Spill The Tea | Episode 2 – SEO Transcript:
[Ming Johanson]
Like we had a hilarious conversation with somebody that was interviewing us as service providers who turned around and said to us “I only want customers to call us.”
[Kira Carlin]
And that’s okay if you’re only looking for pretty much Gen-X and upwards.
[Ming Johanson]
Anybody, aged 38 or above
[Kira Carlin]
Anyone who’s a millennial or under is never gonna call you, they would rather cut off their own fingers.
[Intro]
What if you could learn from the mistakes of others? The Spill The Tea podcast is a great way to get information on all things related with digital marketing and business hosts myself, Ming Johanson and Kira Carlin breakdown our knowledge all in various fields, including business, sales and marketing. So whether you’re new or old at doing any of these things, tune in each week and hear the lessons learnt titbits of knowledge and talk of tea.
[Ming Johanson]
Already I’m stuck
[Kira Carlin]
You’re stuck and you just tripped over the dog.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes, I have. Which was a fun trip. I’ll send you a postcard.
[Kira Carlin]
Please do
[Ming Johanson]
Hi Kira
[Kira Carlin]
Hi Ming
[Ming Johanson]
So today’s episode is talking about UX design.
[Kira Carlin]
User experience. For those of you who are not geeks like us?
[Ming Johanson]
Feel like geeks is a strong word.
[Kira Carlin]
I don’t know. Isn’t geeks, Aren’t geeks cool now? It’s like 1985
[Ming Johanson]
I thought it was nerds. Isn’t it nerds? I feel like this is a distinction between the two and I can’t remember which is which. So today’s Tea is called the Blue Byron from the Clean Tea Company, which is a butterfly pea flower and lemon myrtle tea.
[Kira Carlin]
Just to be clear, it doesn’t have actual butterfly pee in it. Well it does but not that kind. It is a plant.
[Ming Johanson]
It is a flower. It’s the blue flower. And the tea comes out blue. And then when you add lemon, it turns purple or pink.
[Kira Carlin]
Purple.
[Ming Johanson]
Purple Yes, pink. Purple Pink.
[Kira Carlin]
Pinky Purple
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. And I quite enjoy it because it’s like a gin. There’s a gin that I have that’s called Ink gin, which is made from the same flower. And it’s deeply entertaining when the bartender adds lemon, because it’s just magical. And so I have the same magical experience with my tea.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s funny because it’s the only blue thing that I have a real funny thing around blue food.
[Ming Johanson]
Blueberries?
[Kira Carlin]
But blueberries aren’t really blue. They’re kind of a deep purple colour. Or as these? Like there’s not much in nature that is this colour.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah… Okay. You have kangaroo paws now with blue.
[Kira Carlin]
I know, but I don’t eat them.
[Ming Johanson]
Fair, fair point.
[Kira Carlin]
No, I don’t do, like – blue cake or even blue M&M. I don’t do blue things.
[Ming Johanson]
You don’t do Blue M&Ms.
[Kira Carlin]
I can eat them but I feel weird about it.
[Ming Johanson]
I feel like I don’t even know you man.
[Kira Carlin]
I know right and it’s so weird because it’s not like any of the other M&M colours are more natural. I know it’s a weird thing
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah cause, you know green…
[Kira Carlin]
Green M&M’s so natural.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
The organic M&M’s.
[Ming Johanson]
The Organic M&M’s
[Kira Carlin]
So, yeah, I have a complicated relationship with this tea because it’s so pretty and so yummy, but it’s very hard to.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s very blue.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s very blue.
[Ming Johanson]
We’ll share photos on our socials. Probably, if we remember.
[Kira Carlin]
Probably, we’ll try to remember. No but honest to God, it looks like someone’s melted a crayon in there like it’s very blue.
[Ming Johanson]
You didn’t eat crayons, obviously, in your childhood?
[Kira Carlin]
No, it was more paper.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh.
[Kira Carlin]
Grass.
[Ming Johanson]
I suppose we should get on with it. I mean, we’ve done a really good job of even not talking about user experience at all, which is actually probably pretty representative of people’s experience. Of user experience, to be honest.
[Kira Carlin]
It seems to be something that not a lot of people think about, particularly when they’ve built their own websites. And obviously we build websites. So we have a slightly love-hate relationship with self-built websites. Some of them are great and at certain points in business, having a website that’s built on Wix that you did yourself or your brother did for you is a really good place to start. We get hold of those things at a later point in your business when you need to scale.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And it’s a mess for us because it hasn’t been done in a way that is easy to work with. But putting all of that aside for a second, some of those things can be really good. Usually what we say with those is that people haven’t thought much about their customer journey.
[Ming Johanson]
No. So that’s essentially what UX and user experience is, it’s a fancy name for customer journey and design, and that’s definitely an overgeneralization. But I think what our customers and our business owners really need to understand at the core of this is what’s the outcome and how do you transact? Like, yeah, thinking about that transaction is really important.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. It amazes me constantly how many people make it very, very difficult to buy things from them.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] Yes
[Kira Carlin]
So we see it all the time is people who have an amazing service or an amazing product and people go, great, I need that thing. I want to book an appointment, I want to buy the thing. And then they give up because your calendar has been broken for two years.
[Ming Johanson]
Well you had an experience, if you’re willing to share it, about a rose purchase.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh God! The worst online customer experience I have ever had in my life. Okay. So I’ve been trying to remember where all of this began. I have been trying to buy a very specific variety of rose for several years.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes.
[Kira Carlin]
And because we live in Western Australia, things are tricky. You can’t always get people to send you things because…
[Ming Johanson]
Can’t get it past the border because somebody will stop you and the big burly man in a police uniform will beat you up.
[Kira Carlin]
Some people, some particularly East Coast businesses, don’t enjoy having to deal with the quarantine thing and the quarantine processes that make it possible for West Australians to buy things. So it was very, very hard for me to find someone who would even sell this to me in the first place. And I did. And I was ecstatic. I’ve been trying to get this thing for years, so I go onto his website.
It’s all set up for e-commerce. He’s got a nice little cart in the top corner. It’s a bit clunky, but it’s working. And then I realise when I go to put this thing in my cart that there is no ‘add to cart’ button, the first red flag.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh no.
[Kira Carlin]
I didn’t want the thing so much. I would have gone right then and there.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
If I didn’t, if they didn’t have something that I couldn’t get anywhere else, I would have left.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
but they didn’t. I didn’t. I had this thing I wanted. So I emailed them and I said, Look, I’m trying to buy this thing, but there is no ‘add to cart’ button. How do I do this?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And I get back a full paragraph spiel about the fact that they’re looking at upgrading their website at this point. And I know too much about your business processes now, and I still don’t know how to buy the rose. We went back and forth like that in about ten emails.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
The whole time I’m going, That’s great. How do I pay you?
[Ming Johanson]
How do I give you the money?
[Kira Carlin]
You just want to give you money. And they’re saying, “Oh, it’ll probably cost too much for the quarantine inspection fees, Oh, it’ll probably do…” like I don’t care. I don’t care what it costs.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
I just want to give you money to give me the thing.
[Ming Johanson]
So it’s so interesting, do you think it’s that they didn’t have a belief that anybody would actually pay for it to go so far?
[Kira Carlin]
No, I think they didn’t want to deal with the quarantine and would try to talk me out of it. So all of this goes on emails after emails, after emails. Three months later, I have the rose in my hands. It went into my garden last week. Three months…
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, That’s so long for a transaction.
[Kira Carlin]
If I hadn’t wanted that thing more than anything else I could think of, I would have given up at every point I started keeping track of where the off ramps were that they were giving me to walk away from them.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And it was every single time I spoke to them, multiple off-ramps, dozens of emails trying to get this one thing and I had to really push them. I shop online for plants quite a lot, so. Yeah, I know how this should look.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
What this should have looked like was an ‘add to cart’ button and then an out of stock notify me.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
That’s it. They never had to speak to me. I could have just gone through the process, set up a notification, and then when it came back into stock. Oh, my God, I missed the best bit. So I had been. I had been sending emails back and forth to this person for two months at this point. And I finally managed to raise someone on the phone to talk about it, and it was someone different from the person I’d been speaking to. And she says to me, Oh no, we sold out of those and I nearly cried.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep.
[Kira Carlin]
And then the next week someone emailed me back and was like grudgingly, like, okay, we’ll send it to you. And I’m like, But aren’t you, Sold out? Yeah. So what I’m seeinjg from this as a consumer, I was ready to peel off my own face.
As a digital marketer, I’m looking at this going, Oh, you stock management systems are rubbish completely.
[Ming Johanson]
And they’re not connected.
[Kira Carlin]
They’re not connected. They probably a notepad and a stab of a pencil somewhere.
[Ming Johanson]
Spreadsheet usually. To be honest, a spreadsheet probably would have been a better system actually.
[Kira Carlin]
This is a company with thousands of different varieties of roses. They’re a very established grower.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And just to clarify, for those in WA, it is absolutely not Melville’s. They are and always will be stupendously good.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes
[Kira Carlin]
No but somebody else. And they just made it so difficult at every point. So I’m seeing no stock management system. Their website is and this is a technical term, a shit show. They haven’t got processes set up for postage and quarantine, batching things which is hand-in-hand with the marketing process. They have made their own lives so difficult that they no longer want to sell to people.
[Ming Johanson]
So I know like we’ve built a few of these websites that do ship things interstate and I know that one of our clients in particular because our team are overachievers and we do things that are well and truly out of scope, but just find a way like we we love doing that because it solves lots of problems for business owners. And in particular, this one client had been told by a previous web developer that it wasn’t possible to calculate shipping.
[Kira Carlin]
Which is nonsense.
[Ming Johanson]
Which is nonsense. And so Vern who is a very detail oriented, diligent web team member spent, I think probably a week figuring out the maths of all the different zones and all the different postcodes and all the different shipping costs relevant to size, weight and, you know, description, so that the customer, our customer, the business owner didn’t have to sit there and spend hours calculating shipping.
[Kira Carlin]
And it saved us so much time.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So from what I know about other nurseries that sell online and ship to various places, the system that they have set up is that the quarantine inspector comes once every three weeks or once a month or whatever it is and they just batch the whole thing. And they have a line every time you put in a postcard in their postal like postbox.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah
[Kira Carlin]
That says my experience of delays of this many weeks. Very, very straightforward.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So you can like there’s lots of things that you can automate and inform your customer before they get annoyed with you so that they don’t get annoyed with you. And you can set up email notifications and all sorts of things around that. So yeah. So when we’re talking about, when we talk about user experience and there’s so much more to this topic that we really cannot cover in 20 minutes, but like when we’re talking about user experience, from what we’re talking about, we talk about transaction.
How do we get the money from your customer to you faster and more efficiently? And I think this speaks to Amazon, right? Amazon’s whole business model is geared around how do I get you to purchase something in one click or less?
[Kira Carlin]
This is an analogy we use quite often with clients with all sorts of people . You think about your physical premises, you put big signs on the front of it, you make it look attractive, you make your seats really comfy, you make everything easy for your client. Why is your online space the equivalent of a warehouse covered in rusty Nails
[Ming Johanson]
Or you know, a staff member staring at the mobile phone?
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
Not attending to customers. And like, I think I’ve sat there with clients and we’ve gone through and, you know, and this look, I want to point out, there’s no judgement. I get it. I get it’s not an easy thing to understand or think introspectively about your own business. Certainly if the web is not something that you are native to, but you should try going through the experience of either booking yourself or buying yourself through your own website.
And I will often do that with our clients where I will sit down and go. All right, I’ve loaded up the front page of your website. What’s next? What’s the first thing I’m going to look at? What’s the first thing? What’s the first call to action? What’s the first thing you’re asking me to do? And often it’s Go read this article somewhere else or go do this other thing somewhere else, or go to see social media, which that’s immediately removing me from your website. And I’m not spending any time. So you’re actually creating a space for bounce to happen?
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, particularly if I’ve come there, y’know, I’m a person who sits on my online purchases until I know I really want them
[Ming Johanson]
Same.
[Kira Carlin]
So if I want to buy, lets say, a lamp on the Internet, I’m a little bit fussy about my decor. So I’ll sit and look at it for a little while, and then when I decide to buy it, I already know that I want it. I’m going in. I just want to buy the thing.
[Ming Johanson]
I leave things in carts constantly.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh me too. So I just mean that as easy as possible because I already know what I want. Yeah. So you want to cater for those people, but you also want to cater for the browsers?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So what I find with this stuff is that it doesn’t seem to matter. Like it’s great that your website looks fantastic, but if it’s hard to buy from people will get that same thing from somewhere else. If your website looks like it’s from 1992, but your cart system is really easy to use, they’re going to buy it from Mr. 1992.
[Ming Johanson]
100%, Absolutely. And like I think there’s something to be said as well about products, like volume of products and categories. I think the amount of people who have a separate product for something that has a variable like a different colour, exactly the same product, but they have 20 versions of it listed on the website as separate products instead of the one product with a swatch list underneath that, I can just pick the colour that I want and an exit, so get me to my product sooner as well.
[Kira Carlin]
Great filters are the best thing you can do.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep.
[Kira Carlin]
So I buy a lot of yarn for a lot of projects.
[Ming Johanson]
[laugh] So much yarn.
[Kira Carlin]
So much yarn! And there is one really great website that has really good filters. So if I’m looking for something, if I’m just throwing around ideas, I will go in there and filter out all of the blues in cotton in this way, and I’ll just look at them. And more often than not, I end up buying it from that place, even though I could buy it cheaper and closer somewhere else. Yes, I’m already there. I’ve already made the choice. And the other one’s filter system is really clunky.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes. So I had a similar experience with tiaras because I sometimes like buying crowns that are shiny because I want to feel like a beautiful princess.
[Kira Carlin]
And because you’re secretly a magpie.
[Ming Johanson]
Well I… Secretly, secretly a magpie?
[Kira Carlin]
We all are, we all like shiny things.
[Ming Johanson]
Pretty actively talking about being a magpie.
[Ming Johanson]
So I have had experiences where I ended up spending probably twice as much on Tiaras because one website had their shit together with the filters, with being able to transact, with being able to look at the products, with them being in stock and me being able to save them and come back to it. Hmm.
[Kira Carlin]
I mean, if talking about garden things as we were, I spend a lot and I do mean a lot of money at Diggers Club, which is pretty much online only if you’re in WA because their filters include things like when it’s fruiting, what cold zones it’s good for, what times of the year it’s flowering. You can really specify.
So when I’m looking for things like, Oh, I don’t have a lot of things that are fruiting in September, October, I can get down to that. I can look at only the things that are going to work in my zones. Yeah, I can really mess with that. And by the time I’ve done all that, I’m in the mood to buy something.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So when like let’s talk about service delivery businesses, right? Because, you know, products, I actually and I have had arguments with people about this. I think people who sell products have a much easier job of transacting, even though they don’t necessarily make it an easier job. They certainly, you know, people are coming to you for a specific product.
They want something physical and tangible and they’ll buy it from you. And if you make that transaction easier, they’re more likely to buy it from you than your nearest competitor when we’re talking about services. So let’s take coaching, for example, if people are coming to your website and they’re coming from a piece of knowledge, almost always. So you’ve already shared something like a blog or an article or some nugget somewhere, and they’ve gone, ‘oh, I really, I really like that, that really resonates with me.’
I think, you know, when we’re picking coaches, certainly for me, I’m always looking for people who are a little bit further ahead of where I’m at. Who’ve had experience and what I’ve had experience in and I’m always looking for; how do I how I book you, right? And it’s really simple. Booking systems exist like Calendly that can save you time on the transaction, that can transact from the get go. So you don’t have to send them an invoice. You don’t have to follow up with seven emails going, Can you pay your invoice, please? You can just get people to book ahead.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, this is a conversation I had with a friend of a colleague, but a friend who is in the wellness space and she was doing a lot of the right things. Her website was looking really schmick, really beautiful. There were a few things that needed tweaking and fixing. She was pumping out blogs. She was doing a lot of the right things. And then you get to her booking calendar, which everything has been moving towards and it’s broken.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep.
[Kira Carlin]
So if I’m looking for somebody to offer me that particular service and I’ve narrowed in because this person really seems to get what I want.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep.
[Kira Carlin]
And I can’t book, I’m walking away.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah
[Kira Carlin]
You know that is, everything else is fixable. That is a five alarm fire right there. If they can’t get to you, then what’s the point?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, you’ve put in a lot of effort. A lot of effort and a lot of work to get them to that point. And they’re walking away because one component of that is broken.
[Kira Carlin]
The one really important component.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah
[Kira Carlin]
So for service providers, I think it’s really worth the time to go through and book yourself.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And have a really non-tech savvy like the one who’s always asking you to fix their printer family member, go through and do it.
[Ming Johanson]
Like we had a hilarious conversation with somebody that was interviewing us as service providers who turned around and said to us “I only want customers to call us.”
[Kira Carlin]
And that’s okay if you’re only looking for pretty much Gen-X and upwards.
[Ming Johanson]
Anybody, aged 38 or above
[Kira Carlin]
Anyone who’s a millennial or under is never gonna call you, they would rather cut off their own fingers.
[Ming Johanson]
So, you know, and this is where we’ve seen like the evolution of messenger bots, this is where we’ve seen, you know, a little bit more substantial contact forms with a bit more details. You know, there’s a lot more that goes into that where some people are also not in the space to make a phone call. Also, you’re not taking into consideration accessibility for people who wouldn’t necessarily who might, you know, be part of the deaf community. So when you’re making things accessible, you’re helping everybody else in that process as well.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. I don’t know about you, but I do a lot of my online ‘chore doing’ while I’m on the phone. Yeah. So if I’m on the phone with my mum or a friend in another timezone or something like that, I get quite a finger bored.
[Ming Johanson]
Huh. Yes.
[Kira Carlin]
So I knit or I do things. But one of the things that I do is I go online and I book the plumber or I book that, you know, if I can do that when I’m on the phone, I have a doctor’s appointment, whatever it is I need to do. I do all of that while I’m on the phone with somebody I actually want to be on the phone with.
[Ming Johanson]
100% yeah
[Kira Carlin]
I can’t do it online. I’m not doing it.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. And that that also goes for like voice search where, you know, we might talk to Google on you know, a lot of us have the Google home minis or Google home devices and we might ask to book something whilst we’re doing the dishes or we might check with the weather or you know, I think my Google’s going to talk in a minute, but I feel like I’m being very specific about my phrasing.
[Kira Carlin]
This is the only place on earth that I can say the word Alexa and somebody doesn’t talk back to me. We call her who shall not be named when we’re at home.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] Yeah, good. Yeah, cool. So, you know, all of those different tool sets give accessibility in a different way for people to purchase you or book or yeah. Like restaurants. I think increasingly I go on to restaurant websites and I can’t look at them. So I’m somebody who has lots of very specific meal requirements sometimes, and I like to look at the menu ahead of time because I’m usually the arsehole that is sitting there for 20 minutes figuring out what the hell she’s going to order and I’d really rather do that before I get there.
[Kira Carlin]
You know, I do that for totally different reasons to you. So I am one of those people that say… I’ve had this happen to me. A few weeks ago I was having breakfast with a very dear friend who I haven’t seen in far too long, and we would just talk. I mean, you know, that kind of talking where you just like “blelehelehheleh” like that.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
We were just constant. And I often forget to actually look at the menu because I’m involved in the conversation.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So because I’m looking forward to having breakfast with a friend, I’ll look up the menu and see what’s going on there so I can just devote my time and attention to her and I know what I’m having.
[Ming Johanson]
The amount of times I come across a menu that is a PDF that is shrunk to shit that I cannot read it, it actually impacts my decision making as to whether or not I’m going to go to a restaurant.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. And it’s such a basic at this point for a restaurant to have its website equipped with all its menus.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Such a basic. And I think a lot of people put up these barriers either consciously or unconsciously, because they’re trying to attract their best clients by somehow making them fight a battle of honour to get to buy the thing or use the service.
[Ming Johanson]
[laugh] It’s the princess to be rescued.
[Kira Carlin]
And that’s the totally to use another technical term arse backwards way of doing it because that should all be solved with good branding. Good branding solves that issue.
[Ming Johanson]
Absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
So if you are doing those components, we’ll talk about branding probably next episode.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s actually in the next episode.
[Kira Carlin]
If you’re getting those things right, then you don’t need to create a trial of honour for clients to buy your thing.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh come on, got to make them fight for it. No, don’t do that. It just does not work and certainly does not translate the definitely the branding piece around your language and your logo and who you’re actually talking to does a big step towards attracting the right customers.
[Kira Carlin]
And nothing will put me off buying something online or adding a service or booking a service faster than if I have to make an account to do it. If I have to make an account to buy something from you, I am never, ever buying anything from you.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh, never mind the fact that there’s a cybersecurity risk, right?
[Kira Carlin]
Of course there is, it’s dicey.
[Ming Johanson]
You’re going to store my credit card details. No, thank you.
[Kira Carlin]
It is dicey as hell, there’s no way. But even taking that out of account I don’t have the time for that.
[Ming Johanson]
People, there are people
[Kira Carlin]
I don’t want an account on 50 million different websites.
[Ming Johanson]
Oh I don’t want that, no, yep.
[Kira Carlin]
So if I can’t just give you the money and walk away with the thing, I don’t want to be involved in it.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
If you, if I buy enough things from you, I think there’s a problem. I want to save a wish list.
[Ming Johanson]
Or if you lure me with points with a point system where I collect points and then I can save things later, then I might, then I might create an account.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly, Save points or save a wish list. I have a lot of wish lists, but these are all places that I have bought lots of things from.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, same. Clothing. I find that that’s for me.
[Kira Carlin]
Plants, Plants every time.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
So you know if I want to say black milk does this really well is an example of somebody who does this really well because they have such an influx of product and you want to be able to keep track of those things or Diggers or so, same thing.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, UX design, we got a lot to say about it obviously.
[Kira Carlin]
SO MUCH!
[Ming Johanson]
Next episode we’re going to talk about branding.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, which I accidentally led us into.
[Ming Johanson]
No, that’s totally on purpose. Absolutely planned. So if you’re interested in finding out more about what Marketing Jumpstart can do for you, you can reach out with either myself, Ming Johanson on LinkedIn or
[Kira Carlin]
Kira Carlin, remembered my own surname this time.
[Ming Johanson]
We’ll see you in the next episode.
