The following article is reprinted from the July 2009 Plugged In column of Society of American Florists' (SAF) Floral Management Magazine. SAF's Floral Management is distributed to more than 11,000 SAF members and is the floral industry's premier floral business practices publication.
Tracking your Web traffic takes concentration, the kind that you're already devoting to running your shop. Facebook can pull you in for hours and before you know it, you're reading all the comments under a bride's wedding pictures, looking for a mention of the flowers. And orches- trating your deliveries and GPS technologies could easily detour your after-hours time, if you're yanked back into work mode with every delivery hiccup.
But, as last month's cover story de- tailed, these technologies have proven to be must-haves for florists. Your shop can get a grip on them if you're willing to hand off the responsibility of day-to-day management to other staff members.
Under 30-Set Gets Social Networking Facebook touts more than 200 million users, while MySpace comes second with 106 million - the two biggest networks.
Many of these users and almost all of the early adopters on these sites are in Generation Y and younger. Send your Gen Y staff members, aged 18 to 30, into familiar territory and task them with your shop's social networking.
On Facebook, create a page for your shop. That allows you to collect fans and interact with them. Go to http://www. facebook.com/pages/create.php. With MySpace, ask your staff to create profes- sional accounts for themselves using a shop email address. Start by posting basic information about your shop: address, hours, specialties, etc. Then, challenge employees with creative ways to promote your business to their fellow Gen Y-ers.
But we're not talking only kids here. Women aged 45-65 are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook (with their male counterparts not far behind), according to insidefaceboom.com As you may know, this cohort is the No. 1 flower-purchasing group.
Once you have your presence estab- lished, again task your Gen Y-ers to talk up your shop on the microblogging service Twitter.com. As standard practice, blog content should include plenty of links that send Twitter followers back to your Web site.
Shop Traffic: A Manager's Mandate
Assign the shop manager, the Web site manager or the person handling inven- tory to open a Google Analytics account and set up a monthly review process to tweak your Web site based on what it reveals. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics. Like social networks, this ser- vice is free.
Analytics requires you to install special HTML code in your Web site to track information. Consult your Web site vendor before doing so. If a wire service hosts your site, you can work with their systems to allow Analytics tracking. After a couple of weeks, your manager should have statistics about your site's visitors, traffic sources and content.
The visitors category helps the man- ager to accurately count unique visits and check the average time spent on the site, new visits and bounce rate - the statistic that indicates folks who immediately leave because your shop wasn't what they were looking for. The traffic sources category shows which search engines were used to find you, the keywords peo- ple typed and any Web sites that referred visits to you.
In the content section, the manager should be looking for which pages are viewed, which have the most visits and on which page visitors usually finish their session. Work with your manager to har- ness the power of the site overlay feature, which provides bar graphs that reveal what is clicked the most on any page.
Delivery Manager Gets on the Map
Your delivery manager likely has a great system of grouping deliveries to maxi- mize a run to a certain area or zone. But with gas prices on the rise again, finding the shortest possible routes is critical for you to save time and fuel costs.
If you have a point-of-sale (POS) sys- tem, have your delivery manager check if it includes route optimization such as Microsoft's MapPoint, which many floral-specific POS systems already have built-in or can easily add as a module. If you don't have a floral-specific POS pro- gram, you can buy MapPoint for about $300 at a local electronics store.
After multiple addresses are entered for a delivery run, the software calculates the optimal route considering dis- tance, time and traffic, and can output the stops for download to a GPS unit. Connected to the Internet, the software provides up-to-date info to calculate op- timized routes.
Delegating won't just get you out of the weeds, it will empower your employees with new responsibilities and encourage more ownership of the shop's online identity and on-the-street efficiency. Once you've handed over the reins, be sure to schedule regular feed- back sessions or risk getting too far out of the loop - and behind the times.
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