SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it is the way websites like Google, Bing, and others find your website when someone searches content. This is important to you as a florist because your website can only produce sales if people can find it! SEO can seem daunting but if you follow these simple suggestions you can improve your SEO in no time.

Make Your Website Relevant

What keeps your website relevant? Quality content created specifically for your demographic. Yes! Your website just like your business, branding, and marketing should all be aimed towards a specific demographic! Are your potential customers looking for “budget-friendly flowers” or is “flowers with longevity” more important to them? Even simple phrases like “Delivery to the ‘your towns’ area” will help pull in traffic to your page. Make sure these phrases are used through your site as they will be what your customer is looking for when they search online.

Update Your Website Regularly

Another part of staying relevant for SEO is making sure your website is updated regularly. In the vastly growing world of digital marketing staying at the top of your game is critical. Make sure anything that involves a date on your website is constantly updated including copyright, date reminders, blog posts, and more! Regularly updated web-based content is one of the best pointers of a site’s relevancy in search engines.

Behind the Veil Metadata

This can be where SEO gets a little trickier and is the part where many become frightened. There are a lot of SEO opportunities tucked away in what looks like never-ending walls of coding. If you have a website design tool such as FloraNext doing this behind the scenes work can become a lot easier. When designing your website, each page contains a space between the tags to insert metadata or information about your page. These words that your webpage viewers can’t see are critical for your website to grab the attention of search engines.

Link Appropriately

Links leading to other locations on your website are a great way to add SEO value to your page as they may potentially pull in customers searching another website like your own. Try creating relevant, similar, and useful links within your text. These links could be additional information in your blogging text to other knowledgeable sources or a shout-out to a local business or artist that has helped provide additional products for your store like candy. Instead of adding “click here” links, try writing out the name of the destination instead.

Use Your Alt Tags

Alt tags are sort of like Metadata as they are behind the scene text. This text however is associated with visual imagery. Make sure you always label your visuals including imagery and video. Both of which are major selling points in the floral world. Alt text allows search engines to find your page just like the above techniques.

Hopefully, these 5 tips can help you at a little extra boost to your online sales. Regardless of what tips you take make sure to always watch your online traffic to see any increases or decreases in traffic so it can go towards a more effective marketing plan in the future.

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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.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Reels start off just like taking a regular video or photo for your Instagram account. However, before finishing your award-winning shot, select Reels in the lower portion of your Instagram camera. This will bring up a variety of features and tools you can choose from to make your videos uniquely yours.

The “Reel” Features

Instagram Reels come with plenty of features that add different elements to your video creation. These features include Audio, AR Effects, Timers and Countdowns, Alignment Tools, and Speed Editing. You can use each of these options as you go, so play around with them before posting!

There are also two options to create a reel: press and hold the record button to capture footage, or upload video footage from your camera roll. 

Follow these steps for creating your first Instagram Reel:

• Log into your Instagram account and scroll to REELS at the bottom of the screen and tap it.
• Use the tools to prepare for your recording.
  • Tap Audio to select audio from the library and add it to your video.
  • Tap Speed to change the speed of your video.
  • Tap Effects to apply special effects.
  • Tap Timer to determine the duration of the video. 
• When you’re ready to begin, tap, and hold the record button to record a clip.
  • If you set a timer, there’s a countdown before the recording starts.
• During the recording, you can tap the record button to end a clip, and then tap it again to start a new clip.
  • The Align button will appear, allowing you to line up objects from the previous clip before recording your next.
• If you want to watch, trim, or delete the previous clip you recorded, you can tap the clip icon.
• Once you’re done with recording, you can add stickers, drawings, and text to edit your reel.

Sharing Your Instagram Reels

Share your reel to a dedicated space in Explore or post it to the Reels tab on your Feed. When you share reels using certain songs, hashtags, or effects, your reel may also appear on dedicated pages when someone clicks on that song, hashtag, or effect.

Instagram Reels is a great opportunity to show off your brand’s style and appear in florist related hashtags for an increased presence on Instagram. 

Personal Brand Replication

Still don’t know how to use Reels or don’t know what to post? As artists, inspiration can come from everywhere, think of this when it comes to you creating your own reels and any part of social media. Giving them your brand’s personal twist is great and a way of keeping relevant in a quickly changing digital world.

Instagram Reels can be a great tool for marketing if you use them in an effective way. Make sure to include them in your marketing plan! 

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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.

For florists Valentine’s Day is more than a single day! Between online orders, deliveries, walk-ins and more the whole experience can become overwhelming. However, with a little preparation, you can set yourself up for success. 

@lewismillerdesign

3 Weeks Prior 

Three weeks before Valentine’s Day is all about marketing and getting the word out. Preferably, you should have your eCommerce ready for Valentine’s Day before February.  

Consider Décor: Does your shop say Valentine’s Day? Customers respond to seasonal and holiday décor so add those reds, hearts, and cupids for a reminder of the season!

Website Work: Invest in high-quality images of arrangements you produce to give your website a new life. Be sure to use holiday keywords to generate better SEO for your website as well.

Prep marketing: Marketing comes in two forms; digital and physical. Schedule your social media campaigns ahead. Also start reaching out for local advertising in newspapers, radio, and more!

2 Weeks Prior 

The bulk of your work two weeks prior will be ordering. To make sure you don’t over-order check your previous year’s sales.

Order Supplies and Add-Ons: Check your tools and hard goods and order what you need to be replaced or refilled. Consider; plushies, candy, balloons, candles, and cards, these add-ons will increase your sales!

Order Flowers: Similarly to supplies, florists will be ordering early so jump on board to make sure to get what you need in advance.

Scheduling: Talk to your employees about what is required as far as their scheduling. You also may need to hire help for the weekend.

1 Week Prior 

The week before Valentine’s Day should be all about prepping and confirmations to make your Valentine’s weekend run smoothly.

Prep Non-Perishable: Bows, hand-tied strings, folded tissue paper, printed care, and price cards, this is all work that can be done early.

Prep Flowers: As your flowers arrive, be sure to prep them in advance and keep them separate from daily work supplies.

Confirm Deliveries: If you are part of a floral wire service, be sure to check all your delivery orders for the weekend.

Day Before 

With Valentine’s day falling Sunday this year, keeping in mind your non-Valentine’s orders for that Saturday.

Greening: Greenery is long-lasting so make sure you have as many vases prepped with greenery as your refrigerated space will allow! 

Order Lunch: Your staff is critical to the ‘big day’ so treating them well is just as important. Ordering lunch for the staff is always a good idea and a good way to say thanks.

Brief Everyone: Valentine’s work becomes a lot more assembly line than usual so touch base with each employee on how the next day needs to go and what each of their jobs is.

As the holiday ends you will have a few orders to complete and some cleaning to do to pull your shop together. But remember to take the time to pour yourself a drink and relax knowing you made it through another Valentine’s Day! 

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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.

If you’ve created a florist eCommerce website, then paying attention to metrics can help you grow and improve.

In this blog, we’ll cover everything you need to know when starting your own florist eCommerce website from setting up your dashboard to measuring your growth.

Setting up your dashboard

You can’t have a florist eCommerce website without having the proper analytics software. This software will give you the tools to measure all of the metrics. Here are some tools that you may consider downloading and using.

• Google’s tools – Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console
• Social media analytics tools – Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Pinterest Analytics

How to understand eCommerce metrics to measure growth

The above analytics tools will help you track thousands of eCommerce metrics. But what do you actually do with them? Here are the ones you should spend your time looking at.

1. Conversion rate

Your conversion rate is important because it tells you how many people are clicking on your product pages and making a purchase. Depending on the tracking tools you select, you’ll be able to set up conversion tracking so you can see this information and deduce the best way to increase your conversion rate.

2. Traffic

In general, traffic is important because the more people you have on your website the more conversions you’ll see. If you measure your traffic month over month and year over year, you’ll be able to get an idea of how your florist eCommerce website is growing (or not growing). Both are equally valuable pieces of information!

3. Repeat orders

Repeat orders increase your CLV (see #6) and show you that your customers are satisfied with your products and services. Because it’s less expensive (by 4 to 10 times!) to retain a current customer than it is to acquire a new one, increase your repeat customers will lead to more growth. You can obtain more repeat orders by…

• Focusing on high-quality products
• Having great customer service
• Providing a customer loyalty program
• Creating a solid user experience on your website

4. Average order value

The AOV, or average order value, tells you how much your customers spend in a single purchase on your florist eCommerce website. Often, eCommerce websites will improve this number by adding popups that display related products once consumers add something to their cart or after they click the checkout button. It relies on the idea that it’s less expensive to get current customers to buy more than it is to acquire entirely new customers.

5. Engagement

Engagement tells you how invested your customers and visitors are in your brand. you see engagement through social media likes and comments. You see it in email open and click-through rates. You see it in blog comments. You see it in social shares, shoutouts, and mentions. Because you can’t see these metrics measure on a single platform, you’ll want to look at your social media analytics frequently.

6. Customer lifetime value

Also known as CLV, customer lifetime value may be the most important metric you can track in on your florist eCommerce website. CLV is the amount of profit a customer is worth to your business over the course of their/your lifetime. This is important because it’s expensive to acquire new customers, so looking at ways to increase the spending of your current customers if often the way to go. The value will tell you how much to spend to acquire and retain a customer.

Tracking important metrics on your florist eCommerce website can help you grow and expand your business. While you may see a lot of numbers behind the scenes, focus on the above components. They’ll help you cut through the chaos and figure out what really matters.

As florists, we understand that floral trends can change year to year and some may stick around for a while. With 2021 just around the corner,  just three weeks away, let’s take a look at a few florist trends expected during 2021.

photo by sageninesevents – Instagram

Accessories

For true flower lovers, it takes more than just nice flowers, the container should be great as well! The latest trend that will continue into 2021 is wood and leather containers with designs influenced by Indian and African cultures. Florists, keep in mind that interior designers are using a lot of wicker and rattan for added charm.

Micro Weddings

Instead of customers canceling their wedding plans, they decided to go smaller this year with micro weddings. Micro weddings are a trend that will continue into 2021. Wedding floral arrangements on a smaller scale for ceremony and reception. Florist have you considered offering floral designs that are smaller or for intimate spaces?  

This beautiful Micro Wedding by Floressence Flowers

Biophilic Designs 

As many people now working and learning from home, spaces that are multifunctional have really come into focus.  Many consumers are creating biophilic designs that include natural elements such as fresh flowers, light, and plants in their home. Studies show having live plants around makes you more productive during work and can make you happier. 

photo by BIOPHILIC INTERIOR DESIGN on Instagram

Sustainability

Sustainability has been showing up more with floral designers and will continue into 2021. Florists are using eco-friendly packaging and using eco-friendly floral foam substitutions in arrangements. Not only are florist being sustainable with their supplies but also flowers as well. Trends show that Dried flowers continue being a trend with dried flowers being incorporated with fresh flowers or full dried arrangments. What another great way for a florist to reduce flower waste and costs by drying your own flowers. 

Sustainable Flowers by Blossom and Branch

Color and Style

Some of the most Important florist trends are about color and style for 2021. The color of the year according to Pantone is Illuminating!  Illuminating represents strength and positivity.  This Bright color encapsulates deeper feelings of thoughtfulness with the promise of something that is sunny and friendly.

photo by jacksondurhamevents on Instagram

Greenery and Foliage

Greenery and foliage are always a popular choice among florists. Designers have been shown using dyed/bleached flowers, painted greens, and pampas grass that will continue in the new year. The trend really suits the Pantone color of the year!

Florists, what Florist Trends are you planning to follow in 2021? Share with us in the comments! 

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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.

WHO WON THE FLOWER SHOP PET CONTEST?

We know how much love florists bring to the world, so it’s not surprising their pets would show off this love as well! The winner of the contest wins the Floranext Wedding/Event Proposal app for 1 year. 

The Adorable Contestants

We created a survey and had dozens of florists submit their pets with thousands of florists voting on the winners. Here are the adorable pet shops that participated:

Flower Shop Pet – Winner!

And the winner with the most florist votes is…. the beautiful Pomsky Tink!

The owner shared this fact about Tink:

“Tink actually LOVES flowers – and all their beautiful smells. She also likes to play and nap near me when I’m designing which makes her my perfect shop dog!”

Congratulations to Tink’s owner who will win the Floranext Wedding/Event Proposal app for 1 year.  Look forward to next year’s Floranext Flower Shop Pet Contest! 

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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.

As a florist, you create some of the best presents for the holiday season. Flowers are beautiful and versatile—which is why you should be focused on selling them as the perfect holiday gift. To make this easy, we put together a guide to help you prepare your florist website for the holidays!

Optimize Your Products

Before the holiday season heads your way, you want to make sure that your products are guaranteed best sellers. Look for creative opportunities to introduce new product options, prepare your florist website with these new products. The more festive they are, the better! Consider offering bundles, selling seasonal items, and even creating your own beautiful presents!

Test Your Discounts

The holiday season just isn’t the holiday season without discounts—so make sure yours are ready! Plan out how they will be added to the system and when they will go live. It is important to run tests on discount features to ensure that they are applied correctly when your customers make a purchase. 

Cross-Sell Products

You might be a florist, but that doesn’t mean you can only sell flowers. The holiday season warrants a little extra care and a little more excitement. Take the time to find present combinations that will work well for your customers. Adding stuffed animals, balloons, or even tasty treats can help you boost your sales!

Use Social Media for Promotion

Social media is quickly becoming the go-to place for advertisements, so make sure you’re advertising there. Remind your customers that you will be selling amazing products and offering great deals. Social media is the perfect place to announce new products, discounts, or even just spread a good message of holiday cheer!

Kick Up Your Email Marketing

The holiday season means that it is time to start sending out your best emails. Kick up your newsletters, send out discount offers, and remind customers why flowers make an amazing gift. This works even better if you can get a little creative. Show your customers how you can help!

Use Social Proof

Social proof is a concept that focuses on leveraging social pressure to encourage certain actions. Show your customers how amazing flowers are and what a wonderful gift they can be by sharing marketing photos of people enjoying your flowers as gifts. Spread the news about your newest google reviews to show how much people love your flowers!

The holidays are right around the corner, so don’t wait to start making changes. As long as every decision that you make is designed to provide your customers with a better experience, you can expect wonderful results. Happy holidays!

Skowhegan Fleuriste is nestled in the Historic Downtown of Skowhegan, Maine. They’ve been providing central Maine with high-quality products for over 25 years.

In their store, you’ll find beautiful fresh flowers, silk arrangements, dried flowers, and household plants. Skowhegan Fleuriste also creates beautiful wedding and event flowers, their talented design staff is always ready to create the bouquets, arrangements, and on-site decorating for your dream wedding or any special occasion.

Skowhegan Fleuriste is owned by Matt Dubois. He had a successful bakery business and when he saw the flower shop next door was for sale, he realized it was the perfect companion for his bakery.

Floral Wedding and Event Business – Too Much to Keep Up With

Over the past two decades, Skowhegan Fleuriste had a lot of wedding and event industry work. The synergy between their bakery and wedding business helped their growth. They were growing each day and had more and more proposals to prepare for their clients. They got to a point where they needed something to improve their processes and manage their events seamlessly.

When they did consultations with clients it took a lot of time to enter every specific detail of the proposal: flowers to use, markups, the number of supplies needed, the contract. A lot of management time was being used just to create a proposal instead of making the flower arrangements. They knew they had to do something to improve this process and make it faster and easier.

A Better Way to Manage Floral Wedding and Events

Skowhegan Fleuriste’s needs were clear – they needed a system to manage wedding and event proposals faster. So they did research on different systems and ultimately they signed up for the Floranext Floral Wedding and Event Software. With the proposals software they started to create proposals more easily and quickly than before, they updated and customized every proposal for their client needs. They were able to quickly update every aspect of the proposals without losing time entering contract terms or markups.

This Flower Shop saw an improvement in productivity when creating and sending a client proposal. The shopping list feature allowed them to reduce wasted flowers and increased their profit by buying exactly the right amount of flowers needed for their weddings and events. 

Skowhegan Fleuriste saw a big improvement in the process from consultation to closing the deal for weddings and events. This translated into more satisfied customers and more new clients thanks to previous customer recommendations.

Running the Business Better

Skowhegan Fleuriste concludes that they’re running their business better, saving time and increasing profits by using Floranext Floral Wedding and Event Software. It has helped them to increase capacity for their wedding and events management and they are growing the business every day. They have improved processes and response time for new customers and they’ve seen a big improvement in customer satisfaction.

Nothing encapsulates the beauty of Nature quite like flowers, and in Salt Lake City you’ll find the perfect experts to do this in The Art Floral. Their knowledge, expertise, and creative sense elaborate and deliver wonderful arrangements throughout the community. 

They have been around for 69 years. As a family-owned and operated business, they are committed to excellence, uniqueness, and professionalism. 

As a full-service florist, they cover every aspect of customer floral needs. This includes each step of the process, from consultation, to design and delivery. Every customer is of utmost importance to them, and each flower arrangement is custom-made fresh for every customer.

The Art Floral strives to bring life and color in everything they create, after all, they have been around for a long time. They know their business needs to improve constantly and look for innovative ways to manage and run the flower shop efficiently.

COMPLICATIONS WITH DELIVERY MANAGEMENT

When operating their store they discovered they needed to improve the delivery time to become a more efficient business. Their need was to reduce time, costs, and margin of error with customers’ addresses. 

The Art Floral discovered that many times their drivers couldn’t find the address quickly or that they took routes that weren’t the most efficient. Those issues sometimes translated into delays in deliveries, so they looked for features that could improve their retail operations with deliveries and with that improve customer satisfaction. 

REDUCING TIME OF DELIVERY WITH GOOGLE MAPS

The Art Floral started using the Floranext Delivery Manager powered by Google Maps. It is a great way to create optimized routes, manage deliveries on the go, share turn-by-turn directions with drivers. 

With this tool, The Art Floral was able to create delivery routes for their daily orders and drivers. The routes are created for less time and distance delivery. This tool helped them improved their time and organization with drivers. 

The Art Floral drivers started using the Delivery Driver App. Drivers are able to manage routes with ease from their mobile devices. They can access driving directions using Google Maps. It’s easy to update order statuses and mark delivered while on the road. They can also take notes on individual deliveries and click to call the sender or recipient, to help reduce the delivery time and create a seamless customer experience. Overall, the delivery driver app allows them to spend less time doing delivery management tasks. 

INSTANT ADDRESS SEARCH POWERED BY GOOGLE

Instant Address search is an additional tool for improving delivery services. On the point of sale employees type in a few letters of an address and Google Maps suggests a delivery address instantly. 

This Instant Address Search reduces the risk of incorrect deliveries and customer complaints. This tool was a game-changer for this flower shop because previously drivers were often forced to clarify addresses at the point of delivery.  With the instant address search, they can find the delivery location with confidence. 

The Art Floral is now offering same-day delivery service with a lot of reduced time from their drivers and they’ve seen efficient results that have ended up with thousands of happy customers due to their quick and efficient service.