Maximising garden design website visitors from RHS Chelsea
All images on this page courtesy of the talented Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Tips to turn your website visitors into warm contacts as a garden designer: we’re helping brands in the horticultural world make the most of the Spring surge, including attention generated by the Chelsea Flower Show. Last time we shared our introductory website 101 on how to get your garden design website ready for the Spring jump-start to the busy gardening season, which is then amplified at the end of May by the Chelsea Flower Show.
This time we want to help you turn that surge of traffic on your website into engaged followers so that you can build your audience and use that to grow your business as a brand in the garden space.
In this blog we examine how you can turn your website traffic into a goldmine of interested followers that could become clients.
In this series leading up to the Chelsea Flower Show, we want to help you get ready for the Spring season with your business website. Even if you’re not in the garden industry, the following posts are a great template for how to prepare your website for a surge of interest around a campaign or prominent event.
Wildings is a website design agency in Devon. Based in Torquay in South Devon we design standout websites for small businesses like garden designers, interior designers, florists and architects (garden, interiors and lifestyle brands). In this series, we’re looking at how to market your small garden business or brand off the back of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show or the Spring rush: catch up on the previous article, ‘Tips to improve your garden design website for RHS Chelsea’ or explore the rest of our series on how to market your garden brand at the Chelsea Garden Show →
1. Set up a maillist to turn your website visitors into followers
You’ve probably heard loads of people talk about having a newsletter sign-up on your website over the years. It might sound like a bit trivial and a bit of a nuisance, but a newsletter is a really powerful marketing tool, and here’s why.
With all the interest each Spring in gardening (especially if you’re involved with the Chelsea Flower Show), some of that will potentially coming your way, what are you going to do to harness that traffic on your website? If people find your website and then leave, what are you doing to stop them forgetting about you, never to return?
Wouldn’t it be good to keep hold of some of those website visitors somehow in case they become prospective clients in the future? A maillist gives you a way to capture eyeballs on your website and then convert those into more engaged followers.
The beauty of building a maillist is that you can then communicate what you want, when you want and in your own way. You’re not beholden to the algorithms of social media, having to perform summersaults to get across your important messages. E-mail is also still a viable and effective medium to communicate. People who have signed up to your mailist are that bit more invested in you as a garden designer or the like.
In contrast social media content is that bit more superficial, making it much easier to pass over and so harder for you to build and audience and get traction as a garden brand - have you ever been frustrated with your efforts on Instagram?
Also, don’t worry about what you want to say to your maillist at the outset. That can come later! (And we’ll be talking about how to produce really high-quality content through your website blog later on in this series.) The key thing is to capture visitors and then you have the luxury of some time and space to work out what you want to communicate with your list. It’s much harder to communicate when you don’t have an audience.
2. Add your newsletter form to high-vis areas on your website
Let’s say you’ve set up your maillist with an e-mail marketing platform (see the next section for tips on what system to use). Where do you put it to maximise your chances of turning your website visitors into subscribers?
The first thing to say is that you need to get over any reticence about talking about the great things you have in store for subscribers. Your newsletter is not a means to spam people, but provide lots more value to your audience in a more intimate way. That’s a valuable offering (if you do it well), so you shouldn’t be shy about getting people on your bus, as it were.
The best way to build a thriving, engaged mail list is to give people lots of opportunities and reminders to sign up.
The reality is that people need several opportunities to follow you (and the same applies if you are trying to build your social media account or sell a workshop).
Top places to include your maillist signup form on your website
THe footer at the bottom of your website
Often the last place people look before leaving your site (which is why it’s sometimes known as your doormat); give them a reason to sign up before carrying on with their day
Your website homepage
An obvious one, but your homepage is a bit of a sorting room and the place for your best hits (how you offer the most value), so your maillist should be one of them
Your website pop-up
Love them or hate them, pop-ups have a good hit rate for generating sign-ups; whatever you do, make it easy for people to close your pop-up if it’s not for them, plus refresh it on a regular basis so it doesn’t become stale
Your Instagram link in bio
We’ll cover social media in a future post, but a sign-up link in your link in your bio (social media profile) is a great place that you can then mention in Grid posts or your Stories on Instagram. You can opt for one consolidated link in bio or use the new feature on Instagram to add multiple links - make sure to choose the most important ones; less is more!
Your website contact form
An option to join your newsletter when people make an enquiry is an absolute must; if someone is contacting you it’s likely they’ll be open to hearing more from you
At the end of your blog posts
If you’re creating valuable, insightful content on your blog, it makes sense to allow visitors to get more of your content; again make it simple and easy to sign up
3. Integrate your website with a good e-mail marketing system
The good news with e-mail marketing systems is that there are lots out there (many are free or have free starter tiers available), and predominantly they are quite easy to setup and use.
Here are some of the main players for you to consider:
MailChimp https://mailchimp.com/ (note that MailChimp recently capped the maximum number of subscribers on its free plan to 500)
ConvertKit https://convertkit.com/
FloDesk https://flodesk.com/ (interesting offers one standardised plan across the board)
HubSpot https://www.hubspot.com/
There are a ton of other ones besides that you could use too - MailerLite https://www.mailerlite.com/ is another to check out.
With that in mind, we’re not going to go into the relative strengths of them all; if you want to compare them more in detail, check the following articles:
The 15 Best Email Marketing Services by EmailToolTester
The Best Email Marketing Software by PCMag
Compare The Best Email Marketing Services by QuickSprout
What we’ll do instead is give you some pointers on what to look out for when choosing or setting up a email marketing system on your website.
Check the limit of any free plans
E-mail marketing systems tend to come with a free plan that gives you an upper limit of subscribers before you have to upgrade. Make sure you are happy with that threshold or potentially upgrading to a paid plan before long.
As mentioned, MailChimp recently reduced its free subscriber cap to 500, which may sound like a lot if you are starting from scratch, but if you gain traction, you will quickly outgrow the free plan, so watch out for future costs.
If you want to import your maillist or transfer your audience from another platform, make sure you know what the cost implications are before committing to a new provider.
Is it compatible with your website?
Modern e-mail marketing systems are usually plug and play, so you can integrate them easily into a website. However, it’s worth checking whether you need to setup any extra steps.
It’s helpful to know if you can easily embed sign up forms in order to use them as lead magnets, particularly if you don’t have that specific native functionality on your website platform.
Check any advanced functionality
If you want to add contacts from your enquiry form, for example, which we mentioned above, it’s like that you’ll need an extra automation such as Zapier or similar. This allows you to transfer contacts to your maillist automatically. Make sure you’ve thought through what you want to do and cross-checked this with any potential system.
Something else you might want to do is segment your audience directly from your sign-up forms to organise waitlists or waiting lists for workshops or for those who want to hear about specific campaigns.
4. Craft a personal welcome message for website visitors
The process of getting website visitors on board with your brand doesn’t stop after they press your newsletter sign-up button. The key to successful marketing and audience building is to treat it as a journey.
We’ve talked about the user journey of visitors on your website in the past (some call it a marketing funnel) from awareness to engagement.
Read more on our blog: Why your customer's journey on your website matters & how to influence it
Creating and sending a welcome message to new subscribers who have been on your website is a great way to continue to build trust and authority with your audience. Although it’s polite and welcoming to receive an introductory message, there’s more to it than that. A welcome message to new subscribers is a chance to introduce yourself, the person or people behind the brand, as well as the key ways that you help clients.
If you’re a garden designer or landscape gardener or architect, you’re going to want to stand out in a busy garden space, especially at a busy time of year, and this is a very good way to do so.
We mentioned this above, but people need lots of different opportunities to hear who you are and how you help through your products or services. It’s so easy to miss or forget things in the rush of life online or digital channels. By repeating the core things of your business and glossing the ‘humans behind the handle’* you’re making it easier for people to connect with you. The easier it is to resonate with you and your brand, the more likely it is that you’ll turn that attention into enquiries and sales for your business.
*Handle = your account name on social media, e.g., @wildings.studio
Ideas for a really personal but effective newsletter welcome message
A picture of the brand or business owner with some interesting personal facts (if new people resonate with this, they know they’re in the right place and will be keen to hear more)
A list of your most popular blog articles (listicle posts, how-tos or tips & tricks are ideal)
A reminder of how you help through your core services and the key benefits (no boring lists of features!)
A short note on what people can expect to receive from you (again underlining all the fantastic value you offer)
An obvious link to join you on your preferred social media channel or a link to your latest workshop
5. Include an incentive to sign up on your website
When we say incentive, we don’t mean a cheap trick to get someone to hand over their e-mail in exchange for a torrent of turgid e-mails.
The key with getting your new audience ‘on your bus’ - whether that’s in the Spring, off the Chelsea Flower Show or during the rest of the year - is to offer value continually, which we hope is what has come across in this blog. One of the questions people will have when they visit your website of the back and consider signing up for your content is, ‘what’s in it for me?’.
This is a natural question that we all have, particularly when navigating lots of website and social media accounts all offering something. An incentive should ideally be something of genuine worth to your audience that in some small way helps with a problem they have or a question they’ve been looking to answer.
For example, one of the ways we, at Wildings Studio, do that is to offer free resources for businesses, which include checklists on optimising aspects of your website or analysing the effectiveness of your branding. We’ve have set these helpful checklists in a password-protected part of our site, which subscribers get exclusive access to on signing up.
Here’s our newsletter sign-up with a little incentive (give it a go and check out our freebies!) or there’s the sign-up block at the bottom of the blog: https://mailchi.mp/d33b2c709431/studio-emails
It’s an exclusive thing and a bit of a thank-you to people who put their e-mail in our hands.
Ideas for incentives to boost maillist signups
A downloadable, printable checklist or template from you as a garden expert
A calendar to help your clients plan an aspect of their garden (top tip: a percentage are not going to be able to do this, which is where you and your services come in)
A short PDF e-book on an aspect that your audience will find helpful if they’re considering revamping their garden
Exclusive access to some video content with useful planting advice for beginners in their garden
