This is an interview with Michelle Barto. She is a digital marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur who helps businesses grow through smart systems and inbound marketing. She has nearly 20 years of experience in various industries, from manufacturing to fashion. She has helped her clients increase their productivity by determining the best way to meet their target consumers using digital marketing and technology stack.

The interview focuses on the reasons why customers may leave your website. Also included are three obstacles that entrepreneurs should overcome to grow their business and increase sales.

You can really set yourself up for success if you plan out all of the steps from customer acquisition to fulfillment. This is primarily the struggle of new businesses and the source of burnout for some entrepreneurs. She noticed that people are afraid to let go and make errors under the guise of perfectionism or fear of making mistakes. It is to see how that system could really work without your hands and every little step of the way as you recreate them.

She says that if you don’t have a proper system in place, it would be difficult for you to hand it over to someone else as the company grows. So, if you are hand-holding every step of the process, it can get overwhelming, from minor to more oversized orders.

Email marketing is the most powerful thing an entrepreneur can do right now, as per Michelle. A solid email list is really important because it is an excellent way to market research, listen to your customers, and look for what they want. Also, set up a system for continuous email communication with your customers so they’ll hear your story because people love stories. They love feeling connected with the brand, and it helps them understand why they should care and why they should engage with your brand. Therefore, she thinks setting up an email nurture sequence is one of the best things you can do. 

The best real estate that you have on a website is the first screen that customers click on. The majority of them access websites via mobile, so keep that in mind when designing your site. If you’re targeting an older demographic, make sure your content is not only mobile-first, but also looks great on a wide screen.

If you’re a service-based business in general, she highly recommends you go with Squarespace. It’s pretty adaptable and changeable, and it doesn’t break.  If you have the idea of wanting to add membership down the road or you want to offer a more complicated interaction with your customer, she thinks that you can’t go wrong with WordPress, but it does a major software update. On the contrary, Squarespace is robust. It doesn’t break and only necessitates a little more front-end testing and picture resizing. And Shopify is what she’s going to recommend for anyone who’s selling more than five to 10 products. It is well-designed for shipping and provides a positive fulfillment experience.

The existence of having a video is compelling, and the great way to do it is to make sure it’s meaningful to your audience. People gravitate towards people, so it is vital to include them in the video. So, if you want an image from a video or a static image, it should include at least one or two people, and it should consist of people that the individual may imagine themselves. So, if you’re marketing to women, make sure you have a woman who looks fit, or if you’re selling to men, make sure you have a man who looks suitable, just so the individual can look and go in a nanosecond and think, “This product is for me.

Consider the perspective of someone who has never visited your site before while designing your navigation. Also, look at the fundamentals of writing, such as what questions they will ask and how to navigate them. Beware of the nicknames that are cutesy because it can hurt your SEO in a perfect world. 

She views a website as if it were a map. It’s a map for people, and it’s as much fun to use as it is to save those wonderful creative words for later. People get drawn in, they look at where they want to go, and then they fall in love with your brand and your words, but that happens two or three screens away.

Getting a domain, email addresses and syncing them to your website platform of choice are some tips for those who are just getting started with their website. After that, conduct your research. Use as few words as possible to lead them on this journey of learning what your product is and what your vision is.