofyour live inventory displayed
online even if it's notpurchasable online, at least
that they can browse enough ofit to figure out what you have
before coming.
So that's why this project isso important, and it's important
all the time, but especiallyleading up to the holidays.
But it can be a very dauntingtask because in jewelry, we have
(24:42):
a lot of products, a lot.
So what I recommend is startwith your vendors and you can
either go up vendor by vendor orcase by case.
However, you want to flowaround your store and I like to
start by contacting my vendorsand say you know, this is the
list of all the items that Idon't have good pictures of from
(25:02):
your collection.
Do you have pictures that youcould send me.
You'd be surprised how manytimes.
Yeah, and checking on thevendor's websites is always a
good place to start too.
Another little hack is,especially if it's a designer
line.
You can sometimes just searchby, like Roberto Coin, and then
put the style number and just inthe Google and some other
(25:23):
jeweler may have alreadyphotographed that piece for you
and you can sneak in, sneakysneaky.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
That's a good one, I know.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I know, so don't tell anyone.
I told you that one, sosometimes I try that.
That usually only works for adesigner, though, so that has a
style number that might beeasily recognizable over the
internet, but otherwise I startwith the vendor's website and
then, if I still don't find it,I will email them or contact
them directly.
Maybe they have something thatthey haven't posted on their
website yet, and then, if I'mstill coming up short, then I'm
(25:52):
going to shoot it on my gemlight box.
But I kind of go by thatprocess that you kind of start
with the low hanging fruit, Iguess, start with the easy stuff
, and then you're hopefullyeliminating how many pieces
you're actually having to shooton your own on the gem light box
.
And then, if you have toprioritize it again, I would
start with your best sellers, orstart with the products that
(26:14):
you want to be most known for,like, if you want to be a bridal
store, start with engagementrings, you know.
Or if you want to be, if you'rea designer store, start with
your designers and then trickledown from there.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Just maybe even go one more layer deep.
What is your in store processfor shooting on a gem light box?
Do you do it just one personand they have the gem light box
set up on the case and they justreach into the case, put it in
their shoe and then put it backin.
Or do you do it like a tag teamstyle?
What do you guys do at Kiefer?
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Okay.
So we actually have a processwhere when an item comes in, it
gets checked in by our inventorymanager into the edge and then
she tries to find a photo of itfrom the vendor first.
If she can't find the imagefrom the vendor, then she puts
it.
We have a bin that we keep inour safe, called the needs
picture bin very selfexplanatory and it goes there
(27:10):
and then we let it kind of pileup and then it's either myself
or one other person that doestakes all the gem light box
photos and we try to just let itstore up for like for the week
and I based Thursdays is usuallylike my gem light box day and I
will shoot everything that's inthere because I also like to do
it before the tag gets on it.
So my inventory manager knowsthat if it needs a picture she's
(27:33):
not going to put the tag on ityet, she's going to just slip it
in the baggy with it and thenthat way I can get a picture of
it clean, with no tag, and I'mnot having to like waste, like
cut off a tag, and then I'mgoing to shoot it.
Then I upload it to the website,edit everything and put the tag
on it and then we have anotherbin that's like the ready to
display bin, and then it goes inthere until someone can put it
(27:54):
out on the sales floor.
So that's usually our process.
But if you're working backwards, like maybe you're, you've got
a lot of inventory already outin your case that you need to do
it for.
That's why I like to go case bycase, and I'll just like go
through one case and I mighthave a laptop pulled up next to
it to see all the pieces in thatcase that don't have good
pictures, that I'm going to pullall those items, go, photograph
(28:17):
them, retag them, put them back, and that's kind of the easier
way to do it if you're goingbackwards.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Yeah, man, that's the kind of stuff, those are the
details, in my opinion.
That are what I would be lookingfor if I was, you know, trying
to trying to tackle this project, because there are a lot of
ways to to create theseoperations and workflows, and
I've learned that the best wayto shave off time on a process
(28:43):
is by learning from someoneelse's process.
And I think that, again, it'slike you could go through and
try to, in one day, shoot everysingle photo, every single
product that's in your, in yourstore.
They're just like, first of all, that's a big old project, but
instead, if you take it piece bypiece, It'll allow you to be
(29:04):
more thorough, also a little bitmore thoughtful when it comes
to it, because if you do rush, Ithink it'll show.
So I think doing it in a like amore methodical way having
someone that that is going to betheir job, or two people
diversifying it and making it sothat there is a process and you
know technique or strategy, sothat things do feel uniform I
(29:27):
think is definitely the best way.
That's true.
Let's get going on witheverybody's favorite topic.
I'm lying, I hate this topicmeta descriptions.
It's important, but I am.
First of all, alex, can youexplain or define what a meta
description is?
Oh?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Gosh, I feel like you might be able to describe it.
I don't know why I can't either.
Alright, maybe.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I'll try.
Meta descriptions are the like,kind of like a alt tag.
It's what the it's adescription of this, of what a
image is or a product is, andit's also what the what search
engines will see, because asearch engine can't necessarily
(30:10):
Understand everything that's onthere.
If it's written in play text orit's an image or something like
that, a lot of times they willdefault back and learn about a
meta description.
I'm gonna send that link andI'm gonna send it to still our
digital marketing director andbe like hey, can you just check
if that's an accuratedescription, because it's that I
feel like the definition haschanged over time.
But now, how do you update yourmeta descriptions?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Okay, so I put this on the list because this is like
the one thing I have beenprocrastinating so badly, and I
will say that out of all thesethings, I would probably rank
this one the lowest priority toout of everything that we're
gonna talk about today, justbecause I know there's a lot of
new updates out there showingthat Google isn't really, you
(30:55):
know, ranking the metadescriptions like it used to and
everything.
But I do think that if youactually got through all the
rest of this and you had someextra free time, this is a good
project to work on.
Or if you could somehow work itinto your Structure where it
wouldn't take on a lot of extratime, I think it's worth it.
But the edge has a really greatoption on the website tab when
(31:16):
you can add in a meta title anddescription and I know that
punch mark actually likedefaults that for you If you
don't fill it in, which isanother great reason to it's
such a great, like you know,relationship because of that.
So I've been kind of relying onthat so far.
I do have.
I have spent some time on themeta descriptions on some of my
(31:38):
my most like converting landingpages on the website and you
guys actually helped me Getthose kind of cleaned up and
revamped and just made sure thatwe've we're making the most of
those, and I think it's good tojust update those from time to
time.
As far as I understand that,google likes to see like things
being refreshed and everything.
They like websites that arechanging and not always staying
(32:00):
just stagnant.
So so that's why this isimportant, but you know,
building that into yourstructure.
I know there's a lot of greatresources on how to format it
and everything, and I'm notgonna bore everyone with all
those little details and I'mstill definitely a newbie with
all of this, but this is onethat's on my list that I am
(32:20):
actually working on right nowtoo.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, I looked it up.
a meta description is an HTMLtag that summarizes a web pages
content, so One of the ways thatyou'll see One of the ways the
reason why it's so kind of likeunsexy to talk about is because
when you Most likely you'llnever even see it, it's usually
(32:45):
for the search engines so thatit can kind of Know what's going
on.
Because if you have, if youdon't have any, just written
Long-form text on the page, itwon't really know what the point
of the pages and that's whatyour meta description is going
to be.
It's kind of describing what isthis page for or even what is
(33:06):
this product for.
When it comes down to a productbasis.
Let's get off of that topic.
I hate that topic.
Let's talk about updating andcreating landing pages and blogs
.
This is something that is feelsincredibly manual.
It's probably easier if youlisten to our Episode on a ask
(33:28):
AI and chat, gpt and how you canintegrate artificial
intelligence into your workflow.
How are you updating, makingnew landing pages and blogs
right now?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, so I like to dig into my Google Analytics.
It's also like a monthly thingthat I do, where I just at least
go into my Google Analyticsonce a month and Doing the the
marketing program with punchmark helps kind of remind me to
do that.
I always do it right before mycall, which is right after this,
actually, so it kind of forcesme to look at it and then we're
(33:59):
gonna talk about it.
So there's anything that Idon't understand, I can ask them
about it while we're on thecall.
But I like to look at what arethe landing pages or pages on my
site that are getting the mosttraffic, and I want to go and
check those regularly and makesure that they look good.
Is all the information Correcton them?
Is there a page that's notconverting the way it should be?
(34:21):
Like it's getting a lot ofpeople on it but it's not
getting any appointments or it'snot.
You know it's not getting thecall to action that I want it to
get.
So I like to go through.
Those are my blogs that are themost popular, getting the most
are.
You know hits Are.
Is all the information on themstill up to date and even just
fluffing it a little bit more.
Are the products on it stillAvailable or do I need to change
(34:42):
those up?
So I like to do that as much aspossible, but in the summer,
doing a good sweep of it all isreally good.
Another thing that you couldlook at is To go on on punch
mark.
We have an option where you cansee terms that get searched the
most frequently in, like thesearch bar, and so then I want
to make sure all my landingpages reference those terms a
(35:03):
lot, because that's clearly whatpeople are searching for.
Or I want to use those terms inthe product descriptions that I
am writing, because that's whatpeople are looking for.
So you know they're looking forcrucifix.
I want to make sure that I saycrucifix if it is applicable.
I'm not just saying cross, youknow so.
So those are some things tolook for and just good for you
(35:23):
to be cognizant of movingforward when you're doing
anything for your website.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Yeah, it's.
It's kind of it needs to take alittle bit of extra thought when
it comes to these kind ofthings, because the answer won't
usually be written right outfor you.
But one of the ways that you canlook at it, for example, is
Finding these common searchesand then seeing, like you had
mentioned, if there is analternative phrase that you're
(35:50):
commonly using, and the one ofthe biggest ones I see is the
term bridal versus engagement.
A lot of people aren't usingbridal in an everyday talk.
It's more of like a jewelerterm, and a lot of jewelers are
very close to the, the sourcematerial, and they care because
this is isn't just an engagementring, it's a bridal ring.
But you kind of need to get offyour high horse a little bit
(36:15):
and look at what is it that the,the shoppers are speaking about
locally, you know, regionally,or locally or amongst themselves
, and if you are able to find alittle detail like that, who
knows, maybe it pays off in away that it increases your time
on page by just a little bitmore or it increases your you
(36:36):
know your checkout by Point zeroone.
Well, it's worth it.
Then you just made youryourself an additional sale and
it just takes a little bit oftime.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, exactly, and I think this is the kind of
project you could really go downthe rabbit hole on.
So I would just give yourselfan amount of time you're gonna,
you can dedicate to it.
Maybe it's just one day thatyou're gonna like close your
email and you're just gonnafocus on this and that's it and
that's fine, and just do as muchas you can for that day and
you're gonna close it until thenext time that you have some
(37:07):
more time to devote to it,because you could spend months
Really working on this projectfully.
So I would just not driveyourself nuts with it, and just
do what you can and then move onlanding pages.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
I, I argue, landing pages and blogs I I'm becoming
more partial to landing pages,though it recently are, in my
opinion, the most impactful waythat you can update your website
regularly and they don't costanything to make.
If you most likely, on whateverwebsite platform you're using,
(37:39):
whether it's punchmark orsomeone else, if you are, you
know if you don't have a landingpage for every single major
category on your website rightnow.
So we're talking Jewelry, alljewelry.
We're talking bridal menjewelry, earrings, bracelets,
things like that if you don'thave a landing page for every
(38:01):
single one of those right now,that should be your next project
, because you can go in.
You'll probably set up like aStructure or like a base
template that you can use forevery single one of them most
likely a header, kind of Topbanner sort of thing, at the top
, maybe three to five imagesbelow that in the second section
, a Additional call to action inthe bottom and maybe one more.
(38:25):
That's kind of all you need todo to set it up.
You can even go and look onsome major websites, major
jewelers, and kind of see whattheir structure is for a landing
page and then take some heavyinspiration from that and go
back and build it yourself.
It's not, it's Lanny.
Pages are the secret sauce for alot of people and it's not like
(38:45):
we're trying to hide that it's.
It just takes a little bit ofwork, a lot of the time, and I'd
recommend yeah, maybe you justStart with one and they do
another one next month, andthere you go.
Now you got two.
Okay, let's move on to socialmedia Biopages and setting up
your highlights and editing alttags on your Instagram.
(39:06):
So this is kind of just allaround Instagram and making sure
that your Instagram is actuallykind of a, a branch of your
company and does, I'd say,relate.
And talk back to your website.
I know that you are a big fanof Instagram.
What are you doing kind ofregularly that you aren't doing
or, at this point, that youaren't just doing on a
(39:29):
day-to-day basis?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
So I just like to do a good sweep of everything on
all my social media.
We'll kind of focus onInstagram for this one, because
that is the one that I feel likecan be monetized the best for
jewelry right now.
But I want to look at my bio.
It's been a little while sinceI've changed my bio.
I just want to look at it again.
Does it still all look good?
Does it match my content?
(39:52):
Is it getting the people I want?
Do I want to just try somethingdifferent for a little while?
Do I want to try changing upthe wording and maybe, instead
of having the you know since1957 as my top line, and maybe
make I want to make engagementrings my top line on there for a
little while and see if thatmakes any change.
Is there anything else I can addto my highlights?
(40:12):
Did I miss anything?
I'm going to go through myarchive and make sure that I
have added as much as I can frommy past stories to highlights,
because people are going to gothrough all those.
It's kind of like you knowshopping you on your website
before coming into your store.
I want to make sure that peopleare going to see good content
on my page and what they want tosee.
So I go through all myhighlight reels, make sure just
(40:34):
everything looks good.
Is there anything else I canadd to them?
Can I add any new highlightreels that might make sense now?
Do all of my previous posts havealt tags on them?
Again, that helps forsearchability.
It helps for the internet toknow what that is and to help
you know more people find thoseDo.
You can go back and actuallyedit the descriptions, the
(40:55):
hashtags.
You can go back and tagproducts.
So maybe I have, like a highperforming post that people
still happen to land on, but theitem that I tagged in it has
sold, so the tag has beenremoved.
I could maybe tag another itembecause you know we have this
issue in the jewelry businesswhere we might get the same
(41:15):
style number in over and overand over but every time it's
going to get a different, likeskew number or product number,
if you will, so I might havethat item again.
but it's a different number soit lost the tag.
So I'm going to tag that againso that I can still convert on
this post.
That's been on my page formonths, so just things like that
(41:36):
.
Just, you know, cleaning, ormaybe there's a post in there
that's just like making my feed.
It's just breaking up my feedand it's not looking good on my
feed anymore.
Maybe I'm just going to deleteit, you know.
So, just things like that, justto make sure the page looks
good, because, again, this is arepresentation of who you are
and especially millennials andGen Z are checking that before
they're deciding if they want toshop with me.
(41:58):
So I want to make sure thatthey're seeing what they want to
see.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
I agree there's nothing wrong.
I mean, if a post has servedits purpose like, for example,
I've done some things where Iran a giveaway for my art and
then the giveaway announcement,that kind of like ends, the
giveaway is very utilitarian andit's not beautiful, it's not
great, but I had to do it, it'sokay in, like, you know, six
(42:22):
months, come back to it and thenI just archive it and it just
served its purpose and then youcan go back and curate and I
think that that kind of does adda little bit of elevation to it
and I think that's important.
But maybe quick pit stop, areyou on the threads?
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Oh, yes, yeah, we joined the threads.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Threads versus threading Threading.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
I'm threading, still not exactly sure what this is
all going to look like, but itdefinitely has gained a lot of
traction.
I think they said what it's gotlike a hundred million
downloads already, and it tookTwitter like five years to get
to that number of users and ithit that number in five days.
So I think there's definitelysomething to say about this.
(43:06):
And you know, I don't think weneed to be spending a lot of
time on it yet, but I encourageon my diamond diaries all the
time just go, secure the handle,set up an account for your
business and maybe for yourselfpersonally.
It's super easy, because Idon't know if you've done it,
but if you have an Instagram,you can just like, basically log
in through your Instagramaccount and it pulls through
(43:27):
your bio, your profile picture,and you can automatically follow
everyone you follow onInstagram on threads.
So I mean, there's really noexcuse.
It's so easy to set it up andthen you can just decide what
you want to do with it later.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Yeah, I, I like it.
I was looking for a reason toget off Twitter I.
It was just very toxic for awhile and I was.
I just picked it up and I wasvery amazed.
As a user experience kind ofguy, I was very impressed by the
onboarding and overall kind offeel of the setup.
The setup was so quick and Ireally liked how I went from
(44:04):
having no following, no one, tohaving, you know, a very active
feed and I thought that that wasgreat.
That's my least favorite partabout starting a new social
media is when you're kind offollowing and your timeline sort
of ends and you kind of reachthe bottom of your timeline,
which is the opposite.
But we could probably dive intothreads for an entire episode.
(44:25):
I'm sort of waiting to see whatthe next move is on that before
we do an episode, but maybe wedo one sooner rather than later.
That'd be fun.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Sounds good.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
All right, the last one.
So let's talk about productdescriptions on your website and
kind of setting up aninfrastructure behind it.
I know that productdescriptions for people that are
listening, they're the writtenkind of description that
describes all the detail of aproduct on a what we call a
product details page.
(44:55):
So this is when you are on theindividual product and there's
usually like a little write upFirst of all.
What's your relationship withthat and how do you go about
making sure that they stay up todate?
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah.
So recently I took some timeand created a Google doc with a
system for not only how we weregoing to write our product
descriptor, our titles and ourdescriptions, and I also started
saving some kind of romanticlanguage, if you will, for some
of my designers, like John Hardy, that it's all handmade and
Bali and it's made from recycledsterling silver.
(45:28):
I have a little snippet thatliterally gets copied and pasted
on the product description ofevery John Hardy piece.
So we I set that up, took sometime to do that, and then I
shared it and kind of went overit with everyone that might be
editing these product titles anddescriptions so that we can all
get on the same page, cause Inoticed on my website that when
there's multiple people doing it, some people are saying 14
(45:51):
carat diamond earring, and thensome people are saying diamond
earrings set in 14 carat andsome people aren't even putting
the carat, and some people areputting the carat weight and
some people aren't so, and somepeople saying John Hardy at the
beginning or the end.
So I wanted it to all beconsistent.
So we set up this system.
Now everyone follows it and notthat we have to.
(46:11):
I still catch things and westill have to go back and edit
things, but once you start itand then move forward with it,
it's a lot easier than having tomove backwards and fix
everything you've already done.
So I think just setting up thatsystem, however you want it to
look like and make it easy,where everyone can access it and
copy and paste as much aspossible, really will save you a
lot of time and get you aconsistent look across the board
(46:33):
.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yeah, I'm going to tease this.
I'm not even no, I don't evenknow if I can, but I'll bury
this in.
You know, 48 minutes into anepisode.
Punch Park is really looking athaving a way to have AI
features inside of productdescriptions, because it is
incredibly manual and, like yousaid, a lot of people don't
(46:57):
really enjoy that part and Icertainly don't and that is like
the prime use for an AI ishaving it take like this very
manual thing that requirespretty much no brain power and
having it automate for you.
It's going to be something thatwe're looking at, trying to roll
out.
It won't be before the showseason, but it's going to be
relatively soon.
(47:18):
We want to have it ineverybody's hands ahead of time,
before you know the holiday, soyou actually have time to
implement it.
But it's something we're we'reteasing.
We'll tease it privatelybecause the only people I'm
listening right now are the coolpeople, so we'll keep it on
like that.
I'm the DL for a second, so allof that.
That's 10 little little nuggetsthat you can do for your summer
(47:43):
cleaning If you have a littlebit of a slow season and to kind
of speed run them.
I'll just say it's mergingduplicate customer accounts,
using the cleanup for yourcleaning up your phone numbers
and your email addresses andaddresses in general, removing
bounced emails, making sure yourtop customers have complete
profiles, setting up a drop boxor kind of folder structure for
(48:05):
your images, updating yourphotos for products which is
just a big task, but that issomething you can chip away at
updating your meta descriptions,updating or creating new
landing pages and blogs,updating your social media bio
pages and you know yourhighlights and editing your all
tags on your Instagram and then,finally, updating product
(48:25):
descriptions on your website.
We just covered that in about,yeah, 48, 49 minutes, and I
think that it's if you can justtake maybe one or two or three
of them and going after them.
Which one are you working onright now?
I think you're probably workingon all of them, but which one
in particular?
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, a lot of them are ongoing.
I have already completed thenumber one and two and three
actually for the year.
So the duplicate customers, thecleaning up of the database and
the bounced emails so I justdid those in the last month and
have not yet worked on the topcustomers for this year.
I'm going to work on that.
My sales team kind of is morethe one that handles that, but a
(49:01):
drop box is one that I've gotset up, but I am continually
adding to that and organizingthat, and probably my biggest
one that I need to focus onmoving forward is the meta
descriptions and landing pages.
So that's that's my focus, and Ijust want to end with if anyone
that's listening to this needsa little bit more hand holding
or wants some more one-on-onehelp with any of this, that's
(49:24):
something that I offer with mydiamond diaries.
You can book a one-on-oneconsultation with me.
You can find me on Instagram atdiamonddiaries or at
diamonddiariesme, and I'd behappy to help.
But I think this is a greatepisode to share to anyone that
might have a social mediamanager or like an inventory
manager of some sort, and youcan give them a good like task
(49:45):
list moving forward, and there'sno reason why anyone should be
bored after listening to thisepisode.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Yeah, that's the thing is.
It's just, I feel like I neverhave a completed to-do list, and
when I finish a to-do list, I'malways like, oh, I just was
like what is the next thing?
I think that having more thingsin the hopper for you to
actually go after and accomplishis the best way to fill what,
for many, is a slower part ofthe season.
(50:12):
It's going to pick up reallyfast and you'd be crazy to try
to do all 10 of these things,you know, in November.
It's time to look at it now andagain.
It just starts with one andthen the rest will fall in.
If you haven't yet, make sureyou go give Alex a follow on
Instagram.
Her link is going to be in ourshow notes below, and I
(50:35):
appreciate you coming on, alex,this is really interesting.
I think that a lot of them wenta little over my head, but I'm
sure that everybody loved it andthey are going to start going
after them.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
I hope I can help.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
Awesome.
All right, thanks, everybody.
See you next week.
Bye, all right, everybody.
That's the end of the show.
Thanks so much for listening.
This week's episode was broughtto you by Punchmark and
produced and hosted by MichaelBurpo.
My guest this week was AlexSchlinwine, also known as
Diamond Diaries.
Give her a follow on Instagramand learn a little bit more from
(51:09):
her, as she teaches peopleabout how to be the most
effective retail jeweler youpossibly can.
This episode was edited by PaulSuarez with music by Ross
Cochrum.
Don't forget to rate thepodcast on Apple Podcasts and
Spotify and go to punchmarkcomslash loop that's L-O-U-P-E to
learn more about the podcast.
We'll be back next week,tuesday, with another episode.
(51:29):
Thanks, thank you.
Welcome back everybody to In the Loop.
What is up everybody?
My name is Michael Burpo.
Thanks again for listening toIn the Loop.
This week.
I'm joined by Alex Schleinwein,also known as Diamond Diaries,
and we're talking all aboutsummer cleaning.
So as the end of the summerapproaches and you're kind of
looking for where your next movewill be at the store, we want
(00:22):
to give you some suggestions,and we've got 10 good tips for
you to kind of spruce up yourstore as you get ready for the
final quarter.
Alex is great.
She's very well versed in howto run a good store.
She's a retail jeweler as wellin Florida, so she's always kind
of looking for ways that shecan pick up her store and
(00:42):
improve things, and a lot of ithas to do with your point of
sale system and cleaning up yourmarketing list so that way,
when you do start marketing forthe holidays, everything is as
efficient as possible.
I think it's a fun talk, enjoy.
This episode is brought to youby Punchmark, the jewelry
(01:03):
industry's favorite websiteplatform.
Whether you're looking forbetter e-commerce performance,
business growth or campaignsthat drive traffic and sales,
punchmark's website andmarketing services were made
just for you.
It's never too late totransform your business with a
user-friendly point of saleintegrated website platform
designed for growth and results.
Sign up for your free demotoday at punchmarkcom.
(01:25):
While you're enjoying thisweek's episode, take a moment
and leave us a star rating onthe 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 usgrow into show that you really
enjoy the show.
Thanks, and now back to theshow.
Welcome back everybody.
(01:51):
I'm joined by Alex Flynnwein,also known as Diamond Diaries,
and we're talking about it's notspring cleaning, it's like
summer fall cleaning, it's kindof like the slow season of
cleaning.
How do we set this up, alex?
Is that kind of what you see itas?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, so I know this might not be true for all
jewelry stores, but in generalduring the summer we might
experience a little slowdown orjust have a little bit of extra
time because there's no holidayfor a little while.
We made it through Mother's Dayand Father's Day and really we
don't have the big next push fora couple months now.
So I don't know about someother stores.
(02:29):
We have a store that has a lotof snowbirds and the snowbirds
may be gone right now, so wefind ourselves with a little bit
of extra time in the summer.
So I thought it would be a goodopportunity to share some of
the kind of summer clean outactivities that I'm currently
working on, and some of theseactivities I try to repeat every
(02:49):
year.
So it's a good behaviors andhabits to use, moving forward
too.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, and we have 10 here, a list of 10.
And what I'll do is I'll makesure I put them into the show
notes and you can kind of maybejust take a look at them and
decide oh I do this every year,so I don't need to do this one
right now.
But maybe you pick one to threeof them and you go after them
and maybe it'll improve yourbusiness a little bit and,
(03:15):
without further ado, we can kindof just dive right into it.
Some of these are a little bitover my head because I don't run
a business and maybe I am kindof relying on Alex to provide
the context of it, but it's allcentered around, again, cleaning
out the junk, streamliningthings and making sure that your
business is ready to take onthe next push, which is going to
(03:38):
be the holidays and cyberseason, you might say.
So the first one is going to bePaul, just throwing a little
ding right here, mergingduplicate of customer accounts
in your point of sale system oryour CRM, and so can you kind of
set that up?
First of all, when we say pointof sale system, usually we're
(03:58):
meaning the edge Is that that'swhat you guys use, right.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yes, we use the edge and a lot of the things that I'm
going to talk about.
I will kind of set it up foryou in an edge framework, but I
think a lot of other point ofsale systems or CRM systems have
a similar functionality.
It just might look a little bitdifferent or be called
something different in anotherplatform.
So kind of keep that in mind.
(04:23):
But in the edge this happensfrom time to time where when you
enter a customer, when you'remaking a transaction, you might
accidentally enter a newcustomer that has already
actually shopped with you before.
You just didn't realize it whenyou were going to check them
out.
And the edge does have a lot ofkind of balances to try to make
(04:45):
sure that it'll ask you likehey, did you mean this customer,
if there is anything thatmatches.
But if you misspell thecustomer's name, if you don't
check for them first, you mightenter someone that's already
actually in your database andthen you end up with duplicate
customer records, which makesall of your marketing funnels
(05:07):
and initiatives cluttered andyou might accidentally send that
customer duplicated emails,postcards, etc.
So we want to clean that upbecause we don't want to waste
money and we don't want to miss,waste time or feel like we're
harassing that customer becausewe're accidentally sending them
marketing over and over.
So there is a function in theedge it's under the reports
(05:30):
section reports tab in the edgeand you can check for duplicate
customers and it's going to tryto match it based on name,
emails, phone numbers andaddresses.
So it's going to run a list ofeveryone that has where there's
more than one customer witheither the same email, phone
number, address or name on theaccount.
So that can be a good way tojust go through that.
(05:52):
The more frequent that you doall of these tasks not only this
one the less tedious theybecome, because the longer you
wait, the longer the list isgoing to be, obviously.
So this is a great task to doand it does require that human
touch of like.
You are going to have to gothrough one by one and kind of
see, yes, is that the samecustomer?
(06:12):
And then you can merge theaccounts if it is the same
customer or you can just ignoreit if it is truly a different
customer, and that can happen.
There are some common namesthat are going to happen
multiple times.
If you have a John Smith inthere a couple of times or
something along those lines, butusually you're going to find
some duplicates that can bemerged.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
And we notice that every single show season I'm on
a couple of vendors mailinglists because I've done
partnerships or business withthem in the past and I receive
all their marketing materials.
But then we have a bad habit ofthis.
We have a whole bunch ofaliases for Punchmark, so we
have, for example, podcasts atPunchmark and we also have
(06:53):
design team at Punchmark and allof those get directed to me as
well, and whenever we send outan email blast, we're on all of
our mailing lists and we end upI've received the same email
like nine times in a row, whichis like it's just will skew your
metrics and make it lesseffective, but you make a great
point if you're paying perrecipient.
(07:16):
It's just wasted money, so it'stime to clean that up.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, exactly, most email programs nowadays you do
pay per send.
It might be it's a big number.
You're buying half a millioncents for the year or a million
cents for the year or whatnot,but still you're wasting a send
essentially, and you might beoverpaying for the service that
you're using.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, so let's move on to the next one.
Let's talk about the cleanupphone number, address and email
function in the point of salesystem.
It's kind of I think it's allabout having just like accurate
and reliable data for your listof customers.
Is there kind of like morenuance to it than that?
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yes.
So this is different than thefirst option in the way of you
might have bad phone numbers oremail addresses in your database
.
And again, same principleyou're wasting time and money
when you have that bad data.
But, like you might have aphone number that doesn't have
area code in front of it, orit's not 10 digits or it's too
many digits, or it's notformatted correctly for the edge
(08:24):
to be able to run reports usingit.
Same with addresses you mightnot have a zip code.
You might.
It might not be a completeaddress of some sort, or just
might be incorrect completely.
So checking for that.
And then for emails there's allkinds of errors that can happen
with emails.
There might be, a spacesomewhere in the email.
You might have forgot to putcom, you might have spelled gmail
(08:46):
wrong, you might have spelledthe.
It might just be a bad email.
So this is a great way to cleanall that out.
The other reason I love to dothis is because when someone is
checking out a customer in mypoint of sale, if there's
missing information, weformatted it and this is an easy
setting in the edge to make itbold and it's red and it's
screaming at you and it's sayingplease get their information
(09:08):
and fill this out.
Now, if there is a phone numberthere but it's a bad phone
number or the wrong phone number, my sales associate doesn't
know to ask them for theircorrect phone number and we
might accidentally text themthat their repair is done, but
it's not going to get to thembecause the phone number is not
formatted correctly.
So it there's a lot of issuesthat could happen from having
(09:30):
bad data.
So doing this cleanup this oneis very quick and it's in the
customer field in the edge andif you scroll down, I think it's
under utilities and then itsays cleanup and you have to do
it individually for phone number, address and email and then run
through that I like to actuallytry to do this one twice a year
if I can, because you'd besurprised how quickly this one
(09:53):
can really add up.
I just did it a couple of weeksago and it cleaned up like a
thousand emails that were justwith misspellings and stuff like
that.
And sometimes I can figure out.
Okay, they just spelled Gmailwrong.
Let me fix that and save it.
Sometimes it's like I don'tknow what the correct email is
supposed to be, so I'm justgoing to delete it and hopefully
we'll have another opportunityto get the correct email next
(10:15):
time they visit.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, with just that punch mark.
When we were doing, when wewere launching version six of
the platform, we were dealingwith a massive influx of
projects and one thing that wediscovered, probably a couple
months into the process, wasthat we realized that a couple
of our email addresses that wehad at the point of contact for
(10:40):
some of our clients were notreceiving them because we could
only send to.
For example, we were onlysuccessfully sending into Gmail
from our automated system and werealized that, like, a bunch of
projects had languished duringthat because we hadn't picked it
up.
So these types of issues,especially around email
(11:02):
addresses I think because that'show we communicate the most,
but also probably phone numberstoo are the silent killers.
Like, if you don't clean thoseup, they will haunt you in a
weird way that you won't detectfor a very long time.
And there's nothing worse thanbeing like someone's mad and
either drops a project or, youknow, doesn't come back.
(11:23):
And then you ask them and theysay, oh, I haven't heard from
you in this long.
And then you go and you say,hey, I sent you this many emails
during this amount of time andthey say I never got one of them
and you realize it's becausethey have a bad email.
Well, this is the time to catchit.
I think it's very important.
I definitely agree.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
That's so true, and it really is a customer service
aspect.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yep, let's move on to .
I mean, we're on emails.
Let's talk about bounced emails.
I think that bounced emailsmaybe first of all can you
define what bounced emails areand then talk about how you go
about removing them.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah.
So anytime you do an emailblast, there's always a number
of emails that are going tobasically bounce or come back to
you.
It could be again like amisspelling in an email address,
just an email address that'sbeen closed, just undeliverable
for some reason.
And this goes back to the factthat most email service
providers you do have to pay persend.
(12:18):
So again you're wasting money,wasting time and you might also
have a customer servicedeficiency with a with a bounced
email, so you might not noticethis if it is a closed account
from doing some of the edgeclean out activities.
So that's why you want to dothis from your email service
provider.
(12:38):
Usually you can run a bouncedemail report, either for a
period of time or for certainemail campaigns that you sent.
You can download that.
And then I like to go back andcross check that with the edge
or whatever point of sale CRMsystem you are using and you
want to go take all those emailsout again because the customer
is not getting them.
(12:59):
They're incorrect for somereason or undeliverable for some
reason.
So I like to go and removethose one by one from the edge.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
And one of the benefits that will come with
that as well is it just willgive you a much more accurate
delivery number, as well as openrate and all of the metrics
that go along with it, whichmost CRMs will will provide to
you.
We use HubSpot as ours, andHubSpot has, like, a lot of
really nice metrics.
However, if you have just abarbaric amount of bounced
(13:30):
emails, it will throw off allthe subsequent metrics as well
deliverability and read link.
So we try to remove bouncedemails at the source, which is
usually associated with theactual account, and then that
way we don't try to deliver tothem again and that way we know
(13:51):
if something bounces in thefuture, it's a new issue instead
of a repeating one.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Let's move on to kind of a little bit more fun.
So those are moreadministrative.
This one is almost about clienttelling.
So you have on here make suretop customers have complete
profiles in your database beforeholiday marketing begins.
And I know that you'vementioned in the past about how
important some of your do youcall them whales Like your
(14:19):
important VIPs are.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
We call them VIPs.
Yeah, you call them VIPs, notwhales.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
That's not it.
So, first of all, what type ofyou know what is included in a
complete profile that you mightnot have right off the go?
Is that like an anniversary day, or is that like previous
purchases, or what do you add?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Exactly so.
We want to have a completeprofile.
We like to have name of husbandand wife or, you know, primary
customer and spouse, whateverthat looks like, and they're add
full address emails for bothparties, phone numbers for both
parties and birthdays, andbirthdays for both and an
(15:04):
anniversary if that's applicable.
So that's what we, that's likewe've gotten the gold star, if
we've gotten all of that andkind of.
The reasoning behind this toois the whole.
You probably heard of inmarketing the 80, 20 rule that
80% of your business comes fromthe top 20% of your customers.
And you know, at some point yourdatabase gets very large.
It can be difficult to havecomplete profiles on everyone in
(15:27):
your database and somecustomers just don't want to
give certain pieces of personalinformation, and that's fine.
But as much as possible youhave to focus somewhere, and so
you want to focus on the top 20%and so there's an easy way to
run this in the edge.
There's a top end report thatyou can run so you can make it
whatever number you want top 100customers, top whatever numbers
(15:51):
achievable for you.
You can run that and theneasily start from the top and I
like to call those customersDefinitely it's a client telling
initiative to just say hey,just wanted to touch base with
you.
I realized that we don't haveyour email in our system.
I want to make sure that you'regetting our special offers and
coupons.
Would you mind giving you know,taking a second to help me fill
(16:13):
out your profile for you?
And people love when you'recalling them and not necessarily
like trying to just sell themevery single time.
Like.
This is more of a service call,like I want to make sure you're
getting all of our coupons andspecial offers and I want to
make sure to congratulate you onyour birthday and your
anniversary and people areusually pretty willing to give
that information when youpreface it that way.
(16:35):
So this is a great thing to do,especially leading into the
holidays.
We want to make sure that wehave all our top customers
contact information so that theyare getting all of our
marketing.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And you mentioned the spouse being added.
Can you like try and just alittle bit of light?
I think we've covered this inthe past, but how do you market
individually to for a VIP, let'sjust say couple?
How are you marketing to themen and then or to the husband
wife?
How are you doing that?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
So right now we do, we do e-blast and postcard for
anniversaries.
That one goes to the couple andit will say it's actually
really cool.
There's a plug-in with the edgethrough with drive retail that
will customize the postcards too, and it will put their names on
it and it will say happyanniversary, sam and Laura.
(17:28):
Here's a coupon to you.
So that's going to thehousehold.
They're both receiving it.
They can both choose to use ithowever they would like.
And then birthdays right now Ijust have it going to the
birthday recipient.
So it'll say happy birthday,sam.
Here is your coupon to treatyourself for your birthday.
But we are working on one thatwould go to the spouse and would
(17:50):
be directed to be getting thema gift for their spouse for
their birthday.
So we're working on that oneright now too.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Man, it's that kind of stuff.
It really does make adifference and I think a lot of
people think that it's.
It should be like 100%conversion on that kind of stuff
.
Oh, I said that my postcards,so they should come back, and
it's like no, it's more likeyou're just going to increase
the likelihood or the chance orshorten the buy cycle just a
little bit, and that does add upconsiderably over the years.
(18:22):
And that's a that's a focus forus at Punchmark right now is
we're trying to again shortenthe buy cycle because you know,
if someone is buying every fouryears and you can shorten it to
every three and a half or threeyears, well, suddenly you're
increasing your profits by 25%.
Oh, quick maths.
Let's talk about setup Dropboxon other on.
(18:44):
Let me try that one again.
I'll cut that part, all right.
Let's talk about Dropbox andyou know organization for your
images and your files.
You had a big push at one pointto reshoot a lot of your
jewelry and I know that a coupleof our clients were really in
the middle of that.
I think it was from Barnett,anna Barnett from during our
(19:09):
retail roundtable.
She was mentioning that she wasgoing through it and I can only
imagine how stressful it iskeeping hundreds and maybe even
thousands of photos organized.
How do you go about organizingyour photos?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, so this is something I've really been
making a priority this year.
Specifically, I like to useDropbox, but you could really
use any file saving softwarethat you would like to use.
But we signed up for the youknow professional account with
Dropbox so we can all share it,everyone can add to it, and I've
set up specific folders forlike the content of what's in
(19:44):
the photos, especially for whatI'm using for social media.
So I have a key for couplesfolder that I'm saving into, and
what I actually started thisyear was breaking it out by year
too, because there's likelittle things I want to be able
to do at the end of the year.
I want to, if I want to make areally quick you know recap reel
of all our top couples from theyear, I can know exactly the
(20:06):
folder to go to to grab all mytop couples and their pictures
and make that very quickly.
Or let's say, like I'll make afolder for custom design and I'm
going to save all of ourcustoms for the year in that
folder, because you never knowwhen I need to pull an example
of a custom that we've done andI'm going to save the rendering
of the design and also the finalproduct of it too.
(20:29):
Then I'm also saving picturesfor, like, different categories,
like repairs, or, you know, mydesigners, and anytime I get
good social media content orpictures of a customer wearing a
piece or whatnot, or in storecontent, I'm going to save it in
that folder because you neverknow, like right now I'm
actually going through theredesign program with Punchmark
(20:51):
and we're redesigning myhomepage.
I know right, that's so excited, I can't wait for it.
But I needed to pull imagesquickly of, like, custom of
necklaces, of earrings for myhome page and I'm like I don't
know.
I have tons of good picturesbut like, where are they?
You know they're all saved inmy download somewhere and I got
to dig through my downloads andtry to find something good.
So just trying to get thatorganized, because when you need
(21:14):
to find a graphic to use for amarketing initiative, you want
to find it quickly and I thinkwe all have way more than we
think we do.
We just don't know how toaccess it.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
It's totally right.
And one thing just to you know,make this about me.
I will say that I've startedtrying to be more organized with
my this painting thing I'mdoing right now, and what I've
learned when it comes to stayingorganized is it's okay to make
more folders and more subfolders, it's okay to break things down
(21:45):
and when you have time likewhat this episode is kind of
intended for is it's okay tostart, like you said.
So you have jewelry, but if youhave one folder that is just
all of your custom jewelry, wellthen you're going to look into
it and then you're going to haveto either sort by day added or
by something like that wherethere is no sorting.
(22:06):
But if you go in and you add,for example, the year this
project was completed or you addother more interesting kind of
details to it, for example, withmy own paintings, I've started
adding two different folders.
I have scans, which ishigh-quality, high-resolution
(22:27):
scans of my paintings, and thenI add a subfolder.
That is what I call framed work, which is like the photographs
of the painting in a frame, outeither in light or on a wall or
something like that.
But there's two differentapplications for using the
images, even though they bothcan be considered work.
(22:50):
There are differentapplications, and it sounds like
you're doing that kind ofespecially also with the Kiefer
couples, because then you'regoing to use them in a variety
of different ways.
But there are some of thosevarieties required to be this
year's only, or onlyprofessionally shot ones, or all
(23:10):
just Instagram screenshots orsomething like that.
So it definitely behooves youto have a little bit more
organization and then maintainthat organization throughout the
year.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
All right, let's keep going.
Let's talk about updating yourphotos for your products.
It is the bane of everyjeweler's existence.
Going to a jewelry show, yougot to come back and you got to
re-photograph everything,seemingly.
Or you have to hound yourvendor to get their products
(23:42):
either added to their premiumvendor program or sent to you so
you don't have to shoot themall again, or you just have to
shoot them on your gem lightbox.
What's your process for that?
I think we've covered it in thepast, but what do you do so
that you can tackle thismountain?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeah, I just want to preface that.
This is if you want to bee-commerce or have product on
your website.
This is a great project to workon in the summer and it's great
to get it up to speed beforethe holidays, because we all
know customers want to checkthings out before they drive up
to your store.
Especially during the busyholiday season.
They want to know it'sworthwhile to get in their car
(24:20):
and go to you.
So that's why having as much ofyour live inventory displayed
online even if it's notpurchasable online, at least
that they can browse enough ofit to figure out what you have
before coming.
So that's why this project isso important, and it's important
all the time, but especiallyleading up to the holidays.
But it can be a very dauntingtask because in jewelry, we have
(24:42):
a lot of products, a lot.
So what I recommend is startwith your vendors and you can
either go up vendor by vendor orcase by case.
However, you want to flowaround your store and I like to
start by contacting my vendorsand say you know, this is the
list of all the items that Idon't have good pictures of from
(25:02):
your collection.
Do you have pictures that youcould send me.
You'd be surprised how manytimes.
Yeah, and checking on thevendor's websites is always a
good place to start too.
Another little hack is,especially if it's a designer
line.
You can sometimes just searchby, like Roberto Coin, and then
put the style number and just inthe Google and some other
(25:23):
jeweler may have alreadyphotographed that piece for you
and you can sneak in, sneakysneaky.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
That's a good one, I know.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I know, so don't tell anyone.
I told you that one, sosometimes I try that.
That usually only works for adesigner, though, so that has a
style number that might beeasily recognizable over the
internet, but otherwise I startwith the vendor's website and
then, if I still don't find it,I will email them or contact
them directly.
Maybe they have something thatthey haven't posted on their
website yet, and then, if I'mstill coming up short, then I'm
(25:52):
going to shoot it on my gemlight box.
But I kind of go by thatprocess that you kind of start
with the low hanging fruit, Iguess, start with the easy stuff
, and then you're hopefullyeliminating how many pieces
you're actually having to shooton your own on the gem light box
.
And then, if you have toprioritize it again, I would
start with your best sellers, orstart with the products that
(26:14):
you want to be most known for,like, if you want to be a bridal
store, start with engagementrings, you know.
Or if you want to be, if you'rea designer store, start with
your designers and then trickledown from there.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Just maybe even go one more layer deep.
What is your in store processfor shooting on a gem light box?
Do you do it just one personand they have the gem light box
set up on the case and they justreach into the case, put it in
their shoe and then put it backin.
Or do you do it like a tag teamstyle?
What do you guys do at Kiefer?
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Okay.
So we actually have a processwhere when an item comes in, it
gets checked in by our inventorymanager into the edge and then
she tries to find a photo of itfrom the vendor first.
If she can't find the imagefrom the vendor, then she puts
it.
We have a bin that we keep inour safe, called the needs
picture bin very selfexplanatory and it goes there
(27:10):
and then we let it kind of pileup and then it's either myself
or one other person that doestakes all the gem light box
photos and we try to just let itstore up for like for the week
and I based Thursdays is usuallylike my gem light box day and I
will shoot everything that's inthere because I also like to do
it before the tag gets on it.
So my inventory manager knowsthat if it needs a picture she's
(27:33):
not going to put the tag on ityet, she's going to just slip it
in the baggy with it and thenthat way I can get a picture of
it clean, with no tag, and I'mnot having to like waste, like
cut off a tag, and then I'mgoing to shoot it.
Then I upload it to the website,edit everything and put the tag
on it and then we have anotherbin that's like the ready to
display bin, and then it goes inthere until someone can put it
(27:54):
out on the sales floor.
So that's usually our process.
But if you're working backwards, like maybe you're, you've got
a lot of inventory already outin your case that you need to do
it for.
That's why I like to go case bycase, and I'll just like go
through one case and I mighthave a laptop pulled up next to
it to see all the pieces in thatcase that don't have good
pictures, that I'm going to pullall those items, go, photograph
(28:17):
them, retag them, put them back, and that's kind of the easier
way to do it if you're goingbackwards.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Yeah, man, that's the kind of stuff, those are the
details, in my opinion.
That are what I would be lookingfor if I was, you know, trying
to trying to tackle this project, because there are a lot of
ways to to create theseoperations and workflows, and
I've learned that the best wayto shave off time on a process
(28:43):
is by learning from someoneelse's process.
And I think that, again, it'slike you could go through and
try to, in one day, shoot everysingle photo, every single
product that's in your, in yourstore.
They're just like, first of all, that's a big old project, but
instead, if you take it piece bypiece, It'll allow you to be
(29:04):
more thorough, also a little bitmore thoughtful when it comes
to it, because if you do rush, Ithink it'll show.
So I think doing it in a like amore methodical way having
someone that that is going to betheir job, or two people
diversifying it and making it sothat there is a process and you
know technique or strategy, sothat things do feel uniform I
(29:27):
think is definitely the best way.
That's true.
Let's get going on witheverybody's favorite topic.
I'm lying, I hate this topicmeta descriptions.
It's important, but I am.
First of all, alex, can youexplain or define what a meta
description is?
Oh?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Gosh, I feel like you might be able to describe it.
I don't know why I can't either.
Alright, maybe.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I'll try.
Meta descriptions are the like,kind of like a alt tag.
It's what the it's adescription of this, of what a
image is or a product is, andit's also what the what search
engines will see, because asearch engine can't necessarily
(30:10):
Understand everything that's onthere.
If it's written in play text orit's an image or something like
that, a lot of times they willdefault back and learn about a
meta description.
I'm gonna send that link andI'm gonna send it to still our
digital marketing director andbe like hey, can you just check
if that's an accuratedescription, because it's that I
feel like the definition haschanged over time.
But now, how do you update yourmeta descriptions?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Okay, so I put this on the list because this is like
the one thing I have beenprocrastinating so badly, and I
will say that out of all thesethings, I would probably rank
this one the lowest priority toout of everything that we're
gonna talk about today, justbecause I know there's a lot of
new updates out there showingthat Google isn't really, you
(30:55):
know, ranking the metadescriptions like it used to and
everything.
But I do think that if youactually got through all the
rest of this and you had someextra free time, this is a good
project to work on.
Or if you could somehow work itinto your Structure where it
wouldn't take on a lot of extratime, I think it's worth it.
But the edge has a really greatoption on the website tab when
(31:16):
you can add in a meta title anddescription and I know that
punch mark actually likedefaults that for you If you
don't fill it in, which isanother great reason to it's
such a great, like you know,relationship because of that.
So I've been kind of relying onthat so far.
I do have.
I have spent some time on themeta descriptions on some of my
(31:38):
my most like converting landingpages on the website and you
guys actually helped me Getthose kind of cleaned up and
revamped and just made sure thatwe've we're making the most of
those, and I think it's good tojust update those from time to
time.
As far as I understand that,google likes to see like things
being refreshed and everything.
They like websites that arechanging and not always staying
(32:00):
just stagnant.
So so that's why this isimportant, but you know,
building that into yourstructure.
I know there's a lot of greatresources on how to format it
and everything, and I'm notgonna bore everyone with all
those little details and I'mstill definitely a newbie with
all of this, but this is onethat's on my list that I am
(32:20):
actually working on right nowtoo.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, I looked it up.
a meta description is an HTMLtag that summarizes a web pages
content, so One of the ways thatyou'll see One of the ways the
reason why it's so kind of likeunsexy to talk about is because
when you Most likely you'llnever even see it, it's usually
(32:45):
for the search engines so thatit can kind of Know what's going
on.
Because if you have, if youdon't have any, just written
Long-form text on the page, itwon't really know what the point
of the pages and that's whatyour meta description is going
to be.
It's kind of describing what isthis page for or even what is
(33:06):
this product for.
When it comes down to a productbasis.
Let's get off of that topic.
I hate that topic.
Let's talk about updating andcreating landing pages and blogs
.
This is something that is feelsincredibly manual.
It's probably easier if youlisten to our Episode on a ask
(33:28):
AI and chat, gpt and how you canintegrate artificial
intelligence into your workflow.
How are you updating, makingnew landing pages and blogs
right now?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, so I like to dig into my Google Analytics.
It's also like a monthly thingthat I do, where I just at least
go into my Google Analyticsonce a month and Doing the the
marketing program with punchmark helps kind of remind me to
do that.
I always do it right before mycall, which is right after this,
actually, so it kind of forcesme to look at it and then we're
(33:59):
gonna talk about it.
So there's anything that Idon't understand, I can ask them
about it while we're on thecall.
But I like to look at what arethe landing pages or pages on my
site that are getting the mosttraffic, and I want to go and
check those regularly and makesure that they look good.
Is all the information Correcton them?
Is there a page that's notconverting the way it should be?
(34:21):
Like it's getting a lot ofpeople on it but it's not
getting any appointments or it'snot.
You know it's not getting thecall to action that I want it to
get.
So I like to go through.
Those are my blogs that are themost popular, getting the most
are.
You know hits Are.
Is all the information on themstill up to date and even just
fluffing it a little bit more.
Are the products on it stillAvailable or do I need to change
(34:42):
those up?
So I like to do that as much aspossible, but in the summer,
doing a good sweep of it all isreally good.
Another thing that you couldlook at is To go on on punch
mark.
We have an option where you cansee terms that get searched the
most frequently in, like thesearch bar, and so then I want
to make sure all my landingpages reference those terms a
(35:03):
lot, because that's clearly whatpeople are searching for.
Or I want to use those terms inthe product descriptions that I
am writing, because that's whatpeople are looking for.
So you know they're looking forcrucifix.
I want to make sure that I saycrucifix if it is applicable.
I'm not just saying cross, youknow so.
So those are some things tolook for and just good for you
(35:23):
to be cognizant of movingforward when you're doing
anything for your website.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Yeah, it's.
It's kind of it needs to take alittle bit of extra thought when
it comes to these kind ofthings, because the answer won't
usually be written right outfor you.
But one of the ways that you canlook at it, for example, is
Finding these common searchesand then seeing, like you had
mentioned, if there is analternative phrase that you're
(35:50):
commonly using, and the one ofthe biggest ones I see is the
term bridal versus engagement.
A lot of people aren't usingbridal in an everyday talk.
It's more of like a jewelerterm, and a lot of jewelers are
very close to the, the sourcematerial, and they care because
this is isn't just an engagementring, it's a bridal ring.
But you kind of need to get offyour high horse a little bit
(36:15):
and look at what is it that the,the shoppers are speaking about
locally, you know, regionally,or locally or amongst themselves
, and if you are able to find alittle detail like that, who
knows, maybe it pays off in away that it increases your time
on page by just a little bitmore or it increases your you
(36:36):
know your checkout by Point zeroone.
Well, it's worth it.
Then you just made youryourself an additional sale and
it just takes a little bit oftime.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, exactly, and I think this is the kind of
project you could really go downthe rabbit hole on.
So I would just give yourselfan amount of time you're gonna,
you can dedicate to it.
Maybe it's just one day thatyou're gonna like close your
email and you're just gonnafocus on this and that's it and
that's fine, and just do as muchas you can for that day and
you're gonna close it until thenext time that you have some
(37:07):
more time to devote to it,because you could spend months
Really working on this projectfully.
So I would just not driveyourself nuts with it, and just
do what you can and then move onlanding pages.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
I, I argue, landing pages and blogs I I'm becoming
more partial to landing pages,though it recently are, in my
opinion, the most impactful waythat you can update your website
regularly and they don't costanything to make.
If you most likely, on whateverwebsite platform you're using,
(37:39):
whether it's punchmark orsomeone else, if you are, you
know if you don't have a landingpage for every single major
category on your website rightnow.
So we're talking Jewelry, alljewelry.
We're talking bridal menjewelry, earrings, bracelets,
things like that if you don'thave a landing page for every
(38:01):
single one of those right now,that should be your next project
, because you can go in.
You'll probably set up like aStructure or like a base
template that you can use forevery single one of them most
likely a header, kind of Topbanner sort of thing, at the top
, maybe three to five imagesbelow that in the second section
, a Additional call to action inthe bottom and maybe one more.
(38:25):
That's kind of all you need todo to set it up.
You can even go and look onsome major websites, major
jewelers, and kind of see whattheir structure is for a landing
page and then take some heavyinspiration from that and go
back and build it yourself.
It's not, it's Lanny.
Pages are the secret sauce for alot of people and it's not like
(38:45):
we're trying to hide that it's.
It just takes a little bit ofwork, a lot of the time, and I'd
recommend yeah, maybe you justStart with one and they do
another one next month, andthere you go.
Now you got two.
Okay, let's move on to socialmedia Biopages and setting up
your highlights and editing alttags on your Instagram.
(39:06):
So this is kind of just allaround Instagram and making sure
that your Instagram is actuallykind of a, a branch of your
company and does, I'd say,relate.
And talk back to your website.
I know that you are a big fanof Instagram.
What are you doing kind ofregularly that you aren't doing
or, at this point, that youaren't just doing on a
(39:29):
day-to-day basis?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
So I just like to do a good sweep of everything on
all my social media.
We'll kind of focus onInstagram for this one, because
that is the one that I feel likecan be monetized the best for
jewelry right now.
But I want to look at my bio.
It's been a little while sinceI've changed my bio.
I just want to look at it again.
Does it still all look good?
Does it match my content?
(39:52):
Is it getting the people I want?
Do I want to just try somethingdifferent for a little while?
Do I want to try changing upthe wording and maybe, instead
of having the you know since1957 as my top line, and maybe
make I want to make engagementrings my top line on there for a
little while and see if thatmakes any change.
Is there anything else I can addto my highlights?
(40:12):
Did I miss anything?
I'm going to go through myarchive and make sure that I
have added as much as I can frommy past stories to highlights,
because people are going to gothrough all those.
It's kind of like you knowshopping you on your website
before coming into your store.
I want to make sure that peopleare going to see good content
on my page and what they want tosee.
So I go through all myhighlight reels, make sure just
(40:34):
everything looks good.
Is there anything else I canadd to them?
Can I add any new highlightreels that might make sense now?
Do all of my previous posts havealt tags on them?
Again, that helps forsearchability.
It helps for the internet toknow what that is and to help
you know more people find thoseDo.
You can go back and actuallyedit the descriptions, the
(40:55):
hashtags.
You can go back and tagproducts.
So maybe I have, like a highperforming post that people
still happen to land on, but theitem that I tagged in it has
sold, so the tag has beenremoved.
I could maybe tag another itembecause you know we have this
issue in the jewelry businesswhere we might get the same
(41:15):
style number in over and overand over but every time it's
going to get a different, likeskew number or product number,
if you will, so I might havethat item again.
but it's a different number soit lost the tag.
So I'm going to tag that againso that I can still convert on
this post.
That's been on my page formonths, so just things like that
(41:36):
.
Just, you know, cleaning, ormaybe there's a post in there
that's just like making my feed.
It's just breaking up my feedand it's not looking good on my
feed anymore.
Maybe I'm just going to deleteit, you know.
So, just things like that, justto make sure the page looks
good, because, again, this is arepresentation of who you are
and especially millennials andGen Z are checking that before
they're deciding if they want toshop with me.
(41:58):
So I want to make sure thatthey're seeing what they want to
see.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
I agree there's nothing wrong.
I mean, if a post has servedits purpose like, for example,
I've done some things where Iran a giveaway for my art and
then the giveaway announcement,that kind of like ends, the
giveaway is very utilitarian andit's not beautiful, it's not
great, but I had to do it, it'sokay in, like, you know, six
(42:22):
months, come back to it and thenI just archive it and it just
served its purpose and then youcan go back and curate and I
think that that kind of does adda little bit of elevation to it
and I think that's important.
But maybe quick pit stop, areyou on the threads?
Speaker 2 (42:39):
Oh, yes, yeah, we joined the threads.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Threads versus threading Threading.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
I'm threading, still not exactly sure what this is
all going to look like, but itdefinitely has gained a lot of
traction.
I think they said what it's gotlike a hundred million
downloads already, and it tookTwitter like five years to get
to that number of users and ithit that number in five days.
So I think there's definitelysomething to say about this.
(43:06):
And you know, I don't think weneed to be spending a lot of
time on it yet, but I encourageon my diamond diaries all the
time just go, secure the handle,set up an account for your
business and maybe for yourselfpersonally.
It's super easy, because Idon't know if you've done it,
but if you have an Instagram,you can just like, basically log
in through your Instagramaccount and it pulls through
(43:27):
your bio, your profile picture,and you can automatically follow
everyone you follow onInstagram on threads.
So I mean, there's really noexcuse.
It's so easy to set it up andthen you can just decide what
you want to do with it later.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Yeah, I, I like it.
I was looking for a reason toget off Twitter I.
It was just very toxic for awhile and I was.
I just picked it up and I wasvery amazed.
As a user experience kind ofguy, I was very impressed by the
onboarding and overall kind offeel of the setup.
The setup was so quick and Ireally liked how I went from
(44:04):
having no following, no one, tohaving, you know, a very active
feed and I thought that that wasgreat.
That's my least favorite partabout starting a new social
media is when you're kind offollowing and your timeline sort
of ends and you kind of reachthe bottom of your timeline,
which is the opposite.
But we could probably dive intothreads for an entire episode.
(44:25):
I'm sort of waiting to see whatthe next move is on that before
we do an episode, but maybe wedo one sooner rather than later.
That'd be fun.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Sounds good.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
All right, the last one.
So let's talk about productdescriptions on your website and
kind of setting up aninfrastructure behind it.
I know that productdescriptions for people that are
listening, they're the writtenkind of description that
describes all the detail of aproduct on a what we call a
product details page.
(44:55):
So this is when you are on theindividual product and there's
usually like a little write upFirst of all.
What's your relationship withthat and how do you go about
making sure that they stay up todate?
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah.
So recently I took some timeand created a Google doc with a
system for not only how we weregoing to write our product
descriptor, our titles and ourdescriptions, and I also started
saving some kind of romanticlanguage, if you will, for some
of my designers, like John Hardy, that it's all handmade and
Bali and it's made from recycledsterling silver.
(45:28):
I have a little snippet thatliterally gets copied and pasted
on the product description ofevery John Hardy piece.
So we I set that up, took sometime to do that, and then I
shared it and kind of went overit with everyone that might be
editing these product titles anddescriptions so that we can all
get on the same page, cause Inoticed on my website that when
there's multiple people doing it, some people are saying 14
(45:51):
carat diamond earring, and thensome people are saying diamond
earrings set in 14 carat andsome people aren't even putting
the carat, and some people areputting the carat weight and
some people aren't so, and somepeople saying John Hardy at the
beginning or the end.
So I wanted it to all beconsistent.
So we set up this system.
Now everyone follows it and notthat we have to.
(46:11):
I still catch things and westill have to go back and edit
things, but once you start itand then move forward with it,
it's a lot easier than having tomove backwards and fix
everything you've already done.
So I think just setting up thatsystem, however you want it to
look like and make it easy,where everyone can access it and
copy and paste as much aspossible, really will save you a
lot of time and get you aconsistent look across the board
(46:33):
.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yeah, I'm going to tease this.
I'm not even no, I don't evenknow if I can, but I'll bury
this in.
You know, 48 minutes into anepisode.
Punch Park is really looking athaving a way to have AI
features inside of productdescriptions, because it is
incredibly manual and, like yousaid, a lot of people don't
(46:57):
really enjoy that part and Icertainly don't and that is like
the prime use for an AI ishaving it take like this very
manual thing that requirespretty much no brain power and
having it automate for you.
It's going to be something thatwe're looking at, trying to roll
out.
It won't be before the showseason, but it's going to be
relatively soon.
(47:18):
We want to have it ineverybody's hands ahead of time,
before you know the holiday, soyou actually have time to
implement it.
But it's something we're we'reteasing.
We'll tease it privatelybecause the only people I'm
listening right now are the coolpeople, so we'll keep it on
like that.
I'm the DL for a second, so allof that.
That's 10 little little nuggetsthat you can do for your summer
(47:43):
cleaning If you have a littlebit of a slow season and to kind
of speed run them.
I'll just say it's mergingduplicate customer accounts,
using the cleanup for yourcleaning up your phone numbers
and your email addresses andaddresses in general, removing
bounced emails, making sure yourtop customers have complete
profiles, setting up a drop boxor kind of folder structure for
(48:05):
your images, updating yourphotos for products which is
just a big task, but that issomething you can chip away at
updating your meta descriptions,updating or creating new
landing pages and blogs,updating your social media bio
pages and you know yourhighlights and editing your all
tags on your Instagram and then,finally, updating product
(48:25):
descriptions on your website.
We just covered that in about,yeah, 48, 49 minutes, and I
think that it's if you can justtake maybe one or two or three
of them and going after them.
Which one are you working onright now?
I think you're probably workingon all of them, but which one
in particular?
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, a lot of them are ongoing.
I have already completed thenumber one and two and three
actually for the year.
So the duplicate customers, thecleaning up of the database and
the bounced emails so I justdid those in the last month and
have not yet worked on the topcustomers for this year.
I'm going to work on that.
My sales team kind of is morethe one that handles that, but a
(49:01):
drop box is one that I've gotset up, but I am continually
adding to that and organizingthat, and probably my biggest
one that I need to focus onmoving forward is the meta
descriptions and landing pages.
So that's that's my focus, and Ijust want to end with if anyone
that's listening to this needsa little bit more hand holding
or wants some more one-on-onehelp with any of this, that's
(49:24):
something that I offer with mydiamond diaries.
You can book a one-on-oneconsultation with me.
You can find me on Instagram atdiamonddiaries or at
diamonddiariesme, and I'd behappy to help.
But I think this is a greatepisode to share to anyone that
might have a social mediamanager or like an inventory
manager of some sort, and youcan give them a good like task
(49:45):
list moving forward, and there'sno reason why anyone should be
bored after listening to thisepisode.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Yeah, that's the thing is.
It's just, I feel like I neverhave a completed to-do list, and
when I finish a to-do list, I'malways like, oh, I just was
like what is the next thing?
I think that having more thingsin the hopper for you to
actually go after and accomplishis the best way to fill what,
for many, is a slower part ofthe season.
(50:12):
It's going to pick up reallyfast and you'd be crazy to try
to do all 10 of these things,you know, in November.
It's time to look at it now andagain.
It just starts with one andthen the rest will fall in.
If you haven't yet, make sureyou go give Alex a follow on
Instagram.
Her link is going to be in ourshow notes below, and I
(50:35):
appreciate you coming on, alex,this is really interesting.
I think that a lot of them wenta little over my head, but I'm
sure that everybody loved it andthey are going to start going
after them.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
I hope I can help.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
Awesome.
All right, thanks, everybody.
See you next week.
Bye, all right, everybody.
That's the end of the show.
Thanks so much for listening.
This week's episode was broughtto you by Punchmark and
produced and hosted by MichaelBurpo.
My guest this week was AlexSchlinwine, also known as
Diamond Diaries.
Give her a follow on Instagramand learn a little bit more from
(51:09):
her, as she teaches peopleabout how to be the most
effective retail jeweler youpossibly can.
This episode was edited by PaulSuarez with music by Ross
Cochrum.
Don't forget to rate thepodcast on Apple Podcasts and
Spotify and go to punchmarkcomslash loop that's L-O-U-P-E to
learn more about the podcast.
We'll be back next week,tuesday, with another episode.
(51:29):
Thanks, thank you.
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