ANSWER THESE 4 QUESTIONS TO FOCUS YOUR GROWTH AND SCALE YOUR ECOMMERCE BUSINESS
Does your ecommerce business have steady orders? Great.
Have you built an infrastructure to support increased sales, traffic, and customer interactions? Perfect! It’s time to focus your growth and scale your ecommerce business.
Scaling refers to increasing revenue without dramatically increasing overhead costs—and it takes precise planning and implementation. Once you’ve covered basic steps to scale, consider more advanced growth strategies.
Ask yourself questions like:
What are my blended customer acquisition costs—and how can I reduce them?
What are my conversion rates and how can I improve them?
What is my customer’s product purchase path—and how can understanding it give insight into my acquisition and retention efforts?
Do I have a strategy for earning repeat revenue?
Let’s unpack each of these.
1. What are your blended customer acquisition costs—and how can you reduce them?
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the cost of acquiring a new customer through your paid marketing efforts. Blended CAC includes all your marketing channels.
Why is Blended CAC essential? Brands today should take a big-picture look at how all of their paid marketing efforts impact their overall business.
3 tips to decrease your blended CAC
Drive organic traffic with SEO. With paid marketing costs on the rise, brands should also use organic strategies for driving website traffic. Create SEO-optimized product descriptions to rank better in search results and write product descriptions that highlight benefits (over features). Be sure to incorporate keywords into all content (from headlines to alt text).
Build landing pages. Optimized landing pages are an ideal (and quick!) way to deliver information to potential customers and drive conversions. Less friction = quicker purchasing decisions.
Partner with influencers and affiliate programs. Some brands find it cost-effective to work with influencers to create content (that’s often more engaging for customers). Partner with an agency like The Outloud Group to develop a strategy that works.
2. What are your site conversion rates and how can you improve them?
Conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a specific action (for example: taking a quiz or completing a purchase).
To calculate your site conversion rate, divide the number of conversions (actions taken) by the total number of visitors to your store.
Increase your site’s conversion rate with clear, impactful CTA’s, imagery, and landing pages. The higher your conversion rate’s percentage, the more actions and sales you’ll see for your business.
5 CRO strategies that accelerate the path to purchase:
Think of buttons (CTAs) as communication points. They call out the desired action you want the visitor to take. Make them a focal point.
Analytics tools, such as Lucky Orange’s heat mapping, are one way to learn more about how your website functions and what visitors are clicking on. What’s working? Where are there difficulties? Where can you make improvements with a call to action?
A/B testing is another way to learn how changes to your site impact performance. Some of those changes—copy, imagery, and website flow—will earn you an improved conversion rate. Lean into what works!
Use a quiz to help customers find ideal products. Jones Road Beauty uses Octane AI to connect shoppers with perfect foundation matches. Their quiz captures emails and helps Jones Road build a personalized relationship with the customer (and shopping experience).
But, remember: It’s not just about driving more traffic to your website. While you want to drive more visitors, you also want to keep an eye on the quality of potential customers (this is another place that influencer marketing can be a valuble strategy). The key is to convert them from browsers to shoppers. To do so, focusing on improving your user experience for site visitors and building a high-functioning website are two ways to accelerate a customer’s path to purchase.
3. What is your customer’s product purchase path—and how can it give insight into your acquisition and retention efforts?
What’s a customer’s product purchase path? It’s the journey they take across channels and campaigns to convert from a prospect to a customer. The journey consists of 3 main stages: 1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision
Understanding a customer’s path allows you to:
Identify friction. Knowing these points can help you optimize your acquisition and retention efforts by improving the customer experience at each stage of the journey.
Identify the traffic sources and channels that work the best—and narrow focus on channels that have the biggest impact.
Identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
Identify the types of products and campaigns that are most popular. Use this data to develop marketing campaigns to promote these products to new and existing customers.
Unsure how to calculate your product purchase path? Use Tydo to see a high-level overview of your store’s key performance metrics and to answer questions like:
What’s my site’s conversion rate?
What are my highest-performing products
What’s the percentage of first-time and repeat customers driving sales
Which 3 products are purchased most frequently as a first purchase? Second purchase? Third?
4. Do you have a strategy for earning repeat revenue?
After a customer’s first purchase, it’s all about convenience. They’ve already researched and picked their product — it’s up to your brand to save their order and personalize a repeat order experience.
Service providers like Repeat make it easy for customers to simply buy again. Order reminders can be sent via email or SMS to customers when they’re most likely to be running low, and offer a one-click reordering experience. It’s an ideal solution for customers who aren’t ready to subscribe, but don’t want to run out.
You could also include a scan-to-reorder QR code on your packaging and direct mail, and into shipments as inserts. Customers can scan and reorder in seconds, without downloading a new app or creating an account.
Ready to pull the next growth lever?
Once you’ve secured a repeat customer, offering a subscription can be a powerful method of securing recurring revenue.
Leverage your store’s analytics as you scale your ecommerce business and focus your growth
Analytics can help you make smarter business decisions. However, accessing reliable, up-to-date data (and understanding it) isn’t easy nor straightforward.
Leverage Tydo’s free Platform to better understand your data. Tydo connects all your data sources (the tools and channels you love) in one spot to create a single source of insight. We help world-class brands like Madhappy, Birthdate Co., and Dose supercharge growth!
If you’re looking for custom reports, check out Tydo Custom (starting at $1K/month). Get paired with one of Tydo’s on-demand data analysts, and we’ll build a dashboard fit for you and your business needs. If you’re interested in chatting with Tydo, book time here.
About the Guest Author:
Kate calls Philadelphia home and has a passion for building educational marketing content for DTC brands and relationships with Shopify partners. She currently works at Tydo, a Shopify app that connects your brand’s data, marketing sources, and tools to solve your biggest problems and uncover your biggest opportunities.