Tips for E-commerce Growth Strategies

📲 I spent over 5 years in SMS marketing for eCommerce. After analyzing/working on dozens of programs... Here's how I'd approach it from the ground up if I were starting from zero👇 Phase 1: Build the shell 🐢 Set up core behavioral automation & list growth strategies to increase revenue. If you don't get these right, you'll never scale it. - Two-tap opt-in onsite + at checkout to capture subscribers - Welcome Series + set up day 1 two-way messaging expectations w/ subscribers - Abandoned Cart - Browse Abandonment - Post-Purchase ( Educational onboarding and reorder reminders) - Transactional Updates (97% of consumers want these & they are VERY low hanging fruit to drive engagement + revenue. I've seen brands drive $50k/mo from these messages) Phase 2: Add more fuel 🚀 Start leveling up your strategy - Start sending SMS campaigns as your retargeting list grows. Campaigns are great... but remember unsubscribe rates go up a lot and segmentation is your best friend🙂 - Begin behavioral segmentation inside of your automations to personalize messaging/increase relevancy. - Integrate your Customer Service platform to start handling replies (fast if you can)... These are often buying questions that can lead to more sales and happy customers - Test more list growth strategies like adding SMS opt-ins to your order tracking pages, interactive email, package inserts, and test paid ads/influencer funnels that go to SMS funnels Phase 3: Optimization & Conversational 🧪💬 Focus on 2% improvements... - A/B test EVERY automated flow with at least 2 variations per message. Test copy, timing, mms vs sms, personalization, etc... - A/B test your sign-up units. Whether it's behavioral or the look/feel of the sign-up unit... don't settle for one. Let the data tell you what is the top converting path. - A/B test your campaigns. Figure out the best send times for your respective segments, what voice works best for copy, mms vs sms, top converting offers, etc... Don't just test revenue here (think unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, etc...) - Implement 2-way conversational automation across key flows. Look for key moments to engage in more conversations with your customers to build relationships, collect more zero-party data, and deliver personalized content. My favorites are the welcome series and post-purchase... but I've seen cool examples even in places like the abandoned cart to handle objections (we built a whole business off of this at Tone). Bonus: If your vendor does human-powered texting like Concierge or Sales, this might be the time to consider it (only after everything else is in place!). 👉 Great SMS programs are not built overnight. The best programs are built in phases... with constant evaluation, testing, and optimization. Those 2% improvements over time compound and set you up for long-term success and growth. Hmm maybe we should name a podcast about that? 🤔 #smsmarketing #ecommerce

eComm brands spend years building up their presence online, capturing new customers and presenting themselves on many communication channels. Great! But eventually, they all hit a plateau. It's totally normal, I've seen it hundreds of times. If you're DTC brand and you're on that plateau, you have 3 ways to break through and start scaling, again: 1. Acquire new customers - find a new audience that will appreciate your existing goods. Spin up a new brand if you have to. 2. Sell new products to existing, loyal customers - you know your customers well... find out what else they need/want, design products around those desires and widen your offering. (Kevin Kelly's "1000 fans" solution). 3. Improve your back-office efficiencies - Optimize and automate your entire back-office from inventory management, accounting, fulfillment, vendor relationships, replenishments, etc etc. Stop using cobbled systems and spreadsheets. Consolidate everything into 1 ERP. Your brand has matured. It's ready for this. You need to truly understand your profitability and see your entire business as an organism. Find the weak points and fix them. Make money through saving money. 1 & 2 are customer facing and I'm willing to bet you know how to win, here. But if your back-office isn't as automated as possible, scaling 1 & 2 can actually hurt your brand (late shipments, inventory inaccuracies, lack of profitability insights, etc). No. 3 may not seem obvious, but dedicating to this growth will serve you well for the rest of your career. This is the secret sauce I've learned by working with all these successful brands. The closer they watch their numbers, the bigger they grow. Hot on my mind because of all the conversations I had at #shoptalk2024 #eCommerce & #ERP || #BetterTogether #DTC #B2C #B2B #POS

I generated over $10,000,000 in e-commerce revenue before the age of 20. If I’d known these 7 things, I could’ve made it much faster: 1. Conversion rate is the strongest lever you can pull. You simply can’t just out-ad a broken funnel. Make CRO a part of your (at least) weekly topics of focus. 2. ROAS is a vanity metric in 2023 This might sound ridiculous but hear me out. As ads get more and more expensive (and tracking less accurate), it’s crucial to focus more on CAC/LTV. In other words, how much you make per customer vs how much you pay to get one. 3. Do everything within your power to introduce the subscription model into your biz This is something I don’t see enough people talk about. The subscription model is one of the best ways to build a brand with positive cashflow and actual enterprise value. 4. Watch & track your numbers religiously Most don’t pay enough attention to this which is a HUGE mistake. Always keep track of your: • Cashflow • LTV • CAC Understand payback periods and you can scale effortlessly. 5. Plan in advance For example, if you want to win on BFCM, you should be already clear on your plan by now. Most brands are reactive, not proactive. That’s why they always get short-term results. Play the long game to get long-term results. 6. Automate chargeback fighting Chargebacks can eat up a big chunk off of your net margin. Find a way to automate this or use Disputifier. It’s free to install and you only pay a % of recovered revenue that you’d otherwise lose. No-brainer. 7. Prioritize customer experience Packaging, communication, post-purchase flows,… Make sure you put your customers first. The market has sophisticated a lot and people are tired of low-value “brands”. What would you add? Comment your thoughts below 👇

Ecommerce stores can learn a LOT from brick and mortar. 'Digital marketing' isn't really a thing anymore - it's just marketing. Software and the internet ate the world. The lines between physical and digital are blurring, if they still exist at all. And the best brands treat their ecommerce experience a lot like an IRL store. → Personalization: Just as a good retail salesperson in a physical store can help a first time shopper or remember a returning customer’s preferences, ecommerce platforms should leverage data to personalize the shopping experience. → Immersive experiences: Brick-and-mortar stores have the advantage of creating sensory-rich environments. Ecommerce stores can replicate this by investing in high-quality content, virtual try-ons and 360-degree product views. There used to be an excuse that your product is 'difficult to sell online', but it's been busted. If people buy sunglasses, mattresses, and cars online - then you can definitely find a way to make your product more immersive. → Trustworthy customer service: For many shoppers, a helpful store assistant can make or break a sale. Ecommerce stores should focus on excellent customer service through live chat, and responsive customer support that goes the extra mile. → Leverage Data for continuous improvement: Physical stores often use foot traffic and sales data to optimize store layouts and merchandise. Ecommerce stores should use website analytics to understand customer behavior, optimize the sales funnel, and refine the user journey. It’s a no-brainer for brands to gather heat maps and customer feedback to unlock valuable insights into improving the online shopping experience. → Omnichannel: Successful brands integrate their online, offline, and marketplace channels to create a cohesive shopping experience. Features like BOPIS, Buy with Prime, and seamless returns across channels can enhance customer convenience and satisfaction. → Community engagement: Brick-and-mortar stores often serve as community hubs, hosting events and fostering a sense of belonging. Ecommerce brands should build communities with their audience so customers can engage with each other, as well as with the brand directly. → Innovative tech stack: IRL stores are investing heavily into technology, from POS to loyalty and beyond. Your ecommerce experience should feel fresh, easy, and exciting if you’re going to stand out in a sea of competitors. Ensuring that promotions, loyalty programs, and customer data are unified across channels strengthens brand consistency. Anything I'm missing?

Want to scale your e-commerce business to $500k/mo with just paid ads and email marketing? Here's the step-by-step strategy I did that I want to share with you: 1) Start with a good product. Choose a product that: - Solves a problem - Emotional connection - Has a decent profit margin - Has room for upsells/cross-sells Without a good product, your ads will not convert. 2) Optimize your website for conversions. Ensure that your website: - Loads fast - Has clear and compelling copy - Has high-quality product images - Has a user-friendly layout Your website is the first impression a customer gets. Shopify has great themes that do this. 3) Create a customer avatar. Figure out who your ideal customer is and create a persona around them. This will help you craft marketing messages that resonate with them. 4) Set up your email marketing. Start by: - Creating a welcome series - Setting up abandonment emails like checkout, cart, product, site abandonment, and email abandonment. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to convert leads into customers. 5) Set up your ad campaigns on Meta. Start with: - One product - One platform - One audience Test and optimize until you see a positive ROI. 6) Scale your ad campaigns. Once you have a winning ad campaign, scale it by: - Increasing your ad budget - Testing new audience segments - Testing new ad creatives/messaging 7) Implement a post-purchase experience. After a customer makes a purchase, take steps to: - Upsell/cross-sell - Encourage repeat purchases - Get feedback/reviews The post-purchase experience is important for building customer loyalty. 8) Analyze your data. Use data to: - Optimize your ad campaigns - Improve your website - Identify upsell/cross-sell opportunities - Improve your email marketing Data-driven decisions will help you maximize your ROI. 9) Rinse and repeat. As you scale, continue to: - Test new marketing angles - Launch new products - Improve your website and customer experience Scaling takes time and effort, but it's worth it for the long-term growth of your e-commerce business.

🚀 Rethink Scaling: A New Playbook for $40M Success Scaling from $20M to $40M demands a departure from the conventional. You've built something extraordinary, reaching $20M in sales, but to double that, it's time to rewrite the rules. 🎯 What to Focus On: Increase Productivity Spend Less 📘 Your Simple Guide: 1. Clean the House 🏠 Evaluate every process, contract, or deal. Slash at least 15% of operational inefficiencies. How? Embrace automation. Let technology carry the load, freeing you to strategize and innovate. 2. Renegotiate Contracts 💼 Empower your buying team to secure better deals with suppliers. Seek significant drops in the costs of acquiring goods and services. Smart negotiations fuel sustainable growth. 3. Upsell and Cross-sell 📈 Uncover ways to maximize sales with existing customers. Aim for a 20% increase in customer value. Your loyal customer base is a goldmine; extract its full potential. 4. Find Growing Markets 🌍 Expand your business by 25%. How? Tap into new customer pools in unexplored territories. Direct your focus to burgeoning markets ripe for exploration. 5. Cash is King 💰 Master the art of cash management. The target? Get paid 10 days faster. Improved cash flow is the lifeline to sustainable growth. 6. Trim the Inventory 📦 A leaner inventory is a more profitable one. Boost turnover rates by 20%. Sell faster without drowning in surplus stock. 7. Employee Retention 🤝 Commit to a 15% reduction in employee turnover. It's not just a goal; it's a promise to your team that you're on this growth journey together. Quality people stick around, eliminating the need for constant recruitment. 👊 Ready for the challenge? Rewrite the rules, redefine success. #BusinessScaling #GrowthStrategies #RedefineSuccess

You buy a new high-end espresso machine… But it’s not just a new coffee maker… It’s a chance to know everything about a new category. Before you know it, you’re watching every tutorial, joining forums and even considering buying Arabica beans for the most premium flavor. That’s Customer Momentum Customer momentum is a powerful surge of excitement and engagement a customer feels right after making a purchase. But here’s the problem: most eCom brands completely IGNORE this. Let’s break this down: When a customer feels excited about their purchase, they’re in a prime state to engage with your brand: → They’re more likely to open your emails → Follow you on social media → Make additional purchases ($$$) But if all you’re doing is sending them DRY emails saying “thank you for your purchase…” You’re WASTING this momentum. Here’s what you should be doing instead to channel this momentum: Post-Purchase Flows: Right after the purchase, send personal text-based emails from a character inside the brand (founder, CEO, etc). Then point them to valuable content like a tutorial on how to use the product, tips for getting the best flavour or stories from other customers. Make sure everything feels personal. Exclusive offers: Show your customers how much you value them by sending them extra discounts and deals. An extra 10% off their next purchase or a discount bundle deal will get them excited to shop for your products. -> Bonus point: introduce them to adjacent, non-competing product lines for a nice LTV boost. Invite them to a community: Your customers shouldn’t be just another sale to you. They’re actual people with different values, interests, and personalities. Address that. After they purchase their product, you need to make them feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. Tap into that emotional side of them that wants to feel like they belong to something. GymShark, for example, is amazing at this. They market their apparel for the "dream chasers". It’s more than just a pair of shorts. They’re the shorts you show up in daily to chase your dreams and achieve your health goals. It’s inspiring, motivating, uplifting. It’s that bigger message of belonging that’ll keep your customers coming back for more of that feeling. A customer in motion will stay in motion IF you can keep that initial excitement alive. IF you make them feel like more than a sale. That’s how you create a customer for a lifetime and keep them coming back. Customer Momentum.

Benchmarks are an easy way to stay mediocre. Take conversion rate. A lot of DTC hovers around 1% conversions. Where should you be? E-commerce is a high intent environment. People aren’t there to browse, they’re there to buy. Tough love time: Your conversion rate should reflect that. It should be healthy double digits (30-50%). Even luxury and high ticket items, which will be lower, is still around 10% as measured by human behavior. Customers are there to buy. They have the problem and you have the solution. If you aren’t hitting that rate, there are two main areas to address. Both can be difficult to hear, so do this when you’re ready. 1. Product 2. Go to market 1. Does your product solve a problem for your market, in the way they want it solved? Is it a good solution? If your product is just ok, it’s harder to convert. Find a way to improve your perception or iterate a version of your good that customers value. If your product solves a problem that doesn’t exist (demand creation model), you’ll struggle. Figure out what your customers actually need and want, not what you want them to want. If your product is cool to you, but others need to be told how cool it is, you’ll struggle. It needs to meet their needs, not yours. 2. Go to market. If they can’t find it, they can’t buy it. How many clicks does it take to get to what they need on your site? How many founder stories and brand videos and popups do they need to wade through? Is your navigation clear and useful? Could my grandma figure it out? A strong measure of how you are doing here is a mix of your bounce rate and your organic traffic. If you bought more than 30% of your traffic and your bounce rate is over 15%, your site needs work. The key to your growth is in one of those two areas (sometimes both). Ignore the hacks, fix these and thrive. The danger of benchmarks is that they measure the other participants, not how close you are to good. Don’t choose to be tied for last. #sales #marketing #ecommerce #cro #seo #benchmarks

Scaling an e-commerce business from $0 to $10M isn’t easy, but the formula is simple. There are 4 components that take e-commerce businesses from $0 to 8-figures in revenue. 1. Ad creative How you reach and talk to your customers is everything. Your ad creatives should speak to pain points your customers face, and clearly outline how you solve them. Always be testing new hooks, creative styles, creators, and formats until you find a formula that works for your brand. For most brands, this ends up being UGC-style creative with punchy hooks (both copy + visual), an explanation of why your product is the best solution, social proof, and an offer. 2. Conversion funnels Great - you got a prospect to click from your ad and go to your website. Now, can you convert them? Too many operators still send their traffic to 1) their homepage or 2) a PDP. Yes, that can work, but for most brands, you’re missing out on higher-converting funnels that can unlock new growth. Some of the ones that I’ve seen work: - Listicle LP with an embedded PDP to Checkout - LP to quiz funnel to checkout - LP to PDP to checkout - LP with an embedded PDP to checkout Shoot me a note if you want to see examples of each of these— would love to share. 3. Media allocation There’s a lot of talk about how media buyers are getting less and less important in today’s creative & algorithm-driven media buying landscape. To a certain extent, there’s truth to that, but media buying still isn’t stupid-proof. You need to know what channels to be spending money on, and how to spend that money within those channels. For almost all brands, this will be Meta. For most of the rest, it’s Google. And for a very small segment, it could be TikTok (I personally wouldn’t put all my eggs into this basket). I run a $2M brand exclusively through Google’s Performance Max campaigns. I have another brand on the way to 7-figures using just Meta. The point is— each brand is different. Find what works for you, and focus on it. 4. Product Finally, it’s impossible to build a lasting brand with a bad product. You need to have a great product— it doesn’t have to be best-in-class. A great product helps you with: - Word of mouth / referrals - Social proof - Repeat purchases - Less operational headache (CX, returns) It still is possible to get to 7-figures without a great product, but at that point you’re just playing advertising arbitrage and you’ll hit a ceiling on growth sooner rather than later. *** Growing an e-commerce business to $10M+ is incredibly difficult. But the good news is that the formula you need to follow is simple. For those of you who have made it this far, I’d love to hear your growth stories and where you’re struggling the most— shoot me a note and I’ll try and see where I can help!

Over the years, Michael Epstein and I have turned around a fair number of ecommerce brands. These are the top 5 things we do in every turnaround. I'd say they are universally applicable too, just as relevant if you don't run a turnaround yourself. Just good operational and marketing lessons: 1️⃣ Move from a custom IT stack to off-the-shelf stack. AutoAnything and Karmaloop were running on a server rack in a physical location… no cloud. At both companies, one could literally trip on a cord and unplug the website, turning off $100M in revenue.   This legacy approach required developers and sysadmins and IT staff and consultants and . . . you get the idea. All in the maintenance costs was in the high seven-figures. Our first step was always moving off legacy infrastructure ASAP. Plug-and-play off-the-shelf ecom allowed us to focus on building a team around the things that moved the top line (revenue).  2️⃣ Implement lifecycle marketing Imagine a X-million people email list in which the X-million people receive an email with the same discount, EVERY day. This is probably the #1 symptom I've seen at busted brands: spray and pray discounting. Imagine the money they are leaving on the table by giving out a discount when the customer would have purchased anyway. It's called a subsidy cost, and you won't see it in the financials but it's there. Plus they are teaching all new customers to buy at discount. Move off spray and pray. Discounts are not the devil, but use them where they actually can influence customer behavior in a good way. Lifecycle marketing FTW.  3️⃣ Implement a culture of execution across the business Most busted businesses are: - Clueless about company or team goals.  - Overly bureaucratic. - Overstaffed. You need to build a culture of execution. Go read about Slootman's 3 B+ companies and how he does it, or about 3G capital and what they do when they take over a business. We heavily rely on the Traction method as our goal framework. 4️⃣ Maximize revenue Our approach is rooted in a framework by Jay Abraham which I call the “three multipliers”. 1) Increase the AOV (avg. order size) 2) Increase the frequency of purchase 3) Increase the total number of customers Most businesses blindly go after the third multiplier, which is the most expensive one. Instead, try focusing on the first two multipliers and turn to customer acquisition later. 👉 We review our framework for prioritizing marketing activities in our Nerd Marketing episode, link in the first comment. 5️⃣ Look for unexploited channels We’ve found that busted brands rarely use #directmail. Simply extending what’s working into new channels is often a low-hanging fruit that these turnaround brands aren’t doing. That's it. Multiple turnarounds but 5 core themes. Hope they help inspire you this weekend! Want to dive deeper into these turnaround secrets? Download all 30 tips from the series here → https://lnkd.in/erjwCtv6 #dtc #marketing