Want to get more florist wedding business this season? A beautiful wedding banner for your florist website will help showcase your wedding work.

On the wedding page itself, make sure your florist wedding page shows off a slideshow or similar portfolio of high-quality images – customers respond better to an artistic presentation than an e-commerce portfolio with prices.

Click here to Download the Floranext Wedding Banners

Click here to Download the Floranext Wedding Banners

Also, take a look at some of our other wedding related blog posts:

5 Steps for a Better Florist Wedding Website

Slideshows for Your Florist Website

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

Your florist website is about to be impacted by Google’s search engine ranking change. Starting on April 21, 2015 Google will begin weighting mobile-ready higher in their search ranking algorithm. Here’s some background and what you can do to make sure your flower shop is ready for the Google update.

What does it mean for your Florist Website to be Mobile-Ready?

A mobile-friendly or “responsive” website will automatically and dynamically change the sizes of the images, text, and website navigation so that it is easy to read on different devices including a mobile phone, tablet, and a full-sized computer.

images by google.com

image via google.com

How can you test if your Florist Website is is Mobile Optimized?

You can easily test if your website is responsive is to open it on a browser like Google Chrome and change the size of your screen. If parts of the website start to get cut off or move out of the field of vision, your site is not responsive. You can also open up your website on your phone and see if it is easy to read and navigate.

Google offers a great tool to test whether your website meets its standards for mobile readiness.

images via google.com

How will websites show differently in Google search results?

Florist websites that are mobile ready may rank higher. Google looks at many different factors when deciding on search engine ranking – they plan to make mobile-readiness a more important factor.

Sites that are responsive will show a “Mobile-friendly” badge when you search for the site on your mobile phone.

image by floranext.com

How to convert your florist website to a responsive design?

Getting your website mobile ready isn’t hard, but if you work with a florist website provider they can help make sure your website is fully mobile ready so that you can keep moving up in the Google ranking. Floranext has a variety of responsive website themes for flower shops, we are happy to advise you. Good luck with the coming change!

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

How important are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social sites for your florist website’s Search Engine Optimization? They are critical for your flower business but maybe not for the reason you think. Here are three tips:

1. Social Media Sites are search engines

image via floranext.com

Florist Search Engine Optimization has mostly been about moving your websites up in the Google’s ranking. Since Google makes up almost 70% of the searches in the US, this seems intuitively right.

But people are often skipping Google and searching in using Social Media – your flower shop needs to be active and ranked on these sites themselves to be “findable” because people searches are expanding to include social sites.

Facebook is a great example – people use Facebook to search for florists. Type florist in Manhattan into the search bar and you will find some of the top florists in New York City. Likes, checkins, and Facebook activity will drive your ranking here.

2. Google doesn’t use social media likes to rank your florist website – but they are still important

image via floranext.com

According to Google engineer Matt Cutts Google doesn’t use your Facebook or Twitter followers to more highly rank your florist website. And while we don’t know all of Google’s secrets, we can be pretty sure that having twice the number of likes alone won’t automatically get you to the number one spot on Google.

That said, these likes are incredibly useful when customers are evaluating your business. Wedding and event buyers often look at Facebook to see the quality of your work and how other customers have fared at your business.

3. Pinterest boards can help brides find your shop

image by floranext.com

Brides are often looking on Pinterest for wedding inspiration. They may search for general terms like “spring wedding flowers” but specific searches for weddings at specific venues or locations are common as well.

Creating boards of your work with terms like “Cape Code Wedding Flowers” can help brides find your work related to a specific location. These won’t necessarily drive up your florist website Google ranking, but  they can dramatically improve your find-ability for likely wedding customers.

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

Still spending your annual florist marketing budget on Yellow Pages listing? While it may be intimidating at first, online marketing is one of the most efficient ways to reach a wide audience of potential customers for your flower shop.

But on top of creating arrangements, running deliveries, and managing your own books, how many florists really have time to learn the ins and outs of the many online advertising services? If this sounds familiar, Google AdWords Express may be for you. Google Adwords Express is a simplified and affordable way of promoting your shop online.

How Google Adwords Works for Florists

All that you’ll need to get started with Google AdWords Express is to give them some broad information about who you are and who you want your ads to reach. Generally, this will include your:

•        Product/service category
•        A headline to run on your ad
•        A general description of what you want your ad to be
•        Where to send people – your florist website
•        A maximum monthly budget

AdWords Express will handle the rest.

Using this information, they’ll create an online campaign targeting potential customers in your area. Many online ad campaigns work off of what is known as Pay Per Click (PPC). In this set up, you pay Google, for example, every time someone clicks your ad. This requires much more tracking and can run up a serious bill. Google AdWords Express, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach. Your flower shop would create a maximum budget. Google will then estimate the number of people will see and click through your online advertisement.

More About Your Flower Shop Ad

You ads will appear above or next to Google search results as pictured below. That doesn’t mean that everyone in the world will see your ad though, and that’s a good thing! Part of the set up process will be telling Google where you want people to see your ad. It can be in your neighborhood, city, or state. This ensures that there is a real chance that the people who see your ad will click through and buy their flowers from you.

Does It Work?

Of course, even the world’s best ad campaign isn’t worth very much if it’s not creating more sales for you. Luckily, Google Adwords Express provides ways to measure the effectiveness of your ad campaign. Their dashboard provides you with a comprehensive view of how many people have seen your ad, how many have clicked, what they’re viewing it on, and where they’re viewing it from. It also keeps track of how much your flower shop has spent, which depends on the number of clicks your ad receives.

This extra level of transparency is one of the biggest benefits to online marketing. There is no real way to know exactly how many people see your Yellow Pages listing, TV commercial, or even a billboard. Google Adwords Express offers you detailed numbers on how many people see your ads, and how effective the ad is.

Google Adwords Express is well worth the investment for flower shops looking to boost their online marketing presence. It gives florists (who don’t have advanced degrees in internet marketing) a chance to make sure their flower shop is seen by a new crowd of potential customers without breaking the bank.

Are you ready to bring your shop into the digital age of marketing? Feel free to share your experiences in the comment section below.

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

Getting great reviews of your flower shop is key to getting florist website orders. What can you do to get better reviews of your shop – here are a few ideas to build your florist website business.

Check reviews of your florist website for any negative reviews

First check the most important websites where your flower shop may be reviewed. You should do this on  a regular basis as negative reviews may impact your florist website traffic significantly. Search for your business to see your reviews – monitor these and other review sites every few months:

• Google Maps (there will be a link to your Google Plus/Business Page)
• Yelp
• Yellow Pages – yp.com
• local.yahoo.com
• Superpages.com
• foursquare.com

Get more review activity on your florist website

Customers and search engines look at your reviews and scores on review websites. But it’s not just the review, the number of reviews matters too – Google views websites with as more important. More reviews means a more trusted brand. And if you have more reviews, one negative review will not have the same impact.

Encourage Customer Reviews in Store –  During and after every sale, ask your customers to leave you a review on Yelp or Google. Be prepared with flyers, business cards and any other creative means you can to let your customers know you want their opinion and where they can find you online. A florist shop that gets lots of reviews overall looks better to customers. Many positive reviews take the sting out of a bad review whenever it happens.

Email Friends, Family – Email trusted parties like friends, relatives, and loyal customers with a link to the page to add a review. Make sure to include the link or links so your friends can easily add their own review. Send out these emails over time rather than in one go so it spaces out the positive reviews over time.

Email Happy Customers After Orders – You can add a link to Yelp or Google Places on your confirmation email after a successful order. Email brides who you know are happy customers a few days after weddings.

First steps to fixing bad reviews on a florist website

As a florist shop owner, when you get a bad review, stay calm and read it first to see what the reviewer is really saying. The bad review shown reveals the customer felt they did not get the flowers they ordered which could be resolved. Here are a few tips:

Contact the customer privately – and politely and ask what flowers you can send them to fix the problem. You can either contact them through the website or use your shop’s florist software to pull that customer’s information up and give them a quick phone call. Listen closely to them to make sure you know what needs to be done and offer them an incentive beyond what they suggest. The customer will probably add a new glowing positive comment that gives visitors a much better impression. Reviews cannot be deleted so the next best solution is to have a second raving review from that customer.

Add a public owner’s comment – to a bad review to show everyone who looks at the reviews you care about your customers and want to improve your service. It would be very wise to make time to respond to your customer reviews. You want to have as many positive comments as possible.

Head off negative reviews with a great florist ecommerce experience

The best way to deal with a negative review is to make sure it never happens in the first place. Provide the best customer experience possible every day. Listen carefully to what the customer wants and do the best you can to give it to them. Use your flower shop software and the tools it provides to give your customers the best service possible.

• Delivery Confirmation – senders should receive an automatic delivery confirmation
• Satisfaction Guarantee –  Advertise 100% satisfaction on your florist website so customers know they can come to you with problems.
• Make Your Customers Happy – Figure out a way to make an unhappy customer happy. It could be a replacement, a gift card, or a full explanation. A great attitude and undertanding can go a long way to turn a negative experience into an overwhelmingly positive one!

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

How does Google decide which sites get ranked highly in its search results? Search engines now rank your website by the number and quality of sites linking back to yours. One way to help your ranking is to create links to your site from well know sites like Mapquest and Superpages.

Here’s a partial list of sites that you should be listed on. You can add your business for for the ridiculously affordable price of free! Your “Google Places” listing is the most important and it’s worth doing through the steps to get listed to build connections for powerful search engine ranking.

– Google Places (this will get you listed on Google Maps also!)
– Yahoo Local
– Bing Local
– Yelp
– Insider Page
– Merchant Circle
– YellowBot
– Mapquest
– Superpages
– Citysearch
– Whitepages
– Local.com
– Telenav
– Getfav
– Topix
– Switchboard
– Brownbook
– Localsearch.com

Get linking today and start building SEO links and a more powerful flower shop brand online!

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

A new crop of florist website domain names is coming online to complement the .coms, .nets. The new wave already includes .florist and soon .flowers will be available. You could be the owner of www.newyork.flowers or www.sanfrancisco.florist. And these new domain names aren’t just for florists – lots more business-specifc domains are on the horizon – .bar, .photo, .menu, and many more.

So should you invest in buying a new florist-specific domain name?  What do experts have to say about whether these florist domains are good for your flower business?

Some SEO Experts Doubt SEO Benefit of .Flowers

The supposed SEO benefits of having an exact match domain remain unproven. Matt Cutts, a former Google software engineer, doubts that gTLDs will boost search engine rankings at all. “Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD),“ Cutts argues. “Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either.”

Consumer many also not recognize or understand these new domains immediately. Many of your customers are probably accustomed to the standard web endings. Leo Mirani, writing for the tech website qz.com, gives a brief, unenthusiastic history of new domains.

“Seven [new domains] came into existence in 2000, and a further eight in 2004. Most of the new domains in these two waves never really took off. You will sometimes spot .biz or .info in the wild, but more niche ones such as .mobi (aimed at mobile sites)… got little attention from the markets they were aimed at.”

Add on the fact that gTLDs typically cost more on an annual basis (most start at $39.99 per year), and you can see what many businesses will opt to stay with the domains they know.

But .Florist or .Flowers Domain May have some Benefits

Some experts predict that the new top-level domains could help bring more traffic to your site through search engine optimization. Writing for Kickstart Commerce, Alvin Brown writes that while .coms are still on top of SEO now, that could all change with gTLDs. He finds that those with exact match domains especially may give .coms “a run for their money.”

A florist-specific domain will make your flower shop’s website stand out from the .com crowd. It could also be a second shot if your flower shop’s name was already taken when you went to register it online. For instance, if John Smith could not register www.newyorkflorist.com because it was already taken, he now has the option to register www.newyork.florist.

In the example above, newyork.florist is an exact match domain because the url is the actual name of the business with no extra .com diluting the search result.

Final Verdict on .Florist and .Flowers Domains

There are strong arguments for and against launching a new florist website at .florist or .flowers. Shops that enjoy staying on the cutting edge of florist technology may want to seek out a gTLD site of their own, while others will want to wait and see the results first. In either case, the advent of the .florist and .flowers domains show how important ecommerce has become to florists, and how much of an impact florists are having on ecommerce.

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

How can you capture customer feedback soon after the flowers go out for delivery?  SurveyMonkey is an amazingly easy to use tool to send customer satisfaction surveys to your flower shop customers.

Use the email delivery confirmation on your florist POS software to send an email survey to your customers. In your Florist POS, set the email delivery confirmation to include a link to your customer satisfaction survey:

Use Survey Monkey survey to capture customer feedback from flower shop customers.  Survey Monkey is a free, customizable software solution. Ask survey questions on quality, customer service, delivery and even free text fields for open-ended questions.

Creating the Survey Linked to A Delivery Confirmation Email

Here is how you create a new survey.  From any page in your SurveyMonkey account, click Create Survey from the upper right-hand corner of your screen.  Choose create a new survey, type your title into the appropriate box, and then pick a category. To add questions and page breaks, from the Design Survey tab, click Add Question.

A dialog will open for you asking you for the question type and question text visible. Type the question then choose what kind of question it will be from the drop-down menu. You can any of the questions types shown here.

When you finish adding questions, click Save & Close.  When you finish creating the survey, you will need to create a web link to distribute a survey.  On the Design Survey tab, click Send Survey button in the upper right-hand corner.  You will see the Send your Survey page where you can copy this web link to use it in email, on Facebook, or part of a printed document.  You should now press Control+C to copy the web link to use in the next step.

Adding the Survey and Viewing Results

If you have Floranext’s Florist POS software you can do this in your admin by clicking Store Settings→ Delivery Confirmation. Turn the confirmation feature on by selecting yes to enable Delivery Confirmation.   Include the web link to your survey and the link to your florist website in the message you send to customers.

A friendly message could be something like “Thank you for placing your floral arrangement order with us.  Your flower order # 74214 was delivered. We hope you enjoy it and please don’t hesitate to contact us when you need more flowers.  Please take a moment to complete this survey, as we do value your option. https://surveymoney.com/sample_flower_order_customer_survey/

When you have a delivery ready to go out to a customer, go to the Orders or Deliveries send tab then set the customer’s order status to Taken/Delivered.  Your Florist POS emails the delivery confirmation message including your web address and the survey web link to the customer.  You now have a complete solution for creating an information rich customer survey along with the way to give the customer that survey along with the delivery confirmation message they usually receive from you. Here is what the results look like:

Customer surveys using SurveyMonkey or similar tools are a great way to collect customer feedback and improve your flower shop. Let us know how they work for you!

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

Floranext is excited to announce some great new features for our florist software. We are always working hard to improve our software. Here are some big improvements to our Point of Sale software that you might want to check out.

Florist Software – Florist POS

Florist Point of Sale Feature Improvements

– Loyalty Points – set dollar value of points and print points on receipt

– Flower Shop Network Support (including support for FSN websites) – send/receive Flower Shop Network florist-to-florist orders right from the Floranext POS

– Zip Code Lookup – easily search for zip codes in Flower Shop Point of Sale based on address and city data

– Tax Exempt Per Item – selectively switch off taxes for specific items (e.g. food products)

– Enhanced International Support – including delivery charge by zone rather than zipcode

– POS Product Search  – includes multiple price points (Better, Best, etc.)

– Auto-Categorize Products – easily track the categories of your products using our new auto-categorize feature

Floranext is committed to improving our software. We launch improvements to the software every week, so our customer’s experience is getting better and our software is easier to use and more powerful.

Keep an eye out for some exciting new features coming up next month including gift card support!