We all agree that landing pages are one of the best ways to convert qualified website visitors into bridal appointments. If you haven’t heard of landing pages? You should enroll in our free Bridal Breakthroughs Course. In this course I explain landing pages and teach you how to implement systems for turning visitors into sales.

Ok, let’s get on with the technique for creating landing pages.

As a bridal shop owner, you may not have the resources to be able to create these landing pages. Who has time to learn HTML and all the other mumbo jumbo that goes into successfully implementing a landing page? Not you. And that’s why you are going to outsource this task to those that do this all the time.

Here’s how to do it successfully.

Step #1: Create the Landing Page Wording

This step you should not outsource. You are the subject matter expert and a techie is not going to be able to create wording that speaks to brides. You know what brides want and so you will need to create the landing page wording. You can simply use a text editor of your choice (Microsoft Word, etc). Keep the word count between 300-500.

What should you say??? Well, you need to sign up for the Bridal Breakthroughs Course to learn that. It’s free, so there is no excuse.

Step #2: Design your conversion form

The conversion form is the form that the visitor fills out to send their inquiry to you. Submission of this form “converts” them from a visitor to a lead. The general consensus is that you want to keep your forms brief. The more fields that are on your form, the less likely a bride will complete it. You can do a brief write up of the form you would like to use and include it in the document you created in Step #1.

How do you build these forms if you are not a “techie”? Well, there are a bunch of form builders available online. Some are free (like Wufoo). The problem with these form builders is that the way you receive the lead is through email. This means that you will be spending time doing data entry. Is that what you signed up for? No way. There’s got to be a better way. It’s called BridalLive’s Web Forms. When you use the BridalLive Web Forms, leads (i.e appointment requests) will arrive right inside of your BridalLive app and no data entry is required.

Step #3: Outsource on oDesk.com or Elance.com

The secret weapon of the savvy entrepreneur is to use services like oDesk/Elance to outsource tasks to other that have the requisite expertise. You will be amazed at how affordable this is. And if you find someone you like, you can keep using them again and again.

However, outsourcing does not work if you do not give a detailed explanation of the task at hand. At a minimum, you must outline the task and your expected delivery timing.

Bonus Step: Rinse and Repeat

Once you’ve outlined the process for creating landing pages (yes you should document this in your process binder), you can now hand this task off to an employee. You should task this employee with thinking about each “niche” (or bride profile) that you serve and have them create the wording document and manage the outsource process.

I'm happy to announce that the next version of BridalLive is available for you to download for free (as always)!  This version introduces some powerful and exciting features that you will want to take advantage of immediately. Let's have a look at a few highlights.

Mobile Phone Texting
You can now send and schedule text messages from BridalLive to your contact's mobile phones.  Just in time for prom season, this feature opens up a new marketing channel to a demographic that is increasingly mobile.  This feature is free for Internet Marketing Tools subscribers and also requires a Twilio.com account. You can watch a how-to video to learn more about this feature.

New Support Center
In an effort to make it even easier to obtain support and learn more about BridalLive, we are launching a new Support Center which is available at http://support.bridallive.com.  The support center has also been embedded right inside of BridalLive under Administration > Support Center.  When you need some help, just open the Support Center and search the vast knowledge base of topics (coming soon!).  Over the next few weeks, we will be filling out the Knowledge Base with articles on various BridalLive topics.  If you have a suggestion for an article, simply post a question on the new Support Center and I'll add it to the growing list of articles.

New Reports
There are 3 new reports that will help with buying inventory and customer pickups (Sales Summary by Size, Sales Summary by Color, and Pickup Report).

Discontinue Items
BridalLive now allows you to discontinue inventory items.  You will now be warned when adding a discontinued item to a Sale or Sales Order.  This feature is evolving as I receive feedback from you.  If you have any suggestions on how you'd like this feature to work going forward, please reply to this email and let me know!

Credit Card Processing Compliance
Mastercard recently announced support for partial approvals and BridalLive now supports this as well.  If you still don't have a merchant account that is linked with BridalLive, please reply to this email for a free cost analysis.

If you are already running BridalLive, updating is simple and takes less than 1 minute per computer. On each computer running BridalLive, follow these 3 steps:

1. Open the Administration Module
2. Click "Program Settings"
3. Click "Check For Updates" and click "Yes".

Important Note: When performing your updates please remember to update your "Master" computer first followed by each of your "Workstation" computers.

Helping you thrive,
Tom Esposito
Founder | tom@bridallive.com | 888-764-2605
 Join BridalLive on Facebook

This year I'm doing something fun at the Atlanta Market and I'd like you to be a part of it.  In addition to having a booth (Booth #12E111B), I'll be celebrating the launch of BridalLive version 2.5 at the bar of the Sun Dial Restaurant from 5-7pm on Saturday, August 20th.  To attend, you just need to stop by Booth #12E111B and pick up your ticket (and free drink coupon!).

The Sun Dial Restaurant is a unique Atlanta landmark that provides a magnificent view of the Atlanta skyline from it's 360-degree rotating restaurant.  And, it's just a 5 minute walk from the Merchandise Mart building.  Walking directions will be provided at the booth and can also be found by clicking here.

From the Sun Dial Restaurant website – "An exhilarating 85-second ride in one of our two scenic glass elevators will carry you 723 feet to the observatory View Level atop The Westin Peachtree Plaza, the tallest hotel in the Western Hemisphere. From this level, take in the breathtaking 360-degree panorama of the magnificent Atlanta skyline."  

I hope you can join me to celebrate this milestone release for BridalLive!

Tom Esposito

Founder, BridalLive
tom@bridallive.com
888-764-2605

Have you ever had an employee leave (bridal consultant, ordering manager, etc) and since you didn’t have ‘systems’ in place it was difficult to quickly train a new employee to pick up where her predecessor left off?

If you are anything like the hundreds of bridal shops that I’ve worked with over the years, you know that having systems in place for your staff’s duties is critical. The problem is that recording or documenting these systems is not always a high priority with all of the other duties we have as bridal shop owners.

Here’s a great tip I learned from Dane Maxwell of Recruiting Ninja on how to document your ‘systems’.

Step #1: Buy a headset
You’ll want your employee to record what they do with a headset like this one.

Step #2: Setup Jing
Jing is free software that let’s you record your computer screen while you talk. Your staff will explain what they do in a video.

Step #3: Send an email to your staff
In this email tell each employee that you’d like them to show you how they rock at what they do. Give them the link to Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing/) and tell them to set it up on one of your computers. Also tell them that you’ll be by to give them the headset you purchased from Amazon. The final step, which is optional, is to tell them that you will give them a .25/hour raise after it is complete.

Try this out and let me know how it works. If I were you, I’d have videos as many videos as you can. Here are some ideas of videos/audio to create:

1. Record the audio of your bridal salon’s phone greeting.
2. Record your in person greeting when someone comes through your doors.
3. How appointments are booked
4. How to enter a customer
5. How to create a purchase order
6. What to do when a customer doesn’t show up for an appointment
7. How to send an email
8. How to confirm an appointment

Helping you thrive,

Tom Esposito
Founder, BridalLive

There is a reason why David’s Bridal has captured more than 1/3 of the bridal market. It has little to do with the products they carry and a lot to do with the fact that they have mastered online marketing. In this article, I’ll show you 3 online marketing techniques that David’s employs. Then I’ll show you the easiest way to implement these concepts in one week or less.

David’s Online Marketing Trifecta

1. Effective SEO – This one is simple.  If you search for “wedding dresses” on Google, David’s is #1.  The Google Keyword tool estimates that there are over 4 Million searches for phrase “wedding dresses” EACH MONTH.  A recent study by “Search Engine Watch” shows that the first search result gets 34.6% of the clicks.  This translates to David’s getting nearly 1.5 Million page visits per month on the “wedding dresses” phrase alone.
2. Converting Online Visitors into Prospects – Having a large number of visitors is worthless unless you are converting those vistors into prospects.  David’s is great at this as well. A look at David’s website reveals at least 3 ways that they entice a visitor to “Sign Up” (i.e. convert). When a visitor signs up, they are entered into David’s marketing funnel. This is where the real magic begins.
3. Automatic Follow Up – Once the bride has signed up, David’s computer system takes over and starts the bride on a personalized drip marketing campaign that encourages her to a) visit a local store, b) buy online, c) make a repeat purchase (bridesmaids, accessories, favors, etc).

With a multi-million dollar marketing budget, it’s no surprise that David’s has an effective online marketing strategy.  But it doesn’t take millions of dollars to accomplish this anymore.

With BridalLive, you can take the guesswork out of online marketing. Our Automated Marketing will set your business up for online success.  Once you start using these tools, your business will benefit from:

• More leads coming from the web
• Pre-sold and pre-qualified brides
• Fewer appointment cancellations
• Automatic Customer Follow Up
• Repeat sales
• Expert Advice and Training

I'm happy to announce that the next version of BridalLive is available for you to download for free (as always)!  This version introduces some powerful and exciting features that you will want to take advantage of immediately. Let's have a look at a few highlights.

Mobile Phone Texting
You can now send and schedule text messages from BridalLive to your contact's mobile phones.  Just in time for prom season, this feature opens up a new marketing channel to a demographic that is increasingly mobile.  This feature is free for Internet Marketing Tools subscribers and also requires a Twilio.com account. You can watch a how-to video to learn more about this feature.

New Support Center
In an effort to make it even easier to obtain support and learn more about BridalLive, we are launching a new Support Center which is available at http://support.bridallive.com.  The support center has also been embedded right inside of BridalLive under Administration > Support Center.  When you need some help, just open the Support Center and search the vast knowledge base of topics (coming soon!).  Over the next few weeks, we will be filling out the Knowledge Base with articles on various BridalLive topics.  If you have a suggestion for an article, simply post a question on the new Support Center and I'll add it to the growing list of articles.

New Reports
There are 3 new reports that will help with buying inventory and customer pickups (Sales Summary by Size, Sales Summary by Color, and Pickup Report).

Discontinue Items
BridalLive now allows you to discontinue inventory items.  You will now be warned when adding a discontinued item to a Sale or Sales Order.  This feature is evolving as I receive feedback from you.  If you have any suggestions on how you'd like this feature to work going forward, please reply to this email and let me know!

Credit Card Processing Compliance
Mastercard recently announced support for partial approvals and BridalLive now supports this as well.  If you still don't have a merchant account that is linked with BridalLive, please reply to this email for a free cost analysis.

And over 25 more new enhancements and bug fixes…
For a complete listing of new features and improvements, check out the release notes.

Update Now!
If you are already running BridalLive, updating is simple and takes less than 1 minute per computer. On each computer running BridalLive, follow these 3 steps:

1. Open the Administration Module
2. Click "Program Settings"
3. Click "Check For Updates" and click "Yes".

Important Note: When performing your updates please remember to update your "Master" computer first followed by each of your "Workstation" computers.

Helping you thrive,
Tom Esposito
Founder | tom@bridallive.com | 888-764-2605
 Join BridalLive on Facebook

I just attended a webinar on the ‘Science of Email Marketing’ and thought I’d share some findings.  These findings are based on over 9 billion (with a B) emails that were sent to consumers and businesses.  I’ve stripped this webinar down to just the most important pieces of information for us bridal retailers.

I’m a firm believer in the power of email marketing.  That’s why I’ve made the next version of BridalLive an email marketing powerhouse that can completely automate most of your emailing duties, including appointment confirmations and follow up sequences (i.e. drip marketing).

In preparation for launching version 2.1 of BridalLive on February 28th, the first 10 people to purchase any one of BridalLive’s plans (Pro, Plus, Starter) will get a special Pre-Release of BridalLive v2.1, a FREE Custom HTML Email Template and 1 free hour of consulting (total value = $399).  During our time together, I’ll show you how to use BridalLive to send professional emails (including appointment confirmations, after purchase Thank Yous, Feedback Requests, etc) and how to set up a drip email marketing sequence that will entice your customers to come back and buy more from you.  If we have time remaining, I’ll show you how to leverage BridalLive to target your customers’ behaviors and respond by automating follow up sequences, scheduling tasks and much more.  As an added bonus, I’ll show you how to stop wasting time processing bridal show leads by leveraging BridalLive’s new import and bulk subscribe features.

If you are looking for a way to reduce customer acquisition and follow up costs, this is how you do it.

Call me at 888-764-2605 or buy online TODAY! This offer Expires 2/28/2011

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

Improved Order Tracking/Management

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

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

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

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

Improved Appointment Options

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

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

Improved Inventory Management

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

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

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

How to get the new version

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

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

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

Helping you thrive,

Tom Esposito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shameless plug follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Establishing web site goals within Google Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

Measuring your Web Site’s Effectiveness with Google Analytics

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

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

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

Tweaking your website

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

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

This concludes the discussion on measuring web site performance.

Follow the links below for the rest of this series:

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

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