Getting your website right is one of the biggest challenges of an eCommerce store and today we’re joined by Shopify Developer extraordinaire Anna from House of Cart. From how to get your site converting, the big mistake that is slowing down your site, and a bunch of tips and tricks to make your site inviting, this isn’t an episode to miss! And if you listen till the end she shares some great tools she has and is happy to send your way!
In today’s episode you’ll learn:
- Why you should hard code rather than get ‘appy happy’
- The danger of pop-ups
- The importance of building a brand rather than just a website
- Her best conversion and optimisation tips
- The power of nurturing your customers through email
- And so much more
Transcript
[00:00:00] Anna Tillotson: If you just generally think about the top five brands that you purchase off regularly, for whatever reason, you’ll have a connection with them. Whether you like what they do or you like their vibe or whatever it may be, there’ll always be a common connection and you’ve gotta find what yours is to connect with your customer
[00:00:15] hi, and welcome to the bright minds of e-commerce podcast. I’m Donna founder of bright red marketing, and after helping so many businesses in the e-commerce space over the years, I wanted to bring you the best advice from Australia and experts in e-commerce and e-commerce store owners. If you want to relatable stories and actionable advice and the latest Facebook advertising strategies, you’re in the right place.
[00:00:34] One help with your Facebook and Instagram ads. Remember you can always book in a free strategy session@brightredmarketing.com.edu. Forward slash free dash strategy dash session will run through your ads. See what’s working and what’s not. And no sales pitch. I promise. So let’s get into today’s episode.
[00:00:53] Dahna Borg: On today’s episode, we’re joined by Anna from House of Cart. Welcome Anna.
[00:00:56] Anna Tillotson: Hey, thanks for having me. Really great to be here.
[00:00:59] Dahna Borg: so good to have you. So just give us a little bit about your background and experience with House of.
[00:01:04] Anna Tillotson: Okay, so House of Cart has been around about five years now. I really fell into Shopify after I’ve had my first child because I started a clothing label. actually houses it on Shopify itself. And I decided after a few years of doing the clothing label dealing with the public face-to-face and retail was not for me.
[00:01:22] And actually loved building Shopify stores when I did my one. I absolutely loved the whole process. I’m very design focused. So I’m completely self-taught. The business started from there. I decided to make it a bit of a hobby business. It kind of scaled really hard and fast in the first year or so.
[00:01:37] And then as we got closer to when Covid hit, it started snowballing really quickly. COVID was very good to me and a lot of our clients. So, you know, fast forward five years, here we are with a small team of eight. So we’re Shopify, we’re Klaviyo. And our whole purpose as a business is about.
[00:01:54] Mainly based on females. So giving females the opportunity to create a lifestyle design that they want. So being able to build a business online that can, you know, keep them away from having to go back to corporate, give them the extra income that they need, give them independence, give them the option, and, you know, ability to have that lifestyle design, whatever that.
[00:02:13] Looks like for them. It’s our purpose as you know, it’s my purpose in life. It’s my purpose, it’s our families, and I love that it’s, you know, our purpose for the business. So most of the people we work with, you know, from small to medium sized businesses, they just wanna get online. They just want transparent assistance with, you know, someone that actually really has an interest in their business and you know, their success in e-commerce.
[00:02:34] So that’s kind of how we’ve evolved and where we’re at and the kind of people that we work.
[00:02:39] Dahna Borg: I love that, and I totally agree. We are very similar in sort of that ethos of just trying to get people to have nice work life balances
[00:02:46] Anna Tillotson: Absolutely. Especially now. , you know, and I feel like that big shift after Covid has absolutely cemented that idea for so many people. Most of my clients from, you know, the middle of Covid to now, any new clients have just absolutely got their mindset. They’re, they’ve, they just wanna ditch corporate.
[00:03:02] They wanna ditch the five day working week. And they’re looking for new ideas. And, you know, a lot of people have, the opinion is, you know, is it too hard now? Is there enough space for someone else? And there absolutely is, you know, there’s absolutely space for everyone to start something up and make a success.
[00:03:16] Dahna Borg: Yeah, a hundred percent agree with you. So you obviously have a lot of experience building websites. What makes a good website for an e-commerce brand?
[00:03:24] Anna Tillotson: Look, it comes down to so many different factors, and I guess. The biggest issue we see is people not having a full understanding about setting up the foundation to correct from the start. It’s like anything, you know, if you don’t put the time and the effort and the money in, it’s not gonna succeed. If you don’t set it up to succeed it, it won’t.
[00:03:43] But having all the foundations set in place, so we are talking about things like making sure you’ve got an absolutely beautiful theme and that the theme is. To convert. So you have a beautiful customer journey and user experience. So you have branding, you have a logo, you have imagery, you have conversation on the website, you have, you know, a vibe of who you are and what you are and what you stand for.
[00:04:06] Because you know, the biggest thing, I talk to clients and when I’m on the phone I say to them, you know, you gotta understand, you know, you are not a shop window. You’re not a shop in the mall where someone can walk past and talk to you and understand who you are. Look at your shop, look at your window, and go, you know, that brand seems really great.
[00:04:21] You’ve gotta convey that very quickly from a homepage when someone lands. So that’s a very different factor to how you would convey that if you’re a physical store or if you’re at a market store inside a market complex. It’s a very different ballgame. Perceiving that online and just making sure that you know, all those bases are covered in terms of how you represent who you are and what you are as a brand online.
[00:04:43] Because you know, when you jump onto any store, you know, even if you’re shopping yourself, you know very quickly what you think about the store. You make a judgment. within the first five seconds of whether the store looks nice, whether it looks cheap and tacky, whether it looks like something you’d wanna continue looking around on.
[00:04:59] So, you know, first impressions really count. So making sure that you know, you’re doing your research, you’re understanding, you know who your target market is, who your competition is, and you need to be better than them to make it a success.
[00:05:12] Dahna Borg: Yeah, I totally agree with that. As you said before, you know there. For everyone, but there’s space for people doing it well that are doing something different, that are reaching a different market. They still see a lot of websites coming up that are very broad and don’t really speak to anyone cuz they’re trying to speak to everyone.
[00:05:28] And I think the people that are getting the most success these days are the ones that are doing that really well, where they really speak to a particular person and you know, grab that attention really quickly.
[00:05:37] Anna Tillotson: Absolutely. And you know, it’s the same with like, so word, house of cart. You know, I’m not for everyone, you know, I’m generally, I don’t work with a lot of guys. You know, my niche is working with. I’m a mom, I’ve got three little kids. You know, I build a business from nothing. And you know, I connect with moms like that, all females that wanna work in the small business industry.
[00:05:55] And I know that. So I don’t go after clients that don’t match my match, who I’m after. And same when I say to my clients, like, you’ve gotta work out who you’re actually selling to, what the persona is of your customer is, and target that. Because if you go too broad, it’s really hard. It’s really hard.
[00:06:12] Dahna Borg: Yeah, it’s very hard to convince lots of people of one thing, but very easy to convince a group of people that are very specific about this one thing,
[00:06:20] Anna Tillotson: that’s it. And it’s about connection. You know, if you don’t feel the connection with the brand, like if you just generally think about the top five brands that you purchase off regularly, for whatever reason, you’ll have a connection with them. Whether you like what they do or you like their vibe or you know, whatever it may be, there’ll always be a common connection and you’ve gotta find what yours is to connect with your customer, which is so important.
[00:06:41] Dahna Borg: Yeah, I totally agree. So obviously on that sort of note, trust and credibility are such big things. Obviously you can’t walk into the store, you can’t, you know, get that face-to-face contact. What are some of your best tips on building that trust and credibility on a website, especially a new one?
[00:06:56] Anna Tillotson: Yep, absolutely. So how it looks is really important. So if you have a site with no logo or branding straight away, it’s turn off. So making sure that you, I see so many brands that come to me and they don’t understand how important, it’s that they don’t. You know that they have a logo and they don’t have one.
[00:07:10] So important to show that you are a brand and you are, you know, you’ve got something to stand for. So making sure you have a logo, making sure you have beautiful branding because it will give you credibility. Trust factor comes down to. Social proof is massive. So on your homepage and on your product page you know, we could talk about that for hours, about how they need to look, but the things that fit, trust and credibility, making sure that you get some trust icons so they can be in Canberra.
[00:07:35] You know, graphics designs will make them for you. Yes, they might be a bit better and a bit nicer, but you can do some yourself and Canva, making sure you’ve got four or five trust icons. Let’s just ramble off a few. Could be free shipping free. , eco-friendly, you know, easy customer service, whatever it may be.
[00:07:52] What are your unique selling points that make me feel comfortable and, you know, confident and comfortable to purchase from you? So, trust icons on the homepage and product page. Making sure that you are putting that social proof everywhere. So, further down the homepage, I wanna see, you know, five or six different reviews, power reviews from people that have purchased and enjoyed the experience.
[00:08:11] Same goes on the product page. The one thing quickly I’ll put in there, , you know, the apps that say, John bought this five minutes ago, Sarah bought this 20 minutes ago from Melbourne. Get rid of stuff like that. I often see that cuz it’s a crock, you know, and John didn’t buy it five minutes ago and Mary didn’t buy it.
[00:08:28] Yeah. You know, it’s just, and I call it Las Vegas. You know, it’s like you either love or hate Las Vegas, but when you jump into a store and things like that pop up, it doesn’t really give you credibility, but beautiful, a beautiful slider on your homepage with some really, you know, curated reviews of how amazing the experience was or the product was, is gonna reach a customer so much.
[00:08:48] You know, more than tacky apps that are popping up. So yeah, trust icons, social proof and just making sure that, you know, you’ve got your payment icons there, you’re displaying that you’ve got your payment icons as well. It’s all gonna give you absolutely more credibility.
[00:09:02] Dahna Borg: I love that. On that note, what are your thoughts on popups in general?
[00:09:07] Anna Tillotson: Uh, look, love or hate. Love or hate. So in terms of apps in general, I have a saying. Many people have heard me say it, but don’t get happy. Happy. And for me that means, you know, I guess because I come from a dev. Point of view as well, development point of view. Our theory is because every single app you put into your store slows things down.
[00:09:26] There’s no two ways about it. So the more apps you have, the heavier your store is. People don’t realize that throwing apps in all the time and deleting them leaves the code, makes you site really slow. So they wanna have the pop-ups, they wanna have all these bells and whistles, and as I referred to before, I feel like it makes it very Las Vegas.
[00:09:43] Same with popups and, you know, spin the wheels and things like that. Love or hate them. Yeah. Some, you know, love or hate them. I’m gonna reference one of my amazing customers who when we did the rebuild for her store, little shop happiness wave out to her. She had a pop, uh, spin the wheel and I was like, we’ve gotta get rid of that wheel.
[00:09:59] I hate it. I hate the wheel. But you know what, that wheel made them a lot of money. So you’ve gotta know your audience. Who are you selling to? What kind of client? If you’re selling $400 dresses, they don’t wanna spin the wheel. You know, if you’re selling $19 dresses, they might wanna spin the wheel.
[00:10:14] You’ve just gotta think about it logically, about what kind of person is gonna appreciate, you know, and the other thing, like you mentioned, popups open your site up on a whole new computer. And wait 10 seconds and then see what happens. If you have more than two things pop up, you got too much going on.
[00:10:28] If you have a review widget pop up. If you have a spin the wheel and a popup for signup and a popup for rewards,
[00:10:35] Dahna Borg: and a live chat
[00:10:36] Anna Tillotson: a live chat. You know, that’s what other people also don’t realize is they put all these things on, but how does it look? To the customer because it’s nothing worse than you getting all of that.
[00:10:44] And then you just, it’s just so distracting to the eye because you need to keep ’em focused on what they’re there for, which is to add to carton buy, and all the distractions in the world are just pulling them away from that process. So popups do work, use them sparingly. I did do a post on my Instagram somewhere.
[00:11:00] It was about best practice for popups. You can have a look on there, but there was about 10 or so items that we recommended. But just, you know, don’t keep it too tacky. Make it short and sweet. A beautiful image to go with it. Keep it simple. Don’t do it straight away. Wait for them to move through the side a bit more, so, you know, maybe wait until they’re at least two thirds of the pa way down the page.
[00:11:20] And making sure it’s not popping up on every single page. Make sure you’ve got timers in place that if it’s popped up once, it doesn’t pop up again for another, you know, two weeks for that customer. So just setting boundaries around how it acts.
[00:11:33] Dahna Borg: Yeah, that’s great. I think there’s nothing worse than landing on a website that you’ve never been to before and all of a sudden there’s three popups and you’re like, I’m out
[00:11:39] Anna Tillotson: absolutely.
[00:11:40] Dahna Borg: know if I like you yet. Bye.
[00:11:41] Anna Tillotson: That’s the thing. Bounce, right? Like, you know, and the other thing, like a one quick tip with popups. Don’t just put up a popup that says, give me your email address. Why should I, why? Why would a mi am I gonna go, I know what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna spam me. I always, you know, you gotta give to get, if you want to get the email address, you need to give them something.
[00:11:58] So give them a discount, give them a freebie. Give them, you know, a promise of some something that you’re gonna send them if you’ve got that kind of product. Just asking for emails is just, it’s just not gonna cut it. So making sure that you’ve always got some sort of value giving back is really important with the popup to make it succeed.
[00:12:14] Dahna Borg: Yeah. I love that. That’s great advice. Now, you said you don’t want people to get Happy, happy, which I love . But are there any sort of plugins or
[00:12:22] apps.
[00:12:22] Or like features of a site that you think are really important that most e-commerce businesses should have?
[00:12:27] Anna Tillotson: Look apart from, you know, the obvious, like, we stand behind Klaviyo really heavily. So, you know, I mean, it’s an app, but it’s more of a functionality. But in terms of just your basic apps, Things like, you know, having an Instagram, Instagram feed at the bottom. So Insta Feed is an awesome app right down the bottom that can look aesthetically beautiful and helps with moving the traffic around.
[00:12:45] We really like either Hot Jar or Lucky Orange just for. Analytics sake and being able to understand your story a bit more. This is the thing you wanna use apps that are actually gonna give you value. Like what are they in there for? And when it comes time to, okay, I want this functionality, reach out to your dev, reach out to whoever does your Shopify support.
[00:13:04] Ask them, let’s just say you want a free shipping bar at cart, so when they get to cart, it says you’ve only got, you know, 40 more dollars to get free shipping. Don’t go and throw the app in. Get it hard coded. You’ll probably find it’ll be a couple of hundred dollars. The benefits are, it’s hard coded in, so it doesn’t slow your store down.
[00:13:20] You’re not paying a monthly fee potentially. . And it can be, you know, designed and edited a lot nicer. So if you see a functionality that you want, always reach out to someone and see if they can hardcode something in for you. And then obviously just all the, you know, I think under 10 is, is fine. If you’ve go into your backend today and have a look and you’ve got over 10 apps, you’ve got a problem and you need to look in there and find out what you’ve got in there.
[00:13:42] Is it using, what is it doing? Is it, has it got any feature of functionality that you know, you have to have? If not, get rid of.
[00:13:49] Dahna Borg: Yeah, that’s great. When you said before that even when you get rid of apps, the like coding is still there, is there a way for people to get rid of that and like really clean it out? Or do they need.
[00:13:59] Anna Tillotson: So for years we’ve been like, I’ve, I don’t know how many times we’ve asked and. Requesting from Shopify to have a popup when people hit that delete button to say, please make sure you’ve uninstalled correctly. If the app itself doesn’t have an uninstall or enable disabled function inside it.
[00:14:17] Reach out to their support. So by enabling and disabling, that will pull the code out Often, sometimes it doesn’t. But we always say to all our clients you need to reach out to the support. There’ll always be a contact on there. Email them saying, I wanna delete the app. Please remove all my code.
[00:14:32] Because we do get a lot of people that come to us and say, okay, I’ve got this really shitty site because everything’s so slow and I’ve got all this out. Can you go and remove all the code? It’s like a needle and a haystack, and it’s just, . You know, if someone quotes you to do it, you’ve wasted your money because they’ll never find the code.
[00:14:47] Once the app’s gone, you have no trace. So, yep. Absolutely. Reach out to the app. Support and do it correctly. Or uninstall. Or disable anything before you hit the delete button.
[00:14:56] Dahna Borg: I really think Shopify would make that
[00:14:58] Anna Tillotson: I know
[00:14:58] Dahna Borg: for
[00:14:58] Anna Tillotson: you would think. Yeah, you would think as I say, we’ve requested for so many years for them to do that because it just makes so much sense that, I dunno why they wouldn’t, but Yeah.
[00:15:07] Dahna Borg: Yeah. All right. Well there you go. Reaching out to app support, I would’ve never even have thought of that.
[00:15:12] Anna Tillotson: Yep. And that’s the other thing with support. You know, a lot of people don’t realize that the Shopify chat and the Shopify support, you pay your 29 or your $79 a month and you do get support. You know, a lot of my clients don’t even realize they have a live chat, you know, at the moment. You know, they are based everywhere.
[00:15:28] Like I jumped on there as a partner the other day and I got someone in New Zealand. We had a great chat. It was the support is epic. One of my staff members is ex Shopify support. He was trained by Shopify and they will offer a lot of help for free, and people don’t realize they can reach out and do that.
[00:15:42] Just reach out and ask them the question. They’ll either say yes or no. And same with your theme. If you’ve got problems or issues with your theme, same goes, you can reach out the theme developer and their support, and they will often help you for free too, which a lot of people don’t realize.
[00:15:56] Dahna Borg: That’s amazing and a very good tip. Thank you. The other thing is obviously you’re a conversion rate for your. Website is really important. Do you have any top tips on how to improve your conversion rate?
[00:16:07] Anna Tillotson: Yeah, we do. Conversion comes down to so many components. But what you need to be looking at, Anne, I have got, you know, a couple of cheat sheets. If anyone wants ’em, I’m happy to email them out. Just one. I’ve got one for the homepage, which is really good. But we need to be looking at the, hierarchy of the homepage and making sure it’s set out to convert.
[00:16:26] We don’t wanna. Because you’ve got three seconds to convert me when I land. And there needs to be a beautiful image of, and it’s, you know, what you are, who you are, what you sell, and an option to buy. So I always use the example of the picture. If it was a t-shirt store, the picture needs to be someone walking down the beach looking amazing, wearing the t-shirt.
[00:16:42] The caption is we sell t-shirts. They are amazingly comfortable by now. It’s that simple. Keeping it really clear about who and what you are immediately. Top tips I can give you are making sure your CTAs, which is your call to action, your add to cart buttons and other buttons throughout the store are a non-branded color.
[00:17:00] Let’s just think about, you know, a black and white store. It’s got some red through it. Make the button green, make the button yellow, make it something very attractive. The amount of stores I see with a black or a white button thinking it looks stylish and s. It’s just a conversion killer because I need to see it straight away.
[00:17:17] So making sure that the CTAs are nice and bright. Have a look at your fonts. Have you got really small fonts? Keep in mind people that have, you know, site issues, can they read your site really clearly? Not having too much content on the homepage. Nobody is going to read it. Nobody is gonna read paragraph after paragraph.
[00:17:34] They’re there to shop. Transform as much content as you can into imagery or. To really get your points across. Like if you want to talk about how you know what you, your unique selling points are, put them into icons. If you’re eco-friendly, if you have recycled packaging and you wanna talk about it, no one cares.
[00:17:51] But if they see an image of an icon, that’s okay, because no one really wants to know where you got the packaging from. And you know, we support this, that, and the other, but they’ll see the icon and go, yep, perfect. Tick my box. So making sure everything’s really you. Easy on the eye, and because people wanna move through really fast, you need to be testing your store about how it feels for you.
[00:18:12] Get yourself, get two friends that a completely different onet tick savvy friend, one completely untick savvy friend to jump on your site and go through it and give you a rundown of how it felt. Was it easy to get to cart? Was I pissed off that they were shipping at cart? You know, did I understand what the returns policy was gonna be?
[00:18:30] All of those things, if they’re any roadblocks, that’s where people are gonna bounce. So the biggest thing I say to people is jump on your store. Have the experience yourself. Get people to have the experience as well, and tell them, get them to tell you what they enjoyed and what they didn. And that’s a true c r o as well as you know, what’s actually going on.
[00:18:47] And then if anyone wants, cuz there’s a lot to do with c r o. If anyone wants a homepage c r o chart that I’ve got, I’m happy to send it over to ’em if they wanna reach out. So, which will give you some good tips and tricks, but yeah, there’s a lot you could talk about, but those are just a few that hopefully help them on the way.
[00:19:00] Dahna Borg: Yeah. I love that I. The buttons is a really big one. I was on a site the other day that I didn’t actually realize they were buttons cuz everything was beige
[00:19:08] Anna Tillotson: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you think of the tones like that everyone, you know, they wanna be neutral at the moment, have these really neutral sites, which look stunning, but, and people think, oh, I can’t put a really bright button that will just ruin the vibe. It doesn’t at all, you know, think of if you’ve got a Bay site, put a nice, you know, really neutral red in there or something like that, you know, and you’d be surprised at how different it looks.
[00:19:30] And as you say, you know, you missed a button and other people are too. So, yeah, it’s a big.
[00:19:35] Dahna Borg: Exactly. Uh, do you have like your top best three tips for e-commerce?
[00:19:40] Anna Tillotson: My top best three tips for e-commerce. The biggest one would be, Buy a, , premium theme. So when you’re on Shopify and you’re using the free theme, they are good. But it’s like anything in life. You do get what you pay for. If you are serious and you wanna make money and you want your site to convert, invest in a premium theme.
[00:19:59] The fees are one off, they’re around about three 50 to four 50 Australian by converted. But it’s a one-off fee that you have forever. So invest in a premium theme is the best thing you can do, and making sure you’re investing in one from the Shopify theme store, not from theme forest or third parties. So making sure you’ve got an amazing theme.
[00:20:16] Get your foundation set up. Correctly from the start. So making sure that everything is set up to convert. And if you know, if you have all your foundations down, then you’re ticking all the boxes. And the third biggest tip I would say is when it comes to marketing, you know, do not leave any money on the table without setting up an ecosystem of emails.
[00:20:36] Nurture is so, so important. You can have that website there and you can have it sitting there, but if you’re not nurturing them at every touchpoint, you’re just letting money go. So it’s not about just the people that purchase, it’s about the people that just come and browse for three seconds and run away.
[00:20:52] Or the people that get to cart or the people that purchase and maybe forget about you, but then you could have brought them back. So making sure the full circle is there. The website is on point, the marketing is on point with the nurture journey through email and just making sure all the foundations are there in place to.
[00:21:09] Dahna Borg: Yeah, I think that’s fantastic advice. Obviously we do Facebook ads and a lot of people come to us and think that we can just run their Facebook ads and make them lots of money. But if you don’t have that, Own media that mailing list, building out the nurture sequences, like it’s so expensive.
[00:21:24] Like we can do it, but my goodness,
[00:21:27] Anna Tillotson: Yeah. Agree.
[00:21:28] Dahna Borg: better to get everyone in at the front end with your Facebook ads and then do everything else. Do all the hard lifting with your emails.
[00:21:34] Anna Tillotson: Absolutely. Yep. It’s massive. So, and you know, Shopify and klaviyo marry so perfectly together. There’s no reason not to get them both set up.
[00:21:41] Dahna Borg: Yeah. klaviyo amazing.
[00:21:42] Anna Tillotson: It is. It’s another whole topic.
[00:21:44] Dahna Borg: Very much so. Do you think that we’ve missed anything else? I mean, obviously there’s, we could talk about this for hours,
[00:21:49] Anna Tillotson: Yeah, we could. No, look, you know, the biggest things I would just say to people is, you know, at the moment, especially when talking to people, new brands or existing brands, is, you know, always stay in your own lane and just do your own thing. If you’ve got a passion and you’ve got drive to do what it is you’re doing, don’t worry about the noise.
[00:22:05] Don’t worry about what, how everyone else is succeeding or failing. You know, just do you and your brand and put everything you’ve got into it. As I said before, I still believe there’s so much room for new business, new products, new exciting things. You’ve just gotta give it a go and don’t give up. You know, don’t look back.
[00:22:21] It can get hard. Entrepreneurship is freaking hard, but it’s worth every single tier, and it’s worth every single effort. So, Yeah, that would be my biggest thing to close is just don’t give up. And keep the mindset to just keep going. And those are the people that succeed. Those are the people that are able to quit their jobs and have those passive income coming in are the ones that just, they just went for it.
[00:22:42] They just went for it. You know, don’t worry about waiting for it for tomorrow. Just if you wanna do it, just jump in.
[00:22:48] Dahna Borg: I love that. I love that. On that note, do you have any strategies or habits that you follow each day to help you stay on track in business?
[00:22:56] Anna Tillotson: Uh, yes I do. So I look, you know, I’m a mom. I’ve got three kids under eight. So my life is very hectic for me. So I get up and I go to the gym every morning while my school mornings because I need my mindset to be right. And then I was meditating for a long time, which I really enjoyed, but I have dropped the ball on that a little bit.
[00:23:14] But my big, and then when I get into the office, I’m in a completely different mindset. Boundaries and lists are probably my two biggest things. So being a mom and trying to juggle, running a business with. Staff and having three little people that need me. Boundaries are massively important. You know, no phones at night, no phones in the bed, cutting off, you know, communication in between hours where I know that I need to be present is massive because combining the two gives me a lot of anxiety.
[00:23:39] So, I’m really loving the fact of having boundaries. It makes me feel better and I’m more productive. And then in terms of when I’m in the work, you know, I’m big on trying to do blocks of work, so focusing on just, you know, two or three tasks that I need to do on my list, getting them done. . I am a multitasker by heart and I can do it very well, but it does give me a lot of stress.
[00:24:00] So I’m trying to just, I think the biggest thing you can do, and same when I have new clients come on board and you know, they get the onboarding pack and there’s all these lists and checklists. Often they message me and you just go, oh wow. Okay, now. But you know, if you just break it down and you just go, okay, I’m gonna do two things off that list every.
[00:24:16] and I’m gonna work through it instead of jumping around and, you know, juggling different components. So yeah, step by step lists and just, you know, blocks of time to get things done makes productivity a lot better.
[00:24:27] Dahna Borg: Yeah. Wonderful. Uh, do you have a favorite podcast
[00:24:31] Anna Tillotson: Do I have a favorite podcast? Can I say one that’s totally random? Because when I.
[00:24:37] Dahna Borg: people do, to be fair,
[00:24:38] Anna Tillotson: because, uh, when I listen to podcasts, I’m actually trying to avoid work and I’m trying to avoid this American life, which is based obviously in the States is absolutely fascinating. It basically every week he talks to different people and different walks of life, different things in America, just the most random topics, and it just takes me away for an hour and I love it.
[00:24:58] So I listen to probably two episodes a week. So this American Life, I find it fascinating, some amazing topics on there about.
[00:25:04] Dahna Borg: Amazing. We’ve had lots of crime podcasts.
[00:25:07] Anna Tillotson: Yeah, I can
[00:25:08] Dahna Borg: are in the same boat.
[00:25:09] Anna Tillotson: I can imagine. And you know, like I’m, I mean, I do read some stuff and listen to some stuff for work, but you know, you get so entrapped in it. I’ve gotta be honest. It’s nice to disappear into another world for a while.
[00:25:20] Dahna Borg: Yeah. Not everything is about work,
[00:25:22] Anna Tillotson: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:25:23] Dahna Borg: The
[00:25:23] Anna Tillotson: it is. Yeah, it is.
[00:25:25] Dahna Borg: And if people are interested in getting any of these downloads and things that you’ve talked about or hiring you, what’s the best way that people can visit you?
[00:25:32] Anna Tillotson: Yep. So as I say, Anna, from House of Cart, you’ll find me at, uh, www house of cart.com au. Our email address is hello house of cart.com au. Otherwise, you can search us on Facebook or Instagram and just reach out. Send me a message and if anyone wants the PDF that I’ve got for c r o for their homepage.
[00:25:49] Absolutely happy to send it off. And we do send out a newsletter every two weeks, which is very non-salesy. It’s all education based. Just really helping people succeed in their journey. So it’s always to do with tips and tricks around Shopify and Clavio. So sign up to the newsletter. And if you just wanna chat, absolutely jump on my site.
[00:26:05] Book a call. And I’d love to connect.
[00:26:08] Dahna Borg: She also shares some really great reels,
[00:26:10] Anna Tillotson: Yes.
[00:26:12] Dahna Borg: interesting.
[00:26:12] Anna Tillotson: I’m trying. Yeah, I’m trying. It’s a mix of my crazy children in the background with some motivational or educational content across the top. So yeah.
[00:26:22] Dahna Borg: Fantastic. Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for joining
[00:26:25] Anna Tillotson: you’re more than welcome. Thanks.
[00:26:28] Thank you for listening to the bright minds of e-commerce podcast. As always, you can find the show notes@brightredmarketing.com.edu Forward slash episode 38 Thanks for listening.
