Martin Pascual

Automation Systems & Operation Plans For Naturopuff.com By: Adam Lando Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 PART A. Customer Service – Order Tracking & Fulfillment Objectives Implementing Tools Total Approx. Expenses 2 2 2 2 PART B. Book-keeping/Tracking In-Out come Objectives Implementing Tools Total Approx. Expenses 3 3 3 3 PART C. Social Media Marketing & Outbound (excludes non-web marketing) Social Media Limitations Automation tools Human Involvement Total Approx. Expenses 4 4 5 6 7 PART D. Email/Inbound Marketing & Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Implementing Tools Total Approx. Expenses 8 8 9 PART E. Remarketing or Collecting Unfinished Purchases Implementing Tools Human involvement Total Approx. Expenses - PART F: SUMMARY Non- Labor Related Expenses Labor Related Expenses 11 11 12 INTRODUCTION Automation Systems & Operation Plans for Naturopuff.com The types of tasks and responsibilities for running the site and marketing are to be divided into the following groups. A. Customer Service, Order Tracking & Fulfillment B. Book-keeping/Tracking In-Out come C. Social Media Marketing & Outbound (does not include any non-web marketing) & Blog D. Email/Inbound Marketing & CRM E. Unfinished Purchases & Uncollected payments The majority of this can be automated, some will take a bit of time to implement at first but eventually will be automated, with other tasks being outsourced for much less. We will be a little more involved at the start but less once things get going. This guide breaks down the planned app usages for each site, and how each task will be doing. 1 PART A. Customer Service – Order Tracking & Fulfillment I. Objectives: To answer questions pre and post purchase about shipment & product features, relay order tracking numbers to customers, fulfill customer payments and orders. A. Answering Questions Pre and Post Purchase: This is a task initially involves a bit of human involvement, but eventually can be automated for the most part. With the recurrence of questions, we would be able to set up a “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQs) section to cater to customer’s needs and inquiries. Majority of initial human involvement would be about product and payment inquiries. Anything involving post purchase tracking and collecting payment can be automated in responses referencing spreadsheets we will be using to keep track of purchases. We can set email triggers to automatically send emails once we have tracking numbers to send to customers. II. Implementing Tools Objective Implementing tool To run all customer Zendesk Platform service through (will be fully outsourced employees automated with enough data) On site & over social Chatbots media customer service inquiries Costs $5-$19/month (depends correspondence done) free other than expense to implement Notes Any questions that fall outside the expertise of the bot can be emailed to us or outsourced as higher ticket items Requires human involvement to eventually emulate language Tracking orders, emails and fulfillment Outsourcing Costs Once tracking obtained, we can set triggers using Zapier integration with Gmail and Google Sheets to auto email customers with their tracking number. If customers ask about packages, we can have outsourced overseers look over charts and provide tracking no’s from charts. Entered manually from our end, we can purchase shipping labels online or at post office. A. Zendesk: $5-$20/month. $5/month should be fine. If we're paying $20 it means business is really good. This basically will allow whoever is doing customer service to operate from one single platform rather than having to transition from multiple ones. Its cloud based so questions can be answered super quick and the info travels instantly so people can get quick answers and orders. B. Outsourced help: $4 per hour if I can find the right hire. It will be done overseas and the person used will be merely for oversight of the systems over time. For the most part customer service will not be a worry. III. Total Approx. Expenses: Total of $5-20/Month for systems and approx. $4/hr of customer service correspondence 2 PART B. Book-keeping/Tracking In-Out come I. Objectives: This will involve accounting for & tracking all revenue, expenses, profits and other tasks within our job descriptions. Eventually, it should be able to automatically request and pay orders to our suppliers when we are low on inventory. The expense and revenue tracking should be integrable/automated but oversight and review will be manual and can be outsourced. II. Implementing Tools Objective Implementing tool Accounting/Bookkeeping QuickBooks or Xero Tracking paper receipts Shoeboxed Oversight Book-keeper Costs $25/month Notes Choice would depend on their adaptability with our system. It should be able to integrate into our CRM and track how much certain customers have spent and allow reports creation To be determined Tracks all paper receipts and (low fee) automatically can compile expense reports $7-$15/ hour Can also be outsourced A. QuickBooks or Xero: Both cost $25/month. Deciding on one will be dependent on how both can integrate with our systems. If one is more integrate able that may be the one to use. Both are extremely bookkeeper friendly and should be able to be automated once all systems are synced and costs of each expense or product are entered into our systems. This should also be able to plug into our CRM and track how much certain customers have spent and allow to create reports. B. Shoeboxed: an ideal app for tracking paper receipts. It tracks all paper receipts and automatically can compile expense reports for a low fee. C. A book-keeper will be required for oversight but can also be outsourced. I am currently hiring one for another business so I am not too sure how much it will be but I estimate somewhere in between $7-$15 per hour, which is about 25% of what you will pay here. III. Total Approx. Expenses: $25/month for systems, with $7-$15 per hour of bookkeeper oversight. This should be pretty limited. 3 PART C. Social Media Marketing & Outbound (excludes non-web marketing) Since we are a dispensary, there are some rules that need to be made very clear to the outsourced help. For one, Facebook has a very clear rule in their user and page agreement saying “We remove any promotion or encouragement of drug use,” What this means is that we need to avoid listing items for sale on our page or making promotional posts. We can still have pictures of new items, but no pricing. We can post links on the page but one post can get us banned if it’s sale-sly. It may be good for whoever we have running socials to research and look at how other pages run their social accounts. I. Social Media Limitations A. Facebook - Images, news & product updates, articles, and any other information that your audience will find valuable. We can post MMJ related news and use automation to generate content and repost it. We can also reverse engineer and contact other pages members with a private Facebook account. B. Instagram - This platform is image-driven and quite popular among the cannabis community, so we recommend setting up an account. Share beautiful pictures of your products, your business, and any other imageries that both reflect your brand and will resonate with the cannabis community. C. Twitter Twitter allows for real-time messaging, whether it is text, images, or video links, with a limit of 140 characters at a time. Post news updates, articles, deals and specials, questions to your followers — you can play around with different messaging to see what resonates. Promotional posts are accepted on twitter, and we can follow other dispensary members directly with no issue. D. YouTube Drive video marketing efforts on YouTube. If you don’t have a budget or the bandwidth for video right now, don’t worry about this platform just yet. We can create review videos using hot girls and connect with influencers in the community to review products and offer coupon codes and affiliate driven sales. We can also connect with our brands and offer product reviews to our site to drive sales for them and for us. E. Reddit there are lots of MMJ reddits we can post our products and drum up awareness with. We'd be hiring someone to post about our products and brand in the selected forums. F. Blogging our page actually has a blog onsite and I think it would be good for us to work with MMJ Bloggers to help create a buzz and to create SEO content to bring traffic to our site. We can outsource this for the most part, and tech is being created to automate things like this. 4 II. Automation tools Objective Increase reach of social media update Implementing tool Edgar or Airtweets Costs $80/month or $49/Month (if paid 12 months upfront) Replicate competitors’ followers to easily develop a targeted following Automatically schedules social media updates Toolset.co free other than expense to implement Hootsuite $10/ month Notes The value in an app like this shows when you consider how much organic reach is on Facebook (means % of fans on your page see a post with no ads). The number is 2%. So if you have 1000 fans, only 20 will have it pop up in their newsfeed It also allows you to follow people by hashtag use and unfollow people that aren’t following you back. Similar would be done for other social websites for scheduling. A. Edgar or Airtweets– Edgar makes sure that your social media updates reach as many of your followers as possible. With Edgar, you save your updates to a library and schedule times throughout the week you want your posts to go out. Edgar will then choose updates from your library and after it’s posted, Edgar will return the content back to the library. Once all the other updates from your library are posted, it will then cycle through all of them again. Now you have an endless supply of content going out forever. - Great considering we aren't able to do advertised postings. Note: Airtweets may be a lot cheaper when it launches B. Toolset.co – Toolset allows you to copy your competitors’ followers quickly, easily and for free. It also allows you to follow people by hashtag use and unfollow people that aren’t following you back. This is huge for developing a targeted following and can be done to all our competitors. It’s pretty much cheating. C. Hootsuite– Automatically schedule your posts for times when they’ll be seen by most of your followers and allows you to plan out socials for all far in advance. Similar would be done for other social websites for scheduling. 5 III. Human Involvement: Laying out a guide for our employees and content creation will need to be done from our end with outsourced help. It’s very important that they understand the rules and do not cross over the boundaries set by Facebook. We would make sure that is 100% established before a hire is made. Objective To manage company’s social media presence Implementing tool Social Media Manager/Poster Costs $4-$6/hour To create and upload contents on the company blog To assure company’s presence in Reddit is visible and continuous Blog/Written content $5/hour Notes If we find we don't need it, we won't use it but if the returns are good, then we will use it more frequently. May be merged with other tasks. Reddit Poster $15/week May be merged with other tasks. 6 IV. Total Approx. Expenses: This is probably one of the costly areas due to human involvement in content creation. A. Social Media Plan/Strategy (optional): Approximately $300 It might be good to have someone create a plan for any outsourced employee to follow, as it will probably be executed better if we give someone strong direction. It will also be good if socials get so busy we need extra help. It also gives us something to build on. B. Social Media Manager/Poster: $4-$6/hour (3-5 Hours/Week) This will vary depending on how much of our growth and business is coming from Social media. If we find we don't need it, we won't use it but if the returns are good, then we will use it more frequently. I will be hiring overseas, and since posts can be scheduled, time differences are no problem and we can make 30 minutes a day max to review everything our poster is going to post for the week. Eg. He can plan posts over weekends, and we can review them on Sunday evening and make changes if needed. It will run itself at that point. C. Edgar/Airtweets: Edgar: $80/month or $49/Month (if paid 12 months upfront) The value in an app like this shows when you consider how much organic reach is on Facebook (means % of fans on your page see a post with no ads). The number is 2%. So if you have 1000 fans, only 20 will have it pop up in their newsfeed (this doesn't include people who come to your page) Apps like this will multiply your organic reach by as much as twenty times, so that number can reach 40%. There is obvious value in that. Also, Edgar reposts old content (you can store up to 1000 posts), so if you offer some of the same products and if we pair this with a scheduling app, we can optimize posts to show up at the best time. This is great if you're working with products that you plan on carrying a long time. NOTE: Airtweets does this with twitter and can be bought for $99/Year. Huge Value there considering twitter does not ban sale posts. D. Toolset: Free of charge, amazing E. Hootsuite: $10/month max, free for up to 3 accounts. F. Blog/Written content: $5/hour most likely if outsourced. We can have 10 blog posts written over a week, and put up over a month. Think of it like $50 a month G. Reddit Poster: $15/week, 2 hours. Total: $75/month approx. for all apps $200/month for all socials (won’t get this big until were fully rolling) Most likely around $275/month give or take $25 once were started. Note: + $300 one time cost approx. with social media planning (optional) 7 PART D. Email/Inbound Marketing & Customer Relationship Management (CRM) There is a very limited list of expenses here, as the jobs are very straight forward. Here’s just a recap of what both the things above do: A. Email marketing/inbound marketing: This means collecting emails, and turning those emails we collect into sales, and eventually repeat customers. Building a mailing list is one of the biggest parts of running an online site. If you have someone agree to give you their email, it allows you to provide the constant updates on new products and lets you build the relationship with the customer. This is extremely vital, especially considering that social media is limited in the dispensary industry. You want to be able to get people to opt into your email lists, and this can be done with the pop-up offering a coupon at the very first page and it can be done with things like having them to agree to get the email with any purchase. Aside from paying the monthly service fee, this is a pretty much free service. Inbound marketing is another way to refer to it because it categorizes the marketing as when a customer finds you. Having them get to your page is one thing, turning them into a customer is another and inbound marketing is a great way to do this. B. Customer Relationship Management: CRM is one of the most valuable things I’ve implemented into my operations over the last few months. A CRM system lets you keep track of all your customers, the purchases they make and the tendencies they have as well as what they're into. This allows whoever is handling your CRM to communicate in a more personalized manner to potential customers as well as repeat ones. Think of this as customer service on steroids. I. Implementing Tools Objective Implementing tool Builds companies Mailchimp email list to extend its reach and maintain or create customer connections Platform to perform Insightly or CRM Hubspot To manage Mailchimp platform To handle CRM platforms Costs Free Hubspot is free, Insightly is $12/month Mailchimp Expert $10-15/week CRM Expert $10-$24/week Notes Price increases beyond 2500 emails Insightly is the one that I have more experience with, but if Hubspot can do everything and integrate like we hope it can then I think it would be just as good Hire someone who is familiar with the platform A. Mailchimp- Mail chimp is the most popular email list builder And it should integrate into nearly every element and app we use. Basically, you have people give you their emails and it builds a list in mail chimp. You have it integrate with your CRM to give you more personalized insight into the customer. 8 When you have new products come in, want to promote a sale or anything else in that matter, you can use Mailchimp to email blast your entire following and let everyone know. It should be pretty clear to see the value in this. If you are on any mailing lists, then you most likely have been attitude of checklist at some point. There are also tools to personalize the emails to send to people's names included. Note: By using a CRM, you can even create a mailing list of people that are only into certain products or brands to let them know when the new product is in, allowing for personalized mailing blasts. II. Total Approx. Expenses: A. Mailchimp: Free for up to 2500 emails, then increases in price after. B. CRM: Hubspot is free, Insightly is $12/month. Insightly is the one that I have more experience with, but if Hubspot can do everything and integrate like we hope it can then I think it would be just as good. C. Human Involvement & costs: We will be hiring someone to manage the Mailchimp list and to create emails and campaigns. It won't take a lot of time to do, but hiring someone who is familiar with the platform would be a very smart move as once things are rolling we are knocking to halftime and/order remember to do this. Creating a good template and email can take as little as half an hour, and you might only be sending only 1-2 emails/week at first. I’d budget 2-3 Hours per week. We will also need someone to manage the CRM, though we can set up Mailchimp to automatically add customers who signed up to the mailing list as well as purchases to auto add to the CRM and Mailchimp. I would expect only around 2 to 4 hours per week on the CRM to get it running smoothly. Cost for Mailchimp expert: $5-$7/hour x 2-3/week = $10-15/week Cost for CRM expert: $4-$6/hour x 2-4/week = $10-$24/week approx. Total: $20-$40/Week. This is obviously a very reasonable cost, so once our brand gets noticed it will be important to have better writers on board and it may cost a little more to do that. 9 PART E. Remarketing or Collecting Unfinished Purchases This section is going to be very short, as it really just involves a couple of plug-ins. Basically, nearly 30-50 % of people who add items to their cart on the website end up not purchasing the items. This means they came super close, but decided not to pull the trigger. This also means that they might still be very well close to purchasing a might just need a little push. Remarketing is the process of turning those unfinished purchases into customers. When you go on a webpage that has remarketing implemented, there're cookies that will download onto your browser using these we'll send you emails to remind you that your purchase has not been completed. There could be set up to include a coupon code or other incentives to try to make the customer purchase. I. Implementing Tools: Any remarketing plugin compatible with Woocommerce will do. A paid one will be best, and may only cost about $20. II. Human involvement: Aside from designing emails to send to customers who make unfinished purchases, there actually is no human involvement required other than standard customer service. III. Total Approx. Expenses: $20 10 PART F: Summary of Future Possible Expenses I. Non- Labor Related Expenses I. Customer Service, Order Tracking & Fulfillment A. Zendesk B. Chatbots II. Book-keeping/Tracking InOut come A. QuickBooks or Xero B. Shoeboxed C. Book-keeper III. Social Media Marketing & Outbound A. Edgar or Airtweets B. Toolset.co C. Hootsuite To run all customer service through outsourced employees On site & over social media customer service inquiries $ 5- $ 19/ month Accounting/Bookkeeping Tracking paper receipts Oversight $25/month To be determined (minimal) $7-$15/ hour social media updates reach as many of your followers as possible Copy your competitors’ follower Automatically schedule your posts $49/Month (if paid 12 months upfront) V. Remarketing or Collecting Unfinished Purchases A. Available ones in the Market FREE $10/month Approximately $300 (one time) D. Social Media Plan/Strategy IV. Email/Inbound Marketing & Customer Relationship Management (CRM) A. Mailchimp B. Insightly FREE Email list builder Customer Relationship Management $10-$15/week $12/month remarketing plugin $20/ month TOTAL: $140-$165 monthly expense and a $300 optional onetime expense 11 II. Labor Related Expenses (Staffing) I. Customer Service, Order Tracking & Fulfillment A. Customer service correspondence Tracking orders, emails and fulfillment $4/hr II. Book-keeping/Tracking InOut come A. Book-keeper Financial Oversight $7-$15/ hour Will manage social media presence Content Creator $4-$6/hour Reddit Presence manager $15/week To manage the Mailchimp list and to create emails and campaigns To manage the CRM $10-15/week Design emails to send to customers who make unfinished purchases FREE III. Social Media Marketing & Outbound A. Social Media Manager/Poster B. Blog/Written content Creator C. Reddit Poster IV. Email/Inbound Marketing & Customer Relationship Management A. Mailchimp Handler B. CRM Expert V. Remarketing or Collecting Unfinished Purchases A. Internal Labor $50/ month $10-$24/week TOTAL: Will depend entirely on the contract between the Company and the Employee regarding work time and schedule. Expenses will be greatly minimized if similar tasks were to be assigned to the same employees. (eg. Reddit Poster and Blog Content Creator) 12